‘It's just stupid superstition!' she said wildly. 'But if it did happen you'd never know! Because I'd hide at the ends of the earth rather than let you near your son! And I'd never tell him that he was the spawn of a devil without a soul!'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
'SO THIS is what the end of the earth looks like?'
Sitting at the top of a slightly rickety ladder in the poetry section of the narrow shop, Elizabeth wobbled dangerously as she stared down into the dark, mocking face that she hadn’t seen for almost a month. Twenty-eight horrible, infinitely elastic days that seemed to have the ability to stretch themselves out until it seemed they would never end.
'W-what are you doing here?' she said uncertainly, wondering if she was talking to just another fevered illusion, the cunning work of a weary mind that had only just conquered an anguished fixation that every black head in a crowd was a taunting Frenchman with a smile of ice and a heart as metallic as the flash of gold in his ear.
'Where else would a devil without a soul be except wandering the depths of purgatory?' So he remembered every bitter word of that last horrible night. Good! So did she. Unfortunately she also remembered that not all of it had been horrible. 'Actually I'm here on a mission from my grandfather.'
Elizabeth's hands clenched on the catalogues in her lap. She couldn’t believe the old man would be that cruel. He knew the way she felt about his son. Knew that she hated Jack and that Jack despised her. She had told him. She had practically sobbed her life story out on his shoulder as she begged him to arrange for her to leave the Isle of Hawks, and he had been very kind, considering that she had forced her way past his outraged manservant at the crack of dawn and confronted him while he was still in bed. He had patted her on the hand and thanked her for returning his property at such enormous stress to herself, and calmly ordered Andre to arrange for a helicopter and a connecting flight from Tontouta to Auckland. Elizabeth, who had spent the rest of the hours of darkness lying stiffly awake on her bed waiting for a thundering assault on her door, and terrified by mental images of Jack stealing her babies, had been inexpressibly stricken when Alain St Clair had managed to spirit her away exactly as she had requested.
She had half expected to be stopped at the airport for some trumped-up charge which would hold her long enough for a deeply remorseful, or far more likely savagely angry Jack to snatch her back under his possessive control, but Alain St Clair's name had worked like magic, clearing her through Customs and Immigration and on to the plane before she could draw breath.
One consolation had been that at least she had finished the job that she had gone there to do. Her uncles would suffer no lasting damage from her reckless jaunt. About herself she wasn’t so sure.
Now she looked inside herself for the courage to be civilised when she longed to fly down and tear him limb from limb. She had thought she loved him, but how could she love such a monster? How could she trust herself to make the right choices when he only had to touch her and she was overwhelmed with feelings and desires she couldn’t control? The idea of being in helpless thrall to her sexual cravings for a man who despised her was more repulsive than the idea of herself as a closet nymphomaniac!
‘I did write to your grandfather and explain that we wouldn’t be doing any more business with him...'
'Yes, I know. He was very disappointed. He hoped I would be able to change your mind.'
‘I never change my mind,' said she who had been so indecisive since she came back that she'd had a hard time even selecting what to have for dinner each night. She picked at a bit of fluff on her winter skirt. She had lost some weight in the last few weeks but her warm winter tights and thick sweater probably made her look even fatter. Her hair was falling out of a silly bun and she knew she looked awful. He, in contrast, looked wretchedly marvellous, lean and beautiful, even in the open trench coat that was spattered on the shoulders with rain.
'Won’t you come down and talk to me, Eliza-Beth?'
She hadn’t heard her name drawled that particular way for a lifetime. Tears filled her eyes. She had been very emotional lately and she knew her uncles were worried. They tiptoed around her as if she was an invalid, or dangerously insane. And maybe she was. She wanted nothing more than to fling herself off the ladder into his arms.
But, 'No!' she retorted. 'That's a pity.' 'Why?'
'Because I wanted to talk to you about something.'
Elizabeth discovered that she had snapped the ballpoint pen she had been holding and she frowned as she scrubbed busily at the blue marks on her palm.
'Eliza-Beth?' The voice was warm and soft, like the air on his sub-tropical island, which wasn’t fair because she knew he was neither.
'What?' she snapped, glaring down at him. She liked being this far above him, mentally as well as physically. It felt right.
He looked up at her, hands on his hips tucking the coat back to reveal black jeans and a cream sweater. He raised his voice over the brief roar of traffic as another customer entered the shop. 'Have you had your period yet?'
Elizabeth jerked in horror as several browsing heads lifted, and the ladder wobbled again, violently this time. She screamed and grabbed at the sides, showers of catalogues sliding off her lap and raining down on Jack's head as the whole precarious structure teetered and fell, tumbling her precisely where she had wished to be for the last several weeks.
'Chérie...' She trembled at the familiar feel of his body against her, heat flooding into her cold heart. 'For God's sake, you shouldn’t be up ladders with your risk of vertigo—'
The warmth washed into her pale face as she pulled away from him, smoothing down her clothes with shaking hands. ‘It wasn’t vertigo, it was you. How dare you come into my shop and ask me something like that!'
‘I didn’t think you'd agree to see me anywhere else,' he said with a meekness that she didn’t trust, tucking one wayward strand of her hair behind her small ear.
'Don’t—'
'Touch you? I can’t help it. I've been thinking about it for weeks.'
'Well, I'm not pregnant, so you can stop thinking about it.'
He looked at her bulky sweater where it bunched over the waistband of her woollen skirt. 'Are you sure?'
'Of course I'm sure,' she hissed viciously, impulsively hauling up the bottom of her sweater to show him her slightly trimmed waistline. 'See!'