VANESSA lifted her head and let the stiff breeze float her loosely bound hair off her shoulders. She dug her cold hands deeper into the pockets of her down jacket as she walked along the beach, stepping carefully in her thick-soled trainers to avoid slipping on the piles of loose rocks.
Unlike the silky white-sand beaches of the east coast of the Coromandel, most of the west-coast bays were small, rock-strewn stretches of brown sand scalloped from point to rocky point, the mussel- and oyster-encrusted rocks at the waterline giving way to small boulders than could be overturned to reveal scuttling colonies of crabs and, up past the high-tide line, bleached driftwood and stiffened brown seaweed lay among thick drifts of smoothly weathered stones and pebbles ranging through the spectrum of earth colours.
Vanessa looked up at a sharp cry, but it was only a seagull wheeling above the shallow inshore waters, brown with stirred-up sand. She watched its soaring, wind-tossed flight across the pale grey sky, envying its freedom. There were times she would like to fly free, away from all her problems. But instead she could only drive and walk and even then she wasn’t escaping them, because her biggest problem was herself.
She turned to retrace her steps and froze, her heart shuddering in her breast.
Correction, her biggest problem was in front of her, calmly strolling between the rocks as if he had as much right to be there as she did.
She waited until he got into earshot before she asked tightly, ‘What are you doing here?’
Benedict shrugged, his black leather jacket sliding open over his cream sweater with the careless movement as he halted on the other side of a shallow rock-pool. ‘Walking.’
She snorted. ‘You never walk.’
‘Only because I don’t usually stay here long enough to miss my daily swims. I’ve decided I’d better get out and about a bit if I don’t want to run to fat.’
She gave his lean length a contemptuous look. ‘I don’t think you have to worry about that.’
‘Thank you.’
‘It wasn’t a compliment, it was a statement of fact,’ she said irritably.
‘Thank you anyway. You’re looking very trim yourself.’
He was looking at her long legs, clad in the jeans that she kept in the boot of the estate car along with her spare down parka and a pair of old sports shoes. When she had left the house earlier she hadn’t even bothered to change, just grabbed a cardigan and fled, and now, with her prim navy ‘uniform’ lying on the back seat of the car, she felt wretchedly defenceless.
She brushed the wind-blown hair out of her eyes, trying to tuck the strands back into the scarf she had used to tie it back.
‘Did you follow me here?’ she asked bluntly.
‘What makes you think that?’
She refused to retreat in the face of his daunting amusement. ‘It seems a very strange coincidence, that’s all.’
‘Since there’s only one main road around here, it’s not that much of a coincidence. I saw the car parked on the verge so I stopped.’
He made it sound like an idle impulse but what reason would he have for driving north from Whitefield? He didn’t strike her as a man with sightseeing on his mind. That only left one alternative.
‘You said I could have the afternoon off,’ she challenged.
‘I suggested we take the afternoon off,’ he corrected gently. ‘And you snuck away to hide as soon as my back was turned.’
‘I’m not hiding. I just wanted to—to get some fresh air and stretch my legs,’ she invented wildly.
Ever since that electric encounter two weeks ago she had been attempting to put a physical distance between them that he had been equally determined to thwart. One night, to her fury, he had invited Richard and his mother to dinner and commanded Vanessa to act as his hostess. She had been forced to smile and act cool and unruffled by his teasing casualness while underneath she had simmered with a temper that had given an unaccustomed sparkle to her looks and prompted some searching glances from Mrs Wells. She couldn’t help but be aware, seeing Richard and Benedict together, how dramatically different they were, like light and shadow, day and night, and unfortunately a primitive part of her was far more fascinated by the powerful lure of the hidden and forbidden than the mellow sunshine.
To her further dismay, during dinner Richard had let the cat out of the bag about the work she was doing for Judge Seaton’s publisher, completing the book about the colourful history of Thames that he had been working on at the time of his death. Richard had cheerfully recounted the difficulties she had had trying to collate and compress boxes of copious notes and sort through half-scribbled ideas in her spare time and somehow by the end of the meal Vanessa had found that she had been neatly manoeuvred into accepting Benedict’s help.
Since then much of her spare time had been spent cheek by jowl with Benedict at the library desk, resolutely trying to treat him like a block of wood while deeply chagrined to realise that his unwelcome expertise was indeed making the book progress much faster.
‘Precisely my plan,’ he said smugly now. ‘We can stretch our legs together. Exercise is boring without company, don’t you think?’
