by Miranda Lee
‘The lighthouse. I’m in the process of having it converted into living-space. In fact, you might say this is the penthouse suite.’
Vivian winced as his words reverberated like a knell of doom inside her fragile skull. She lifted her other hand and massaged her painfully throbbing temples, desperately trying to remember how she had ended up in bed with her worst enemy—a man who ten years ago had accused her of murder and Janna of complicity, in words that had burned the paper on which they were written with their vitriolic spite.
Her fingers pressed harder against the distracting pain as she asked the question that should have been the first thing out of her mouth.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘If you mean physically, rather than existentially, at the moment I’m just enjoying the view.’
He wasn’t referring to the window behind her, Vivian realised, as his gaze slid several points south of her pale face, where it settled with a sultry satisfaction that made her belatedly aware of a growing coolness around her upper body.
She looked down, and gave a mortified shriek as she saw that her chest was as bare as his—more so, since she didn’t have a furry pelt to cloak her firm breasts, thrust into lavish prominence by her unconsciously provocative pose. All she had to hide behind were her freckles, which were scant protection from his mocking appraisal. In the split second before Vivian whipped her arms down, she was shamefully aware of a tightening of her pointed nipples that had nothing to do with the invisible caress of chilled air.
Flushed with humiliation, she snatched at the bedclothes, tugging the sheet up to her face as she cringed against the rough wall behind her. Outrage burned away her drug-induced lethargy as her blush mounted. All the time that they had been talking, Nicholas Thorne had known that Vivian was unaware of her semi-nudity. While she had been seriously struggling to communicate, he had been encouraging her to flaunt herself like a floozie, savouring the anticipation of her inevitable embarrassment!
She skimmed an exploring hand down under the covers and found to her deep dismay that all she had on were her tiny bikini panties.
‘What happened to my clothes?’ she demanded furiously, sweeping a blurred look around the room. The bed, a small bedside cabinet and a strange, triangular clothes-horse in the centre of the room appeared to be the only furniture. No closet or clothes, masculine or feminine, appeared in evidence.
‘Don’t you remember taking them off?’ he asked, shifting to fold his arms casually behind his head, his leg brushing her knee under the covers and making her jump.
‘No, I do not!’ she gritted back fiercely. ‘I remember you taking them off.’
Her fingers tightened their grip on the sheet, her eyes blazing green fury above the white veil of cotton as it all came rushing back in vivid detail. He had been kissing her, gloating over her helplessness, and it was only because of his insidious drug that she hadn’t fought him tooth and claw!
But she wasn’t helpless now, she thought grimly. He wanted a run for his money and that was what he was going to get!
After all, that was the reason that she had knowingly walked right into the jaws of his meticulously baited trap.
Her plan was beautifully simple: by presenting Nicholas Thorne with his prime target at point-blank range, she would draw his fire long enough to exhaust or at least appease the machiavellian lust for vengeance that was compelling him to treat anyone and anything that Vivian loved as a pawn to be used against her.
‘Did I?’ His surprise was patently mocking. ‘Goodness, how shocking of me. Are you sure it wasn’t just a wishful fantasy?’
‘The last person I would want to fantasise about is you!’ She whipped the sheet down to her chin, raking him with a look of furious contempt. She was prepared to take anything he dished out, as long as he left her family alone. The success of her whole mission hinged on his never finding out that she was a willing self-sacrifice.
‘You lured me here under false pretences. You drugged me and took off my clothes!’ she hissed at him goadingly.
‘Only the ones that were superfluous to requirements,’ he replied blandly.
‘What in the hell do you mean by that?’ She bristled like a spitting ginger kitten, all kinds of wild scenarios exploding through her scandalised imagination.
‘What do you think I mean?’ He stretched the arms behind his head languidly, expanding the impressive structure of his chest as he murmured tauntingly, ‘Are you wondering whether those sexy emerald-green panties are a tribute to my gentlemanly honour...or to my sexual ingenuity?’
Since it happened to be exactly what she was thinking, Vivian reacted furiously. ‘In the circumstances, I hardly think the question of honour arises,’ she said scathingly.
