by Susan Napier
‘Ha! What do I look like—a masochist? You’d run me into the ground!’
‘I’ll go at your pace,’ he offered. ‘Come on; if your connection with your twin is putting your body under stress you could probably do with a little extra conditioning.’
She snapped at the challenge. ‘I’m in perfect shape for my lifestyle, thank you very much!’
It was meant as a haughty rejection, so how was it that half an hour later she was bending over against the drunken U-shape of a wind-distorted palm tree at the side of the trail, desperately trying to suck another breath into her shattered lungs?
‘Do you think you’re going to be sick?’ The fact that Luke’s words were crisp and even, without the slightest hint of a puff, added insult to injury as far as Rosalind was concerned.
‘This isn’t morning sickness, it’s exhaustion!’ came tearing out of her throat between whistling breaths. ‘I told you you’d run me into the ground.’
‘But I was pacing myself to your stride—’
‘Yes, well...I was showing off, wasn’t I?’ she wheezed, giving up on her dignity.
‘Can’t you catch your breath? Here, try this way.’ Luke stood behind her and looped his arms under hers, lifting them straight up over her head so that she was forced into an upright, shoulders-back stance. ‘Now try slow and deep rather than fast and shallow.’
Immediately the tightness in her chest eased and she found that her breathing slowed enough for her to joke, ‘I guess that’s me off the team, huh?’
‘I should have realised you were pushing it, but you acted OK with the pace right up until you stopped.’ His voice was rough with self-accusation.
‘You’ve only now figured out what a great actress I am?’ She tipped her bright head back against his shoulder, feeling the smooth power of his raised bicep brush her cheek. She could feel the heat and dampness of his chest through her thin top. His heart, she was chagrined to register, was barely skipping a beat, while hers was still going crazy.
‘Do you ever switch off or are you always on, always acting a part for the person you’re with?’
She stiffened at the unexpected thrust and tried to pull her arms down. ‘You can talk.’
His breath was hot on her nape as he steadied her in position. ‘Not yet; just wait until your heartbeat slows a little more. Trust me—you’ll feel better in a minute.’
She realised that his fingers around her wrists could feel her pounding pulse. Trapped by her fresh awareness of his superior strength and fitness, she resorted to striking back with words.
‘Trust you? Why should I trust someone who pretends to be something he’s not...who can’t even be open with me about something as innocent as what he does in his spare time?’
His fingers tightened briefly. ‘I’m Luke James. I’ve never pretended to be anyone else. Unlike you—’
‘I had good reasons.’
‘Escaping publicity? Oh, come on; publicity is something you’ve always thrived on.’ He suddenly let her wrists go, his loosely encircling hands sliding the length of her arms as she lowered them to her sides and felt her fingers tingle with the returning blood.
He gripped her shoulders and spun her around to face him. She was shocked by his darkly intense expression and the rigid tension that gripped his entire body. She realised that she had finally goaded him into real anger. There was no gentle diffidence in him now, no shy uncertainty. The adrenalin which had been pumping into his system during the run was still saturating his blood.
‘No, there’s much more to it than avoiding a few newspaper reporters, isn’t there, Rosalind?’ he said harshly. ‘I’m an intelligent man. Do you think I haven’t realised why you practically dragooned me into letting you take over my holiday? It isn’t solely for my benefit, is it? All I am to you is a distraction to keep your mind off whatever it is you’re running away from...’
“That’s not true—’
‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’
‘No!’ Her gaze faltered, even though she realised at that moment that it was indeed the literal truth. That wasn’t all he was to her, not by a long chalk...
She stepped back, and found her buttocks coming hard up against the dipping curve of the misshapen palm that she had grabbed to catch her breath. She clutched at it again as Luke simultaneously mirrored her movement, leaning forward to brace his hands on either side of her hips, trapping her even more effectively than he had a few moments before, this time in a position in which he could read every nuance of her expression.
‘Your personality shines with such incandescent brightness that most people are too dazzled to see the shadows,’ he said quietly. ‘What are they, Roz? What is it that makes you run?’
