Dark Fever

by Charlotte Lamb

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ Bianca assured him, taking a piece of chorizo, the spicy red local sausage, from a little tapas saucer.

  ‘Enjoy, senora,’ he smiled, getting up to go and talk to some of the other guests.

  They moved on a few minutes later to another bar, another selection of tapas—the other guests grazed eagerly on the food on offer while they drank their glasses of wine, discussing the various dishes with each other. Bianca noticed that Freddie and her husband had disappeared; perhaps they had taken a taxi back to the hotel.

  The range of tapas was bewildering—artichokes in vinaigrette, baby clams served in a garlic sauce, fried whitebait, baby eels or squid, snails, mushrooms in a rich tomato sauce, chorizo, hard-boiled eggs stuffed with a variety of things. Everything was beautifully cooked but very rich.

  The last bar they visited was the best—along with the tapas there was music and flamenco dancing, a black-jacketed man urgently drumming the heels of his highly polished shoes, his partner dancing with passion and invitation around him, her red skirts flaring.

  The sexual tension in the music and dancing did something drastic to Bianca’s mood. She was flushed and feverish as she clapped along with the others and drummed her feet, as they were instructed—the rhythm of the music had got into her blood.

  When the dancing ended the bar seemed even noisier; as the evening went on and more and more people piled inside until there was hardly room to move. Bianca began to get a faint headache. She needed some fresh air so she wriggled through the crowded bar and went outside into the cool Spanish night.

  She had no intention of going far; she would just wait in the street for her companions to come and join her. They would be leaving soon, she imagined—it was getting very late.

  The cool air was delicious on her overheated skin; she stood there breathing in for a minute, sighing with pleasure, feeling her headache easing off, and then, across the narrow street, she saw a small boutique and was struck by a dress displayed in the window. It reminded Bianca of the dress the flamenco dancer had worn—low-necked, tight-waisted, full in the skirt, and a vivid red. She walked over to take a closer look. It was stunning on the window dummy—she wasn’t sure she had the nerve to wear it in public, it was so dramatic and eye-catching; her children were bound to laugh at her. But she was tempted. She had the right colouring and she was slim enough to wear a dress like that.

  She frowned, trying to work out the price in English money, and was vaguely aware of a motorbike roaring round the corner from the main square and heading towards her.

  It slowed as it reached her, someone jumped off it, and she saw another reflection move in the glass window of the boutique beside her own reflection. A small, slim figure in black leather, the face hidden by a black helmet, was running up behind her. The motorbike had skidded to a stop a few yards on along the street.

  With a start, Bianca remembered the guide’s warning about motorbike thieves. Her nerves jumping, she swung round, just as the black-clad figure grabbed for her handbag. She instinctively opened her mouth wide and began to yell, holding on to her bag like grim death. The fact that she couldn’t see the face of her attacker made the whole thing more frightening.

  After trying to yank her bag away the boy let go and pushed his hand into his black leather jacket—the hand came out holding something. In the street-light’s yellow gleam she saw steel glittering and her throat closed in shock. He was holding a knife.

  Everything seemed to go into slow motion. She stared at the long, razor-edged blade, frozen, saw the black-gloved hand holding it, the black leather cuff of the boy’s jacket not quite meeting the glove.

  Between them there was a red line etched in the tanned flesh—a knife-cut, she thought dumbly, and somehow the sight of the scar made the knife real. She went into panic, backing away, so scared that she had even stopped screaming. The knife slashed downwards. For a second she thought he was stabbing her—then she realised what he intended. He was trying to cut the straps of her handbag.

  Her fear subsided a little, but, because she had been really scared, now she got angry. She had once been to a short self-defence class at the local evening school; she remembered what she had been taught, and brought her knee up into his groin, hard.

  He gave a gasp of pain and staggered backwards, then recovered and came at her again with the knife, muttering in Spanish. She didn’t know what he said—his voice was muffled by his helmet—but it sounded very unpleasant, and she knew that this time he was not trying to cut her handbag straps—he wanted to hurt her. The air throbbed with hatred.