‘No.’
He regarded her truculent glare with amusement. ‘Well, in that case you just carry on by yourself and I’ll keep a discreet distance behind.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous—!’
‘It’s not me who’s being ridiculous, Vanessa,’ he said gently. ‘What did you think I intended when I suggested you and I play hooky today?’
Vanessa turned away but he had already seen her blush. ‘Do I have to tell you my thoughts now? Aren’t I entitled to any privacy at all?’ she demanded fiercely.
‘You can have all you want. I haven’t brought my thumbscrews with me. In fact, have I ever forced a confidence out of you, Vanessa?’
‘You’re always doing it!’ she countered explosively.
‘Ah, but by stealth, never by force.’
She gave him a look of immense frustration, aware that he was right. While they had been closeted together over the judge’s disordered manuscript she had revealed far more about herself than she had intended, since talking about herself was the only proven way of stemming his tide of threatening confidences about himself.
She didn’t want to be lured into curiosity about the velvety-dark contradictions of his character. She certainly didn’t want to know that he had worn glasses since he was twelve years old, and that they had fogged up when he had received his first French kiss from a girl when he was fifteen...although she had found herself thinking that perhaps that explained why he had taken them off when he had kissed her!
She didn’t want to know those other things about him that touched her heart: that his childhood had been restricted by parental expectations to the point of oppression—an imperious father whose rigid, exacting standards of excellence had raised his son to expect nothing less of himself than perfection and a mother whose social expectations of him had been every bit as stringent and repressive. One didn’t express emotions openly in the Savage family circle, one acted with dignity at all times. One doled out affection when it was earned by correct behaviour or academic excellence.
Benedict had learned the lessons of his early childhood well. On the surface he had been the perfect son. He had never rebelled as a teenager, he had performed to expectation at school and at home. He had dutifully joined his father’s architectural firm when he had graduated from university and carried on the conservative family tradition, regarding homes and possessions and even people as profitable investments rather than emotional attachments.
Underneath, though, other forces had been at work, the intellectual curiosity and ruthlessly competitive ambition that his father had relentlessly encouraged constantly thwarted by the restrictions imposed by his status within the firm. As the years had passed he’d come to realise that his father’s expectations for him, far from being infinite, were quite claustrophobically finite—the pinnacle of Benedict’s professional success was to be the inheritance of the company when his father retired and his duty then would be the continuation of the Savage dynasty.
By the age of twenty-eight, Benedict had come to a full recognition that he was not the man his father wanted him to be, and never would be. He wanted more and he wanted it on his own terms.
The split had been achieved with customary Savage dignity, a frigid debate in which both men had obdurately refused to compromise. No emotional outbursts, no public washing of dirty linen, merely a cleverly managed PR announcement that had poured cold water on the choice rumours of a family rift. Benedict had continued to see his parents occasionally on a social basis, although he was left in no doubt from his mother that she was deeply disappointed in him and would deny him the warmth of her approval until he had got over his childish fit of rebellion against his father and returned to the family fold.
Benedict had commented wryly that since his mother’s approval was never very warm anyway he could live comfortably without it.
However, understanding him more didn’t make him any easier for Vanessa to deal with.
‘I think I’ve had enough fresh air now,’ she said desperately, and began to march back down the way she’d come.
Predictably, Benedict matched her stride for stride but he was watching her instead of his footing and a rock shifted beneath his leather shoe, causing him to skid off into a small hollow of sea-water, soaking the cuff of his black trousers.
Vanessa, whose hand had darted out instinctively when he stumbled, snatched it away hastily as he smiled warmly at her in gratitude.
‘Thank you, Nessa.’
‘Walking over rocks in shoes like that is asking for trouble,’ she said, quickening her gait to escape the potency of that stunning smile. ‘And now I’ll have to send those trousers to be dry-cleaned. Why didn’t you wear something practical, like jeans?’
‘I didn’t know what we were going to be doing,’ he said equably. ‘And I don’t own any jeans.’
That seemed so inconceivable to one of her generation that she stared at him in wonder. ‘What do you relax in?’ Then she remembered who it was she was talking to. ‘Oh, yes, that’s right; you don’t have time to relax.’
‘Until now there was no need,’ he commented. ‘Perhaps you can teach me to relax, Vanessa.’
She ignored him, remaining stubbornly silent until she reached the car. There she halted, frowning as she saw a vaguely familiar wicker hamper sitting by the front wheel.
