by Penny Jordan
*
Four days had passed since Nico had taken her into the town, and Saffron was discovering that the mood of her captors had begun to change dangerously. Whenever they quoted the maxims of the organisation to her now, it was always with a bitterly vitriolic denunciation of her own culture—a culture they were pledged to destroy. But it was their fanatical hatred of the Roman Catholic Church Saffron found the most terrifying. According to them, it was going to be their first target for destruction, and Saffron shuddered when Olivia turned on her one morning saying savagely, 'Religion has been the opiate of the masses for too long—they are deluded and deceived into believing that there is better to come; that "heaven" awaits them, and because they in their folly have believed it they have become slaves to religion. And why have we not yet heard from her father?' she demanded of Nico. 'There has been time enough. Perhaps he does not yet take our threats seriously,' she added. 'We have never had these delays in the past.'
'We are now living in the present,' Nico told her smoothly. 'And you know the orders from Rome. I am in charge of this operation.'
'Olivia is right,' Piero cut in angrily. 'Perhaps it is time we tried to speed matters up a little. We cannot remain here in safety very much longer.'
'I say we should send her father something to remind him how vulnerable his daughter is,' Olivia suggested. 'Perhaps we should remind him of the blood tie by sending him something a little more tangible than simply a taped message. The Getty boy was ransomed quickly enough once his family received...'
'Enough! I will not listen to any more!' Nico commanded. 'I am in charge of this operation and I shall be the one to decide what steps we take and when, and you will all follow my orders!'
Silence fell as they listened to him, and a nauseous dread clawed at the pit of Saffron's stomach as she contemplated Olivia's threat.
How would they mutilate her? By removing her finger, her ear? The mere thought was enough to bring her out in an ice-cold sweat, but she refused to give in to it, or to give Olivia the satisfaction of seeing her react to the other girl's suggestion.
She knew all about what had happened to Paul Getty's grandson; she had seen it in the papers and remembered her father commenting on it, although she had only been young at the time. His captors had cut off his ear and sent it to his family. And it hadn't been the only case of mutilation. But then he had been ransomed and had lived! If only she could escape! But how? Escape was impossible, she knew that and yet still she yearned for it, was obsessed by it.
And now she was faced with the threat which Olivia had just made. It terrified her, adding a new dimension to the fear she was already experiencing.
The day dragged on. Twice Saffron saw Olivia and Guido closeted together as they worked, talking in low whispers. Were they planning to ignore Nico's commands, usurp his authority even? She had sensed in Olivia a change, a hardening towards Nico and a reluctance to accept his word as law. Somehow he had become her only protection against Olivia's malice and Guido's lechery, and she grew fearful every time he disappeared from sight, worrying about what might happen to him. She didn't put it past Olivia to carry out her gruesome promise of mutilation without Nico's authority—after all, what could he do once it was accomplished? She tried not to picture her father's agony if he were to receive such evidence of her plight.
She couldn't touch her evening meal, her movements were listless and uncaring. Once or twice she felt Nico's gaze, but refused to look at him.
When he rose from the table, abruptly, pushing back his chair with the first awkward movement she had seen him make her eyes flew instinctively to his.
'Piero, our guest looks as though she could do with some fresh air. Walk with her as far as the river and back.'
'Not taking her yourself?' Olivia questioned maliciously. 'Don't tell me she turned you down?'
The Italian girl's desire seemed to have turned to dislike in a remarkably short space of time, Saffron reflected as she followed Piero outside, or was it simply that Olivia was masking her true feelings with pretended contempt?
Darkness had already fallen, but the subtropical night air was soft and warm, the thought of being locked up in her small room once her walk was over causing feelings of acute claustrophobia. In any other circumstances the walk through the olive grove to the river would have been very pleasant, but with Piero at her back, ready to pounce on her the moment she set a foot wrong, much of the pleasure was dissipated.
All she possessed was the illusion of freedom, and it could never be any substitute for the real thing. Ahead of them the river gleamed silver-black under the hunter's moon, and stars shimmered in the midnight blue sky.