  A second later a car came round the corner. The yellow beam of its headlights lit them as if they were on a stage. She turned to face it, waving urgently, shouting, ‘Help! Help!’

  The black-clad figure on the motorbike shouted out in Spanish and turned the bike to come back towards them. Snarling, the other boy climbed on to the pillion, made a very rude gesture at Bianca with his black-gloved hand, then they rode off at high speed and disappeared.

  Bianca sagged against the wall, her knees turning to jelly, trembling violently now that the adrenalin had gone and reaction had set in.

  The car screeched to a stop and a man got out and strode towards her, saying something in Spanish. She weakly lifted her head and the light of the street-lamp fell on her face and showed her his—they recognised each other in that instant. He was the man she had seen swimming that morning.

  ‘Are you OK? Did he hurt you?’ he asked in a deep, husky voice, his grey eyes moving over her in search of some visible sign of injury.

  She shook her head, feeling even more like fainting. Why did it have to be him who came along just at this moment? It seemed less like a coincidence than a punishment. He was the last man she wanted to see right now.

  ‘He wanted my handbag,’ she whispered.

  ‘Did he get it?’ His English was very good, but she heard the faint note of a foreign accent. Presumably he was Spanish. He was certainly very dark, with olive skin and black hair which was glossy and very thick.

  He was very casually dressed, in cream linen trousers and a chocolate-brown shirt, worn without a tie, the collar open at the throat to give her a glimpse of the bronzed skin she had stared at that morning when he’d climbed out of the pool. The very memory of that moment sent a wave of heat through her whole body. From a distance she had found him devastating—at such close proximity he had an even deeper impact on her.

  ‘No,’ she said unsteadily, showing him her handbag which she still clutched in one hand. Then she broke out in a voice that shook, ‘He had a knife!’

  She still couldn’t believe it. It would be a long time before she got over the shock of seeing the knife shining in the lamplight. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before; she had always led a rather quiet, peaceful existence; violence was something she had only read about in newspapers. She had never imagined it happening to her.

  ‘I saw it. As I was driving towards you I saw the knife he held and I thought he was trying to kill you—you’re sure you aren’t hurt?’

  She was wearing a little black jacket over a white dress printed with lilacs. He reached out to touch her shoulders and arms lightly, his fingertips gliding over the material of the jacket in exploration.

  She quivered helplessly, shaken to her depths by what she instantly felt—his fingertips left a trail of fire on her skin through the layers of material under them.

  ‘No, I...I’m not... He didn’t hurt me...’ she stammered.

  ‘You’re cold,’ he said, his frown even deeper. ‘That’s shock. Come and sit in my car. I’ll call the police.’

  She urgently said, ‘No, please don’t—I don’t want to spend hours talking to policemen; he didn’t get anything, or hurt me, so... I couldn’t even describe him; he was wearing a helmet that made it impossible to see his face; he looked like a spaceman.’

  His face tightened in disapproval. ‘You ought to tell the police about it—he’s dangerous;
he might use that knife on someone else and they might not be as lucky as you were.’

  She knew he was absolutely right; it was what she would have said herself to anyone who had been attacked like that. How different a situation looked when it was you, yourself, who was experiencing it. Her common sense and reason told her one thing, she felt another.

  Sighing, she said, ‘ Well... could you ask if I could talk to them tomorrow? I really don’t feel up to it tonight.’

  He stared down at her, his face still hard. ‘Very well, I’ll get in touch, explain what happened; I shall have to give evidence too, because I witnessed the attack. I’ll ask if you can talk to them tomorrow. Come along, I’ll drive you back to the hotel.’

  She resisted the hand that tried to lead her away. ‘I’m with a group from the hotel—they’re in that bar; they’ll come out looking for me any minute.’

