by Susan Napier
‘Rosalind, what is it? What’s happened?’
Luke caught the telephone as it dropped from her suddenly nerveless grasp, his eyes on her white face as he lifted it, and after a short, staccato burst of speech conversed quietly with Jordan for several minutes. When he finally disconnected the call his face was as pale as Rosalind’s.
‘Roz—’ He touched her bowed back tentatively, as if he expected her to lash out at him, but she was too caught up in the vivid horror she had created in her mind to resist as he put his arms around her and lifted her curled-up body gently into his lap, his hand cupping the back of her skull, his fingers ruffling her cropped locks as he held her against his naked chest.
‘I was right to feel sorry for him, wasn’t I?’ she whispered, swamped by a fresh wave of guilt. ‘But I don’t feel sorry now; I just feel...relieved. Part of me is glad that he’s dead, because that solves my petty little problem!’ She hitched a half-sob into his strong shoulder, turning her face into the familiar musky scent of his skin. ‘Oh, God, Luke, what if it was deliberate? What if he did it because of me...?’
‘Shh, don’t torture yourself about it,’ Luke murmured, bending his head to brush his lips against her clammy forehead. ‘You can’t hold yourself responsible for the actions of a mentally disturbed stranger. Jordan said that he had a long history of psychiatric problems.’
‘But if I’d looked on his letters as a cry for help—’
‘Noble apparently had plenty of help over the years. He’d got very cunning at manipulating himself out of official programmes. You were his victim, Roz, not the other way around. He didn’t even see you as a person. He didn’t want you to know who he was because then he might have been forced to face the reality that he wasn’t part of your life and never would be.
‘He probably enjoyed the sense of power over you that his anonymity gave him and Jordan said that the police psychologist thought the things they found in his flat indicated a classic pattern of escalation. Sooner or later he would have felt the compulsion to act out his fantasies, and when he found that reality didn’t match up he would have resorted to violence to punish whoever had disappointed his craving. If he hadn’t been able to get access to you, he would probably have forced some other woman to act out your role...’
He dismissed each of Rosalind’s hectic ifs and buts with the same calm logic and then, when her initial shock had passed and she broke into a storm of weeping, he held her, rocked her, softly kissing away her tears until the passiveness of grief became the militancy of passion and she made love to him with a wild fervour that blotted out the pain and reaffirmed in the most elemental way her fierce commitment to life, love and the pursuit of happiness. He was gentle, accepting her desperate desire for sensual oblivion, tempering her wildness with his ready responses, allowing her to use him to exorcise her demons.
Afterwards, as she lay tucked in the security of his arms, the perspiration cooling on her skin, she said croakily, the words raw in the swollen tissues of her throat, ‘I should be furious with you.’
‘Should you?’
He traced the shadows under her tear-puffed eyes with a light finger. The dawn had become day and the room was suffused with sunshine streaming in through the open curtains. They were lying face to face, their bodies still intertwined, and she could see every nuance of his expression. His deep satisfaction was underscored by a new aura of male confidence.
She sighed. ‘I would be if I had any energy left!’ She felt as weak as a newborn kitten, aware of a pleasant all-over ache mingled with a bitter-sweet sense of melancholy.
‘In that case I’d better do my best to maintain your current state of exhaustion,’ Luke murmured, with the unique brand of playful gravity that had first confused her into thinking he had no sense of humour. Now her confusion deepened. She was grateful that her absurd suspicions about Luke being a crazed stalker had been squelched, but his feelings and motivations were even more of a mystery than ever.
When she failed to respond with her usual pertness to the subtle sexual banter Luke discarded his muted playfulness, a dark determination entering his gaze as he realised that Rosalind was trying to ease herself away from his disruptive proximity. His arm tightened around her waist, pinning her to the bed, her thigh still sandwiched between his.
