Vendetta Read online

  It was a shockingly seductive thought and she wrenched her eyes away from their forbidden fascination with his body, all too aware that his expression of sleepy amusement was belied by the tension in the muscles of his arms innocently resting on top of the bedclothes, ready to thwart any foolish lunge to freedom across his body. Not that she was in any condition to make one. She could hardly think, over the riot in her head. She rubbed a hand across her aching eyes and gasped, suddenly realising what was so different about him. He wasn’t wearing his eye-patch.

  ‘You have two eyes!’ she blurted out.

  ‘Most people do,’ he said drily. ‘But, in my case, one is strictly non-functional.’ He angled his head so that she could see the immobility beneath the distorted left eyelid, the clouded iris.

  ‘H-how did it happen?’ she whispered shakily.

  ‘You have to ask?’

  She closed her own eyes briefly. ‘Yes, it seems I do. They told me at the time that your injuries weren’t serious—’

  ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  Her eyes flew open at his harsh scepticism. ‘I was only fifteen! Still a minor as far as the law was concerned—nobody told me very much of anything. The police dealt mostly through my parents—’ She broke off, realising the dangers of her impulsive self-defence. ‘But you can’t blame Mum and Dad for wanting to protect me,’ she protested quickly. ‘They were just doing what any parents would have done in the circumstances…’

  In fact, they had been so anxious that she should not be traumatised by the tragedy that they had shielded her from all publicity surrounding the accident, and most of her concrete information had come from that dreadful night at the hospital where, still in a state of shock, she had been gently questioned by a Police Youth Aid officer. She was told that the pregnant front-seat passenger of the other car, Mrs Barbara Thorne, had been thrown out and killed instantly when it rolled down a steep bank. The driver, Nicholas Thorne, had suffered concussion and leg injuries. His son, who had been belted into a back seat, had also miraculously escaped without life-threatening injury.

  The car-load of boisterous teenage party-goers, including fourteen-year-old Janna, that Vivian had been driving home along the gravelled country road had suffered only shock and bruises.

  To her relief he didn’t pursue the point. Instead he stroked a finger across his scarred lid and said simply, ‘Fragments of flying glass. This was slashed to ribbons, although fortunately my sight seemed to have suffered only temporary damage. But an infection set in a few months later. A microscopic sliver of glass had worked its way through to the back of the eye…’

  And here she was moaning in self-pity over a mere headache! ‘And…your leg?’

  ‘Not as bad as the limp might suggest. I can do pretty well everything on it that I used to.’

  ‘Except run.’

  Several days after the tragedy she had overheard part of a low-voiced conversation between her parents in which her father had said it had been a twin celebration for the Thornes that night—Nicholas’s twenty-fifth birthday and the announcement that his sprinting had earned him selection to the New Zealand Olympic team.

  ‘Oh, I can still run. Just not like a world-class sprinter,’ he said, in a voice as dry as dust.

  ‘I see…’ She might as well plough on and remind him of all the dreams that meeting her on a rainy road that night had crushed. ‘And…you never married again?’

  ‘No.’

  The clipped reply said more than all the rest. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, her voice crushed with guilt and compassion.

  His expression tightened dangerously, then relaxed as he studied her gravity, the sincerity of the pain-glazed green eyes and tragic freckled nose. His gaze flickered over her kneeling figure, and he smiled with sinister intent that curled her toes.

  ‘How sorry, I wonder?’

  ‘Wh-what do you mean?’ She put a hand up to her pounding head, overwhelmed by the impossibility of dealing with his unpredictability in her debilitated state. One moment he seemed charming, almost gentle, the next he was brimming with black-hearted villainy.

  Maybe she wasn’t even awake yet at all. Maybe this whole ghastly week was just one, ultra-long, insanely bad dream…

  ‘Having trouble concentrating, Vivian?’

  ‘My head…’ she muttered, hating herself for showing such weakness in front of him.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like some hair of the dog? Champagne seems to do wonders for your mood. Makes you very… co-operative.’

  Vivian stiffened. ‘It wasn’t the champagne, it was whatever vile stuff you put in it,’ she growled raggedly.