‘Where did that come from?’
‘Kate. It’s a picnic.’
‘Picnic?’
‘Kate said you told her you were going to the beach and then took off before she could pack you some lunch. She said you often had sandwiches on the beach when the weather was fine. She thought you might have had things on your mind and just forgot to ask.’
Vanessa cursed the over-developed sense of responsibility that had made it impossible for her to take off without letting someone know where she could be found. However, she welcomed the realisation that the hollowness in the region of her stomach might not be entirely due to Benedict’s unsettling effect on her nervous system.
‘I’m not hungry.’
His look was one of amused scepticism. ‘Well, I am, so you can just sit and watch me eat before we go.’
‘We?’ She suddenly noticed that hers was the only car parked along the whole foreshore. ‘Where’s your car?’
‘One of the plasterers dropped me off. He lives at Tapu and was going home for lunch.’
‘You took a lot for granted, didn’t you?’
‘I didn’t think you’d be callous enough to drive off and leave your employer stranded.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘Is that a threat?’
‘Your paranoia is showing. For goodness’ sake, Vanessa, what do you think I can do to you on a public beach?’
He picked up the hamper and began walking towards a huge, twisted pohutukawa tree whose gnarled branches overhung a steep grassy bank below the curve of the road. After a moment she reluctantly followed.
By the time she reached him, deliberately dawdling, Benedict had shaken out a blanket over the long, springy grass.
‘I hope you’re not going to loom over me the whole time I eat. Sit down. Learn to relax, Vanessa,’ he mocked as he sat down on the blanket and shrugged out of his jacket before beginning to rustle about in the hamper.
She sat, and was instantly aware of a strange sense of isolation. With their combined weight the blanket was compressed startlingly deep into the surrounding grasses so that only the sea down the slope directly in front of them remained open to their view. They were totally private from the rest of the beach and the road above. It was also surprisingly warm out of the direct bite of the wind, so warm that Vanessa unzipped her parka and peeled it off, straightening her fleecy grey angora cardigan as she did so.
‘Just like a cosy little nest in here, isn’t it?’ Benedict murmured, echoing her thoughts with unnerving accuracy. ‘And look at you. Downy as a young chick. Would you like coffee or champagne?’
She looked at the cut-crystal glass and Royal Doulton cup he was offering, and then at the silver cutlery and starched white linen napkins he had laid on the undulating surface of the blanket. Nothing but the best for Benedict Savage. Always.
‘Coffee, please,’ she said primly.
‘That’s right, must keep a clear head,’ he said blandly, producing a stainless-steel Thermos flask and pouring a steaming stream of coffee into the cup. ‘Milk and sugar, m’lady?’
‘No, thank you.’
He handed her a cup and poured one for himself before unwrapping some of the food, which was far more practical than the luxury accoutrements, thought Vanessa in amusement. Kate knew what made a good picnic, no matter how wealthy you were: bacon-and-egg pie; marinated cold chicken; creamy, golden New Zealand cheddar; thick, crusty home-made bread and pickles that Vanessa remembered helping to bottle.
‘It’s rather disconcerting to realise that while I have to ask you the simplest things about your likes and dislikes you know everything about mine,’ murmured Benedict, watching her sip her coffee.
‘Hardly everything,’ Vanessa contested automatically.
‘Still, I feel at a disadvantage.’
As a victory it was a vitally unimportant one but the knowledge that he might feel in any way insecure was a pleasing one. She couldn’t help a slightly smug smile as she said lightly, ‘Well, now you know how I take my coffee.’
He regarded the infinitesimal lowering of her guard blandly. ‘Mmm... You may as well have something to eat, too, even though I know you’re not hungry.’
Since she had been practically drooling over the array of food he had spread before her she didn’t bother to protest as he cut the bacon-and-egg pie with a chased-silver knife and transferred wedges on to two plates. With a little flourish he snapped out a napkin and leaned over to drape it across her thighs before handing her the plate. ‘Do you think I’d make a good butler?’ he asked, tongue-in-cheek.
She was startled into uttering the truth. ‘God, no!’
‘That was very emphatic.’ He stretched out on his side, propped up on one arm, munching at his portion of pie. ‘Why?’
‘Because you’re not...you’re too—’ She stopped, wondering how much her opinion of his character was going to be given away.
‘Not what? Too what?’
‘Too old.’
He stopped chewing.
‘The hell I am!’