‘Apart from you, you mean?’ She couldn’t look away from the hypnotic black gaze. She had an odd sensation of falling and the even odder one of knowing that she could rely on Luke to catch her, that he would be a steady, rock-solid support. Perhaps he did have the right to some answers, she thought, and by giving them to him perhaps she might find out something she needed to know.
So she told him about the bombardment of letters and gifts she had been receiving from an unknown fan, about her efforts to ignore the growing sense of menace in his attentions. This time she made no attempt to make her experience sound amusing and, lured on by Luke’s silence she found herself impulsively exposing the heart of her anxiety—the stage fright that had caused her to question the core of her belief in herself.
‘All my life all I’ve ever wanted to be is an actress,’ she said starkly. ‘It’s what I’ve worked for. It’s what I am.’
‘You mean it’s the only thing in your life that you take seriously.’ Luke broke his silence with a sudden, shrewd insight into the essence of her bright, bubbly, fun-loving character. He felt a savage rush of pure adrenalin as he fitted a major piece into the elusive puzzle that was Roz Marlow. No wonder she had so few inhibitions about enjoying the pleasures of life—because she knew how truly inessential such things were to her happiness. The social butterfly flitted compulsively not because she was unable to care deeply enough about anyone or anything to commit but because she was already committed elsewhere.
‘If I can’t perform, if I’m not Rosalind Marlow the actress, who am I? My parents offered me this holiday as a kind of escape, but I suppose the one thing that I’m never going to escape is myself...’
‘And you have absolutely no idea who this Peter is...?’
She almost—almost—said a name.
The relief would have been enormous.
But she couldn’t permit herself the luxury. If Rosalind mentioned Peter Noble by name, Luke would want to know why she hadn’t reported him to the police. He would want to know who he was and how Rosalind had found out about him.
How could she tell him that Peter was Peggy Staines’s illegitimate son, given up for adoption after a secret teenage pregnancy? Peggy had been adamant that no one else was to know. She had never even told her husband about the bitter mistake that haunted her past and she had been appalled when her adult son had somehow traced her and confronted her one day when she was out shopping.
For weeks she had been torn between curiosity about the baby she had been forced to give up all those years ago and fear of the moody adult that he had become. She’d been especially afraid that Peter’s persistent attempts to make her accept him in her life would result in the old shame becoming public and thus jeopardise her marriage and her husband’s all-important career. To add to her guilt, she had found out that Peter had not been happy with his adoptive family, which had broken up and dispersed when he was a teenager.
In an attempt to placate both Peter and her conscience, Peggy had agreed to visit him at his flat, but the more she’d seen of him, the more disturbed she had become by his erratic behaviour. She’d discovered that he had been an outpatient at a psychiatric clinic and her fears about his mental stability had seemed to be confirmed after she’d seen his bizarrely decorated flat and r
ealised the extent to which his fan-worship of his favourite actress had taken over his life.
Peter had no job and was on limited medical benefit, yet in his closet he’d had a complete wardrobe of expensive new clothes in Rosalind’s size, still with their sales tags attached, and a range of her favourite make-up and toiletries lined up beside his razor in the bathroom. A home-made pin-up calendar of Rosalind had been marked with a detailed log of her activities, and when Peggy had found copies of his letters to Rosalind she had panicked at the thought of what would happen if Peter got into trouble and was exposed to the public spotlight.
Rosalind’s knowledge from here on was very sketchy, because by the time she had met Peggy in that infamous hotel room the distraught woman had worked herself into such a state that she had only had time to sob out the bare bones of her story before she had succumbed to the pain of her heart attack, gasping incoherently about something that Peter had done that had made all her soul-searching and suffering pointless...
Rosalind, who had just got out of the shower and had still been in her damp robe when her visitor had arrived at her hotel room fully two hours early for their meeting, hadn’t been quite quick enough when Peggy had suddenly crumpled to the floor. In spite of the choking pain, she had struggled vainly to communicate, only subsiding when a frightened Rosalind had firmly promised that she wouldn’t do or say anything to anyone about Peter until she had Peggy’s permission.