  He shrugged her refusal away coolly. ‘I’ll go in and speak to the guide—it’s Ramon tonight, isn’t it?’

  Startled, she nodded. ‘Yes.’ How had he known that? Had he been on this tour himself? Or did he work at the hotel?

  He had such a marvellous tan—he must surely live here to have got so brown at this time of year. That tan was not the product of a week or two in Spain. It spoke of months of exposure to the sun.

  ‘Sit in my car and I’ll have a word with him, then I’ll drive you back.’

  Bianca was so shaken by what had happened that she didn’t argue, although in other circumstances she might have done. She was too independent and used to running her own life and taking care of herself and her children to enjoy being ordered around by some strange man. But tonight she was quite relieved to be able to let him take charge; she let him lead her to his car and slide her into the front passenger seat.

  He left the door open, but instead of going straight into the bar he went round to the back of his car and was back a moment later with a warm woollen tartan car rug which he gently wrapped around her.

  ‘It gets quite cold at night at this time of year,’ he said as she looked up, startled, her blue eyes wide, the pupils dilated as she felt his hands moving over her. ‘And you’re probably still in shock. Just sit here and rest. It will only take me a minute to find Ramon and explain.’

  He closed the car door and she watched him walk rapidly over to the bar; the light from it spilled out around him as he opened the door and went in, his black hair gleaming and his face in sharp profile, his nose long and straight, his mouth a ruthless slash, his jawline determined.

  Not a man you would want to argue with, and few people probably ever dared—which accounted for his cool assumption that she would obey him.

  That could get annoying! she thought wryly, her mouth twisting. If she weren’t feeling so weak at the knees just now she would probably have resented being ordered around like that.

  Or did she start feeling weak-kneed the minute she saw him get out of this car?

  The idea made her tense and hurriedly shut her eyes as if that would make it easy to forget what she had just thought. It didn’t, of course. She couldn’t ignore the truth. Closer, and fully dressed, he was even more devastating than he had seemed at a distance, almost naked. She couldn’t understand why he was having such an intense effect on her. When he’d wrapped this rug around her his hands had touched her and she had felt her body throb with sensations she was afraid to remember. Her face ran with hot colour, her mouth went dry.

  With a pang she thought of Rob, and felt an instant stab of guilt. It was shameful to be feeling this way about some other man, a stranger she had only seen for the first time today. What’s the matter with you? she asked herself. You have been on your own now for three years and you’ve met plenty of men during that time, some of them pretty good-looking—what’s so different about this one? You’re acting like a teenager with a first crush.

  I wish I were a teenager! she thought. Well, maybe not a teenager—but I wish I were twenty again. I don’t want to be forty.

  Was that what it was all about? Was she desperately looking for some way to stop time? To go back to her youth?

  She pulled the rug closer, glad of the warmth. She was still shivering, her skin icy and her body weak with shock.

  Her birthday had been a watershed, she realised. It had made her think about the way time was passing— seemed, in fact, to be accelerating. She hadn’t noticed the fact until her birthday. She had been too busy looking after her children, learning to run the shop, coping with grief and loneliness. When she had thought about time it was only to remember lost happiness—it had always seemed as if only yesterday she had been twenty years old and falling in love with Rob, walking on air, looking forward to marrying him, starting a family, believing blissfully that they had an eternity together in front of them. She gave a long sigh which wrenched her body. That was the best time of my life. I wish I could have it back again, she thought.

  But you could never have time back. It flowed, like a river, in one direction, on and on without stopping, and you could never swim back upstream. You had to go on with the river.

  She heard a sound and opened her eyes again to see the door of the bar opening. He was coming back.

  He walked quickly, long-legged, easy-moving, the night wind making his black hair blow back from his forehead, making his shirt ripple against him in a way that made the planes of his upper body very visible.

  She stared at the wide, muscled shoulders, the ribs and flat stomach of a man in the peak of condition, swallowing, aware of her pulses going crazy. She had never met a man who had this effect on her; it was really beginning to spook her.