‘You may be right,’ he stunned her by replying. He came up on one elbow and Vivian reflexively jerked the covers more securely around her.
Unfortunately, her hasty movement tugged the coverings away from the other side of the bed, exposing Nicholas’s long, muscled left flank, lean hip and rippling abdomen. The skin was slightly darker on his half-raised leg and thick torso than on his hip, the naked swimsuit line jolting her with the knowledge that, while she might be semi-nude, he was totally naked!
Thankfully his modesty was preserved by a vital fold of sheet, for Vivian’s wide-eyed attention lingered for a startled moment before being hurriedly transferred to his face.
‘Some parts of me are fortunately still extremely functional,’ he purred, his undamaged eye glinting with a predatory amusement. ‘Especially in the mornings...’
‘Mornings?’ Vivian’s hot face swivelled gratefully away from him towards the soft yellow-pink glow at the window. ‘But...it’s sunset,’ she protested in weak confusion. ‘It’s just getting dark...’
‘Actually, it’s getting light,’ he corrected. ‘That window faces east, not west.’
Vivian sucked in a sharp breath as the full implication of what he was saying hit her. She hadn’t just lost a mere hour or two. She had already spend half a day and a whole night entirely at his mercy!
‘Quite so,’ he said softly. ‘This is the morning after, Vivian. Which, given the fact that we’re in bed together, naturally poses the deeply intriguing question: the morning after what?’
Vivian stared at the thin, sardonic curl of his mouth that hinted at depths of degradation she hadn’t even considered.
‘Oh, my God, what have you done?’ she whispered fearfully, her body shivering with the disgraceful echo of a half-remembered thrill.
‘More to the point, what haven’t I done?’ he murmured wickedly, pivoting on his elbow in a fluid flow of muscle to retrieve something from the bedside cabinet behind him.
He offered it to her and, when she refused to let go of her flimsy shield of bedclothes, let a cascade of coloured rectangles spill on to the rumpled fabric between them. Her back glued protectively against the wall, Vivian frowned stiffly down, afraid to move, and frustrated that the surface of the bed was just beyond the range of her near-sighted focus.
‘Here, perhaps these will help.’ He sat up in a flurry of bedclothes, ignoring her automatic cringe as, moments later, he pushed her spectacles on to her wrinkled nose. ‘Better?’
It was a hundred times worse! Vivian stared, appalled, at the photographs scattered like indecent confetti over the bed.
‘Oh, my God...!’
‘It’s a little too late for prayers, Vivian. Your sins have already found you out. Quite graphically, too, wouldn’t you say?’
‘How...? I... You—’
He interrupted her incoherent stammering smoothly. ‘I would have thought that the how was self-evident. There’s this clever modern invention called photography, you see...’
The sarcastic flourish of his hand made Vivian utter a soundless moan as she saw that what she had myopically mistaken for a clothes-horse was in fact a tripod, topped with a fearfully sophisticated-looking camera, its lens pointing malevolently at the bed.
&nbs
p; ‘And as for the I and you, well—we appear to be pretty brazenly self-evident, too, don’t we? Here, for instance...’
Vivian’s hypnotised gaze followed his pointing finger. ‘See the way you’re arched across the bed under me, your arms thrown over your head in abandoned pleasure...’
Vivian clamped the blankets rigidly under her arms, freeing her trembling hands to try frantically to push his away as he sorted through the collection and selected another.
‘But this one is my own personal favourite, I think. So artistic...so erotic...so expressive. Don’t you agree that we make a sensuous contrast of textures and patterns? With your ginger-dappled skin and my deep tan, and the way our bodies seem to flow over and around each other...’
Vivian tuned out his honeyed taunts, transfixed by the searing image suspended from his fingers.
She had seen raunchy advertisements for perfume in glossy women’s magazines that were more physically revealing, but it was impossible to be objective now. The couple in this photograph weren’t anonymous models posing for public display. That was her caught in an attitude of utter abandon, that was his nude body aggressively crushing her to the bed. She went hot and cold at the idea that he had somehow tapped into her forbidden desires.