‘You can’t blame Jordan for grabbing the chance to increase the odds on you being safe. Most people are rank opportunists when it comes to protecting their families. People compromise their own personal integrity—take chances—do things for the sake of people they love that under normal circumstances they would consider completely unacceptable.’ His voice had hardened perceptibly, his eyes glittering with a restless fervency as he challenged, ‘Haven’t you ever done something you knew was wrong, for reasons that you believed were right?’
Rosalind thought of the time she had masqueraded as Olivia in order to qualify her twin for a portrait commission from the Pendragon Corporation. Olivia had been in a deep depression at the time and Rosalind hadn’t even thought twice about perpetrating the fraud in order to promote her sister’s stalled career. That Olivia had ended up with Jordan as well as the portrait commission had been sheer chance!
And now, too, there was Peggy Staines. She wasn’t family, but she had been in such desperate need that Rosalind had found it impossible to callously turn her back.
well, yes—I have...but the ends don’t always justify the means,‘ she said, troubled by his intensity. ’Sometimes the means are too painful, and who’s really to judge whether the ends are worthy of the hurt they cause?’
His mouth tightened. ‘As far as that goes we all have to make our own moral choices and decisions; ultimately—right or wrong—we have to face the consequences of our actions. All of us would like to believe that there is someone, somewhere, who would make the same sacrifices for us. You’re lucky; you obviously have plenty of people on your side. When he asked me to help, Jordan was only thinking of you—’
‘Oh, I can understand Jordan’s thinking,’ said Rosalind, her hair a brilliant splash against the white pillow as she turned her head to confront him at eye-level. ‘But what about you? Why on earth should you want to get involved? Especially after I’d given you the brush-off at the check-in counter...’
‘I was curious about you,’ he admitted bluntly, dashing her fond hopes. If he had told her he had fallen in love at first sight—or even second—she might have been willing to forgive him his secrets! ‘I knew who you were so I wasn’t surprised that you wanted to avoid any curious hangers-on, and when Jordan handed me a legitimate excuse to indulge my curiosity I couldn’t resist. Although I wasn’t quite sure how to go about the introduction—’
‘You could have tried the truth. You could have simply said you were a friend of Jordan’s and that he’d asked you to look me up on the trip,’ she pointed out sardonically. A curiosity—was that all she’d been to him?
His eyes narrowed at the jab. ‘Jordan said that if you knew, or even suspected, that he’d asked me to keep you out of trouble you’d lead me a hectic dance—deliberately try to make it as difficult as possible for me to keep my promise.’
Keep her out of trouble?
Rosalind gritted her teeth at the condescending phrase, but since she would probably have reacted exactly as he’d described she could hardly argue.
She was suddenly diverted by his last words. ‘You actually promised Jordan that you’d look after me?’ Rosalind, of all people, was aware of the importance—and the cost—of keeping rash promises.
One eyebrow flared quizzically at her surprisingly subdued reaction. ‘No, I don’t make promises if there’s a chance I won’t be able to keep them.’ Damn it, she had to respect him for that. ‘I simply promised him that I’d do my best.’
Her eyes kindled at the irony. ‘You’d do your best? You didn’t have to do anything. I practically presented myself to you on a plate!’
‘Dropped into my hands like a ripe peach,’ he agreed, for the shee
r pleasure of annoying her. Rosalind angry was much less mindful of her tongue.
‘And boy, did you take advantage of it!’ she accused.
She struggled free of his arm and this time he let her go, watching as she sat up and hugged the sheet while she fished around in the bed for her dress. He finally found it for her—a sadly crumpled ball stuffed under the pillows.
‘What are you so mad about, Roz?’ he said as she snatched it away from him. He watched her silently debate whether to put it straight on, obviously remembering what had happened last time she had worn it without underwear. He sat up, leaning on one strong arm, and goaded, ‘Are you afraid I only slept with you as a favour to your brother-in-law...to clip your flirty wings and keep you out of the beds of suspicious strangers?’
Rosalind pinkened with rage. She wasn’t going to let him get away with that outrageous lie. ‘The hell you did! Jordan’s not a pimp and you know damned well I’m not a gullible tramp willing to sleep with any sleaze-bag who shows an interest! The only suspicious stranger around here has been you...and the only favour you were doing last night was for yourself!’
