by Liz Fielding
‘It’s time for the last resort. Griff. I want you to set fire to the plane,’ she said, wanting to shock him, provoke some reaction other than a cool, teasing smile. He didn’t move. ‘I’ll pay you if that’s what it takes. How much is that old plane worth?’ Not by one twitch of a muscle did he betray that he had understood what she was demanding. ‘The smoke will be black, acrid.’ The words began to tumble out as he still made no response, but his eyes hardened. ‘Not like a bonfire. It would be seen from the other islands. It couldn’t be ignored.’
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘it certainly couldn’t be ignored. I’m sure we’d be descended upon by every environmental officer in the Grenadines and beyond, all demanding to know why we were polluting the atmosphere.’
‘It’s an emergency!’
‘Really? You’ve been delayed a few days and it’s a crisis? Everyone must jump to attention?’
‘I want to get away from you, Griff, and you needn’t pretend you’d be desolated to lose this particular Eve.’
‘Maybe I would. After all, you have a certain entertainment value.’
‘Entertainment value?’ She could hardly believe her ears. ‘I hardly dare ask.’
‘I particularly like the way you curl your tongue over your lip when you’re concentrating very hard.’
‘I don’t!’
‘You do, actually, and that little wriggle you give before you fling yourself into the sea.’ He moved his hand to demonstrate. ‘And those black stockings—’
‘All right,’ she said quickly. ‘You can set me up as a public amusement and charge admittance if you’ll just get me off this island!’
He shrugged. ‘It’s a lot to ask, Maddy.’
‘Well, if you’d made more of an effort—’ She stopped, began again a little more placatingly this time. ‘I know it’s probably your pride and joy, Griff, but—’
He lifted his head to look at her. ‘You haven’t much time for other people’s feelings, have you, Maddy?’
She stared at him. ‘And just what is that supposed to mean?’
‘What do you think all this has been about?’ She stared at him. ‘Cast your mind back a few days and put yourself in the shoes of Rupert Hartnoll.’
‘Rupert?’ she demanded. ‘What on earth has he got to do with you? Are you life-long buddies or something?’
‘I’ve never met the man.’
‘I congratulate you,’ she said.
‘You told me yourself that he asked you to marry him. You’re not suggesting you offered him no encouragement?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ Maddy replied, as angry with herself for her uncharitable remark as with Griff for provoking it. Rupert had been the most charming companion until he had suddenly decided that she would make him the perfect wife. ‘It’s none of your business.’
‘I made it my business. Tell me about real money, Maddy Rufus,’ he said, reminding her of what she’d said to the poor man. ‘What would it take to buy your heart? You have got one?’ He regarded her stonily. ‘Or is it just a cash register that rings when a man with sufficient cash bears his soul?’
Once. Once she had had a heart and for the briefest moment in Griff’s arms she’d begun to think that it might be resuscitated. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
His eyes gleamed coldly. ‘If you want me to set fire to my plane, I’m afraid you’re going to have to.’
‘Damn you, Griff. I’ll do it myself!’ She turned to walk away but his hand snapped around her ankle strapping, detaining her. ‘Let go of me,’ she gasped, unable to pull away.
‘I thought you’d need this.’ He was turning the lighter between the fingers of his other hand. Maddy made a wild grab for it and collapsed to the sand as her foot gave beneath her.
‘Give it to me,’ she demanded, but he held it away from her.
‘Not before you tell me all about your poor rejected lover.’
She was sprawled across him and his questing eyes were boring uncomfortably into her. She sat up quickly, putting a little space between them. ‘Why should I tell you anything?’ she asked, a little huskily. She wanted the lighter, but she didn’t see why she should indulge his curiosity.
‘Let’s say I’m a student of human nature,’ he said, ‘and I’m giving you the opportunity to tell me your side of the story.’
Why was he so insistent? Why on earth did he care about one rejected suitor, a man he had never even met? ‘Rupert Hartnoll isn’t poor and he was never my lover. Just obsessed... I didn’t realise quite how badly until he turned up in Mustique and persuaded my father to let him stay with us.’
