Vendetta

by Susan Napier

  She waited until she had eaten several mouthfuls of food before she took her first sip. In spite of her determination not to react, she was unable to prevent a murmur of surprised pleasure as the full-bodied flavour exploded against her palate, drenching her senses in its heady bouquet.

  ‘You see, you never know whether you’re going to like something until you try it. You need to be more adventurous, Vivian, experiment more…’

  She didn’t like the strange tension in him…nor the dangerous ease with which he broached the bottle as they both pretended to eat. She noticed he had shaved since their confrontation in his office. It had been necessary for him to shave but not to dress? She felt a strange thrill of fear.

  ‘Weren’t you afraid?’ he said disconcertingly, his deep, hushed tone seeming to weave itself into the darkness. ‘The only locked room in Bluebeard’s castle… Weren’t you afraid of the horrors you might find in there when you stole the key?’

  ‘This isn’t a castle and you’re not Bluebeard,’ she said, resisting the powerful vision he was slyly conjuring out of her imagination. ‘You’ve only ever had one wife,’ she said deliberately. ‘And I’m certainly in a position to know that you didn’t murder her.’

  He looked at her broodingly over the rim of his glass. ‘Ah, yes, my beloved wife. Frank tells me you’re curious about her…’ Vivian was suddenly certain that Nicholas was building up towards some kind of critical release of the tension that raged in his face, seethed in his rest less eye.

  ‘I’m in the mood for violence…’

  She rubbed her damp palms surreptitiously against her thighs and felt the forgotten bulge in her trouser pocket.

  The idea sprang into her mind full-blown. Her fingers closed around the glass bottle warmed by her thigh.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a drink of water, please.’

  He got up, moving with his usual swiftness and precision, and Vivian knew that in spite of the wine he had consumed he was still dangerously alert. It was only his inhibitions that had been relaxed, and thus the bonds that chained his savage inner demons.

  The moment he turned away to the sink, she pulled out the chloral hydrate, wrenched off the lid and tried to shake a few drops into his full wine glass, horrified when the clear liquid came out in a little gush.

  She didn’t have time to get the bottle capped and back into her pocket, and had to thrust it down on her lap as she accepted her glass of water, feeling the remainder of the drug soak into the fabric over her hip as her heart threshed wildly in her chest.

  ‘You wanted to know about Barbara…’

  She watched, her green eyes wide with fascinated horror, as he re-seated himself and took a long swallow of his wine before he spoke again. Oh, God, what madness had possessed her? What if she had given him too much and he died?

  ‘The biggest mistake of my arrogant young life…’

  Mistake? Vivian was jolted out of her frantic abstraction.

  His mouth twisted at her expression. ‘You thought it was the love-match of the century? Mis-match, more like. It was my father’s idea. He’s an extremely dominating man and I’m his only son, his greatest pride—and his greatest disappointment. We clashed on just about everything. When I came back from university overseas, he was very ill and used some very clever emotional blackmail to pressure me into marriage with his god-daughter. Needless to say, he then miraculously recovered.’

  ‘Then…you fell in love with each other after the marriage?’ Vivian said, her thoughts falling into chaos.

  ‘Love was never part of the equation. Like my father, Barbara saw our marriage in terms of status and control. We lived separate lives from the start. She politely endured me in her bed because it was necessary in order to secure her permanent place in the Thorne dynasty—part of her bargain with my father, I gather—and I politely endured for reasons just as selfish, because I wanted nothing to disturb my build-up for the Olympic trials…’

  He paused and Vivian held her breath, hoping the fascinating revelations were going to continue.

  ‘Then Barbara told me she was pregnant and I realised just how permanent was the trap my father had planned for me. Except it wasn’t—the next day she and the baby were killed…’

  He reached for his wine-glass again and Vivian couldn’t stop a darting gesture of involuntary protest.

  ‘Oh, no, please don’t drink that!’ She clumsily tried to knock it out of his hand.

  ‘Why not? Are you afraid I’ll pass out on you before I finish baring my soul?’ He stopped, his face sharpening as he looked from her stark expression of appalled guilt to his glass, his shrewd brain making the impossible leap in perception.

  ‘My God, is there something wrong with this? What have you put in my wine?’

  He lunged across the table with a roar, scattering the burning candles, and Vivian’s chair crashed over as she jumped to her feet, sending the empty bottle in her lap spinning to the floor.

  She didn’t wait to see him recognise it. She fled.

  She flew down the hall and crashed through the door into the lighthouse in a blind panic, triggering the sensor lights in the stairwell. She was thundering up the stairs before she remembered there were no locks on the doors, nowhere to hide. It was too late now; she could feel the pounding vibration of his mysteriously delayed pursuit through the steel under her flying feet.

  He caught her just below the fourth level, not even attempting to stop her but merely gathering her up in his furious momentum, driving her onwards and upwards with the bulldozing threat of his body. Only when they reached the landing of his room did he actually lay a hand on her, catching her right wrist and using their combined speed to swing her away from the stairs and through the doorway, shoving her back against the wall, anchoring her there with the full thrust of his body, slamming his other hand on to the light-switch so that she was exposed to the full glare of his rage.

  ‘How much did you give me?’ he snarled, his breath fogging up her glasses, his lips brushing hers in an angry parody of a kiss. ‘The whole damn bottle? How much, damn you?’ He rattled her against the wall.

  ‘I don’t know—a little, a teaspoonful, I don’t know!’ she panted desperately. ‘I spilled the rest of it, that’s why the bottle was empty. I’m sorry, Nicholas, I panicked, you were frightening me…’ She was begging now, but she was beyond caring. ‘Please, I’m sorry—’

  ‘Sorry!’ he ground out. He shook his head violently, as if the drug was already beginning to affect him.