Not liking the gleam in his eye that accompanied the growl, Vanessa hastened to clarify. ‘Too old to change, I mean. You’re used to having everything your own way. I can’t see you taking orders without arguing—’
‘Are we talking about you or me here?’ he interrupted sarcastically. ‘I’m an architect; I take orders from my clients every day—’
‘I rather got the impression that you only took the orders that you wanted to take,’ said Vanessa drily. ‘Isn’t that why you left your father’s firm? Face it, you just couldn’t cut it in a job that requires you to be constantly deferential. You have to run things, to be in charge. You wouldn’t even know where your forelock was, let alone how to tug it!’
‘I haven’t noticed you being particularly deferential. And since when have I asked for any forelock-tugging from my employees?’
He seemed genuinely pained and she was quick to point out tartly, ‘You give me time off and then expect me to be meekly at your beck and call!’
He gave her a grim smile. ‘Meekly, no—I’m not that much of an optimist. But if you really didn’t want to be here with me now, Vanessa, you would have driven off and left me in a cloud of dust. But you didn’t. And don’t tell me that it was mere deference to my authority. Your thumb your nose at that when it suits you. When we get down to the nitty gritty, this is between Benedict and Vanessa, man and woman, not employer and employee.’
Vanessa gave him a haughty look. ‘I really don’t want—’
‘Yes, you do. You want me and you’re afraid of it. You’re afraid it makes you vulnerable. Well, hell, men are vulnerable too. Much more so. We can’t hide the fact that we find a woman exciting. Look at me, do you think I like having such little self-control...?’
He indicated his body with an impatient sweep of his hand from shoulder to hip. Not understanding his reference, Vanessa followed the gesture to its obvious conclusion and felt herself flushing at the sight of his blatant masculinity, her eyes jerking back to his sardonic expression.
‘Embarrassed? Think of how I feel!’
She did and her blush deepened. He gave a barking laugh. ‘Yes, well, I admit it’s not all bad. In fact...’ his drawl took on a husky note ‘...some of it is pretty damned good. The question is, what are we going to do about it?’
‘We’re not going to do anything,’ said Vanessa shakily, scrabbling for her battered defences. ‘And if you think that you can use sexual harassment to—’
‘Sexual harassment!’ He jack-knifed to a sitting position, cursing fiercely as coffee spilled across his thigh. He wiped the stain carelessly with the sleeve of his sweater as he continued harshly, ‘What in the hell are you talking about?’
‘About you using your...your position to...to threaten me—’
‘Any threats are in your own mixed-up little mind.’ She realised that this time he was genuinely angry and becoming more so with every word he uttered. ‘Why should the fact that you work for me have any bearing on the fact that we find each other attractive? So I went off my head a little at first—I think I was entitled, don’t you? Did I ever say I’d fire you if you don’t have sex with me?’
‘No, but—’
‘No. I said precisely the opposite, didn’t I? And have I touched you sexually against your will?’
He had hardly touched her at all in the past two weeks; that was what had made her so acutely aware of him...the fact that he was making such an obvious effort not to touch her. The fact that she had found herself looking at his hands and his mouth and remembering, wondering...
‘No, but—’
‘Have I made suggestive comments to you while we’ve been working on that damned book? Have I been anything but casual and friendly?’
‘No, but—’
‘But what? I’ve been walking on damned eggshells around you so as not to frighten you off, to give you a chance to get to know me as a whole person, and now you accuse me of sexual harassment? My God, do you really think I’m that bloody desperate? That despicable?’
He was shouting. Cool, contained Benedict Savage was shouting at her. And swearing like an explosive teenager.
‘No, of course not,’ she admitted weakly.
‘Then would you mind telling me what exactly it is that I do that makes you feel so quiveringly helpless before my slavering lust?’ He raked a look down her body that made her feel hot all over.
‘It’s that!’ she blurted out desperately. ‘The way you look at me.’
There was a shivering silence. Then, ‘Look? So even looking’s forbidden now? I think you’ll have to be a bit more precise, Vanessa.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it—’
‘Neither do I!’
Suddenly he was no longer sitting on the other side of the blanket. With a lithe movement he lunged across the clutter between them, upsetting plates and scattering food as he came down over her, straddling her body on his braced arms and knees as she collapsed backwards in shock. ‘I’d much rather do something about it!’
‘Stop it!’ she panted, pushing both hands against his chest, holding him at bay.
‘Who am I?’
She blinked at him, startled, the nimbus of light around his head making it difficult for her to see his expression. ‘What?’
