by Susan Napier
'No—'
He misunderstood, his eyes dominating hers as he forced her chin up and let her see the full force of his masculine intent in a face taut with barely leashed hunger.
'Yes. You have the instincts of a born gambler, Elizabeth, though you may try to deny it. You have a reckless streak in you that you explain away as stubbornness but which I recognise, for it is a trait we share. You gambled on coming to my island, you gambled when you spied on me and taunted me with your inconsistencies, and you gambled again when you welcomed me into your body with such voluptuous enthusiasm and then tried to primly pretend that it hadn’t happened. And most of all, ma chère, you gambled on coming here and expecting me to let you walk away afterwards as if I didn’t exist....'
He fingered the tiny satin bow that was the front fastening of her bra as he looked into her eyes. He held her breathless gaze as they both heard the tiny click that signalled that he had slipped the fastening.
'Now you take the most exciting gamble of all, chérie.' He brushed the lace aside, still without lowering his gaze, and cupped her breasts, massaging them softly. 'You gamble that I am more honest with you than you were with me.'
'Jack—'
'No. I don’t want to talk.' He lowered his eyes and looked at what his hands had done. Her breasts were swollen beneath their garland of precious stones, their tracery of blue veins boldly outlined against their taut paleness, the nipples cresting the heavy globes dark and stiff.
'Grandfather was right...you are ripe. Ripe and ready for this... aren’t you, chérie, even if you don’t realise it yet...?'
He put his mouth where his hands had been and she cried out, struggling to free her arms from the sleeves that held them to her sides, and he drew back.
'Yes, we'll take it slow this time, ma chère... long and slow. This is a first time for you, and I know that you might be afraid...'
The savage edge had gone, only the tenderness remained, and Elizabeth was more bewildered than ever.
‘I don’t know what you mean...' she whispered, trying to capture the elusive quality of his words.
He answered her question literally, stripping off his jacket, and tie and shirt, and throwing them to the thick, richly patterned square of carpet beneath their feet. 'The first time in my bed.'
He reached around her and drew the zip fully down, his furry chest brushing her nipples, making her heavy breasts ache. He helped her step out of her dress, careful not to touch her with his hands, and threw it on top of his clothes. The bra was hanging open from its shoulder-straps and he slid it down her arms and on to the floor. He was naked before she, because he wouldn’t let her take off her silky green pants or the heavy necklace.
He was aroused, and with each slow movement seemed to become more so until every muscle in his body corded with the effort of restraint. And still he didn’t rush her.
Elizabeth was in a state of feverish wonder, hardly able to believe that the man who had threatened to kill her only a short while ago had suddenly become this mellow god of sweet gentleness, but content to accept the unexpected gift and worry about motives tomorrow.
The necklace sliding against her body particularly seemed to fascinate him. He turned and arched her in his arms so that he could admire the way it shifted and settled against her pale satin skin. When he placed her on his bed he took the time to arrange it to his artistic satisfaction before he bent and nuzzled her over, above and between the precious curves and curlicues, murmuring with fascination over the contrast between succulent, warm flesh and cool metal. He kissed her and stroked her hair from its neat rolls until it rained darkly across his white pillow. He ran his hands over her sides, tracing the billowing lines that he praised with erotic words of desire, his fingers teasing up the wide, silky legs of her pants until he became impatient with the barrier to his full enjoyment of her body and tore them in a hiss of splitting stitches. He cupped and suckled her breasts, so gentle that he caused her pain, his tongue drawing out the nipples until they glistened like the rubies that he so admired. He stroked her slightly rounded belly and kissed it, and murmured something secret into the pale, soft down that grazed its surface and then he parted her thighs and praised her there, too, in ways that made her writhe voluptuously in the crisp white sheets.
Elizabeth had naively thought she knew him as a lover. Now he showed her that she was wrong, that she didn’t know him at all. He curbed and channelled her eagerness with a ruthless strength and a single-minded purpose that heightened her arousal until just the touch of his mouth brushing across her skin was an unbelievable delight, moving languidly on her, over her, in her, until she couldn’t contain the building sensation any longer and exploded in an agony of pleasure, rising and falling feverishly beneath him until he grasped her by the hips and pinned her deep into the soft mattress in a powerful, bucking spasm that arched him like a bow and released him into soaring flight with a savage shout of victory.
Afterwards, as she lay tangled in his arms, still gasping for the breath that he had stolen out of her body, he raised himself up on one elbow and touched the necklace that she still wore.
'There's a family legend attached to the wearing of this... a very powerful legend that has come to be accepted as fact. Like this one, from the other side of my family...' he touched the ring in his ear '... being considered a symbol of the reckless luck of the Hawkwood men in fulfilling their deepest aspirations.'
'Oh?' Elizabeth tensed at the silky satisfaction in the lazy drawl.
'Would you like to know what it is?' His silver eyes taunted her with their secrets. 'Ever since the necklace was made, as a betrothal gift for the bride of a pre-revolutionary St Clair, it has exhibited a peculiar power over the women who wear it—'
‘It doesn’t have any power over me. I don’t even like it,' interrupted Elizabeth, quite truthfully.