Even as a tiny, clinical voice of reason was pointing out that the alignment of Nicholas’s fingers on her hip conveniently covered the precise area where the thin strip of her bikini panties would be, Vivian was shattered by a sickening sense of betrayal. The pictures lied; they depicted an act of violation, not of love!
She tried to grab the photographs out of his hand and, when he laughed jeeringly and held it out of her reach, she fell desperately on the others, tearing them into meticulously tiny pieces, all the while trying to protect her threadbare modesty with the slipping covers.
He laughed again, making no attempt to stop her wild orgy of destruction beyond retaining safe possession of his avowed favourite. ‘There are plenty more where those came from, Vivian. It was a very long, exhausting night...’
‘I was unconscious,’ she panted, rejecting his sly insinuation. ‘Nothing happened—’ She stopped, stricken. ‘My God, you were going to do this to Janna?’
‘Actually, the original plan was for someone else to play your sister’s partner in sin,’ he drawled. ‘And when they supposedly disappeared together, with the payment for the land, I would send you photos of the lovers and evidence that they had planned the fraud together. You were supposed to come dashing to her defence on the eve of your own wedding, sadly too late to rescue the contract that your company was depending on, but in plenty of time to negotiate the salvage of Janna’s personal and professional reputation—at the price of your own, of course...
‘Your arriving in Janna’s place sabotaged the exquisite complexity of the plan, but I’m nothing if not flexible. As soon as I saw you, I knew I wanted the privilege of handling you to be purely mine...’
She had already guessed much of it, but the callous detachment with which he outlined the bare bones of the plot was chilling.
She gasped, as an even more horrible thought smacked her in the face. ‘Who took the photos? Who else was in here, watching us—?’ She broke off, shuddering with humiliation at the thought that Frank had been a flint-eyed witness to her degradation...
‘I can promise you, Vivian, you weren’t seen or touched by anyone but me.’ He took a small black wafer of plastic from the table by the bed and pointed it towards the tripod, pressing a button so that she could hear the electronic whirr as the flash momentarily dazzled her eyes. ‘Remote control. It’s a state-of-the-art instant camera—the photos only take a few minutes to develop.’
He rolled off the bed and Vivian uttered a choking cry, closing her eyes a fraction of a second too late to deny herself a glimpse of taut male buttocks and hard, hair-roughened flanks.
‘Prude.’ His mockery singed her burning ears. ‘Here.’
She peeped warily through her lashes and relaxed a trifle when she saw that he had pulled on his jeans. He was holding out the thin red sweater he had worn the previous day.
He shook it impatiently at her immobility. ‘Come on.’ He threw it on the bed. ‘Put that on.’
‘I want my clothes,’ she said stubbornly, as she watched him apply his eye-patch, raking his thick, blond-streaked hair over the thin band of elastic that held it in place.
‘Then want must be your master.’ He put his hands on his hips, legs aggressively astride, a bare-chested pirate. ‘Or rather, / shall—and as your master I’m quite happy for you to remain without clothes indefinitely. In fact, yes, I rather like the idea of keeping you here naked...’ He invited her to consider the notion in a dark, seductive voice, watching her defiance waver. ‘Nude, you’d be so deliciously vulnerable, so much easier for me to control...’
With a muttered curse, Vivian snatched the sweater and hastily pulled it over her blushing head, contorting herself to arrange it carefully over the top of the bedclothes before she let them go. Thankfully, the sweater came to midthigh, although she still felt horribly exposed as she crabbed to the edge of the bed and swung her feet tentatively to the floor.
‘That colour makes you look like a fire-cracker with a lit fuse.’
The faint suggestion of approval confused her. She was acutely conscious of the scent of him clinging to the sweater, mingling with her own, and of the soft brush of the thin fabric against her bare breasts. She licked her lower lip, and then fingered it nervously. It felt fuller than usual.
‘What are you going to do—with the photographs, I mean?’
‘Why, there’s only one honourable thing to do with them.’
Hope flared briefly. ‘What’s that?’