‘Not poor? Not rich enough for you, though —’
‘Real money, for your information, Griff, is a family code, a joke between Dad and me. It’s the kind of money you earn yourself. Like my father, like me. Like... like you. Two pounds or two million pounds. The amount is immaterial.’
She saw him frown as he digested her words. ‘Surely it doesn’t matter—?’
‘Doesn’t it? Since Dad’s become successful we’ve met a lot of people with the unreal kind — people like Rupert. He has a whole bank full of the stuff, inherited from generations of Hartnolls who never dirtied their hands with the stuff but employed clever people to make more and more for them. People like my father. But he broke free, took unbelievable risks to be his own man.’ She surged on before he could interrupt. ‘Rupert is good-looking, charming and, despite anything unkind I’ve said, he can be great company when he isn’t imagining himself in love. But charm is not enough.’
‘Not even charm and money?’
‘A man has to have more than that, surely? If Rupert lost all he had tomorrow he wouldn’t know how to earn the money to buy himself a loaf of bread. He certainly wouldn’t be able to live off the land.’
‘I see.’ Did he? Had she betrayed herself? She glanced swiftly at him, wondering if he had caught her unintentional reference to his ability to live at ease with the world, but his eyes gave nothing away.
But Maddy had gone too far, exposed more of herself than she had ever intended and she felt the need to disguise her heart. ‘Of course,’ she said, with a little toss of her head, ‘his grandmother’s ghastly ruby and diamond cluster ring was the last straw. I mean, with my colouring...’
He caught a wayward strand and wrapped it around his fingers. ‘I can see that he should have made the effort to choose something more suitable,’ he said gravely. ‘Something rare, individual—’
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference,’ she said, regaining control of her hair and tucking it firmly behind her ears.
‘Because of the money?’
‘Because I didn’t love him.’ Silence greeted this reply. She had finally said something that didn’t provoke a sarcastic remark. ‘May I have the lighter, Griff?’ she asked, after an age.
He seemed to come from a long way off and snapped his hand shut over the lighter. ‘Some things in this world are beyond price. Rupert Hartnoll could not buy your love, Maddy,’ he said, ‘and not even real money can buy my plane.’ As if to emphasise this, he tucked the lighter back in the top of his briefs, tantalisingly within reach, but far too dangerously placed to risk.
‘I’ll see you get another one,’ she said urgently. ‘At least as good. Better.’
‘No, Maddy. That little aircraft is irreplaceable; it’s part of what makes me what I am.’
‘And what are you?’ She jumped to her feet. ‘You criticise me for being callous, but there’ll be people out there grieving for you too. Haven’t you got a thought in your head for them?’
‘A wailing and a gnashing of pretty white teeth all over the Caribbean?’ he offered, so perilously close to her own thoughts that she felt quite naked. He smiled as if he knew, and added, ‘Just think of the party when I return from the dead.’
‘Damn you!’ She stamped. It was a mistake and before she could recover he was up and beside her, his arm about her waist, and she was so close to him that she could fe
el the hard shape of the lighter pressed against her waist.
‘You once boasted that there was nothing wrong with your manners,’ he said, with a savage little smile. ‘My plane may not be for sale, but if you’d remembered to say please I might just have given it away.’ The sensuous curve of his mouth was inches from her own, his thigh hard and warm against her own, and despite everything a tremor of desire warned her that this was a trap. He touched her cheek, grazing it lightly with his knuckles. ‘Say please, Maddy, and you can take the lighter... if you dare.’
‘Go to hell!’ She stepped back, pushing him away with the flat of her palms, and he made no effort to hold her as she hobbled away.
That night she ignored the food he cooked for her. He could do what he wanted; she just wasn’t hungry. She crawled miserably into bed and contemplated another night, another day in a paradise that seemed tantalisingly within reach, a paradise to which she was unable to find the key.