  ‘You mean the chloral hydrate?’ He met her accusing glare without a flicker of remorse. ‘I assure you, it’s a very respectable sedative—the drug of choice for a whole generation of spy novels. Hackneyed, perhaps, but very effective: tasteless, odourless, highly soluble and fast-acting. You might feel a little hung-over for a while, but there won’t be any lasting physical effects—at least, not from the drug…’

  She wasn’t up to interpreting any cryptic remarks. She was having enough trouble trying to establish the most obvious facts.

  ‘Where am I, anyway?’ she croaked, looking around the small, cheese-wedge-shaped room.

  ‘The lighthouse. I’m in the process of having it converted into living-space. In fact, you might say this is the penthouse suite.’

  Vivian winced as his words reverberated like a knell of doom inside her fragile skull. She lifted her other hand and massaged her painfully throbbing temples, desperately trying to remember how she had ended up in bed with her worst enemy—a man who ten years ago had accused her of murder and Janna of complicity, in words that had burned the paper on which they were written with their vitriolic spite.

  Her fingers pressed harder against the distracting pain as she asked the question that should have been the first thing out of her mouth.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘If you mean physically, rather than existentially, at the moment I’m just enjoying the view.’

  He wasn’t referring to the window behind her, Vivian realised, as his gaze slid several points south of her pale face, where it settled with a sultry satisfaction that made her belatedly aware of a growing coolness around her upper body.

  She looked down, and gave a mortified shriek as she saw that her chest was as bare as his—more so, since she didn’t have a furry pelt to cloak her firm breasts, thrust into lavish prominence by her unconsciously provocative pose. All she had to hide behind were her freckles, which were scant protection from his mocking appraisal. In the split second before Vivian whipped her arms down, she was shamefully aware of a tightening of her pointed nipples that had nothing to do with the invisible caress of chilled air.

  Flushed with humiliation, she snatched at the bedclothes, tugging the sheet up to her face as she cringed against the rough wall behind her. Outrage burned away her drug-induced lethargy as her blush mounted. All the time that they had been talking, Nicholas Thorne had known that Vivian was unaware of her semi-nudity. While she had been seriously struggling to communicate, he had been encouraging her to flaunt herself like a floozie, savouring the anticipation of her inevitable embarrassment!

  She skimmed an exploring hand down under the covers and found to her deep dismay that all she had on were her tiny bikini panties.

  ‘What happened to my clothes?’ she demanded furiously, sweeping a blurred look around the room. The bed, a small bedside cabinet and a strange, triangular clotheshorse in the centre of the room appeared to be the only furniture. No closet or clothes, masculine or feminine, appeared in evidence.

  ‘Don’t you remember taking them off?’ he asked, shifting to fold his arms casually behind his head, his leg brushing her knee under the covers and making her jump.

  ‘No, I do not!’ she gritted back fiercely. ‘I remember you taking them off.’

  Her fingers tightened their grip on the sheet, her eyes blazing green fury
above the white veil of cotton as it all came rushing back in vivid detail. He had been kissing her, gloating over her helplessness, and it was only because of his insidious drug that she hadn’t fought him tooth and claw!

  But she wasn’t helpless now, she thought grimly. He wanted a run for his money and that was what he was going to get!

  After all, that was the reason that she had knowingly walked right into the jaws of his meticulously baited trap.

  Her plan was beautifully simple: by presenting Nicholas Thorne with his prime target at point-blank range, she would draw his fire long enough to exhaust or at least appease the machiavellian lust for vengeance that was compelling him to treat anyone and anything that Vivian loved as a pawn to be used against her.

  ‘Did I?’ His surprise was patently mocking. ‘Goodness, how shocking of me. Are you sure it wasn’t just a wishful fantasy?’

  ‘The last person I would want to fantasise about is you!’ She whipped the sheet down to her chin, raking him with a look of furious contempt. She was prepared to take anything he dished out, as long as he left her family alone. The success of her whole mission hinged on his never finding out that she was a willing self-sacrifice.