He plucked her hand from her mouth and mockingly kissed the backs of her fingers.
‘Have them delivered to the church on Saturday, of course. Your poor fiancé must be given some reason for being left stranded at the altar!’
His tongue flicked against her knuckles, stroking her with a brief sting of moist fire that distracted her from his bombshell. She jerked her hand away, but not before he had caught her wrist and with a savage twist removed Peter’s ring from her finger.
‘We’ll send this bauble along with the pretty pictures, just to make sure he gets the message that he can’t have you.’
He tossed it in the air and caught it, flaunting his possession before thrusting it casually into his pocket.
‘You can’t do that...’ Vivian whispered, her first thought of the havoc he could wreak on an already tense situation, that was, if the wedding hadn’t already been cancelled. Had Janna and Peter taken her advice seriously and gone ahead with the arrangements, or were they still stubbornly wallowing in joint guilt and remorse?
‘Marvel will never marry you now, Vivian. Learn to accept it.’
‘No, Peter loves me!’ she declared desperately, jumping to her feet. On one level, at least, it was still true. It was because of his deep affection and respect for Vivian that he and Janna had put themselves through such torture over the past few weeks. Vivian hadn’t even been able to maintain a righteous fury over the betrayal, for it was obvious that the guilt-stricken pair had suffered agonies trying to ignore and then deny their love, in order not to hurt sweet, gentle, defenceless Vivian.
She had bluntly told them to stop being so nobly self-sacrificing. The practical thing to do would be to forget the huge hassle of calling off the elaborate wedding-arrangements and returning all the presents, and just switch brides. Janna and Peter had looked so appalled that Vivian had burst out laughing. It had been the laughter more than anything that made her realise that perhaps she wasn’t as heartbroken as a jilted woman should be.
So, when the first opportunity had presented itself for her to prove that she wasn’t the sweet, gentle, defenceless creature everyone was going to feel sorry for, she had grabbed at it defiantly with both hands.
‘Marvel’s going to take one look at those pictures and know it’s all
over between you.’ Nicholas continued his ruthless attack. ‘He’ll never be able to forget the sight of you burning in your lover’s arms—’
‘We’re not lovers!’ Vivian shrieked. ‘Those pictures—they’re all fakes. You just... You posed me, like a mannequin—’
‘Did I really, Vivian?’ he taunted softly. ‘You were very willing. Don’t you remember telling me how I made you feel all soft and hot and buttery inside, and grumbling that it wasn’t fair you had to miss out on the thrill of being ravished by a sexy villain...?’
‘That was the drug talking, not me! There’s a big difference between being barely conscious and being willing,’ she pointed out with smouldering force. ‘And—and, anyway—if I... If we had done anything...I’d know...’
‘How?’ He seemed sincerely curious.
She practically melted her spectacles with the glare she gave him. ‘I just would, that’s all,’ she said stubbornly.
‘Not if I was very skilful and very tender, and you were very, very receptive... Not if you were all soft and buttery inside,’ he said, in a satin murmur that slithered over her skin.
‘Stop it! I won’t listen!’ she cried childishly, covering her burning ears with her hands. His eyes dropped to the sharp rise of the hem of his sweater as it flirted against her upper thighs, and she hurriedly lowered her arms. ‘No one else will listen to your lies, either. They’ll believe me...’
‘But you won’t be there to tell them the truth,’ he said smoothly. ‘You’ll be here with me. You don’t think I’m going to let you go so easily, do you?’
‘But you have to let me leave eventually.’ She tried to sound confident.
‘Eventually, you may find that you don’t want to leave...’
His insinuating murmur filled her with alarm. What was he suggesting—that he intended to turn her into some kind of...sex-slave, addicted to the forbidden pleasure that he could provide?
‘You can’t keep me imprisoned here forever...’ she protested faintly.
He shrugged. ‘Who’s keeping you prisoner? You came here of your own free will. In fact, you’ve already sent a fax to your office saying that everything is fine and that you’ll be back with the contract the day before the wedding. So don’t think anyone’s going to come flying to your rescue.’