Now she was trapped by the integrity that the Press claimed she didn’t possess. It was ironic that in order to produce proof of her honour she would have to violate it.
‘I know that it’s someone who’s much more disturbed than I wanted to believe,’ she sighed, hoping that Luke hadn’t read the long pause as significant.
‘Then why haven’t you done something about it?’ he demanded, his impatience reeking of disapproval.
‘I guess I felt—feel—sort of sorry for the guy,’ she admitted, the mingled scents of cologne and male sweat rising between their bodies making her aware of how close they were standing. With Luke leaning in on her, his arms splayed around her sides, anyone coming up the trail behind them would think that they were embracing...
‘Sorry for him?’ Luke’s exasperation with her tolerance was almost identical to Jordan’s and expressed equally forcefully. ‘He doesn’t need your sympathy, Roz; what he needs is to be stopped before he can harm you or himself.’
Rosalind shivered in the steamy morning heat. ‘I know.’ She pulled a face. ‘Jordan suggested I acquire a bodyguard for the duration.’
He frowned. ‘Which you refused, of course.’
He was much better at predicting her behaviour than she was at guessing his reactions. She gave a defensive shrug.
‘I already have too many people following me everywhere. If a crazed fan did try an abduction the reporters would descend like a cloud of locusts. They’d soon scare him off!’
‘And ruin the chance to spin out a good story? More likely they’d stand back and take pictures,’ he said grimly. ‘You’re lucky you’ve got the Staines affair hanging over your head, or you wouldn’t even have the minimal protection of press surveillance.’
Her eyes flashed at the unexpected callousness of the remark. ‘There’s nothing lucky about it! Mrs Staines is still seriously ill in hospital, you know.’
‘Mrs Staines?’ he repeated, his eyebrows flicking derisively upwards. ‘Isn’t that a rather formal way to refer to someone you’ve been having secret assignations with—surely you’re on first-name terms with each other?’
The sting in his tone hit her on the raw. ‘It was only one assignation, damn it!’ she blurted out. ‘It was the first time we’d ever met!’
His seething impatience seemed to still, his voice easing to a toneless neutrality. ‘That must have made it all the more traumatic for you when she collapsed like that.’
Rosalind lowered her head, biting her bottom lip as she replayed her own actions in her mind. ‘I suppose I can’t help feeling as if it was my fault, even though the whole thing was her idea...’ She was so intent on the disturbing memory that she didn’t notice Luke stiffen slightly. ‘I’ve never seen anyone have a heart attack before. There was so little I could do. It was dreadful. I hated being so helpless...’
‘I know the feeling.’
His quiet anger jolted Rosalind out of her self-absorption.
‘Do you?’ She lifted her face to his and saw a bleakness in his brooding countenance that pierced her to the heart. Without thinking she reached up and laid a comforting hand against his rigid cheek. He froze, and his eyes searched hers, then dropped to her pink mouth, which was slightly swollen from her thoughtful nibbling, and she was suddenly breathless all over again, taking shallow sips of air that gave her no respite from the tightness in her chest.
‘Luke...?’
‘What?’ His voice was thick, his cheek heavy in her hand as he leaned his head into her touch, rubbing at her like a giant cat being petted, the corner of his mouth brushing the sensitive mound at the base of her thumb as he spoke.
‘I think...’
‘What?’ He turned his head completely, his mouth opening against the centre of her palm, his eyes flaring darkly at the taste of her, the cold bleakness in their depths disappearing, leaving a smouldering awareness in its wake. He moved abruptly closer, bringing his hips firmly against hers, pushing her backwards against the trunk of the palm, his arms closing in until they brushed her sides.
‘What do you think, Rosalind...?’
