Fortune in the Stars (11 page)

'We haven't time to talk,' he snapped, practically hauling
her along to the car.

'Well, you'll just have to find some!' she exploded. 'Am I
right in believing we're not travelling on a ferryboat?'

'They don't run ferries from here,' he stated
dismissively, releasing her. 'And besides, I've a perfectly adequate
motor-launch of my own.'

'You've a… If you think I'm putting out to sea
with you, you can think again!' she shrieked.

'I don't think it, I know it,' he retorted, swinging his
leather duffle-bag over his shoulder and picking up one of her cases.
'Grab the other one, will you? We're in a hurry, and I need a hand free
to keep tabs on you,' he added, that free hand grasping her by the arm.

'I'm not going,' she stated mutinously, obstinately
standing her ground.

'Penny, I haven't time to argue with you—'

'You don't have to argue with me—I'm not going.
You've already told me how stupid you think I am, but you underestimate
me if you think I'm stupid enough to go to sea in a gale with a raving
lunatic like you!'

'For God's sake, this is no more than a bit of strong
wind!' he exclaimed. 'We've got a plane to catch, and you're coming
with me. You can stall for as long as you like, but I'll throw you over
my shoulder and carry you on to the boat if necessary…and
the more time we waste the less time we'll have to keep to the route
I've promised Don Jaime I'll stick to.'

Feeling trapped and nearer to breaking-point than she had
ever been, Penny opened her mouth to scream abuse at him, then shut it
defeatedly, her movements like those of a sleepwalker as she stooped
and picked up her case.

The motor-launch to which Dominic had almost dismissively
referred as 'perfectly adequate' turned out to be a gleaming blue and
white vessel which, to Penny's increasingly glazed gaze, looked as
though it would have been quite at home in a James Bond film. But by
the time he had removed all the tailor-made protective tarpaulins and
found oilskins for them both, Penny's gaze had taken on an even more
fixed look…she was certain she was already feeling seasick.

She tried lying down in the huge, luxuriously appointed
forward cabin, only to leap to her feet in terror as the motors hummed
to life. The nearest she had ever been to boats was a dinghy in
Brighton, and the sight of Dominic's tall, athletic and supremely
confident figure at the helm brought her no shred of comfort. Despite
the oilskins and the fact that he probably had the best technology
money could buy at his fingertips, to her increasingly jaundiced eyes
he now looked every inch the pirate plundering the high seas.

She turned away from the sight of him, the wind whipping
sharply against her face, now desperately uncertain as to whether her
queasiness was actually caused by incipient seasickness or the
inescapable realisation that if she were going to die—which
she was beginning to regard as almost a certainty—she would
rather do so with his arms locked firmly around her.

'Penny
don't you think you should remove that sweater?' demanded Dominic,
lowering the newspaper behind which he had been engrossed ever since
takeoff. 'You're going to feel the cold in London if you don't.'

Penny gave not the slightest acknowledgement of his words.
She was never going to feel warm again, so the temperature in London
was immaterial as far as she was concerned. And neither would her body
ever recover from the violent buffeting of that life-threatening
journey to Palma—never!

She turned her head to the window, peering out into the
chill blue as she tried to close her mind to the fact that he had just
tossed aside the paper and would no doubt start on her now that he had
caught up with world events.

'I hate to intrude on this self-imposed vow of silence of
yours,' he drawled in that familiar taunting tone of his, 'but there
are one or two things we need to discuss—such as whether
you've left your car at the airport.'

She wondered wearily how he would react to the knowledge
that she didn't possess a car—simply because she had never
been able to afford one. She was still wondering when suddenly her
entire body tensed. What was far more the point, neither had she
anywhere to live!

'Penny!' he growled warningly.

'No,' she muttered belatedly, her mind deciding it had had
enough of all this trauma and obligingly placing itself on hold,
allowing the exclamation of irritation which her reply had elicited
from him to wash over her without so much as a ripple of response.

'All right—where, exactly, do you live in
London, then?'

