by Susan Napier
'You can’t force me to stay,' she said, striving to sound certain.
He looked down at the photograph in his hand, his thick lashes screening his thoughts. 'Can’t I?'
The simple question was enough to make her panic. ‘I'll complain-'
'Who to? The manager?' He dragged his thumb over the photograph, and she felt the shiver from her heels to the nape of her neck, as if he had actually physically reached out and stroked her. He looked up, capturing her in the midst of her unwilling fascination with his caress of the glossy paper. 'Or the police?' he murmured softly. 'Yes, I'm sure you'd rather tell all to the local police, wouldn’t you, chêrie?’
It was Elizabeth's turn to look down, thinking frantically. He probably had the local police in his pocket. After she had seen Alain St Clair she didn’t care what happened to her, but until then she would just have to try and outface him.
'That won’t be necessary,' she told him.
'Why not?'
How he loved the word why.
'Because I've decided to take you up on your generous offer.' 'Which one?'
The expectant glint in his eye warned her not to overreact. 'To let me stay here while my bungalow is being repaired.'
‘I knew you'd see it my way.' If this hawk had had feathers he would have preened smugly. 'Now, let me show you where everything is.'
‘I'll find out for myself, thank you.' Pointedly Elizabeth walked over to the connecting door and waited for him to leave. 'Does this have a key?'
He looked regretful as he delighted in telling her, 'Unfortunately no. Do you sleep-walk?'
'Fortunately no. However, I do know judo,' she lied.
‘I’m surprised you didn’t try it out on me yesterday,' he said drily, walking slowly over to her.
‘I didn’t want to hurt you.'
'But you did anyway, judo or not.'
Her eyes fell automatically to his leg, a twinge of remembered shame leading her to ask, ‘Is it still hurting you?'
'You made me a little stiff for a while, but it passed.'
Elizabeth's eyes jerked up to his face as she blushed uncontrollably, furious with herself when his eyes registered puzzlement for a moment before they caught fire with laughter.
‘I didn’t mean that as a double entendre, Beth, although honesty forces me to admit it may have been a Freudian slip.' His teasing slipped between the cracks in her composure. ‘I thought that of the two of us I was supposed to be the lascivious rake, but you, ma belle, make me feel like an innocent, fumbling boy!'
Elizabeth made sure that the door slammed with satisfying force. Ma belle indeed! He needn’t think flattering her with false compliments was going to blind her to the fact that he was virtually holding her prisoner. Not that she wanted to escape just yet!
And as for fumbling boy...there had been nothing fumbling about his kiss yesterday, or the way he had touched her. He had seemed like a man very experienced in handling a woman's body. Perhaps he had been referring to her wanton over-reaction to him. Perhaps he was the one who needed the key to protect himself from unwanted advances!
Perhaps... Elizabeth was beginning to hate the word as much as Jack did!
The first thing that she did, after she had spent an age in the deliciously hot shower washing the man and the problems he created out of her hair, was to call Uncle Simon—having reversed the charges—and explain succinctly that J.J. Hawkwood had changed his plans and Serena Corvell had flown the coop. There was no point in worrying him with the truth of her crass ineptitude in getting caught, she told herself defensively.
Once he knew that he was the one paying for the call, Uncle Simon was correspondingly succinct in his disappointment.
'Oh, well, them's the breaks,' he said philosophically. 'Better luck next time.'
'Next time?' Elizabeth was appalled at the thought.
'We'll get another shot at him.'
‘I hope that's the royal "we",' said Elizabeth sourly.
'Now, darlin', don’t let one failure get you down. You did good.' Little did he know. 'Just relax and enjoy the rest of your stay.'
Fat chance of that! she thought acidly, when Uncle Simon went on to spoil his selfless advice by adding, 'But keep your ears tuned in case you pick up anything useful. If you get a chance, cultivate the brother and see how much he knows-'
‘I’m not Mata Hari, Simon!' snapped Elizabeth. She'd rather cultivate a rattlesnake!
