The Passionate Sinner (20 page)

Merlin gazed at the ravaged bitterness of her husband’s face, and when he lifted on to his elbow and she saw the thick hair matted against his moist golden skin, she wanted to reach out to him, and yet dreaded to do so.

She flinched as his hand gripped her by the hair and the hate-tinged desire blazed in his eyes, setting them afire. ‘The most astounding surprise was finding you still a virgin. I fully expected you to have lied about that as you have lied about everything else, but on that score it came as quite a—jolt. So you teased men, did you, holding out for a ring on your hand? You have a ring, haven’t you, witch? A moonstone with all the fickle fire of your cruel little heart—God, I should put my hands around your throat and choke the breath out of you, here and now—but that would be cutting off my nose to match my useless eyes, would it not? Why do that when it gives me such a degree of pleasure to stroke your slim neck; to make a bit of heaven for myself out of the black hell you made for me. I hate the very thought of the person that you are, but with my hands and my body I crave every silken curve of you, every soft hair and beating vein—I want you, and while I go on wanting you, I shall keep you, but the moment you pall, my sweet, out you go with not a trinket or a stitch I ever put on your body.’

His eyes glittered down at her, like stones set on fire. ‘Do I make myself perfectly understood, you teasing bitch?’

Merlin shuddered at the word. ‘Paul, you must listen to me.’ She choked on the words, swallowed and tried again. ‘Please—it wasn’t the way you think.’

‘I know exactly how it was, so spare me your tear-jerking explanations. I was there, right there, when they got that muck out of my eyes and I couldn’t see any more! You damned hellcat, you didn’t just blind a man, you blinded someone who was able to be of some use to people who had suffered in fires and road accidents, or who, poor devils, were born with deformed features. Now what am I? A beachcomber on an island, and to live on an island is to be an exile. You will share that with me, every hour of every day and night. You’ll pay, my silk-skinned toy! With every nerve in this pretty body of yours, you’ll pay me back, if I kill you in the process!’

Merlin lay there and felt as if fingers of iron were digging into her throat and paralysing the muscles. Now she felt as she had done at the inquiry ... now she knew that it was happening again. He had her irrevocably mixed up with that other nurse, and there was no way she was going to make him reverse his opinion of her. What he had suffered had been too traumatic... he had to blame someone, and here she lay in his arms, utterly at his mercy ... and he was a man without mercy.

The hollows of Merlin’s cheeks held tiny shadows of grief ... for just a night she had paid a visit to heaven, and no matter what kind of torment he put her through, there would be no forgetting that during the night he had been carried away as much as she and there had been moments of such shattering tenderness that she couldn’t endure to recall them without giving a shaken sob.

‘Now you’re frightened, aren’t you?’ he taunted. ‘You know now that what was civilized in me has been cut away and all I need from a woman are the basic responses to my touch, and they had better be as warm as they were last night—my God, what a consummate little actress you are!’

‘I—I wasn’t acting,’ she protested. ‘I wouldn’t know how.’

‘Then all the better if I get under your skin,
meisje.
It will hurt all the more when I lash out at you, and it will gratify me that I have the power to hurt you. How the Inquisitors knew their business The gradual turning of the screw until the victim shrieked for death rather than suffer a moment more of the living agony.’

His words made Merlin wince, and as he rolled over on his back and rested his tousled head on his own pillows, she studied him and wondered how far beneath the surface of his trained and cultured mind lay instincts of a much darker nature. He had been taught by the Jesuits and they were men with beliefs rooted in the inquisitorial past. They believed that suffering saved the soul, and if Paul harboured that same belief, then he would make her suffer for being, as he firmly believed, his tormentress. The woman who like Delilah took his sight and then made him desire her until his hard body was alive with passion and the physical joy was running molten in his veins.

At that very moment when she had felt as if she reached the heights of heaven he had sprung upon her like a tiger ... her nerves gave a wild flutter as his hand lilted and he drew it across his eyes. He frowned, then said quietly, ‘I can feel the sun—the morning must be well advanced.’

‘The sun is shining right into the room, Paul.’ She leaned over and switched off the Han jade lamp on its base that was iridescent as honey.