Saffron walked along the river bank for several yards, stopping abruptly as she recognised Nico walking towards them from the opposite direction. Obviously he too had wanted to breathe in the soft night air, but unlike her he was free to do so whenever he wished. Her lips twisted bitterly at the thought.
'Piero, I want you to take a look at the Land Rover,' Nico told the other man as he drew abreast of them. 'The engine's running hot.'
'I'll give it a test run now,' Piero suggested, 'and then I can go over it in the morning.'
'Fine. We don't want to risk being without it.'
As Piero slipped away into the darkness and they were left alone, a curious constraint came over Saffron. She glanced out across the river, yearningly, bitterly resentful of Nico's touch on her arm, telling her that it was time to go back. Behind her lay the farmhouse and imprisonment, in front of her the river, and then freedom.
An instinct that overwhelmed caution and fear swept over her, and then without conscious thought she was turning and running, not towards the farmhouse, but away from it, towards the river, no conscious plan formulated in her mind, only a desperate need to be free.
She had caught Nico off guard, and heard him curse softly behind her, but she closed her ears against the sounds of pursuit. Lungs and heart pounding to the point of bursting, she willed her body into a speed she had not known since schooldays. Her enforced captivity had made her lose weight, but that only gave her a momentary advantage; Nico had the strength and stamina she lacked, and behind her she could hear unmistakably that he was gaining on her.
Even then, knowing what the outcome must be, she refused to give in, punishing her body until it screamed in protest, not caring that she was driving herself to the point of collapse, the only thought in her throbbing head the need to escape, to sink into the ground and become absorbed in it, part of it —free!
CHAPTER SEVEN
Suddenly she was falling ... falling, to hit the ground with a thud that jarred her teeth and drove the breath from her lungs. A heavy weight pinned her to the ground. She lifted her head in exhausted defeat and stared ahead of her to where the river ran smoothly between its banks.
'Little fool!' The harsh condemnation was laced with anger. Dragging air into her tortured lungs in aching gasps, Saffron lay quiescent as Nico turned her over on to her back, arms falling uselessly to her side, her whole body shivering with reaction. 'What did you hope to gain?'
'Freedom!' The word was thick and slurred with pain, defeat etched into her face as the moonlight slid over it, mercilessly revealing her anguish. Above her she heard Nico curse, and then, unbelievably, he was cupping her face, kissing her with a heated urgency that melted her body and left her strangely fluid and receptive to his touch. This was no exploratory embrace, no cynical punishment, but the touch of a man driven beyond the bounds of self-imposed restraint into an action of explosive need, and Saffron's senses recognised it as such. The moon slid behind a cloud; with preternaturally heightened senses she could hear the soft movements of the river, the whispers of the night all around them, and a wild clamouring swirled through her, a desperate need to experience all life's pleasures before it was too late; without conscious thought she rejected the code by which she had previously lived her life. If she was going to die she wanted to experience life first; to know the desir
e and possession of a man, even if that man was her captor, or so her body reasoned, and she could no longer fight against it. There seemed to be a strange sort of fatality about being here with Nico, as though it was something that had long ago been ordained there was nothing she could do about it.
Her arms lifted to his shoulders, her mouth parting to his kiss. There was nothing tentative about his touch; it was that of a man aroused to the point where nothing mattered save the need to assuage his desire. Saffron felt it in the hard urgency of his mouth and the tautness of the male thighs pinning her to the ground.
The buttons on her blouse gave way beneath his impatient fingers, and the new, unknown Saffron who seemed to have been born in the moments of her defeat when she tried to escape from him felt only a thrill of pleasure at the way Nico exposed her body to the moonlight and studied it fixedly while the silence thickened around them.
'In this light your skin could almost be alabaster,' he muttered feverishly. 'You could have modelled for a statue of Diana. But your flesh is warm with the temptation of a newly ripened peach, and just looking at you brings out a pagan need in me to touch and taste.'