‘My name—who am I?’ he demanded, allowing her the illusion of being able to keep him at arm’s length as he hovered over her. ‘You don’t call me sir any more and you can’t quite bring yourself to say Mr Savage either. But you refuse to call me Benedict. I don’t like being a nobody. So why don’t you try Ben? You called me that once before, remember? Short, sweet and intimate. Try it. Say Ben, Vanessa.’
‘For goodness’ sake—’
‘Say it.’ He took off his glasses and threw them away in a gesture of reckless intent that made her heart pound.
‘All right, damn it—Ben!’ she retorted wildly. ‘There, I’ve said it. Ben, Ben, Ben—’
Her provocative chant was suddenly smothered. There was no tentativeness, none of the explorative gentleness that had characterised his last kiss. This time he was all aggressive, dominating male. The kiss was hot and hard, swallowing her anger and feeding it back to her piece by defiant piece. In the first few savage moments of contact he didn’t even allow her the luxury of a response—biting, licking and sucking at her mouth as if he were a starving man driven to extract every scrap of nourishment from the sensual feast before it could be snatched away from him.
But even as her mouth parted helplessly under the greedy onslaught Vanessa knew that she wasn’t going to deny him anything. Only Benedict could make her feel like this, so furious, so frustrated, so wildly aroused that she no longer cared about the rules and petty restrictions that she had carefully worked out to build and govern her peaceful life.
‘Say it again,’ his husky voice growled into her moist depths. His tongue caressed hers, stroking his name along her trembling taste-buds, teasing it out of her in an aching sigh of pleasure.
‘Ben...’
He gave a low grunt of triumph and the kiss changed, hardening even further as he came heavily down on her, his lithe body crushing her into the cushioning grasses with a powerful surging movement that dislodged her feverish grip on his sweater. Her hands slid up over his shoulders and curved down over his straining back as he settled his full length intimately against her, pushing insistently at her knees until he had nudged them far enough apart to insinuate himself between them.
‘God, I love the way you say my name...’ He cupped her head in one hand, pulling at her scarf with the other until her hair fluffed out across the blanket, and then he nuzzled at it before returning to her mouth, this time paying thorough attention to her every response.
As his tongue licked at her senses his free hand smoothed down the side of her soft cardigan and over her denim flank to hook behind her knee, bending it up to rest alongside his hip, increasing the intimacy of the undulating pressure between her thighs in a way that made her moan.
‘Am I hurting you?’ he whispered harshly, lifting his mouth from hers to study her dazed expression.
‘Yes...’ Her eyes were closed, her face stiff with an agony of bliss that he couldn’t fail to misread.
‘Then let me help you, heal you...’ He shifted his torso sideways and her eyes fluttered open as she felt a pearlised button between her breasts suddenly give way.
‘Why is it you always wear clothes with so many damned tiny buttons?’ he growled, so intent on his task that he didn’t notice her watching him through wondering eyes. His face was flushed, the tip of his tongue tracing his swollen lower lip as he concentrated.
She looked down at what he was doing, shocked to discover that he wasn’t bothering to undo the buttons in a proper sequence but was merely exposing her breasts as quickly as he could. Somehow it seemed more indecent that way. Instinctively she put a hand to the top button only to have it impatiently brushed away.
‘No. I want to do it. I want to see.’ He looked up then and his eyes were hot and dark and at least as indecent as her thoughts. He deliberately held her gaze as he undid another button and then paused, splaying his hands possessively over the twin swells of soft angora and contracting them just enough to make her gasp.
‘Someone might come,’ she whispered threadily, arching helplessly as his hands contracted again.
‘No one can see us here. We’re safely tucked up in our little nest,’ he murmured, not taking his eyes off her vulnerable face as he undid the rest of the buttons by touch and slowly began to draw the loose edges of her cardigan aside, stroking the downy wool across her sensitive skin. ‘You want me to look at you, don’t you, Nessa, to stop this ache we both have...?’
She stopped breathing, wondering whether he would be disappointed when he finally saw the plain white bra she was wearing, serviceable rather than seductive.
He looked down and stilled, a tiny smile sizzling at the corner of his mouth at the sight of the smooth, seamless cups and the intriguing shadowy outline of her areolae traced against the silky fine fabric. ‘Where does it fasten?’
It was her willingness he was requesting, not operating instructions, Vanessa realised and she responded breathlessly. ‘H-here.’ She pulled her arms from his neck to touch herself nervously between her breasts, her voice nearly as thick as his.