He heard the click and his lips gave a sardonic twist. ‘Has the lamp been on all night?’ he asked.

‘Yes—I forgot to switch it off—last night.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t come as too much of a shock for you to see a naked man,’ he drawled.

‘You—you’re my husband.’ Colour stormed her cheeks; he made her feel guilty about using the word when she really had every right to use it.

‘Are you telling me I am the first man you ever saw—like that?’

‘Of course you are.’

‘There is no “of course” about it, my dear.’

‘Y-you know full well I was a—virgin.’

‘Ah, yes, a virgin, but there are ways of making love without a little schemer like you allowing the treasure trove to be plundered. I wonder how rich you imagine I am?’

‘I—I’ve never thought about your money!’

‘I’m not a rich man,
mijnvrouw,
but I am quite well off, as they say in England. I was left money by my grandfather; enough, my dear, but hardly a fortune. Are you very disappointed?’

‘I couldn’t care less if you haven’t a bean to your name,’ she said tensely.

‘Don’t tell me you married me for love?’ he mocked. ‘That would be too much to swallow—I’d choke on it! No, you came here to finish what you started, and all because I was the only man who didn’t turn his head each time you swished by in your uniform, which always seemed to fit a little closer to your shape than the uniforms of the other nurses. I had better things to do than to come hither at your beckoning, but these days, and nights, I no longer keep so busy. I now have all the time in the world to give you and you can bank on it, you little she-devil, that I shall not be stinting with my attentions. You really are a young Venus. In fact, my dear, you are sexquisite.’

Merlin flung a hand to her mouth and bit back a cry of protest ... she wanted to deny passionately that she was that petite creature with silky brown hair and matching eyes, who had seduced everyone into believing that she had played no part in the malicious injuring of Paul van Setan. But she had injured him, perhaps more than she had intended, and the incredible part was that Paul now believed she was here on the island, married to him, and in bed beside him!

It was wholly incredible, but it was true. Merlin had been but a shadow to him, and in his total blindness it would be impossible for him to imagine her as a reality. He had clad her in the shape of that other girl, and despite his denial that he had felt attracted to that shapely, seductive nurse, Merlin no longer believed in the truth of his denial.

Paul had noticed the girl but had been too involved in his work to do anything about it, added to which there had been his important position at the hospital which he would never have endangered by having an affair with a member of the staff. His sense of discipline would ha\e enabled him to ignore the girl, and unused to such cool treatment, she had retaliated in an unforgivably spiteful way.

Merlin lay there at his side, torn in two ... the desire he felt was aroused by her ... a desire she needed desperately to share and gratify, and which she might snuff like a candle flame if she tried to make him see that she wasn’t the girl he believed her to be. Despite all the cruel pain that girl meant something to him ... the cruellest thing of all was that Merlin meant absolutely nothing. She was a cipher who had to accept everything or nothing ... to let him call her every bitch in the book, or see him retreat as from a faceless shadow he had never noticed as he went about his work.

Merlin lay racked as if by an exquisite sort of torture dreamed up by the Inquisitors ... soul pain had nothing in common with bodily pain, which always seemed to pass. But this hurled her into the shadowy heart of love, where she groped for a way to be herself in Paul’s mind without being suddenly undesired as a woman.

‘How quiet you have gone.’ He flung out a hand and found her. ‘Do you know those lines of Kipling? “A fool
there was who made a prayer, To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair”?’

‘Yes, I’ve heard them,’ she said, her gaze upon his tanned hand against her creamy skin, the nerves tightening deep inside her as his fingertips moved caressingly across her body.

‘They seem appropriate until a man actually touches the object of his prayer. Who made woman, I wonder, God or the devil?’

‘Paul,’ She quivered and her fingernails dug into the bed. ‘Is there no way—no way at all we can forget the past?’

‘Forget?’ His hands gripped her, bruisingly. ‘I don’t want to forget. I want to remember every charming detail of our courtship, for I am a firm believer in the demon mythology. You are the most consummate she-devil who ever pretended to be an angel!’

