The Winter King

by Amanda Carpenter

  ‘I never explain anything.’

  ‘You will,’ Adam told her. His mouth quirked, just a hint of movement, but the suggestion of amusement was infuriating.

  Yvonne’s reaction was the instant detonation of heat-lightning. She flashed, ‘I’ll not be put on a leash, damn you!’

  ‘No?’ That as a question, with those dark eyebrows slanting upwards, was salt rubbed into the wound. ‘Perhaps you should be, then.’

  Amanda Carpenter was raised in South Bend, Indiana but lived for many years in England. She started writing because she felt a need to communicate with people from other walks of life. She write her first romance novel when she was nineteen and has been translated into many languages. Although she has many interests including music and art, writing is her greatest love.

  The Winter

  King

  AMANDA CARPENTER

  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the Author. and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names.

  They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  All Rights Reserved. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written. permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent. resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This edition published under arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises BV

  HARLEQUIN MILLS & BOON and the Rose Device are trade marks used under license and registered in Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, United States Patent & Trademark Office and in other countries.

  Published by

  Harlequin Mills & Boon

  3 Gibbes Street, Chatswood, NSW 2067 Australia

  First published in Great Britain .1994

  Australian copyright 1994

  New Zealand copyright I994

  Philippine copyright 1994 ,

  First Australian Paperback Edition May 1994

  © Amanda Carpenter 1994

  1SBN I 86386 669 8

  Printed and bound in Australia by

  Griffin. Paperbacks, South Australia

  PROLOGUE

  SHE was a scion of Hollywood’s tinsel aristocracy. Her late grandmother had been a legendary movie queen, her grandfather one of the film industry’s most powerful moguls. Her mother and father carried on the tradition: their combined efforts totalled four Oscars and five nominations.

  When she was six, she was on the cover of Vogue and Harper magazines with her mother. By the time she was ten she was an internationally famous child model. By sixteen, because of her parents’ careful orchestration of her career and wise investments, she was independently wealthy.

  At seventeen she left the modelling profession and acted in her first film. At nineteen she abandoned her excellent tutors. By twenty-one she had become one of the top five movie box-office draws in the world, had earned an Oscar of her own, and had been featured on the cover of Time magazine. She had met two presidents, queens and kings and princes, and had been courted by a desert sheikh.

  One morning, after attending the Cannes international film festival, she stood at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. She had starred in a total of eight films. Three had been in the last year alone, all of which had been filmed on location: Mexico, London, Monte Carlo, the Canary Islands, Cairo and Morocco.

  As she stood with other bare feet in the warm silken waters, her famous, unforgettable face was to the sea, and the French city of Nice at her back.

  She was twenty-two years old, and frightened.

  She couldn’t remember which country she was in.

  She had been Celeste, Mary, Elizabeth, Eloise, Rhiannon, Sara, Diane and Isabella.

  She couldn’t remember her own name.

  ‘I quit,’ she heard herself say to the blank cerulean sky, and knew it to be true. Then, as far as the outside world was concerned, she disappeared, and remained a mystery for two years.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ANGER was good.

  The Porsche growled into Beverly Hills, sleek and low-slung and anonymous in the extravagant setting. California had suffered drought in the last five years, but the evidence of the natural calamity stopped at the outskirts of fairyland, where the intrusion of reality was strongly discouraged.

  She liked the emotion anger; it was clean and strong and vitalising. Definitive. She savoured her fury, fuelled it, pampered it, with the expertise of the connoisseur.

  She didn’t know anybody who could sustain anger as long and as effectively as she could; maybe it was a record or something, a mark of some distinction. She had gone past the point of needing distinguishing marks, tattoos on the soul, psychic dental plates, but she hadn’t given up the habit of looking for them.

  The Porsche pulled to a stop before high security gates. She didn’t bother calling the house, instead punching the computer code that would allow her entrance into the lavish fortress.,When the gates swung open she drove through fast, roared up the long, manicured driveway, manoeuvred past a kaleidoscopic army of luxury cars, limousines and chauffeurs, and slewed to a precipitate stop around the side of the house.

  The mansion was ablaze with lights, music and hordes of people. How fashionable. She was late.

  She left the keys and her luggage in the car and strode up to the front doors. The maid who answered and looked up at her was transformed with delight in an instant. ‘Oh, Miss Trent!’

  ‘Hello, Betty,’ she said, as mildly as if she had gone for an afternoon stroll and her two-year absence had never been. ‘My luggage is in the Porsche around the side. See to it, will you?’

  She left the maid gabbling. People were everywhere, in the massive hall, the reception-rooms, up the stairs. In dinner-jackets and evening gowns, torn jeans, furs and feathers, jewelled, coiffed and perfumed, and painted, everyone was a study of attitude, punctuated with uniformed house staff and caterers: actors, agents, writers, producers, politicians and businessmen, wives and mistresses, models and artists, and bohemian hangers-on.

  She prowled through the mansion, a panther on the hunt, not oblivious to the ripple of effect her presence had on the crowd, but uncaring. People turned, stared at her in amazed excitement, and gossip and speculation ran in her wake like wildfire.