‘No.’ He stopped her tentative movement, catching first one wrist and then the other and pressing them down against the rug on either side of her head. She lay quiescent as his fingers trailed slowly away to deftly unclip the tiny catch and delicately ease her breasts free from their aching confinement. His eyes blazed like blue fire.
‘Oh, yes...oh, darling, just look at you...’ He leaned forward and his forefinger drifted across her bare nipple in a whisper-light caress. She flinched and he touched her again, and again, until she was arching into the maddeningly light caresses, needing more than this exquisite teasing.
‘So soft and smooth...’ he murmured, absorbed in his erotic entrancement. ‘And such beautiful, velvety pink rosebuds...look how they darken and furl so sweet and tight when they’re plucked...’ His thumb and forefinger moved skilfully, sending sharp splinters of abandoned pleasure streaking to the core of her being. He let her experience the thrill over and over again before he finally gathered her into his cupped palms, admiring the frame his masculine fingers created around her overflowing ripeness, lifting her, praising her with his eyes and words and finally, to her unbearable delight, his mouth.
Her fists opened and closed helplessly beside her mindlessly tossing head as he suckled his way up the warm, creamy slopes, seeking the peaks that he had meticulously teased to rigid excitement, nuzzling them hotly, licking and sucking at each swollen bud in turn, at first with extreme delicacy and then with a ravishingly raw hunger, working on her with his teeth and tongue until her whole body pulsed with the same powerfully driving rhythm that rode him between her raised legs, stroking her with his growing hardness until she was aware of nothing else but a terrifying pressure building up inside her.
A wave of primitive fear increased the pressure as her body jolted with the impact of another bunching male thrust. He was ready for her but she wasn’t ready at all—she would never be! She couldn’t see him but she could feel how big he was—much bigger than Julian had been and that meant that when he lost control the pain would also be worse and the pleasure that he had given her would be nothing in comparison. She was mad, insane to think she had wanted this...
She wasn’t aware of the frightened little sounds and hectic movements she was making until he reluctantly abandoned her glistening flesh to soothe her frantic cries with his mouth.
‘It’s all right, darling, it’s all right.’
‘No, no...’ She was almost sobbing as she writhed beneath his thighs, torn by the devastating conflict of desire against doubt. ‘It hurts—’
‘I know.’ He kissed her, misunderstanding, holding her tightly and groaning as his body was racked by a long shudder. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for us to go so far... Here, let me at least do this for you...’
She felt his hand on her bare belly, the tug on the snap of her jeans, the metallic slide of her zip, and then the long, skilful fingers were brushing through the soft thicket between her legs, finding her secret source, touching her where she was hot and damp, sliding inside with a shocking ease that sent a piercingly erotic thrill of terror shafting to her brain. She wanted it all in that instant—the pleasure, the ramming pain, the brutal, bleeding emptiness...
‘No!’ She went rigid and blackness came swirling in on her, the way it had that other time when the agony had been so intense that she had momentarily passed out, but this time she fought it, determined not to give in, not to be completely helpless. The darkness swirled hot and suffocating, clinging around her eyes and nose and mouth until suddenly it dissolved with an icy shock.
Her eyes flew wide and she found herself staring up at Benedict, who was kneeling over her on the rug, bathing her face and neck with a napkin dripping with champagne.
‘What a dreadful waste,’ she croaked automatically as she saw him clumsily slop another splash of vintage bubbly into the napkin and she gasped as he applied its wet chill to her throat.
‘It’s not going to be wasted, believe me.’ He lifted the napkin and shocked her by applying his mouth to her foaming skin, lapping it dry with delicate, rasping strokes of his tongue. ‘There. Happy? Now tell me who the hell Julian is!’
‘Julian...?’ The colour that had leached from her face flooded back.
‘The man you seem to have got me mixed up with just now. The bastard whom you begged not to hurt you.’
She tried to struggle upright, pulling her cardigan over her bare breasts. ‘I’m sorry—’
He pushed her flat again with an implacable hand. ‘So am I. I want to know what he did to you. Did he rape you?’
‘I...n-no.’
His mouth thinned at her uncertainty, his blue eyes glowing with ruthless intent. ‘We’re not leaving here until you tell me, Vanessa. I’m not going to be made to pay for someone else’s crimes. Who is bloody Julian?’
She held his gaze, just. ‘A man I used to know. In England.’
