‘Peter won’t ever get me because he doesn’t want me, damn you. Do you hear me, Nicholas Thorne? You were right. I don’t love Peter and Peter doesn’t love me. He loves my sister. It’s Janna he’s going to marry on Saturday, you big, gullible oaf, not me!’
For a moment he remained still, a dead weight, and she thought he had lapsed into unconsciousness, but then he suddenly rolled off her in a tangle of white towelling.
‘What did you say?’
The face beside hers on the pillow suddenly looked completely wide awake. But no, his pupil was almost a pinpoint. He was conscious through sheer force of will.
She moistened her lips and nervously tucked her blouse across her breasts one-handed as she said in a husky little voice, ‘I cancelled our engagement last week. But not the wedding. You see, I found out Peter and Janna had fallen in love, and, well—they were sort of mired in the inertia of their guilt. They didn’t deliberately set out to hurt me, and I realised I hadn’t ever really been in love with Peter, not the way that Janna is. So I told her to go ahead and get married in my place and I’d dance at their wedding.’
She smiled to show how bravely she had accepted the crushing blow to her feminine pride, but the smile began to waver under his sombre stare and, to her horror, her eyes began to fill.
‘I suppose now you’re going to tell me I got what I deserved,’ she whispered, and burst into a flood of tears.
But instead of gloating, as she had always dreaded that he would, Nicholas quietly gathered her shuddering body against his warm length and stroked her wild ginger mane, uttering soothing murmurs while she sobbed out all the wretched details against his chest.
It took a long time to expend her storm of stored-up tears, and repeated assurances from Nicholas that he had no interest in wreaking his savage revenge on her damned sister’s damned wedding, before Vivian finally hiccupped herself into exhausted sleep. Only then did the man holding her allow his mind and body to go equally lax, finally relinquishing his formidable will to the powerful seduction of the drug in his veins.
CHAPTER SIX
VIVIAN took another frigid slap in the mouth and felt her throat burn with the salty abrasion as she coughed the seawater out of her lungs.
She sluggishly instructed her head to turn and her arms to rise and fall, rise and fall, in the rhythmic stroke that had won several long-distance ocean swims at the surf-club she had belonged to in her late teens.
The wet-suit that she had taken from among the diving-gear in the lighthouse storeroom was providing her with extra buoyancy and some protection against the cold, but she knew that mental stamina would be her greatest asset in the gruelling swim.
She turned on her side, checking that she was still moving in the right direction, heading towards the uneven lurch against the horizon that Frank had let slip one day was the nearest inhabited island. Thank God the weather was good and the sea not too choppy, but even if there had been a cyclone Vivian wouldn’t have cared.
She had woken just before dawn and looked at the man lying next to her in a deep, drugged sleep and acknowledged with a thrill of despair that she was in love with her capricious captor.
In the space of a few days the morals of a lifetime had been swept away. Instead of drawing Nicholas into the sunlight of reason, she had been drawn into the shadows. Something dark in herself was called forth by the darkness in him. She could protest all she liked, but all Nicholas had to do was touch her and she melted. And he knew it.
Last night he had admitted that he had never loved his wife. Th
at called into question everything she had come to believe she knew about him. It made his motive for revenge not one of honest emotional torment, which could be appeased, but of cold-blooded, implacable malice.
The realisation that Nicholas must have uncuffed her before he fell asleep was merely confirmation of her bleak theory that he believed he had won their battle of wills. The empty steel bracelet dangling from his own still-manacled wrist was a mute testament to his confidence in her sexual subjugation.
Protest had exploded in her brain. No! She wouldn’t let him distort her love into something that she was ashamed of. She had to be out of his reach before he woke up. Before he could touch her again…
Fool, fool, fool, Vivian chanted inside her head, in rhythm to her stroking through the water. To believe that you could play with fire and not be burnt. Fool, fool…
‘Little fool! What in the hell do you think you’re doing? Of all the ridiculous, theatrical stunts!’
She suddenly realised that the new voice was much deeper than the one in her head and far more insulting, and the loud slapping sound wasn’t the rising waves hitting her face; it was the sound of oars striking the water.
Water sheeted down her face from her sopping hair, sticking her eyelashes together and getting in her swollen eyes as she stopped to tread water and was nearly run down by a small aluminum dinghy rowing furiously towards her.
Nicholas was shipping the oars, leaning over the side, yelling, cursing, trying to grab her slippery wet-suited arm.
Vivian swam away, coughing and spluttering as she briefly sank. When she struggled to the surface again, Nicholas was standing silhouetted against the crisp morning sky, the boat rocking dangerously. ‘For God’s sake, Vivian,’ he cried bleakly. ‘Where in the hell do you think you’re going?’
Still choking on salt-water and shock, Vivian didn’t bother to answer; she just pointed in the direction of the distant island.
Nicholas exploded in another series of explicit curses. ‘Do you want to bloody drown? You can’t swim that far! Get in this damned boat now!’
For an answer Vivian rolled over and began swimming with renewed energy. Each time she turned her head to breathe, she saw Nicholas pulling on the oars, keeping on a parallel course, his grim mouth opening and shutting on words she couldn’t hear through her water-clogged ears.
Gradually Vivian’s false burst of strength drained away and the next time that Nicholas veered close she didn’t have the energy to pull away.