'Ah, but you see, chérie, its power has only just been given its chance to begin to work on you...'
She was alert now to the danger-signals in his dark smile, and sat up, regarding him warily as he lay back against his high pillows.
'The flight of an arrow must terminate within its vessel—and you, ma chère, have just received a quiver-full .. .*
It took a moment for the penny to drop. 'You mean—'
‘I mean that it is a potent fertility charm. Any woman who accepts her St Clair lover while wearing that necklace is destined to be pregnant with a male child within the year...'
Elizabeth bunched the sheets around her as she rose up on her haunches, vibrating with outrage that he could frighten her so. 'That's ridiculous—it's just an absurd story! Surely you don’t believe that superstitious rubbish?'
'Absurd stories seem to be the norm tonight,' he replied smoothly. 'You may call it superstition, chérie, but in three hundred years the necklace has never failed, even on women who were thought to be barren. I did not protect you this time—there seemed no point, since your pregnancy was a predestined inevitability from the moment I entered you...'
She was wrestling frantically with the clasp to the necklace, at the same time trying to keep the sheet covering her breasts, only to fail in both and end up kneeling before him in a provocative pose of rosy nakedness that made him grin approvingly.
'Damn you, take this thing off!' She presented her stiff back to him and he saluted it with a series of slow kisses before he rose behind her, deliberately taking his time to untangle the delicate gold fastening from the strands of hair that had become caught there.
‘It's too late, Eliza-Beth, the deed is done; you are already fertile with my seed—soon your womb will swell with my bounty. A baby, to suckle life from where I have suckled pleasure in the process of his creation,' he murmured, looking down over her shoulder to where her swaying breasts displayed the soft red marks of his lovemaking.
'You're just saying this to frighten me, to punish me because I damaged your stupid male pride!' Elizabeth accused him wildly as the necklace suddenly slid from her
neck to pool on the tangled sheets and she leapt out of his bed, almost falling in her haste to be free of his cruel taunting.
'Would it be such a punishment to bear my child?'
'Yes. Yes!' She denied him the wild truth of her heart, hating him for the method and unbelievably ruthless calculation of his revenge. The fact that he had deliberately not used any contraception she could almost forgive, since she had abrogated that responsibility herself, but to gloat about the possibility of making her bear an unwanted, illegitimate child created from a moment of casual lust was utterly unconscionable!
‘I hate you!' she cried viciously. 'And rather than bear any child of yours I'd, I'd—'
'You'd what?' His voice was no longer lazy or taunting, but hard and sharp as steel as he rose from the bed to confront her in the full threat of his possessive masculinity. 'Beth—'
That strange hoarse note in his voice was another trick. She wouldn’t listen.
'You're sick, you know that? You don’t deserve to have any children and certainly none of mine!' It was the greatest insult she could think of. She longed to fling at him that she'd rather have an abortion. But she couldn’t. Not even in the depths of her greatest torment could she ever kill their child. It might be illegitimate but it wouldn’t be unwanted, and would never be lonely or unloved. But she would be damned if she would give him the satisfaction of knowing that.
‘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!'
'You probably wouldn’t show yet anyway,' he said, gently tucking the sweater down, his grey eyes as clear as the rain outside the window.
‘I tell you, I'm not pregnant!' she insisted, blushing as she caught the eye of a customer hove
ring around the counter behind him. Jack glanced over his shoulder and one brutal look sent the man scuttling for the door. 'Now look what you've done. He might have been going to buy something!'
'Stop trying to change the subject, Beth—'
‘I've told you, I'm not pregnant. How many times do I have to say it before you believe me?'
‘I don’t think I ever will.'
She gaped at him.
His grey eyes were steady, his hand not quite, as he smoothed it over his damp head in the first gesture of nervousness she had seen him make. 'So I suppose the only way I can be sure is to hang around...'
'For how long?' Elizabeth sneered to cover the searing delight that flared through her veins. 'Until next month? Until the end of the year when that stupid myth is finally revealed for the superstition it is?'
'Oh, I couldn’t let that happen,' he said, his eyes darkening. ‘I couldn’t let the legend of the St Clairs be proved a fraud. I shouldn’t have mocked you with it, but, as you know, I was angry for what I saw as your lack of faith—'
'My lack of faith?' she interrupted.
'—and it got out of hand. I didn’t mean to hurt you, only teach you a lesson. As it was I was the one who learnt a painful truth. As Grandpère pointed out when I turned my surly temper on him, it was a matter of personal priorities and I had failed to accept yours as being as important to you as mine are to me. You make me drunk with a sense of my own power, chérie. My emotions tend to get out of hand around you—you make me vulnerable as I have not been in five years, and I don’t always like it. I react badly sometimes. I joke. I am cynical. I experience inappropriately aggressive male behaviour.'
His eyes gleamed with a spark of humour at her astounded reaction to his humble litany, making her realise how bleak and lifeless they had been before. 'We strike sparks, we two, and because of that rare quality between us we bite and scratch when we know that in reality we want to love and kiss,' he went on. ‘I liked provoking you only because I knew what sweet reconciliations would follow. So to demonstrate my good faith I have brought it with me...'
