Vendetta (4 page)

He watched her with a thin smile, and suddenly she had had enough of his subtle tormenting. Any moment now she was going to lose her temper and give the game away. Thinking, In for a penny, in for a pound, she closed her eyes and recklessly quaffed the whole lot. It really was glorious, like drinking sunshine, she decided, drenched in a fizzy warmth that seemed to invade every body-cell.

She was still feeling dazzled inside when she reopened her eyes and found him regarding her with serious consternation.

‘You shouldn’t knock Dom Perignon back like water!’

Well, she had certainly succeeded in changing the subject! She gave him a smile that was almost as blinding as her hair. ‘I thought that was the way you were supposed to drink champagne. It gives such a delicious rush! I think I’ll have some more.’ She held out her glass.

His jaw tightened. ‘One glass is more than sufficient for someone who claims not to drink very much.’

‘But I like it. I want another one,’ she insisted imperiously. ‘A few minutes ago you were trying to ply me with wine, and now you’re sitting there like an outraged vicar. More champagne,
garçon!
’ she carolled, waving the glass
above her head, suddenly feeling marvellously irresponsible. She might as well get thoroughly drunk before she met her fate.

‘Vivian, put the glass down before you break it!’ he ordered sharply.

‘Only if you promise to fill it,’ she bargained, crinkling her eyes with delight at her own cunning.

He looked at her silently for a moment, during which her body began to take on a slow lean in the chair. ‘All right.’

She chuckled at him. ‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

‘Vivian—’

‘Stick a needle in your eye—!’ She broke off the childish chant, putting her free hand to her open mouth, her face blanching under the freckles. ‘Oh, God, Nicholas, I’m sorry.’

‘The glass, Vivian—’

She was too shocked at her thoughtlessness to register anything but her own remorse. ‘Oh, Nicholas, I didn’t mean it, I was just being silly. You mustn’t think I meant—’

‘I know what you didn’t mean, Vivian,’ he ground out, as she regarded him owlishly from behind her spectacles.

‘I would never tease you about your eye,’ she whispered wretchedly.

‘I know,’ he said grimly, lunging to his feet and reaching for her glass just as her limp fingers let it go. It slid past his hand and shattered on the stone-flagged floor into hundreds of glittering shards.

‘And now I’ve smashed your lovely crystal,’ she said
mournfully, her eyes brimming with more tears at the knowledge of the beauty she had carelessly destroyed. ‘You must let me buy you another one.’

‘By all means pay for the glass. You’ve smashed a hell of a lot worse in your time. Perhaps it’s time you were made to pay for that, too,’ he growled, and caught her just as she toppled off the chair, bumping her cheekbone on the edge of the table.

‘Oh!’ Her back was arched across his knee, her head drooping over his powerful arm, hands flopping uselessly to the floor. ‘You’ve gone all wavy and soft,’ she murmured dizzily.

‘Your glasses have fallen off.’ His voice came from such a long way away that she had to strain to hear it. Her thoughts seemed to flow stickily through her head, oozing aimlessly like melted honey and slurring off her tongue.

‘Why won’t my arms move? What’s happening to me?’

‘Perhaps you’re drunk.’

She felt a warm weight slide under her knees and then the whole world went around and she gave a little cry as she seemed to float up towards the heavy-beamed ceiling.

‘I don’t think so. I never get drunk.’ The rocking feeling didn’t make her feel sick as the boat had. She was being carried, she realised muzzily, struggling against the dragging desire to melt into the arms that held her against a hard chest.

‘What’s happening, where am I going?’ she slurred weakly.

‘Wherever I care to take you,’ came the terse reply. ‘Don’t you know what you’ve done, Vivian?’

She had used to know, but somehow the knowledge was now wispily elusive. ‘No, what have I done?’ she mumbled.

‘You’ve pricked yourself on a thorn, a very dangerous kind of thorn…’

‘Poison.’ The word floated up through her subconscious without fear. ‘Was it poisonous? Am I dying now…?’ It was much nicer than she expected, she decided woozily, aware of a strange, shining whiteness all around.

‘No, damn it, you’re just going to sleep. You’re only drugged, not poisoned.’