He bent his head, and something sweet and languorous curled headily through her veins. The touch of his tongue as it stroked across the budding tips of her breasts was a delight and a torment, provoking a muscle-clenched reaction, and a wanton impulse which she didn't deny to lock her fingers in the dark disorder of his hair and hold his head against her skin.
Only the fine tremble of Nico's body betrayed his own reaction, but the heat coming off his skin and the low groan that escaped his lips as they moved in hungry possession against her breast showed that she was not alone in her need to submit to the magic of the night.
When Nico removed her skirt she felt only heady pleasure because it allowed her closer contact with his body. She had already unfastened his shirt, but when he pulled it off completely, followed by his jeans, she drew in her breath in wonder at the male perfection of his body.
'Don't just look at me, touch me,' he muttered thickly, lowering his body to meet hers, circling her with his arms, as his mouth explored her skin. The barriers of shyness and inexperience were swept away, her response total as she pressed trembling lips to male flesh that shuddered to her touch, and yet incited it to be repeated.
Something in their mutual desire sparked off a fevered, almost frantic response in Saffron; a need to drink deeply, knowing that the cup of life was about to be dashed from her lips before she had even tasted the bitter-sweet wine of love.
She felt Nico's full weight on top of her, the tautness of his muscles and the aroused maleness of his body.
'Why?' he demanded softly against her lips. 'Why now and not before?'
She knew what he meant, and with all the barriers down between them could answer him honestly.
'Perhaps because I want to experience everything life has to offer before it's too late.'
She felt him pause, probing the darkness, turning her face into the moonlight to search it feature by feature with eyes suddenly cool and wary.
'I think I heard you, but tell me again, just to make sure I'm not imagining things.'
Hesitantly Saffron did so. When she had finished there was silence. And then Nico said flatly, 'Are you trying to tell me you're still a virgin?'
'And if I am?' Why did her voice have to tremble over the words?
He sighed, and straightened up, sitting with his back to her so that she couldn't read his expression. Then he reached for his jeans.
'Now I've heard everything,' he said wryly. 'But something tells me you aren't lying. Is this honestly what you want?' he demanded curtly. 'A purely physical coming together with a man you don't even know? If it is, why not before? Why now?'
'Because you're here,' Saffron replied as calmly as she could, glad of the darkness to hide her features. This wasn't the response she had envisaged. Nico was lecturing her like an irate parent. She climbed into her clothes again.
'So are Guido and Piero,' he told her evenly. 'Are you saying that they would have done equally well?'
She wanted to, but somehow couldn't force the lie between her lips. Nico had turned round and was studying her, so she shook her head mutely.
'Saffron.' He placed his hands on her shoulders and looked down into her face. It was the first time she could remember him using her name and it added an almost unbearable note of intimacy to the proceedings.
'You might be innocent and naive, but not so much that you won't realise the truth of what I'm about to say. Situations such as this one act like hothouses, forcing the emotions and channelling them in ways they wouldn't normally be channelled—hence the events of tonight.' He paused and seemed to grimace a little in distaste, and a sense of rejection shocked and hurt her as she realised that he was not, after all, going to make love to her.
'If you didn't want me, why did you start making love to me in the first place?' she managed, holding on to her pride, and trying to avoid the look in his eyes.
'I wanted what I thought was an equally experienced and worldly woman,' Nico corrected her brutally, 'not an inexperienced girl child who was using me merely to further her education. You should be grateful,' he added tersely. 'This way you get to save it all for the purpose it is obviously intended for—the sanctity of the marriage bed!'
'Which I'm not now likely to have,' Saffron pointed out bitterly. 'And anyway, I wasn't saving myself for that.'
'No?'
The mockery in the word infuriated her.
'No,' she retorted heatedly.
'Then what, or rather who?'
For a moment she was tempted not to answer, but something deep inside her overruled her innate disinclination to reveal her most private thoughts and feelings, so in a low voice she said hesitantly, 'Someone I could respect and trust as well as desire physically, and who felt the same way about me; a total commitment and involvement of mind and body, a ...'