His hand found her chin and he brought his face down to hers. When his lips touched her mouth her response was uncontrollable as flame and all that mattered was the immolation beyond thought and fear. He made her ache from the vigour of his arms, the fleecing of golden hair against her skin. She trembled, and heard him laugh softly. ‘You are a very shapely bone and a hank of hair, so there’s no need to shake in my arms. While I feel this cheap craving for your trumpery little body, then you are safe enough from any real harm.’

With these words he pushed her away from him and swung carelessly out of bed, the rays of sunlight full on his powerful, tawny body. He reached lazily for a
tanzan
of dark silk, the masculine house kimono, and Merlin felt her senses swim as she watched him put it on. She loved every inch of him with a melting, unashamed, yet hopeless love, and despite everything it was still a breathless miracle that she, whom men had never noticed, could arouse that hard body to a pitch of sensual excitement so intense that it felt as if they flew off the rim of the earth together.

She couldn’t throw it away ... deny herself what she had with him, even if it meant being despised by him. Curled into the embroidered sheets she watched him go into the bathroom that adjoined his room, walking in that deliberate way that could almost fool the stranger into thinking he could see where he was going. But all the furniture was arranged so he wouldn’t bump into it, and when the bathroom door had closed behind him, Merlin allowed herself to look around this room she wanted with all her heart and body to go on sharing with him.

She saw a suite of magnificent furniture carved from jungle timbers, with smooth tigerish markings in the wood and a look of iron firmness. The floor was of natural teakwood, rubbed but unpolished and without a rug to trip Paul’s unwary foot. The bed she lay in was kingly, with the leopards and serpents carved deep in the colossal posts that reared to the ceiling. And on the panelled wall facing the bed there was a painting on silk of an oriental warlord in armour, holding a fierce-looking sword in his hand.

The fierce eyes seemed to look directly at Merlin as she sat up in bed and curled her arms about her up-drawn legs. She brooded there for a few moments, the accusations and the caresses spilling hot and bitter-sweet through her mind. She loved and wanted so desperately to be loved in return ... how wonderful if she could see Paul come through that door with a long adoring smile on his face; a man who wanted her with his heart as much as he wanted her with his body.

A sigh slipped from her half-parted lips and she pushed the tousled silky hair back from her brow. She didn’t doubt that she looked as if she had been madly loved ... she gave a little shiver of delight as she remembered the way he had touched her and moved his lips over her skin, moulding her to him as if she were a woman he created for himself out of the darkness and made his own in a way that wasn’t possible when the night was over and daylight chilled the warmth into hatred again.

‘Paul. ..’ She breathed his name like a prayer. Was it possible to live with him under the terms he dictated, knowing he would get pleasure out of calling her a she-devil who had only one thing he wanted. When her body began to lose its charm for him, what then could she expect? Insult without the savage-tender night to heal the hurts? A broken neck ... or just being cast off the island like the cheap goods he had called her?

Could she endure the insults? Could she take the mud he would sling at her for the sake of that high tide of passion his hands and lips and hard body could sweep over her, until she gasped and tingled and clung to him in that swirling cascade of pure emotion?

It was so unutterably sweet and savage ... oh, worth anything!

He came back into the bedroom, his hair damp against his scalp, his golden torso in contrast to dark slub silk trousers. ‘I’ve ordered breakfast,’ he said. ‘Hot coffee, scrambled eggs beaten with butter, toast, and nectarines. Suit you?’

‘Lovely’ she breathed, and watched him go to the big dressing-table where he picked up a comb and attempted to tidy his hair.

‘M-may I do that?’ she asked. ‘I know your houseboy usually does it for you, but I suppose …’

‘You suppose correctly,’ he said, ‘with you like that in my bed.’ He came over, sat down beside her on the bed and handed her the comb. She knelt there like his longhaired slave and very carefully combed his shower-damp hair, loving the feel of it, heavy and smooth across his finely shaped head. ‘There, I think that’s how you like it. Are all Dutchmen as fair as you are,
mynheer?’

‘A good proportion of them.’ He seemed to stare at her with his zircon eyes, like grey crystal in his brown face. ‘You’re a complex bit of goods, aren’t you? Having you isn’t possessing you, is it? You elude my understanding— you put on such an act of being sweet and good. I could shake you until you rattle, do you know that?’