She almost responded to that with weak laughter, but the
effort would have been too much, so she merely gave a non-committal
shrug and pressed her forehead against the cool of the glass.

But her mind was dragged back with alacrity from its
pleasant limbo the instant impatient fingers sank into her hair and
forced her head round towards his.

'If you don't let go of me right now, I'll scream,' she
informed him, her tone perfectly calm.

Their eyes locked—hers reflecting the unnatural
calmness that had been in her words, his cool and inscrutable as his
hand remained defiantly in position.

'Go ahead and scream,' he taunted softly, his eyes
widening in momentary disbelief as her mouth opened to do so in that
instant before his own covered and crushed it to silence.

'We could well end up spending the entire flight like
this,' he eventually breathed against her lips. 'Or perhaps that's what
you want.'

'I hate you!' she choked, despising herself for the eager
excitement coursing through her.

His mouth returned to kissing hers, his lips coaxing yet
impatient as his hands slid under her sweatshirt beneath his own bulky
sweater to explore her trembling flesh.

'Try telling that to your body,' Dominic whispered barely
coherently as his hands rose higher and cupped the tightly straining
mounds of her breasts.

For several seconds Penny didn't even attempt to try,
weakly giving herself up to the sweet intoxication of his marauding
hands and the hot excitement his lips imparted to hers.

It was the intrusion of the soft voice over the intercom
that jerked her suddenly back to reality, and that distracted him long
enough for her to be able to pull free from him.

She looked at him in total panic as the erotic darkness in
those heavy-lidded eyes seemed to will her back into his arms and every
nerve in her body yearned to obey that call.

'I think I'm going to be sick!' she gasped, her starved
lungs straining in protest as she came out with the only thing she
could think of as a means of escape.

There was open alarm on his face as he quickly leapt up to
make way as she barged past him and raced to safety.

Locked in the small cabin, she frantically splashed water
against her now-burning cheeks as her lungs gasped great gulps of air
and her sense churned in chaos.

She sank to her knees, burying her face in her dripping
hands as she silently begged for freedom from the terrible nightmare in
which she was trapped. All she wanted was to return to normality, she
pleaded hopelessly. To what her life had been before Dominic Raphael
had blasted his uninvited way into it. And hers had been a perfectly
normal, run-of-the-mill life. It had had no more than its fair share of
problems…right up until the day Ted Russell had called her
into his office to tell her he had had an offer he couldn't afford to
refuse for his small graphic design company in which she had worked so
happily for the past three years. That part of the package entailed
shedding all but his most senior staff was something she couldn't
really blame Ted for, she thought miserably. But it had signalled the
beginning of the most horrific change in the entire structure of her
life. Close on its heels had come the truth about Rupert and Linda, and
her having to leave the flat…

She hauled herself upright, bitterly asking herself who
she thought she was fooling. The job, Rupert she could have coped
with… It was taking up Lexy's offer—a stupid thing
to do when she was homeless and jobless—that had ultimately
sealed her fate.

'Penny, what the devil are you doing?'

She started, a sick, hopeless dread filling her at the
angry roar of Dominic's voice and the impatient pummelling of his fist
against the door. 'I'll get a steward to open this bloody door
if—'

'For heaven's sake, I'll be out in a minute!' she yelled
back; there had been a total lack of anything even approaching sympathy
in his voice, she told herself angrily, then gave a soft groan of
exasperation and despair that such a thought should even occur to her,
let alone trouble her.

She dried her face and yanked open the door.

'Just leave me alone, will you?' she hissed as she was
obliged to force her way past his bulk in the doorway before she could
make for her seat.

'OK, whereabouts in London do you live?' he demanded as he
joined her—as though the intervening minutes hadn't existed.
'And you can skip the "I'm going to scream" routine,' he added, turning
to face her, 'because I don't fancy getting into a clinch with someone
who's just spent the past few minutes throwing up—'

'I
haven't
been throwing up!' she
objected indignantly before she could stop herself.

