by Susan Napier
FLIRTING WITH DANGER
The allure of a dangerous liaison fired Elizabeth Lamb's passions and nearly made her forget the real reason behind her visit to the South Pacific island. She thought only of J. J. Hawkwood. His dark sex appeal made her hunger for a taste of ecstasy, a touch of the forbidden. For under the eye of the hawk, nothing was safe—not Elizabeth's emotions, not her secrets, not her body....Testing the limits
CHAPTER ONE
BY THE TIME the jet had climbed to thirty-five thousand feet Elizabeth Lamb had resigned herself to the destruction of her secret fantasies. She would make a terrible spy. A life of glamorous intrigue and spine-tingling excitement was definitely not for her. Why, the plane hadn’t even levelled off yet and she was desperate for the drinks trolley to come around so that she might steady her shattered nerves with a savage slug of pure, potent alcohol.
Elizabeth forced her hands to relax in her lap and allowed her clever brain to attack the problem from another angle. She wasn’t incompetent—or insane. She was doing what had to be done. She had never dealt well with surprises and the one that had been sprung on her at the airport had been bound temporarily to unnerve her. In the circumstances she was handling herself rather well.
She grimaced. Perhaps that was a slight exaggeration. She had been trying to behave with the utmost discretion, to attract as little attention as possible to herself—a task that she usually accomplished effortlessly—and had bungled it badly. First there had been the altercation at the check-in desk when the harassed airline representative had tried to tell her that because she was a few minutes late checking in there was no longer a seat available for her. If she were travelling purely on her own behalf Elizabeth would have happily accepted the offer of a later flight, but as it was she had had no choice but to make a fuss until the airline had backed down. Unfortunately the fuss had generated a ripple of interest through the surrounding queues of semibored travellers including the small, disdainful queue of first-class passengers at the adjacent desk.
Then there had been the incident at the security checkpoint in the departure hall. Elizabeth had set the alarms screaming as she walked through the scanning arch. She had been made to walk through twice more, each time becoming more flustered, before the security officer had run his hand-scanner over her and asked politely if she was wearing any jewellery under her clothes.
Elizabeth had clapped a hand to her chest, her whole body going hot with guilt. 'Yes, but it's gold—a necklace—surely it wouldn’t set that thing off,' she said in her distinctively deep voice.
'It may have some other metal mixed in with it; may I see?' the officer asked in a bored tone that didn’t reassure Elizabeth's anxieties at all. He obviously didn’t think she was a criminal type, but his opinion might change when he saw what she was wearing!
She unbuttoned the neck of her blouse cautiously, conscious of the curious eyes around them, some sympathetic, most amused and one casual silver-grey glance she was most particularly anxious to avoid. She turned protectively away from the passing crowd as she opened the blouse to show the guard what she was wearing, feeling embarrassingly like a flasher as he looked into her parted clothing. His eyes flicked up to her flushed face and down again.
'Looks rather valuable.'
'It is,' Elizabeth admitted in an agony of apprehension. 'It's—sort of a family heirloom. That's why I'm wearing it. I didn’t like to put it in my luggage.'
To her eternal gratitude he didn’t ask whose family heirloom. The officer ran his scanner over her chest and it beeped obligingly. The metal it was detecting was probably the hard, cold lump of terror in her chest where her warm, pulsing heart used to be! 'You're probably wise, ma'am. Going on holiday or business?'
'Oh, holiday,' she said only semi-truthfully. 'To Nouméa—the Isle of Hawks, actually.' Her name-dropping would explain the necklace if the man knew anything about New Caledonia. The off-shore resort was renowned for the glamour of its nightclub and casino.
He turned and had a murmured word with his senior colleague who moved obligingly over and peered into Elizabeth's exposed cleavage, making her acutely aware of the fullness of her breasts. This man wasn’t in the least bored and the faint gleam in his eye told Elizabeth he knew exactly what was going through her mind to make her blush. Or thought he did. If he had known everything he would have arrested her on the spot!