'What?'
To her chagrin she realised she'd said it aloud and she rang off hurriedly, before his detective instincts were fully alerted.
She dried her hair and made her second call, to the St Clair estate, which turned out to be as fruitless as all her others had been. With a sigh she unfolded the map of the island that she had obtained from the tours and charters desk in the hotel foyer. It didn’t have the estate marked on it—another concession to the old man's obsession for privacy, she guessed—but a few casual enquiries among the staff had already elicited the information she needed and she had drawn several extra pencil lines on her map. The general area to the northwest of the island which she had been told to avoid was her ultimate goal.
She didn’t bother to unpack her suitcase. She didn’t think it was worth it for the time she was going to be spending here as a reluctant guest.
Wearing a breezy pink blouse, knee-length khaki shorts and sports shoes suitable for a vigorous walk, and having optimistically retrieved the necklace from the hotel bank, Elizabeth set out on her mission.
At first she followed the single, unsealed road that wound around the island's shoreline, little used by traffic since the only vehicles on the island seemed to be the electric buggies used by the hotel to transport guests to the various treks and water activities on the further beaches. She passed several other walkers and a few joggers taking advantage of the morning coolness to ply their virtuous fitness routines.
When she had gone, by her rough calculation from the sketchy map, about two kilometres north, she halted. Sure enough there was a small track plunging off the road towards the interior of the island marked only 'To Summit'. It led, so the hotel tourist guide had told her, to a look-out on the eastern slopes of the low volcanic ridge that divided the island. However, it wasn’t the view that Elizabeth was after. A quick glance over her shoulder reassured her that there was only one person in sight, quite a long way behind her, a jogger who appeared to be struggling to maintain a laggardly pace.
Hitching her soft-sided beach bag more securely over her shoulder, Elizabeth stepped on to the track, breathing more easily as she moved out of sight of the road. She walked briskly, suddenly feeling energetic and adventurous.
The track rose quite steeply for the first twenty minutes and Elizabeth was breathing hard by the time she came to the expected fork. She ignored the 'Summit' sign and took the smaller, unmarked, almost overgrown path to the right.
It was slow going. After another twenty minutes of ducking and shoving at stray branches and several times veering off the crushed-shell pathway by mistake, Elizabeth was beginning to worry. She stopped and twisted the top of the bottle of Perrier water that she had tucked in her bag. The water was only slightly chilled, but it fizzled and stung refreshingly on her tongue. She was sweating freely and she took off the pink scarf that she had used as a belt for her shorts and tied it around her head to keep the moisture from running down into her eyes. For a moment she just stood and enjoyed the quiet. She couldn’t even hear any birds, only the soft sigh of the breeze in the upper leaves of the trees that towered above the thick shrubs lining the path, the wild sub-tropical lushness which sprang from the volcanic soil a contrast to the carefully landscaped growth on the sandy flatlands below.
She was replacing the half-empty bottle in her bag when she heard a soft rustle of bushes on the path behind her and whirled around, her heart hammering. She knew there were no large animals on the island, let alone predatory ones, but still she was frightened.
He e
merged from the overgrowth at a run, almost knocking down the unexpected stationary object in his path.
It was the jogger from the roadway and he came to an abrupt halt as Elizabeth staggered backwards against the press of leaves.
She felt like screaming when she saw who it was.
'Lost again, Beth?' In running-shorts and a singlet, his taut muscles oiled with sweat, and breathing only slightly hard, Jack Hawkwood made her feel soft and weak. In spite of the laggardly gait that had earlier deceived her he was evidently in the peak of condition, his injured leg notwithstanding.
The lie stuck in her throat. 'Uh-'
'Because if you want the look-out you're on the wrong track. The path to the summit is quite a way back. Well marked, too, I would have thought.'
'Oh.' It was her unaccustomed exertion and the elevation that was making her breathless, Elizabeth decided, not his unexpected presence. 'Then where are you going?' Her mind seethed with suspicion.