  ‘You lured me here under false pretences. You drugged me and took off my clothes!’ she hissed at him goadingly.

  ‘Only the ones that were superfluous to requirements,’ he replied blandly.

  ‘What in the hell do you mean by that?’ She bristled like a spitting ginger kitten, all kinds of wild scenarios exploding through her scandalised imagination.

  ‘What do you think I mean?’ He stretched the arms behind his head languidly, expanding the impressive structure of his chest as he murmured tauntingly, ‘Are you wondering whether those sexy emerald-green panties are a tribute to my gentlemanly honour…or to my sexual ingenuity?’

  Since it happened to be exactly what she was thinking, Vivian reacted furiously. ‘In the circumstances, I hardly think the question of honour arises,’ she said scathingly.

  ‘You may be right,’ he stunned her by replying. He came up on one elbow and Vivian reflexively jerked the covers more securely around her.

  Unfortunately, her hasty movement tugged the coverings away from the other side of the bed, exposing Nicholas’s long, muscled left flank, lean hip and rippling abdomen. The skin was slightly darker on his half-raised leg and thick torso than on his hip, the naked swimsuit line jolting her with the knowledge that, while she might be semi-nude, he was totally naked!

  Thankfully his modesty was preserved by a vital fold of sheet, for Vivian’s wide-eyed attention lingered for a startled moment before being hurriedly transferred to his face.

  ‘Some parts of me are fortunately still extremely functional,’ he purred, his undamaged eye glinting with a predatory amusement. ‘Especially in the mornings…’

  ‘Mornings?’ Vivian’s hot face swivelled gratefully away from him towards the soft yellow-pink glow at the window. ‘But…it’s sunset,’ she protested in weak confusion. ‘It’s just getting dark…’

  ‘Actually, it’s getting light,’ he corrected. ‘That window faces east, not west.’

  Vivian sucked in a sharp breath as the full implication of what he was saying hit her. She hadn’t just lost a mere hour or two. She had already spent half a day and a whole night entirely at his mercy!

  ‘Quite so,’ he said softly. ‘This is the morning after, Vivian. Which, given the fact that we’re in bed together, naturally poses the deeply intriguing question: the morning after what?’

  Vivian stared at the thin, sardonic curl of his mouth that hinted at depths of degradation she hadn’t even considered.

  ‘Oh, my God, what have you done?’ she whispered fearfully, her body shivering with the disgraceful echo of a half-remembered thrill.

  ‘More to the point, what haven’t I done?’ he murmured wickedly, pivoting on his elbow in a fluid flow of muscle to retrieve something from the bedside cabinet behind him.

  He offered it to her and, when she refused to let go of her flimsy shield of bedclothes, let a cascade of coloured rectangles spill on to the rumpled fabric between them. Her back glued protectively against the wall, Vivian frowned stiffly down, afraid to move, and frustrated that the surface of the bed was just beyond the range of her near-sighted focus.

  ‘Here, perhaps these will help.’ He sat up in a flurry of bedclothes, ignoring her automatic cringe as, moments later, he pushed her spectacles on to her wrinkled nose. ‘Better?’

  It was a hundred times worse! Vivian stared, appalled, at the photographs scattered like indecent confetti over the bed.

  ‘Oh, my God…!’

  ‘It’s a little too late for prayers, Vivian. Your sins have already found you out. Quite graphically, too, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘How…? I… You—’

  He interrupted her incoherent stammering smoothly. ‘I would have thought that the how was self-evident. There’s this clever modern invention called photography, you see…’

  The sarcastic flourish of his hand made Vivian utter a soundless moan as she saw that what she had myopically mistaken for a clothes-horse was in fact a tripod, topped with a fearfully sophisticated-looking camera, its lens pointing malevolently at the bed.

  ‘And as for the I and you, well—we appear to be pretty brazenly self-evident, too, don’t we? Here, for instance…’

  Vivian’s hypnotised gaze followed his pointing finger. ‘See the way you’re arched across the bed under me, your arms thrown over your head in abandoned pleasure…’

  Vivian clamped the blankets rigidly under her arms, freeing her trembling hands to try frantically to push his away as he sorted through the collection and selected another.