'Would you mind taking off your sunglasses for a moment, ma'am?' the second man asked, and Elizabeth did so, reluctantly, hurriedly re-buttoning her blouse as one of the more curious spectators edged around to see what the men were finding so interesting.
The officer cleared his throat, staring into her guilty eyes.
Oh, God, he could read her like a book. He was trained to detect the give-away signs of incipient panic. He was going to make his move now. Drag her away in front of all these people for an interrogation and full body-search.
Instead he smiled at her, the gleam now full-blown admiration. 'Did anyone ever tell you that you have Elizabeth Taylor eyes?'
'I—er—yes, no—that's my name—Elizabeth, I mean,' she fumbled, aghast at this sudden personal interest. She knew her big violet eyes with their thick, dark brows were her most memorable feature—that was why she was trying to hide them.
Luckily some other innocent traveller triggered the security alarm and Elizabeth took advantage of the moment to walk away with her fragile calm still intact. Her spine prickled all the way from skull to coccyx as she did so, expecting any moment to feel the heavy hand of the law on her shoulder. It took all her concentration not to break into a frenzied dash as she approached the foreign exchange window and exchanged her few remaining New Zealand dollars for the Pacific French francs used in New Caledonia.
She then scuttled into the crowded departure lounge, sure that she was over the worst, only to stumble over a stray suitcase and knock a young child's paper cup of water flying. The little boy burst into tears and Elizabeth cringed as everyone stared at her, assessing her culpability as a bully. Her furtive effort to bribe the child back into smiles with the offer of a tiny, crumpled pack of sweets earned her a suspicious look and a tart refusal from his parent. Feeling like a convicted child-molester, she slunk into the nearest available seat and discovered the man with the silver-grey eyes sitting directly across from her, idly watching her flustered arrival.
Hastily she raised the magazine she had bought to read on the plane in front of her flushed face and took several deep breaths under the contemptuous gaze of a rail-thin model who looked as if she didn’t know what a blush was. Elizabeth had never wanted to be a model herself, but that wasn’t to say she wouldn’t have liked the option of being a great beauty. However, a lovely pair of eyes didn’t offset a regrettable lack of vertical inches and a superfluity of horizontal ones. Not that she felt physically insignificant. Quite the reverse. Up until she was thirteen she had always been the tallest girl in class and by the time her friends' growth spurts had overtaken her own it was too late, her mind-set was fixed. She had always thought of herself as tall, and tall was the way she acted—with a little help from the footwear industry. She was the tallest five-foot-six woman she knew.
The seatbelt sign pinged off now as the jet achieved its cruising height for the three-hour flight and Elizabeth unrolled her tortured magazine and opened it to take her mind off the laggardly drinks trolley. The self-same haughty model, now stretched invitingly out on some namelessly beautiful Caribbean beach, sneered up at her, and she sneered back. Soon Elizabeth, too, would be lolling without a care in the world on warm white sands lapped by a crystal lagoon, the wettest New Zealand winter on record a mere memory... providing she could take care of one or two little matters first! She m
ight not have a gorgeous, tanned, muscle-bound and no doubt muscle-brained beach-boy to loll about with like the model, but she had something much more satisfying, not to mention healthy—a pile of bestsellers that she had been dying to read for months.
Of course, if Marge had accompanied her on this holiday as had been planned, Elizabeth might have ended up with both, but part of her was secretly relieved that she could now be thoroughly selfish and unsociable if she chose. Marge found it difficult to believe that any woman could be satisfied without a man in her life, but Elizabeth knew better than to believe that there was a designated 'Mr Right' for every woman. There had always been a surfeit of men in her life. She didn’t regard them, as Marge did, as excitingly mysterious or challengingly elusive. She understood them all too well and found them comfortingly but sometimes tiresomely predictable. She enjoyed their company but never made the mistake of taking them seriously. Elizabeth's job as a researcher and assistant to a professor of literature at Auckland University meant that she was surrounded by intelligent young men and women, many of whom took themselves far too seriously and paid the price for it in unnecessary suffering, both physical and mental. But then anguish was supposed to be good for the soul. If so Elizabeth's soul was obviously as indolent as the rest of her.