  ‘Maybe you should sit down before you fall down,’ she said, feeling wretchedly weak herself.

  ‘Maybe I should,’ he said thickly. He pulled her away from the wall and dragged her over to the bed, pulling her between his spread legs as he sat down, fumbling in his bath-robe pocket. She felt a cold metallic clasp replace the heat of his hand on her wrist, and looked down just in time to see him snapping the other handcuff around his own wrist.

  ‘My God, what are you doing?’ she asked numbly, staring at their shackled limbs. So this was why she had got such a head start on his superior strength and speed. He had gone to get chains!

  ‘Making sure you’ll be here when I wake up,’ he said grimly. ‘If I wake up.’

  She shuddered. ‘Don’t say that! Please, Nicholas, where’s the key? You don’t need to do this. I promise I’ll stay…’

  For an answer he fell diagonally back on the bed, throwing his shackled right wrist forcefully out to his side so that she was brought tumbling down on top of him with a soft scream of terror. He pulled off her glasses and tossed them on the floor in a careless gesture that she found paradoxically even more threatening than his violence.

  ‘Nicholas, no…’ She struggled to find purchase with her knees against the mattress, conscious that she was straddling him, and the towelling robe was parting over his powerful thighs.

  ‘Nicholas, yes!’ He pulled her head down, crushing her mouth against his, wrapping his right arm across her back so that her captive arm was
forced behind her. He kissed her until she tried to bite him, and then he nudged her face aside with his jaw and sank his teeth into her vulnerable throat. She cried out, struggling weakly as he began to suckle at the bite, murmuring words against her skin that sapped her will and created tiny shocks of pleasure deep in her feminine core. He began to kiss her again, and this time she didn’t fight him and the forceful thrust of his tongue gentled to a slow, seductive glide that made her tremble with yearning.

  ‘I may pass out, but not before I’ve had a taste of you…not before you’ve given me everything I want…’ His mouth moved to the other side of her throat, nibbling and sucking with tender savagery as his hips and thighs began to undulate beneath her. ‘I’m going to devour every lovely inch of you…use my lips and teeth and tongue on you in ways that you’ve never even imagined…brand you all over with my mark so that anyone who looks at you will know you’ve come from my bed…’

  Vivian knew he was talking about Peter. Briefly surfacing from her passion-drugged state, she tried to arch away, but Nicholas shifted his hand from the back of her neck to the front of her silk blouse, slipping his fingers into the prim neckline and ripping it open with a single downward stroke that scattered the pearl buttons like lustrous tears across his chest.

  ‘Nicholas!’

  Her gasp was lost in a spasm of violent sensation as he flicked open the tiny plastic catch between her breasts and allowed them to tumble free of the confining lace. The ginger freckles were stretched over their swollen fullness, the soft pink tips swaying against the hard contours of his chest, contracting instantly into tight points that scraped and caught on his own peaked masculine nipples.

  His chest heaved and he uttered a harsh sound, violently tilting his hips to roll her on to her side and then her back, hefting her up against the pillows, rising up and over her on his braced hands. In almost the same motion he loosened the belt of his robe so that it fell open around her, baring the full length of his body to her restless gaze. He was hugely aroused and shuddering with a fierce tension, for all the world as if she had given him an aphrodisiac instead of a sedative.

  He looked triumphantly down at the lavish bounty he had exposed, his nostrils flaring as he caught the enticing scent of her body, and recognised the subtle signals of her arousal.

  ‘Yes—Nicholas,’ he ground out. ‘Not Peter, Nicholas. Admit it. You couldn’t give a damn about him when you’re with me!’

  He cupped her breast with a possessive movement of his manacled hand, the narrow chain connecting their wrists dragging in a cold caress against the skin of her ribs as he moved deliberately, his fingers contracting and relaxing, his thumb rubbing against the rigid nipple.

  He bent his head and his tongue darted out to curl around the tip he was cherishing, dragging it up into his mouth, moistening it with tender care then releasing it to the cool night air.

  ‘You don’t love him; you don’t want to marry him.’ The words were muffled by her flesh. ‘You don’t want to cling to your safe, unadventurous past…you want the fierce excitement only I can give you…you want this…and this…’ He held her pleasure-drenched gaze as his mouth closed over her, slanted softly, sucked lightly, twisted, lifted and lowered again…

  ‘I’m…not…the one who won’t let…the past go,’ she panted, biting her lip as he repeated the voluptuously unsatisfying action over and over, clenching her chained hand helplessly against her side, groaning with sweet agony as he finally used his teeth and suckled her with the rough urgency that she needed, marking her as he had promised with his erotic brand of possession. Her extravagant response made him explode into action, pushing heavily between her thighs, moving jerkily on her as if the fabric between them didn’t exist, as if he was already buried deep inside her, pleasuring them both beyond imagining…

  ‘Say it, Vivian…stop holding yourself back…stop pushing me away.’ She was suddenly aware of a settling heaviness in his body as his head sank down on her shoulder. ‘Don’t let me go down into this damned darkness without a prayer…’

  ‘Stop talking about dying!’ she cried frantically, tugging at his hair to try and keep him awake.

  ‘I’m not talking about dying. I’m talking about living. I can’t let him get you… Gotta keep you with me,’ he said with a blurred illogicality that Vivian knew from experience was the drug tightening its grip on his mind, but she sought to drag him back to her with desperate words of truth.

  ‘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?’