'Jogging the same route all the time can get boring,' he said smoothly.
He hadn’t really answered her question, Elizabeth realised, and yet he had.
'Are you following me?' she demanded bluntly.
'Now, why would I want to do that?' he countered mildly, but there was an amused gleam in his eye that parodied his surprise.
'To annoy me,' she said furiously.
'Do I annoy you?'
'Will you stop answering a question with a question?' she seethed.
'Sorry. Old habit. Interrogation technique.'
‘Interrogation?' The very word sent shivers down Elizabeth's spine.
'Mmm. For a while I was part of an army intelligence unit.'
'A spy?' Another shiver.
His half-smile acknowledged her unease. 'Spies don’t wear uniforms. I was a career officer in the French military from the time I left school.'
Elizabeth was diverted. 'What happened—did you get invalided out?' She found it hard to believe, considering the feat of endurance he had just demonstrated, chasing her up a hillside.
'No, I just realised I would prefer to be at the top of a chain of command rather than somewhere in the middle, answerable to people I neither liked nor particularly respected. But the longer you stay in the army and the further you move up in military rank, the greater your chance of being "promoted" out of active service into a desk job. I hate sitting at a desk—that's why I didn’t go on to university as my family expected. So I resigned my commission to go into business for myself.'
'Managing one of your brother's hotels?' She would hardly have called that being top of a chain of command.
His smile became a grin. 'No. As a security consultant, offering anti-terrorist protection to companies and businessmen dealing with the hot-beds of the Middle East.'
He paused, studying her struggle to look uninterested when in reality curiosity was eating her up.
'That's how I got this,' he added tantalisingly, tapping his scarred thigh. 'An...unforeseen complication during a job in Lebanon.' He paused again, waiting for her response to the enticing lure.
'Unforeseen complication.' Elizabeth repeated his words slowly, unwilling to make it a question. Little did she realise that her violet eyes were brilliant with the interest she stubbornly tried to deny him.
'A woman who turned out to be not what she seemed.'
Elizabeth's resistance crumpled like cardboard. 'And what did she seem to be?'
His mouth thinned to a cynical line. 'A woman in love.'
'With you?' So his scarring had been not only physical.
'Do I seem so unlovable?'
'No—I- No!' She was flustered by the sensual undertone in his question. 'And were you in love with her?'
'At the time very much so.' There was no longer a hint of amusement about him, and Elizabeth found a grave, serious Jack Hawkwood even more threatening to her emotional equilibrium than the cynical rake who had menaced and aroused her. 'Or, at least, in love with the woman I thought she was. Zenobia was supposedly working for an international finance group I was liaising with, but she was also an informant for one of the terrorist organisations—some obscure splinter group that was looking to make the headlines. Only I didn’t find that out until afterwards—a great intelligence officer I turned out to be!' His self-derision was bleak. 'The information that she passed on enabled them to ambush my car with a rocket attack that killed two of my clients and almost killed me.'
' W-what happened to her?' The grimness in his voice warned her that the woman had not gone unpunished for her betrayal.
'Oh, Zenobia was only a small cog in a fanatical machine and therefore expendable. She was in the car at the time.'
Elizabeth sucked in a breath. 'She was killed?'
‘Instantly.' The word was clipped, precise.
‘I’m sorry,' she said helplessly.
'For what? My being a gullible fool? For not doing my job properly?'
'You didn’t cause their deaths-'
‘Indirectly I was responsible. I didn’t actually hand-feed Zenobia the information-' He looked at her as he clarified with deliberate bluntness, ‘I never was one to indulge in pillow talk and ironically I thought Zenobia would be safer in total ignorance of my activities. But evidently she picked up enough to make it worth her while to stay with me. I thought myself in love and lost my edge, not to mention my reputation. Security consultants who lose their clients literally also lose their professional credibility.'