'Double gin and tonic, please.' Elizabeth roused herself to give her order to the air hostess who had bent enquiringly over her seat.
'Miss Lamb?' Belatedly Elizabeth noticed the lack of a trolley. Instead the woman held a piece of paper headed with the airline's logo, her French accent somehow making her words sound more ominous. 'I wonder if you would mind coming forward with me?' Elizabeth froze. 'Er—'
'And could you bring your things? Do you have any hand luggage in the overhead carrier?'
Elizabeth shook her head blankly, indicating the handbag and camera case down by her feet, her heart racing all over again. 'Is something wrong? Am I in the wrong seat?'
'In a manner of speaking,' the hostess murmured blandly, with a soothing smile at the surrounding passengers. 'If you'll just follow me—don’t forget your jacket!'
Elizabeth turned and picked up the light, knitted-cotton jacket that she had shed on her seat, clutching her shoulder-bag and camera tightly to her chest as she followed the hostess up the aisle, conscious that she had somehow managed, yet again, to draw attention to herself. Was she being taken to see the pilot? Perhaps she was going to be handed a parachute and tossed off the plane! Or perhaps she was going to be clapped in irons for the duration of the flight.
'I didn’t want to say anything in front of the other passengers,' murmured the hostess as she paused by the small galley ahead of the compact business-class section, and Elizabeth's nerves shivered. 'Some people get very annoyed if there's any hint of inequity but...you've been upgraded to first class!'
With something of a dramatic flourish she drew back the curtain which divided the privileged from the plebeian and indicated the rear aisle seat. 'If you'd like to sit down I'll bring you a glass of champagne and the lunch menu.'
'But...I'm sure there must be some mistake,' quavered Elizabeth, aghast at this new development.
'No mistake.' The hostess looked surprised, as well she might. No one in her right mind would turn down the offer of a first-class ride at economy-class rates. Heads were already turning. Elizabeth realised that if she continued to protest she was going to make herself even more conspicuous than she had already. The woman glanced at the note in her hand. 'I believe you must have a friend in our public relations division,' she offered smilingly. 'That's where the suggestion came from to upgrade you if we had any available spare seats.'
Duncan Frazer! Elizabeth was hard put to it not to scream her frustration. Uncle Miles must have told his friend about her travel plans... his way of making up for the unfortunate position he had placed her in. Little did he know the even more unfortunate position he had placed her in now.
For, as Elizabeth reluctantly moved to take her place in unwonted luxury, there—sitting in the window seat studying his newly acquired travelling companion with speculative deliberation—was the very man whom she had been at such extreme pains to detect and avoid.
The man whom she was supposed to be surreptitiously following, spying on and secretly photographing.
The man she was supposed to expose as a lying, cheating adulterer.
Jean-Jules Hawkwood.
The man with pure silver eyes and a heart as black as sin.
CHAPTER TWO
HANDSOME as sin, too. That was a shock. It hadn’t been Elizabeth's first impression on seeing him at the airport, or even her second. He wasn’t particularly tall for a man, probably around five feet ten, and in the coat he had been wearing he had looked rather bulky. The pony-tail and the earring had been the crowning factors in her dismissal of him as vain and effete. But now he was stripped to jeans and a contoured pale blue shirt she could see that his bulk was all muscle and his hairstyle only served to emphasise the uncompromisingly harsh maleness of his body and face. The sleek blue-black hair drawn ruthlessly back into the small pony-tail at the nape of his neck revealed a face of almost sculpted starkness, all slashing bone and tautly stretched skin. His mouth was wide but his lips were narrow, their thinness adding to the impression of harshness, even cruelty. The earring was a thin gold circle in his right ear. If she hadn’t known that he was a wealthy businessman Elizabeth would have pegged him as a man who lived outside the law—lean and mean and definitely dangerous to know. Someone totally outside her limited experience. A pony-tail, for goodness' sake! Admittedly it was only a couple of inches long, which meant that his hair would barely cover his collar, but still, it was so…menacing! It made him look like a drug-dealer or gun-runner, the kind of man who enjoyed living on a perpetual knife-edge of legality... of risk. 'Miss Lamb?'