‘Must’ve been a rose-thorn, then,’ she said, having trouble getting her silly tongue around the words. There was a flat, echoing, metallic rhythm coming from somewhere close by, keeping time with the rhythmic rocking that was making her float higher and higher away from reality. Confusing images clouded in her wandering brain. ‘Was a rose, wasn’t it…tha’ caused all th’ tr’ble? In B-Beauty an’ the Beast…’

‘You’re getting your fairytales mixed up. Sleeping Beauty.’ The bitter steel of his voice cut into her fading consciousness. ‘I may be a beast but my name’s not Rose—it’s Thorne, Nicholas Thorne.’ His grip tightened and he shook her until her bewildered green eyes opened, staring fiercely down at her.

‘You do remember my name, don’t you, Vivian?’ he burst out harshly. ‘Even if you never saw my face. Nicholas Thorne. The man you almost destroyed ten years ago. The Olympic athlete whose future you smashed to bits with your car?’

She stirred weakly in his arms. ‘No…!’

‘The man whose wife and son died while you walked away with hardly a scratch,’ he went on relentlessly. ‘Do you believe in the Bible, Vivian? That justice is an eye for an eye…?’

She rejected the horror of what he was implying, the black eye-patch suddenly dominating her hazy vision. Perhaps he intended that it was the last thing she would ever see! Frantically she tried to bring her hands up to hide her face, to protect her eyes from his avowed revenge, but they, like the rest of her body, refused to respond to orders.

‘
No!
’ She was falling now, with nothing to save her. He had thrown her from the high place into a pit of horror. She was falling down, down, down and he was falling with her, his breath hot on her face, his unmasked hatred and the formidable weight of his hard body pressing her deep into the soft white oblivion that was waiting to receive them.

‘Ssh, I’ve got you.’

Her body twitched feebly. ‘
No
…’

‘Fight it all you like, Vivian, it’s too late,’ he murmured in her ear, with the cruel tenderness of a murderer for his victim. ‘All you’re doing is hastening the drug’s absorption into your system.’ His hand was heavy across her throat, his thumb pressing against the sluggish pulse under her jaw as his voice deepened and roughened ‘You may as well accept that for the next few hours I can do whatever the hell I like with this voluptuous young body and you won’t be able to lift a finger to stop me. Would Marvel want you back, I wonder, if he knew that someone else had grazed in these lush pastures?’

Strangely, the lurid threat with its menacingly sexual undertones didn’t terrify her as it should have. To be ravished by a man who could make her tingle all over with just a look didn’t seem such a bad thing. She was sorry she would miss it. She might even have said as much, for as her eyelids seeped closed for the last time she heard a soft, incredulous laugh.

Her last conscious awareness was of his mouth warm on hers, his tongue sliding intimately into her moist depths, a leisured tasting of her helplessness as large hands began smoothing off her clothes.

And the sound of someone wishing her sweet dreams.

W
HEN
Vivian opened her eyes she was still trapped in the fuzzy white wilderness.

She blinked, and discovered that she was lying in an incredibly soft, warm bed and the whiteness was the curving surface of a wall a few inches from her nose. She reached out to touch the rough plaster surface, using the contact with reality to push herself upright, meaning to peer out of the narrow window which broke the curve of the wall at the end of the bed. Instead she sank back on her heels with a smothered moan as her head swam horribly.

‘Poor Vivian. Head thumping like a drum?’

She opened herself mindlessly to the warm sympathy in the sugar-coated voice. ‘Umm…’ she groaned in inarticulate agreement.

The sugar melted to sickly syrup. ‘Hangovers are a bitch, aren’t they? I had no idea you were such a reckless drinker. I told you champagne shouldn’t be knocked back like water…’

Vivian swung around on her knees and froze, uttering a gasp of shock as she discovered why the bed was so blissfully warm.

‘
You!
’

‘Who did you expect? The faithful fiancé?’

Nicholas Thorne was sprawled beside her, his solid outline under the covers blocking the only escape-route from the narrow single bed. His tanned shoulders were dark against the stark white pillows and his chest above the folded sheet bare, apart from a thick dusting of gold-flecked body-hair that didn’t soften the impact of the powerful slabs of raw muscle. Even lounging indolently in bed he managed to exude an aura of barely leashed strength. His head was propped against the stout slats of the wooden bed-head and, with his tousled blond hair and scarred beauty, and a mockingly cynical smile on his lips, he looked to Vivian like the epitome of sin—a fallen angel begging for the redemption of a good woman…

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 cover
ings 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.