  ‘But this one is my own personal favourite, I think. So artistic…so erotic…so expressive. Don’t you agree that we make a sensuous contrast of textures and patterns? With your ginger-dappled skin and my deep tan, and the way our bodies seem to flow over and around each other…’

  Vivian tuned out his honeyed taunts, transfixed by the searing image suspended from his fingers.

  She had seen raunchy advertisements for perfume in glossy women’s magazines that were more physically revealing, but it was impossible to be objective now. The couple in this photograph weren’t anonymous models posing for public display. That was her caught in an attitude of utter abandon, that was his nude body aggressively crushing her to the bed. She went hot and cold at the idea that he had somehow tapped into her forbidden desires.

  Even as a tiny, clinical voice of reason was pointing out that the alignment of Nicholas’s fingers on her hip conveniently covered the precise area where the thin strip of her bikini panties would be, Vivian was shattered by a sickening sense of betrayal. The pictures lied; they depicted an act of violation, not of love!

  She tried to grab the photograph out of his hand and, when he laughed jeeringly and held it out of her reach, she fell desperately on the others, tearing them into meticulously tiny pieces, all the while trying to protect her threadbare modesty with the slipping covers.

  He laughed again, making no attempt to stop her wild orgy of destruction beyond retaining safe possession of his avowed favourite. ‘There are plenty more where those came from, Vivian. It was a very long, exhausting night…’

  ‘I was unconscious,’ she panted, rejecting his sly insinuation. ‘Nothing happened—’ She stopped, stricken. ‘My God, you were going to do this to Janna?’

  ‘Actually, the original plan was for someone else to play your sister’s partner in sin,’ he drawled. ‘And when they supposedly disappeared together, with the payment for the land, I would send you photos of the lovers and evidence that they had planned the fraud together. You were supposed to come dashing to her defence on the eve of your own wedding, sadly too late to rescue the contract that your company was depending on, but in plenty of time to negotiate the salvage of Janna’s personal and professional reputation—at the price of your own, of course…

  �
�Your arriving in Janna’s place sabotaged the exquisite complexity of the plan, but I’m nothing if not flexible. As soon as I saw you, I knew I wanted the privilege of handling you to be purely mine…’

  She had already guessed much of it, but the callous detachment with which he outlined the bare bones of the plot was chilling.

  She gasped, as an even more horrible thought smacked her in the face. ‘Who took the photos? Who else was in here, watching us—?’ She broke off, shuddering with humiliation at the thought that Frank had been a flint-eyed witness to her degradation…

  ‘I can promise you, Vivian, you weren’t seen or touched by anyone but me.’ He took a small black wafer of plastic from the table by the bed and pointed it towards the tripod, pressing a button so that she could hear the electronic whirr as the flash momentarily dazzled her eyes. ‘Remote control. It’s a state-of-the-art instant camera—the photos only take a few minutes to develop.’

  He rolled off the bed and Vivian uttered a choking cry, closing her eyes a fraction of a second too late to deny herself a glimpse of taut male buttocks and hard, hair-roughened flanks.

  ‘Prude.’ His mockery singed her burning ears. ‘Here.’

  She peeped warily through her lashes and relaxed a trifle when she saw that he had pulled on his jeans. He was holding out the thin red sweater he had worn the previous day.

  He shook it impatiently at her immobility. ‘Come on.’ He threw it on the bed. ‘Put that on.’

  ‘I want my clothes,’ she said stubbornly, as she watched him apply his eye-patch, raking his thick, blond-streaked hair over the thin band of elastic that held it in place.

  ‘Then want must be your master.’ He put his hands on his hips, legs aggressively astride, a bare-chested pirate. ‘Or rather, I shall—and as your master I’m quite happy for you to remain without clothes indefinitely. In fact, yes, I rather like the idea of keeping you here naked…’ He invited her to consider the notion in a dark, seductive voice, watching her defiance waver. ‘Nude, you’d be so deliciously vulnerable, so much easier for me to control…’