The dark-eyed air hostess was frowning in puzzlement as Elizabeth's hesitation stretched several seconds too long.
'Er—yes, thank you very much.' Her normally deep voice was even huskier than usual, prompting a flicker of curiosity in that lightning-silver gaze. Elizabeth sat down hastily, ignoring him with rigid deliberation as she fumbled blindly at her left hip for the seatbelt clip, unwilling to turn her head even a fraction of an inch to the side even when she began to doubt that her seat possessed a safety-belt. It was a shock when a warm, masculine hand suddenly tangled her searching fingers.
She gasped, jerking her hand back, resisting the natural compulsion to look at him, looking down instead at the blunt, scarred fingers which proffered the elusive device, her smooth, shoulder-length brown hair sliding forward to hide the flush in her cheeks.
'Thank you,' she muttered gracelessly, grabbing at it, careful not to touch him again.
'You're welcome.' His English was impeccable, as was the subtle sardonic emphasis that mocked her apparent rudeness.
Elizabeth fastened her seatbelt and sat, stiff-backed, her handbag and camera clutched in her lap. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that her quarry already had his glass of champagne. He lifted it out of range of her peripheral eyesight and she thought hopefully that maybe he was a lush and would drink enough on the voyage to forget having sat beside her. She also noted that there was no wedding band on his ring-finger. Typical. As a rich man he probably decked his wife in symbols of his possession but he didn’t want to advertise his own marital status—it would cramp his style!
Feeling uncomfortable with her thoughts, Elizabeth bent to put her handbag and camera case underneath her feet, inadvertently tangling the strap of the camera on the delicate heel of her shoe and somehow looping it around her ankle. Her narrow skirt made it difficult to shake the impediment loose even after she shed her shoe, and she had to struggle to free herself mostly by touch since the dark glasses rendered the dimness below seat level almost totally black. When she finally achieved success she bobbed up again with relief, her shoulder knocking the glass of champagne that the hostess was patiently waiting to serve her out
of her hand. The glass up-ended on to Elizabeth's breasts, the sparkling liquid instantly moulding her cream blouse semi-transparently against her skin.
'Oh, Miss Lamb, I'm awfully sorry,' the hostess cried in genuine dismay.
If Elizabeth had paid for first-class she might not have been so gracious, but in the circumstances she was anxious to smooth things over as quickly as possible.
'That's all right, it was completely my fault; please— don’t worry about it...'
She dabbed feebly at the wet fabric with the cocktail napkin which the hostess had handed her before quickly hurrying away to fetch something more substantial, cursing the love of extravagant underwear that had prompted her to wear a particularly daring lace bra in 'mood indigo' under the demure blouse. The only saving grace was that the material across her collarbone had only been slightly splashed, thereby still concealing the precious cargo encircling her neck.
A white handkerchief, exquisitely pressed and embroidered with the initials 'J.H.', appeared under her nose.
'Oh, no, it's all right, I can manage.' Elizabeth turned her head away from the offer, unwilling to be beholden, even in such a trifle, to one such as he.
'I assure you it is clean. Quite uncontaminated,' came the crisp rejoinder. His English was slightly less impeccable this time, barely containing his irritation.
'I wouldn’t want to dirty it—'
'Champagne is hardly likely to do that. Quite the reverse-some people even bath in the stuff, you know...'
Elizabeth suddenly had a startling vision of that lean, hard, amoral body lounging in a bath of the foaming, golden fluid... not alone, of course...
Appalled at her wayward imagination, she held on to her dogged resistance. 'I don’t think—'
'Obviously not. All the while you are arguing so pointlessly with me your garments are becoming saturated beyond saving. I would have thought that modesty alone would have overcome your scruples about my laundry'