'I'm glad to hear it,' he drawled. 'But just let's say I
can think of other ways you'd find less enjoyable of shutting you up,
should you decide to—'

'I can think of none, short of breaking my neck,' she
blurted out—with infantile stupidity, she had to admit the
instant the words were out, given his calculatedly insulting habit of
pointing out to her just how much she enjoyed his touch.

'Penny, for the last time—whereabouts do you
live?' he demanded, his patience plainly about to desert him.

'Nowhere.'

'Look, if this is your idea of a joke—'

'I'm
not
joking,' she protested,
wondering how on earth she was going to get herself out of this one
without yet again being utterly humiliated. 'I have nowhere to live.'

For several seconds he glowered at her with open
disbelief, then his expression altered dramatically and a groaned oath
escaped him.

'Of course—you were living with loverboy,' he
drawled. 'The guy you love to the exclusion of all others, or so the
story goes. Damn it!'

Penny sank back against her seat, almost trembling with
the relief of having been let so unwittingly off the hook by his
assumption.

'Well, we'll just have to find ourselves an anonymous
hotel for the time being,' he muttered, as though thinking aloud.

'We'll
what
?' she demanded in
outrage. 'My God, you didn't actually think I'd be inviting you to stay
at my place if I had one?'

'No, I didn't
actually think
,' he
parodied coldly. 'I was planning on staying there anyway.'

'Tough luck,' she whispered fiercely, suppressing a
violent urge to hit out at him physically. 'I shall be staying with
friends, and—'

'Are you really as stupid as you appear?' he demanded,
genuine puzzlement for an instant warming the glacial blue of his eyes
before being frozen out. 'I want you where I can keep tabs on you until
I've found my sister. So you can forget about friends, because no one,
absolutely no one, is even to know you're back in London… Do
I make myself clear?'

Penny felt her body go completely limp—a feeling
caused no doubt by shock, she informed herself, but one she
nevertheless almost welcomed. On and off she had doubted his
sanity…and now she was convinced beyond all doubt. A man
capable of carrying on in the manner he was, and for so trivial a
reason, had to be completely out of his head.

'How dare you?' Penny exploded the instant the hotel
porter closed the door behind him.

'For God's sake, what are you whinging about now?'
demanded Dominic irritably.

'Mr and Mrs John Smith!' gibbered Penny. 'I don't think
I've ever been so humiliated in my entire life!'

And it hadn't been so much the off-hand insouciance with
which he had plucked such blatantly false names from the air when they
had registered, as the way his eyes had lingered in appreciative
invitation on the extremely attractive receptionist who had appeared
unable to take her own openly appreciative eyes off him.

'Just stick around and you will be,' he drawled, picking
up the telephone. 'But right now you can make yourself
scarce—I have some calls to make.'

'And how, precisely, am I supposed to do that?' she
rounded on him, her eyes pointedly flickering round the large double
room while studiously avoiding the twin beds dominating it.

'Have a bath, wash your hair. Do what the hell you like,
but don't hang around in here!'

Shaking from head to foot with rage, and discovering for
the first time in her life what it was to contemplate murder as an
attractive option, Penny stormed into the bathroom. When, seconds
later, she stormed back out again, he immediately cut off the call he
was in the process of making.

'What the hell do you think you're doing?' he demanded,
scowling across at her as she dragged a case on to one of the beds and
made to open it.

'I need my things—' Her words were cut off as he
leapt to his feet, lifted the case and hurled it into the bathroom.

'Right—you've got them,' he snarled, returning
once more to the telephone.

Penny slammed, then locked, the bathroom door behind her,
hot tears of rage burning down her cheeks as she leaned heavily against
it.

She had never in her entire life been treated like this,
she raged helplessly. And there was no way she intended staying here
with an out and out madman…his moods swung with such
unpredictable violence that she could well be in physical danger. Not
to mention the physical danger
he
could be in,
she told herself, scrubbing angrily at her wet cheeks as she turned on
the bath taps—his violence was proving alarmingly infectious,
judging by what she was beginning to feel sorely tempted to inflict on
him!