His hoarse, muffled whisper made her head spin. Whatever it was no longer seemed important. The important thing was that Luke’s breath was moist and hot in her cupped hand and his bent knee was softly insinuating itself between hers, pressing forward and then retreating until, unable to bear the sensual torment any more, she widened her stance, eagerly inviting the added intimacy. He came the rest of the way in a rush, roughly pushing into the space she had created for him and drawing his other leg sharply against her flank, compressing her thigh between warm pillars of taut muscle.
For some perverse reason she kept her hand over his mouth while the centres of their bodies kissed, shifted and kissed again, her other hand applying pressure to his chest, preventing his torso from crushing against her breasts. She was excited by the stormy look in Luke’s eyes as he submitted reluctantly to the delicate restraint. She was playing power games with him and they both knew it. They knew that he was stronger and fitter and could easily overcome her token resistance if he chose. But he didn’t choose, because he was too much of a gentleman, and maybe because he was a little in awe of her feminine power, thought Rosalind exultantly.
That didn’t mean, however, that he didn’t possess other means of persuasion. Denied the luxury of taste, he resorted to his other most potent sense to appease their mutual craving for contact, holding her gaze as he rocked against her, grinding her soft buttocks into the rough palm-trunk, his muscles quivering with strain. He was wild for more, and so was Rosalind, but she wanted to tease, to withhold the pleasure that she knew was awaiting them for another few, dizzyingly delicious moments.
He made a deep, smothered sound in his chest and she felt his stiffened tongue dart into a crease between her clamped fingers—a blunt, wet probe that she resisted, even as it made her go weak at the knees. His eyes were sullen, raging with a strange mixture of anger and desire, and hints of a sultry male challenge that thrilled her to her toes. This was Luke the athlete, superbly self-disciplined and intensely focused on his own state of physical readiness. Her mouth went dry, a swimmy heat hazing everything but the man sharply centred in her vision.
Rosalind licked her lips, unconsciously tempting him with what she had denied him. His tongue thrust again at her fingers and she felt his thighs simultaneously tense around her trapped leg, squeezing and releasing in a graphic rhythm that made her arch her hips in the instinctive feminine response.
His control slipped a notch and his hands released their whi
te-knuckled grip on the tree-trunk beside her hips and contracted around her waist, his fingers sizzling on her skin where her vest-top had ridden up from the waistband of her shorts. He angled his body, bending Rosalind further back over the curving beam of the palm, until the tendons in her neck ached with the effort of keeping him in sight and every cell and nerve-end between her knees and her waist was imprinted with the indelible evidence of his masculinity.
‘All right!’ she gasped, whipping her hand from his mouth.
‘All right what?’ he growled savagely.
She slid her arms around his taut neck, her fingers linking tightly across his strong nape, supporting herself while at the same time attempting to pull him down. ‘All right, you can kiss me,’ she ordered flatly, and was shocked to find him suddenly resisting. ‘What’s the matter?’ she husked, rotating the bony jut of her hip against the hard resilience between his spread thighs. ‘Changed your mind?’
‘Lost it, more like,’ was the ragged answer, half under his breath. His head dipped closer at her urging. ‘Why am I letting you do this to me?’
Her eyes glowed with cat-like satisfaction at his whisper of helpless fascination. He was admitting that he was hers, to do with as she pleased...
‘Don’t tell me I have to teach you how to kiss as well as how to flirt?’ she murmured invitingly.
He was breathing harshly, his black eyes riveted on her pouting mouth as he struggled with his self-control. ‘What’s to teach? A kiss is just a kiss...’
She laughed—a sound of pure feminine provocation. ‘Oh, Luke, do you have a lot to learn...’
Her condescending mockery was smothered by his urgent mouth. It was hot and hard and surprisingly tart. His lips slanted across hers, his tongue smoothing inside the velvety interior of her mouth, sucking at the sweetness he found there.
Rosalind’s eyes fluttered shut, unable to cope with the sensual overload. She was in a dark world of heat and tumultuous sensation which intensified when she felt his hands drifting up and down her satiny sides under the thin vest-top, his thumbs shaping the tender outer swell of her breasts exposed by her skimpy bra.