  The occupants in the main reception having been searched and discarded, she turned her attention towards the back reception, a great marbled hall with open veranda doors leading to the sumptuous gardens and swimming-pool. A rock group blared in one corner.

  She strolled to the middle of the crowded floor and stopped, a clawed and sinuous predator among the peacocks.

  She was patient in the pursuit, and methodical. She would tear Hollywood apart if she had to, but she had been promised he would be present tonight, and so she searched the crowd as a general surveyed a battlefield.

  Her mother Vivian, petite and immaculately feminine in a Dior creation, was flirting with a greying man in one corner. Her father Christopher was dancing, a tall and distinguished man who appeared to be enjoying himself without a care in the world. They were a family of actors.

  Her brother David would be around somewhere. Her parents had not yet seen her, but they would soon. She noted their positions and dismissed them, and then her gaze lit on the object of her search. She recogni
sed the object from the Press photographs that had accompanied the various articles written about him over the years.

  There.

  Adam Ruarke was a tall, slim man, elegantly and gracefully moulded. His dark auburn hair shone wine-red, his skin a light gold by comparison. His erect carriage, the length of his bone-structure, the tensile male handsomeness of that spare carved face, were masterpieces of design. One might be forgiven, in the face of such terrible beauty, for hoping his eyes did not live up to their legend.

  One would be disappointed, for his dark-lashed eyes lifted and they were as chill and as grey as an Arctic snowstorm, housing a stunning intelligence. The winter king had knocked at the gates of the land of perpetual summer, and had been invited in.

  Adam Ruarke was an inventory in brilliance. At thirty-five the Scottish film director dominated the industry. An ex-Shakespearian actor, he had taken the director’s chair eight years ago. For the last five years his every film had reigned supreme against the competition, sweeping the most awards, achieving ‘both critical acclaim and immense popular success. He redefined genres and broke new ground, and jaded Hollywood bowed down to him in awe.

  She knew the fabled Iceman by reputation. They had never met.

  She smiled, a tiny violence. They were about to meet now.

  Someone had laid a hand on her bare arm and was bleating at her. She shook away the sheep and began to stalk her prey.

  Adam Ruarke’s ice-storm eyes sparkled as they roamed over the room. The small restlessness was the only evidence that he might have tired of his voluptuous companion. Then his gaze lit on her, and stayed in arrested recognition.

  She was a woman of sultry poetry in motion. Her height was sheathed in austere black leather trousers, and gleaming flat-heeled boots, and a plain black camisole top with blade-thin spaghetti straps. Her shapely legs were as slim as a gazelle’s, the curve of hip and breast superbly highlighted by the long, slender waist and the exquisite bone-structure of her shoulders and arms.

  Her magnificent gleaming chestnut hair sprang from a widow’s peak and tumbled to her waist in a neglected windblown tangle. Her face was not beautiful viewed in person: the high cheekbones, the hollows underneath and narrow jaw, the straight nose and wide forehead were a shade too adamantly defined. But the inhuman camera adored such definition, and her full,» precisely chiselled mouth and massive velvet dark eyes were perfection.

  Her fine skin and body were unadorned with either make-up or jewellery. She looked relentlessly naked in sea of baroque artifice, pared to a keen and flawless essence; her utter lack of concern for her own appearance was a powerful statement in itself.

  As his chill grey eyes met hers, she let her, rage, so carefully banked and tended over the last two weeks, flare inside into a blinding climax. Ah.

  He was straight and hard and shining as the noonday sun, and she came up to eclipse him, a dusky, feline shadow. What a surprise: his slender length topped her five feet eleven inches, and she had to look up.

  The winter king was amused. It showed in the line of his elegant mouth.

  ‘Yvonne Trent,’ said Adam Ruarke in a musical sardonic tone. ‘So at last the prodigal returns.’

  Yvonne did not check as she came to stand in front of him. She threw the entire strength of her weight into her arm. Her body was one fluid classical pirouette as she slapped him in the face.

  The force of the blow rocked his head aback and numbed her to the shoulder. She was an athletic woman. She was frankly amazed it hadn’t knocked him down.

  The chill beauty of his features had been a pale imitation of the awesome white blaze towering before her now. Silence radiated out a good twenty feet around them, as the crack sounded over the music and conversation: except for a faint, unregarded shriek from his blonde companion. In front of an avid and shark-like audience, she had branded him.

  Feral satisfaction gleamed in Yvonne’s sharp features and immense dark eyes, as she flexed her hand and wrist. Sufficient unto the day.

  Having done what she had come to do, she was already turning away from him on one booted heel, dismissing his existence with the same complete indifference with which she had dismissed everything and everyone else since arriving home. She took just one step.

  Her arms were seized from behind. Again she was amazed, at the effortless steel strength in the long, slim fingers that snaked around her wrists and yanked them behind her back. She tried one vicious jerk to gain her freedom, and only succeeded in wrenching her shoulder. He drove her before him, an unbreakable, ravening, elemental force at her back.