'Soulmate,' Nico supplied wryly. 'But in the end reality fell very far short of your ideal, or would have done had I not stopped. Oh, come," he drawled when she made no response, 'surely you are not going to tell me that your virginal heart yearned to cast me in the role of perfect lover, a shining white knight, whose perfection was almost divine.'
His mockery stung and she retaliated bitterly, 'Needs must when the devil drives, and faced with...'
'Going to your grave in innocence or taking me as your first lover you chose, the latter,' Nico supplied harshly. 'Am I supposed to be flattered? If so I'm afraid I must disappoint you, and a word of advice—next time you respond so passionately to a man by way of an experiment do him the favour of pandering to his ego and keeping it a secret.'
'Nico!' Olivia emerged from the shadows, calling his name, and Nico turned to help Saffron to her feet. Her skin burned at his touch, but he seemed unaware of anything intimate in the brief contact of flesh on flesh.
'Oh, there you are,' the other girl exclaimed unnecessarily. 'We thought something must have happened, you were so long.'
'Nothing happened,' Nico assured her, and the words were like a pain in Saffron's heart. Nothing might have happened to him, but to her ... Rejection was no easy thing to bear, especially when the one doing the rejecting was a man she had sworn hatred and vengeance against.
Confused and bewildered by her own emotions, she started to walk back to the farmhouse. With the cooling evening breeze blowing over her skin the frenzied desire she had experienced in Nico's arms seemed to have been felt by another person, like a dream incompletely remembered. It seemed impossible to believe that she actually behaved in that way, responded so passionately, and yet deep down inside her there was still a tiny ache of regret, a thought that 'if only' she had not spoken when she had ... Banishing the traitorous thought to the back of her mind, she entered the farmhouse and walked upstairs to her room, the malevolence of Olivia's darkly bitter gaze an almost physical emotion in the small, confined room.
'How much longer
do we have to stay here?' she heard the Italian girl demanding of Nico, when she was secured in her room and Olivia had returned downstairs. 'They must be growing impatient in Rome. We have never taken so long to complete a mission before.'
'No,' Nico agreed, as Saffron strained to catch his deeper, softer voice, 'and you have never been so close to capture as you were last time. That was a foolish thing you did, killing John Hunter when you did. It lost us the ransom, too.'
'The police were on to us.' Saffron could hear Olivia's voice quite clearly. 'He had seen us and could describe us, we couldn't afford to take risks.'
The days had taken on a dreary routine. After breakfast Saffron worked in the fields, always under the keen eye of one of her gaolers. Nico drove most days into the local town; sometimes Olivia went with him, sometimes one of the others, and she had learned to tell herself that the pain she felt when she saw him with Olivia meant nothing. How could she feel anything for him after all? He had humiliated her, betrayed her trust, hurt her physically and mentally, and done them all with a hard determination against which her puny retaliatory blows wounded no one but herself.
Today dull clouds lay heavily on the horizon, threatening rain, and as the day wore on and the light breeze dropped the electric tension presaging the coming storm seemed to infiltrate the farmhouse as well.
Tempers were on edge, Olivia snapping at Guido and Piero over lunch. Piero barely reacted, concentrating on his pasta, but Guido took her toughly by the arm, shaking her almost violently. Olivia pulled away, tension crackling between them, and in the stormy atmosphere Saffron felt her wound ache for the first time. It had healed well, but she suspected there was always be a faint, scar just below the curve of her breast to remind her of what had happened—as though she needed any reminding.
Nico had gone into town, and rather than endure the atmosphere in the farmhouse Saffron walked outside. Piero followed her, leaning against the second Land Rover, cleaning his gun as he watched her, a silent warning that she would be foolish to ignore. How quickly the human mind adapted, she thought wretchedly as she followed the dusty track down to the olive grove. Already she found nothing odd in the sight of guns; in the fact of being a prisoner.