‘Were you in love with him?’
Her eyes fluttered away from his. ‘No! Yes—I don’t know—’
‘This isn’t multiple choice. Which was it?’
He was angry, but she had the sense to know that it wasn’t with her. She looked back at him pleadingly. ‘Please, let me do up my cardigan first...’
For an awful moment she thought he was going to refuse, his eyes growing hungry again as they roved over her flushed, well-loved breasts, but then he muttered something violent under his breath and swivelled to rake through the debris of the picnic and find his glasses. He put them on and watched broodingly as she fumbled first with the fastenings of her bra and jeans and then started on the tiny buttons of her cardigan. When it was evident that her shaking fingers were tackling a task that was temporarily beyond their capability he took over with an impatient growl, making her painfully aware that her nipples were still stiff and throbbing from his mouth. When he had finished he caught her chin in his hand.
‘Now, Vanessa. Talk.’
He was brooking no refusal and after the devastating intimacy they had just shared her resistance was wretchedly weak.
‘Julian was the son of the man I was butler for in London,’ she said wearily. ‘He liked a challenge and I was naïve and stupid enough to present him with one. It was my first really independent job and I had no family or friends in London and the whole situation was pretty nerve-racking—Egon St Clair and his wife were going through a fairly spectacular marriage break-up and their two grown-up daughters and Julian used to turn up at the house every now and then and contribute to the shouting matches.’
She pulled herself out of his grasp and sat back, trying not to notice that Benedict’s casual elegance was now sexily rumpled, the coffee-stained fabric of his trousers stretched tautly across his thighs, the sleeves of his sweater pushed up to reveal the dark hair on his arms and the steel watch glinting on his strong wrist. ‘So when Julian suddenly started plying me with attention I was grateful for his kindness, and flattered...he was thirty, rich, handsome and sophisticated—what insignificant nineteen-year-old wouldn’t have been impressed? And he presented this image of himself, you see, as a tortured romantic, a misunderstood poor little rich boy who secretly longed to have his rakish life redeemed by the love of a good, plain woman. Like an idiot I fell for it. But all he wanted was a one night stand, a chance to flex his ego...’ All her wretched humiliation was in her voice and in the bitter smile that bracketed her wide mouth as she looked unflinchingly at Benedict. ‘So you see, it wasn’t rape because I went with him willingly.’
‘But you changed your mind somewhere along the line, didn’t you?’ he said shrewdly. ‘Vanessa, if he forced you at any point, it was rape.’
Her mouth twisted in a painful attempt to be honest. ‘I told you, I wanted to... I tried to enjoy it but he—I just couldn’t seem to—’ She broke off and shrugged miserably, looking out to the white-capped sea. ‘I don’t wonder he got furious in the end.’
‘Did he hit you?’ he asked in a peculiarly clipped monotone.
‘Oh, no, nothing like that. He was very strong; he just held me down while he—he—’ She shuddered, her eyes hauntingly dark. ‘I—I was badly bruised, that’s all,’ she ended up lamely, cringing away from the memory of the clinical details. ‘And I was sick for a couple of days...’ To recover just in time for the fresh storm to break over her unsuspecting head.
Benedict was too acute an interpreter of the language to miss the glaring subtext. ‘He was your first, wasn’t he?’ he said ferociously. ‘Your first lover and the selfish bastard botched it!’
Vanessa was disturbed by his relentless intensity. ‘It happened years ago. It really has nothing to do with you—’
‘It does if you’re going to faint with fear every time you approach a climax in my arms.’
‘Benedict!’ She folded her arms protectively across her breasts as they surged back to aching life. Tiny cramps of treacherous pleasure ripped through her body, causing an immediate panic. ‘I can’t let it happen again,’ she said desperately. ‘I can’t afford to get involved with you—’
‘Why? I’m free, I won’t cost you anything.’
His attempted lightness caught her on the raw, lancing another festering boil. ‘That’s what he said, and in the end it cost me everything I had!’
‘What are you talking about?’
It was time he knew. Perhaps then this awful agony of indecision and apprehension would be over. He would reject her finally and completely before it was too late. He would fire her and she could crawl away with her pride in tatters but her fragile heart still intact.
‘I’m talking about why I left England when I did,’ she said in a hard voice that matched the shellac shine in her eyes.