* * *
She slept fitfully, dreaming uneasily of her mother — that calm, serene woman who had rejected her husband’s love because he had wanted excitement, risk. Maddy began to shout at her, tell her she was crazy, stupid, that nothing was perfect, that she must take what life offered. But her mother couldn’t hear and she was drifting further and further away.
‘No!’ Maddy cried. ‘No! Come back!’
‘Maddy!’ Griff was holding her, crushing her against his chest as she reached out for her mother. ‘It was just a dream, my love. Hush now.’ He captured her arms and turned her into him, rocking her gently, and gradually she stopped struggling, became aware of her surroundings, the large white bedroom. That he was holding her. That he had called her his love.
‘A dream?’ she murmured. What was dream and what was fact?
He brushed the hair back from her face. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
She shook her head, then realised what he meant. ‘It was my mother. I haven’t dreamed about her for a long time.’
‘You’ll see her soon.’
‘Will I? It doesn’t seem very likely.’
‘I promise.’ He regarded the tangled, damp ruin of her bed. ‘Come on. You can’t stay here. You can have my bed—’
‘No, I’ll be all right,’ she said quickly, pulling back.
‘Don’t argue.’
‘I can’t...’
‘I hadn’t planned to share it with you, Maddy.’
‘Why would you?’ She shook her head. ‘It’s just that I don’t want to go back to sleep. Dreams sometimes come back—’
‘Then we’ll go down to the beach and wait for the sunrise.’ He lifted her from the bed and, cradling her in his arms, carried her down the path to the white crescent of the beach, settling beside her, cradling her head against his shoulder.
‘Another day in paradise,’ she said with a sigh.
‘It could be.’
‘Not for me.’
‘Try a little harder,’ he said. ‘Listen.’
The sea lapped gently against the shore to the counterpoint of tree frogs chirping in the forest and the occasional disgruntled chuntering of a bird disturbed on its perch.
‘“A ship, an isle, a sickle moon —
With few but with how splendid stars
The mirrors of the sea are strewn
Between their silver bars!”’
Maddy turned to Griff, her cheek brushing against his shoulder as she looked up into his face. ‘That’s beautiful.’
In the moon’s deep shadows, he seemed to smile. ‘It’s a pity that the moon’s full. Perhaps I could tempt you back when it’s new.’
‘Tempt me? Don’t you know that if you wanted me, Griff, I’d never go away?’
‘Want you?’ He groaned softly. ‘Maddy, don’t you know how much I want you? Why else would I care what you are, what you do?’
It was enough. She laid a finger to his lips. ‘Don’t speak. Don’t say anything.’ When she was sure that he would obey, she took her hand away, replacing that light touch with her lips, kissing him, softly, gently as the sigh of the waves, and in that moment her body seemed as fragile as an eggshell — his to cradle gently in his hand, or to break.
‘Oh, Maddy,’ he breathed as her head fell back across his arm to expose her smooth white throat. ‘You idiot. You crazy, beautiful little idiot.’ Then he buried his face in her neck, his mouth firing a trail of kisses across that delicate arch, his tongue liquid fire as it traced the sensitive hollow of her collar-bone, and his hands slid beneath the baggy T-shirt she had worn for sleeping, to cradle her back, the pads of his fingers deliciously rough against her skin, sending tiny shivers of electricity charging through her veins.
Maddy reached out tentatively, to stroke her fingertips through the rough hair of his naked chest, to graze small male nipples that hardened to her wondering touch, and she felt almost giddy with the heady sense of power as he trembled beneath her hands.
‘Maddy!’ He gasped an urgent warning. ‘I’m not made of wood.’ As if to demonstrate his all too potent humanity, he lifted up the T-shirt, drawing it over her head, dropping it to the sand. Maddy, her arms upraised as if in supplication to the moon, its rays shimmering her body with silver, felt only gratitude for her release, the glorious sense of freedom. The gentlest of breezes rippled from the inlet, stirring her hair, cooling her fevered skin, and she couldn’t wait to be completely naked. She uncurled from the sand like a nymph, standing for one breathless second before Griff’s kneeling figure.