‘And you, I hope,’ he said, with an incendiary coolness that made her realise that he had been deliberately baiting her. ‘So...I think we’ve established that you were curious about me too. The fact that it rapidly developed into something more complex was something neither of us could have foreseen. We both got more than we bargained for out of our curiosity, didn’t we? I agree, I had a hidden agenda to mine, but you were the one making the decisions about where and how far the relationship was going to go—’
‘Yes, but they weren’t fully informed decisions!’ she protested, clutching the balled-up dress to her chest to try to ease the tightness of her breathing. He didn’t sound like a man gloating over his one-night stand with a minor celebrity. Men who were only after sex talked about complexity and relationships before they got the woman into bed, never afterwards...
His eyes narrowed on her white knuckles before moving back up to her defiant face. ‘I hope you’re not suggesting I seduced you against your will. If anyone was seduced it was definitely me. After all, you were the one who crept into my room last night—’
‘Not because I wanted to seduce you,’ she protested hotly.
‘No?’ He smirked sceptically.
‘No! Because I wanted to check out your computer files again. Because I thought you might be Peter and I wanted to see if I could find any evidence to prove things either way!’ she flung at him.
His smirk turned to shocked outrage. ‘You what?’
‘Well, what was I supposed to think?’ she yelled. defensively. ‘I didn’t know you were bosom buddies with my brother-in-law. I didn’t know you were playing amateur bodyguard! I was just going to hack into your system to see if there was proof one way or the other—’
‘You were going to mess around on my hard disk?’ he howled. He seemed more affronted at the thought of his computer being tampered with than he was at the idea of being suspected as a psychotic stalker of women.
‘I brought back the floppy I took,’ she said, lifting her dainty chin aggressively. ‘I was going to reread it, but I dropped it on the floor in the dark. And then you woke up and...and—’
‘And you realised your suspicions were completely unfounded and utterly ridiculous!’
‘Well...you took me by surprise and...uh...’
He read between the lines of her inarticulate stammer and swore with startling fluency.
‘So you thought I might be dangerous, but you fluttered up to the flame anyway? Damn it, Roz, don’t you have any sense of self-preservation?’ Each sentence worked him into an even quieter fury. ‘No wonder Jordan was worried! Do you realise what could have happened?’
‘I thought it had,’ she reminded him, with a trace of her old insouciance.
He stamped on it grimly. ‘You know how strong I am. If I had been your stalker I could have hurt you, abused you in some perverted way to feed my sick obsession, killed you even,’ he emphasised viciously. He took her by the arms, giving her an urgent little shake. ‘You may act tough but sophistication is no protection against violence. You don’t have the strength to fight a man who thinks he has nothing to lose—’
‘P-Peter’s dead, for goodness’ sake!’ she stuttered, her heart hammering at the fierceness of his reaction.
‘You didn’t know that last night! Just what the hell were you thinking, to take such a stupid risk?’
‘I refuse to answer on the grounds it might incriminate me!’
His eyes sharpened. Too late Rosalind remembered the frighteningly perceptive observation amongst his diary of notes that she had a habit of resorting to flippancy whenever her emotions were in danger of being too deeply engaged. It was a self-protective mechanism that she had used a lot where Luke was concerned.
‘Roz?’
His fingers sank deeper into the soft flesh of her upper arms and she dropped her dress, pushing against his chest to no avail. Unattended, the sheet across her breasts sagged, but Luke didn’t take his eyes off her face as he pursued her with silken tenacity.
‘Maybe you weren’t thinking at all. Maybe you were operating on pure instinct. Your logic told you not to trust me until you’d checked me out, but you’ve never been guided by logic, have you? You invariably act from the heart. What was your heart saying to you last night, Rosalind?’
She shook her head slightly, her eyes flashing like rare jewels in the streaks of sunlight that lanced through the room. ‘That I was crazy,’ she said breathlessly.