  Yvonne caught the hasty approach of Vivian and Christopher out of the corner of her eye. Naturally they were appalled, but not amazed; they knew their daughter.

  ‘Hello, Mother, Dad,’ said Yvonne almost idly as she was force-marched past her parents. ‘How’ve you been keeping?’

  Said the Iceman, to her father, one terse clipped word—‘Privacy.’

  Christopher Trent hesitated only for a moment. ‘Upstairs.’

  They strode through the hall. The man behind her steered her like a recalcitrant ship through the people. Her eyes narrowed in thought as she watched the various astonished expressions on their faces go past.

  The winter king, apparently, was a mind-reader as well. A silken and menacing voice in her ear said gently, ‘Try to scream. I invite you. It would give me an excellent reason for stuffing a gag into your lovely mouth.’

  Immensely surprised, she didn’t scream. She threw back her head and laughed out loud instead.

  If anything, his bruising grip on her arms tightened. Yvonne was nearly running by the time they cleared the top of the stairs. Certainly she was breathing hard, as they strode down the wide corridor, startling one or two people into jumping hastily out of their way.

  ‘No,’ she said, when he would have stopped at the first door. She dragged him forward, ignoring the extra strain on her shoulders as he refused to relinquish his hold, until they reached the end of the corridor. Then Yvonne steered left to the last door that was partly ajar, leaned back against the man who held her prisoner, and with one foot she kicked the door open to her old suite of rooms.

  The maid Betty, in the process of unpacking her suitcase, nearly leaped out of her skin and whirled to gape at the amazing sight of the pair in the doorway.

  Yvonne’s body was bowed backwards, one strand of her dishevelled hair slung across her eyes; her bare shoulders rested against the hard white chest of the auburn-haired man behind her, his carved, handsome face searingly alive with such a peculiar expression, as his ferocious grey eyes stared at the woman he held captured in his hands.

  They must have appeared as some bizarre kind of partnership, with the shape of her hand reddening the Iceman’s taut, lean cheek, and the assertive way she had led him to the door. Yvonne was laughing again like a crazy woman as she read the eloquent expression in the maid’s wide eyes.

  ‘Thank you, Betty,’ she said. ‘That will be all.’

  The maid stared at the sulphurous menace at her back. ‘Miss Trent—’ stammered the smaller woman, obviously intimidated and yet holding her grounds‘—are you sure you wouldn’t like for me to-that is,-I’d be glad to stay and finish?’

  Adam. Ruarke’s icy gaze met the maid’s. ‘If I were you,’ he purred, ‘I would get while the getting is good.’

  The maid’s defiance lasted all of two seconds. She even closed the door behind her when she bolted. As soon as he heard the tiny sound of the latch clicking into place, the man at her back threw her across the room.

  Yvonne landed, with emphatic precision, face-down on the middle of her large bed. She gasped at the jarring impact, her hair floating in a glorious fan about her head and shoulders, then she found purchase with tingling hands, and thrust up.

  The winter king had circled her, hawk-like, as she came up on her hands and knees and met his hooded grey stare through the veil of her wild hair. She was panting, in high roaring temper and exhilaration. She appeared to
hover on the brink of motion, an undomesticated cat readying either to lunge at his throat or to spring away.

  He looked—electrified. She glared, then sat back on her knees to fling away the obstructing mass of her hair. When she looked at him again, he had coiled himself in again: that flawless, legendary self-control of his.

  Adam Ruarke leaned against the wall, crossed his arms and kicked one foot over the other. His eyes narrowed; honed to a keening edge, he performed laser surgery on her face. Unknown to her, one of her hands crept to her cheek, to finger the unmarked flesh in wonderment.

  ‘Explain yourself.’

  There was no anger in his stern and beautiful face, the cut of that elegant mouth, or his voice. There was no emotion whatsoever. ‘He was perfect in his stillness, like a statue again, but the concept of such a vital male being nothing more than cold stone instead of warm-blooded humanity was an incredible offence. My God, she thought in equal parts of amusement and anger, he must be soulless. She would have to provoke him even further.

  He spoke the Queen’s English with exquisite richness; Yvonne offered it back to him in perfect mocking mimicry. ‘I never explain anything.’

  His muscled, tensile gracefulness had become that of a master swordsman, deadly and impassive as he studied his opponent before moving in for the kill.

  ‘You will,’ he told her. His mouth quirked, just a hint of movement, but the suggestion of amusement was infuriating, a casual flick of the rapier while those grey eyes watched perpetually.

  Her reaction was the instant detonation of heat-lightning. She flashed, ‘I’ll not be put on a leash, damn you!’

  ‘No?’ That as a question, with those dark eyebrows slanting upwards, was salt rubbed into the wound. ‘Perhaps you should be, then.’

  Her great dark eyes were as blank as her incredible face. She gave him no warning; she gave him nothing. Still he was at the door before her and blocking the exit, even as she exploded from the disturbed bed. She laughed then in the defeat of her second bid for freedom just as she had before, an angry, quiet little aside to herself, as if in the confirmation of the vagaries of men.