‘Help me, Griff,’ she said from somewhere deep in her throat, in a voice she barely recognised as her own.
‘Oh, dear God, Maddy,’ he groaned, laying his cheek against the soft curve of her belly, his hands cupping the flare of her hips. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing to me.’
She looked down and touched his face, traced the outline of his cheekbone, his jaw, the warm, soft curve of his lips that parted and caught her fingertips. In that moment when they were on the brink, when sanity was still — just — a possibility, she understood with an almost blinding clarity of vision that no matter what else she did with the rest of her life, this was one moment that she would never regret.
‘Show me.’ Her voice quickened. ‘Show me what I’m doing to you.’
Griff slipped his hands beneath the silk wisp of her panties and suddenly she was exultantly free, standing before him, ready for love as she had never been in her life. His lips touched the delicate white skin in the hollow of her hips and her whole body shivered with the shock of pleasure, her bones melting as his mouth, his tongue, his hands traversed her body, rising with almost agonising slowness across the plane of her stomach, exploring the indentation of her navel, the curve of her waist.
He rose to his feet to cradle the soft swell of her breasts, drawing each firm tip into his mouth to tease it with the tip of his tongue, his teeth, until she was moaning softly deep in her throat, her nails digging into his shoulders as she thought she might pass out from the exquisite, almost agonising pleasure. Then he raised his head.
‘Now it’s your turn, Maddy,’ he said, his voice scorching her skin.
Hardly knowing where to begin, she could only follow her instinct and the lead he had given, using her hands, her tongue to explore his body, wanting to give as much pleasure as he had given her, loving the little involuntary shivers and moans of delight at her touch. She slipped the button at his waist and, with fingers that trembled as the velvet hardness of his need for her became demandingly apparent,
She sank to her knees, her hands sliding from his waist to his taut buttocks and, as she took him into her mouth, she heard the dragon roar.
For a moment she surrendered herself to his pleasure and then, his fingers tangled in her hair, he raised her head so that she was looking at him.
‘Love me, Griff,’ she breathed and with only the warm night air to cover them and the waves lapping at their thighs, he carried her with him to some glorious height from which they finally plunged in a wild, re
ckless fall that echoed that dizzy leap from the lip of the waterfall.
She felt utterly, gloriously breathless. Then, laughing at the sheer, unexpected glory of it, Maddy looked up at him. ‘Would you like to go back and do that again?’ she asked.
He stared down into her face, a little crease of concern drawing his brows together. ‘Maddy...’
She raised her hand to touch the frown, smooth it away. ‘Don’t look so serious.’
‘It’s just that you took me by surprise. I didn’t expect... It’s been a while, since you’ve had a lover?’
She felt a little stab of pain. ‘Did I disappoint you?’
‘Don’t you know?’ he whispered.
‘I thought... it seemed...’ She tried to read his face, but it was all shadows. ‘I know that I’m not very good...’
‘Dear God, you don’t know,’ he murmured, and she felt foolish, unbearably young and inexperienced. “Right now I feel...’ Laughter bubbled from low in his throat. ‘I feel like the first man on earth.’ He kissed her with such painful tenderness that she could not doubt him, and finally, when the need for air drove them apart, her breath caught on a little sob of happiness and tears spilled down her cheeks.
‘Tell me, Maddy,’ he demanded fiercely. She shook her head, not wanting to destroy the perfection of the moment with dark thoughts of the past. ‘Tell me who hurt you that much.’ When she would have pulled away, he refused to let her go. ‘Don’t let it poison your life, Maddy. Talk about it.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ she mumbled into his chest. It was so long since she had allowed herself even to think about it.
‘Start with his name.’
His name. ‘Andrew.’ Her voice was so faint that she could scarcely hear it herself but she met Griff’s clear, penetrating eyes and drew strength from him. ‘His name was Andrew,’ she said, more bravely, and after that it seemed to pour out — the glamour of a man five years her senior, with a minor title, a job in the city, a sleek red sports car and a family estate in Gloucestershire. Every young girl’s dream.