‘I had to. You see it wasn’t just Julian I slept with. Oh, no. I had sex with his father, too, even though he was fat and ugly and old enough to be my grandfather. I didn’t care because I knew he was rich.’ The words began to pour from her in a brittle avalanche, gathering an icy momentum of their own. ‘I had it all perfectly planned, you see. I insinuated myself into Egon’s household and then I seduced him in the marital bed and persuaded him to kick his wife out into the street. I made sure he alienated the rest of his family and then I convinced him to write a new will that disinherited them all and left his entire fortune to me. Then he conveniently died of a heart-attack, probably because I injected an air bubble into his veins one night when we were having sex. Only the autopsy never proved it, so I got away scot-free.’
‘What in the hell are you talking about?’
Behind the mask of his bewildered shock she knew what was happening. His fastidious mind was already beginning to recoil from the muck-racking lies. Mud sticks. That was what the St Clairs had relied on when they had started their sordid rumour campaign—Julian included. He had robbed her almost simultaneously of her virginity and her virtue. By the time the furore had died down she had been a social and professional pariah, clean only in the eyes of her father and Judge Seaton, who had been a personal friend of Egon St Clair and knew the greed and viciousness of which Belinda St Clair and her offspring were capable. The judge had been as shocked and angry as Vanessa that Egon had chosen to make her an unwitting accomplice to his posthumous revenge on his estranged wife by naming her as his heir, thereby setting her up as the sole target of her furious malice. He had suggested that she sue the St Clairs for slander and the papers for libel, but Vanessa had just wanted to put the whole horrible nightmare behind her. She couldn’t face more prying publicity; the snickers and the pointing and the leering curiosity had sickened and sapped her spirit almost to the point of breaking.
‘Oh, don’t worry. I didn’t prosper from all my sordid crimes,’ she flung at Benedict in wretched defiance, hating him for sitting there so silent, so still, unquestioning, accepting. ‘The fortune turned out to be wildly inflated and I had to sign away my claim to avoid financial litigation. I’m surprised you don’t recall the juicy details; it made the tabloids all over the world. It was a story with everything—kinky sex, blackmail, fraud and murder. You should ask to see my scrapbook some time! Nothing ever came to court, of course, but that’s only because I was too clever for the cops—the police couldn’t dig up enough solid evidence to bring charges. But this is probably no surpirse to you, right?’ she goaded, at the end of her tether. ‘You always thought there was something suspicious about me and the judge. Maybe you were right. A woman with my back-ground—’
She broke off. His head was bent, his shoulders were shaking. He was erupting with rage, with outrage; he was going to slice her heart out of her chest with a few brutal words and sling her into an exile far worse than the oblivion she had already endured. But then he threw his head back and she saw that he was laughing—laughing...
For a moment she thought she was going to vomit with the pain. She leapt to her feet, black dots dancing nauseatingly in front of her stinging eyes. ‘Oh, so you think it’s funny, do you?’ she choked. ‘My life being ruined is just a big joke to you—’
She whirled to run but he was up, catching her by the elbow, still laughing. ‘No, Vanessa! Listen—’
‘Listen? You—’ She tried to hit him and he twisted her arm behind her back.
‘I wasn’t laughing—’
The blatant untruth made her twist violently. ‘Let me go, you filthy liar—’
‘Vanessa.’ He shook her panting form roughly. ‘You can’t fling things like that at me in a temper and expect me to take them seriously. Besides, if that farrago of ridiculous nonsense bears any relation to reality I’ll eat my hat. Of course I laughed. To anyone who knows you at all the idea of you being an evil, gold-digging vamp is totally risible. What you know about seduction can be written on the head of a pin! You have no idea what turns a man on. Now, why don’t you just calm down and tell me about your deep, dark, dreaded past properly, instead of waving it in front of my face like a red rag to a bull? You got exactly the reaction you damned well deserved...’
And so had he, thought Vanessa savagely a few fraught moments later, looking in her rear-view mirror to see the masculine figure standing in a cloud of sandy dust as she accelerated recklessly away from the beach. Was he shaking his fist at her? He was certainly furious, his last frustrated yell ringing in her ears.
‘You can’t run away from your emotions forever, Vanessa. I won’t let you use Whitefield as your private bolt-hole to avoid life’s nasty human complications—’
At least she had got the final word in. As she’d slammed the car door, almost catching his fingers in the process, she had yelled back, ‘Why not? You are! I never believed you decided to come down to Whitefield out of the blue just for an innocent holiday. You said you needed to get away and Auckland was too accessible. You’re running away from something, too, so don’t preach your self-serving sermons at me!’