'So...you went into the family hotel business instead.' Had he come to Ile des Faucons to lick his wounds, to hide from what he felt was a humiliating failure? And when he fully recovered would he be back out there again, risking his life in a private war against terrorism? 'How long has it been?' she asked.
She was expecting him to say a year or even less, so she was shocked when he murmured, 'Five years.'
'Five years?’
He read her effortlessly. 'Did you think this was just a panacea for my ills?' His eyes silvered with lazy amusement. ‘I’m doing exactly what I want to do, Beth. I never coveted my brother's inheritance as eldest son, but this place is rather special... we spent most of our childhood here. As far as I'm concerned I've come home. I also discovered, rather to my surprise, that I happen to be damned good at running a hotel... at the hands-on stuff as opposed to the boring business end that's Jules's forte. Here I'm in command of myself and Ile des Faucons is my sole domain—I virtually have carte blanche with the place—Jules's way, I suspect, of consoling me for only being second son...'
'And you don’t pine at all for your old life?' Elizabeth asked curiously. Uncle Simon had told her about some of the thrill-junkies he had known from his time in the army—the men who required the constant adrenalin-rush of dicing with death to give them their 'high'. The kind of men who became mercenaries in times of peace in order to satisfy their craving for action. Jack had been a kind of mercenary.
He shrugged. ‘I’m a realist. I'm no longer young. I'm fit, but this leg will never be one hundred per cent reliable in the way that it needs to be for the kind of fieldwork I specialised in—which would have meant me doing the kind of desk job I'd left the army to avoid. So I turned the operation over to my partner and came here to convalesce and re-think my life. When I found myself making excuses not to leave I knew I'd found my new niche. These days if I want thrills I can get all I need in the casino, where the only thing I risk losing is money.'
Of which he obviously had plenty. But still Elizabeth didn’t believe that he was as settled as he claimed. As much as he denied it his restless edge was still there, and he was subconsciously looking for something to hone it against. That something right now being Elizabeth. It seemed a very unequal challenge!
‘Intelligence training is invaluable in running a hotel,' he continued musingly. ‘I can generally spot the troublemakers before they cause trouble and I'll never again make the elementary mistake of being too trusting, no matter how innocent the face...'
&
nbsp; So absorbed was Elizabeth in adjusting to what he had just revealed about himself that she didn’t notice the words were aimed very specifically at her. 'We all need to trust in something and someone, Jack, it's human nature,' she murmured. 'One betrayal doesn’t make the whole world untrustworthy.'
'Are you saying that I can trust you, Beth?'
She blinked at the unexpected question and then looked hurriedly away from the piercing grey eyes, flushing uncomfortably.
He folded his arms across his chest. ‘I thought not.'
Although his expression was sardonic his words were spoken with a wry amusement that increased as he regarded her unease.
‘In that case, Beth, in view of our mutual distrust, I think it would be an advantage on both sides to— cultivate a closer understanding of each other...'
It was that tiny hesitation before the word, along with the mocking hint of emphasis, that alerted Elizabeth. She had opened her mouth to accuse him furiously of listening in to her phone calls when she realised that to do so would open herself to all sorts of awkward questions. She went into a cold sweat just thinking about it. If he found out what her Uncle Simon did for a living he would soon ferret out the rest.
He raised his eyebrows as she snapped her mouth shut, almost biting her tongue.
'You were going to say something?'
‘I was yawning,' she denied cuttingly. ‘I find this conversation becoming rather boring...'
'Really? I'm finding it very interesting. In fact I find all your conversations fascinating, Beth...'
Now she was positive. Either he had listened in personally to the calls she had made from his bungalow or he had had someone else do it. Perhaps he had even had them recorded! In the depths of her naïveté Elizabeth had never even considered the possibility of such deviousness. She was savagely pleased she had called him a snake. She glared at him, her mouth quivering with the frustration of controlling her temper.
‘I do look forward to us getting to know each other better,' he continued in that sultry French accent. ‘It'll be so much easier now that we're living together.'