‘I know the feeling,’ he murmured, vagueness suddenly blanking off his expression.
Was that a declaration? An admission? Why did she feel that she had disappointed him in some way? What did he expect from her?
‘I keep discovering things about you that put a whole new spin on your character,’ she blurted out in frustration. ‘How can I trust the real you if I don’t know who that is? What other secrets have you been keeping from me...?’
‘Only one.’ His eyes were hooded. ‘But it’s the most important one. Are you going to ask me to tell you what it is...?’ His hands fell away, setting her free, as he lazed back down in the bed, tension evident in every muscle and sinew. Experiencing a strong premonition of danger, Rosalind drew the sheet back up over her breasts in an unconsciously symbolic gesture of concealment. ‘You want us to be totally honest about ourselves?’
‘Yes...of course I do,’ she faltered.
Luke’s lowered lashes flickered as he revealed the hook in his tantalising bait. ‘Well, if you want to talk secrets, Rosalind, I’m quite willing... as long as it’s mutual. Are you ready for that yet, do you think? Are you ready to bare the deepest, darkest, most important secrets of your soul on the strength of a one-night stand?’
Her whole being revolted at his brutal definition of their night together, even though she knew he had used it deliberately to provoke just such a reaction. ‘That isn’t how it was—’
‘No.’ He cut her off smoothly. ‘I agree. So let’s say we’re lovers, then. And lovers are supposed to confide in each other, aren’t they, Roz? To share their joys, their sorrows, their guilty secrets...’
Rosalind moistened her lips, knowing what was coming next, as he went on with insidious calm, ‘So that must mean that you’re going to tell me all about you and Peggy Staines and what led up to her having a heart attack in your room. Maybe you’re going to tell me the rumours about blackmail were true...?’
Rosalind threw back her head proudly. ‘I wasn’t blackmailing her—’
‘Then she was blackmailing you?’
‘No!’
‘Then what was all the money for?’
‘It wasn’t as much as the newspapers said—just a few hundred dollars—and it belonged to someone else. I was simply...minding it,’ Rosalind said reluctantly. Peter Noble’s last and most frighteningly direct gift had been a thick wad of banknotes stuffed in with his letter and she had inte
nded to ask Peggy to return it. Peggy had had it in her hand when the pain had struck and in the ensuing panic the money had been scattered around the room.
‘Was it some sort of drug deal gone wrong?’
She glared at him. ‘No, of course not!’
‘Then what?’
She remained silent, folding and refolding the top of the sheet across her chest. Even dead, Peter Noble had the power to create havoc in Peggy’s life.
‘Still want to keep your secrets, Roz?’ Luke taunted softly as the silence stretched.
She swallowed the copper taste of fear. Why was he pressing her like this? Was it just a matter of principle, or did he have some deeper purpose? He must realise his flatly confrontational approach was bound to rankle. It was almost as if he wanted her to refuse...
‘This one isn’t mine to tell. My promises mean as much to me as yours do to you—’
He pounced. ‘Who did you promise? Peggy Staines? Does that mean you know something that could be damaging to her or her husband?’
Rosalind looked away. Oh, he was sharp. So very, very sharp. If she wasn’t careful, with a little more information he might piece the picture together. In a way she wished he would guess the truth and thus relieve her of the burdensome responsibility she had impulsively shouldered. His impartial, analytical brain might see an honourable resolution to her painful dilemma.
‘I’m sorry...’ Her expressive voice was redolent with weary regret. This was even harder than it had been denying her own family. The Marlow clan would always stand staunch for one of its members. Her family’s love and private belief in her was strong enough to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But the relationship between her and Luke was still very fragile and new and she might be damaging it beyond repair by demanding that he take her on faith. ‘I can’t tell you anything else.’
‘Not ever?’ he asked with equal quietness.
Her heart quivered with a faint pulse of excitement. ‘Ever’ was a world without end. His question implied a future that she feared to contemplate.