  He opened the door and got back into the car and she was immediately tense, wildly conscious of his closeness, of the proximity of their bodies in that small, enclosed space, of the faint scent of his aftershave, his long legs stretching out beside her own. Sensual pleasure went through her in waves, making her mouth dry, her skin hot, her ears beating with hypertension.

  ‘I found Ramon and explained,’ he said, starting the car and glancing at her at the same time. ‘He was horrified when I told him what had happened. He wanted to come out to make sure you were OK, but I told him I’d look after you.’ The car began to move slowly as he added drily, ‘He also tells me he had given the usual warning about never leaving the party and going off on your own.’

  Flushing, she admitted it. ‘Yes, he did, but...’

  ‘But you didn’t think it could happen to you?’ His tone was sardonic and she felt her skin prickle with resentment. He obviously thought she was stupid, a silly woman with no common sense.

  ‘It was very hot and crowded in the bar and I needed some fresh air; I didn’t think it would be dangerous just to step outside; I didn’t mean to go anywhere else. But I noticed a dress in a shop window so I went over to look at it and—’

  She broke off, swallowing as she remembered the moment of panic as she’d faced the knife. She had been stupid; she couldn’t deny it. His cool censure was justified. She had no excuse for her folly. She had been warned, and had taken the warning lightly. ‘It happened so fast, there was no warning,’ she whispered.

  ‘There never is; they don’t give their victims a warning; they’re ruthless and vicious,’ he said drily. ‘You were lucky it didn’t end in tragedy—he might have used that knife and you could be on your way to hospital now, or a slab in the morgue.’

  She shivered and stared out of the window. He was right. She had had a narrow escape. What would have happened to her children if she had been killed tonight?

  As he drove through one of the squares, she stared at a large stone fountain, the spray of water shooting out of a nymph’s hands, glittering in the lamplight, rainbow-coloured. A group of young people in jeans and T-shirts ran out of a narrow, winding street and danced across the square, laughing and singing under the bare-branched, pollarded lime trees.

  The car drove on along another road, between white houses, their window-boxes filled with little pink flower
s, their shutters closed over the windows behind which, too doubt, people were eating—in Spain they ate dinner very late, often at nine or ten o’clock at night.

  A few moments later he drove out of town and headed down the motorway which ran along the Costa del Sol from Malaga to the border, with golf courses and new villa estates on their left, the sea on their right, a distant gleam of silvery water under the moon.

  She sighed. ‘It’s so lovely here, it’s hard to believe anything violent could happen.’

  ‘Well, it could,’ he said impatiently. ‘Just remember—it could happen anywhere, any time. We live in a violent world—whether we live in London, New York, Spain or anywhere else—it’s wise to be careful, wherever we are.’ He shot her another look. ‘You’re here for two weeks, aren’t you?’

  Her blue eyes widened. ‘Yes—how did you know that?’

  ‘I run the hotel, Mrs Fraser. It’s my job to know who is in each apartment. We pride ourselves on our security—some very rich and famous people stay with us and they expect us to keep a close eye on who comes and goes in the hotel. I’m sure you’ve noticed our security men patrolling the grounds?’

  Still absorbing the fact that he was the hotel manager, she blankly shook her head, her black hair flicking against her shoulder. He gave her another of his dry smiles.

  ‘Well, they’re here, day and night. Look out of your window some time and you’re bound to see one. They wear uniform, they’re armed and they keep in touch with base on walkie-talkies. Any disturbance is dealt with immediately; you need have no fear while you’re in the hotel grounds.’

  She was taken aback by this new revelation and shivered. ‘I find that pretty scary—having armed men all around me day and night!’

  He turned his head again, to look down into her blue eyes, his expression changing. His stare seemed to dive down into her very soul, and her heart made a frightening leap, like a salmon trying to fight back upstream against a powerful tide.