The lights from the saloon spilled out over the deck, casting long shadows in the hazy evening. The sun had disappeared now and the stars were beginning to come out in little glittering groups, like celebrities at happy hour, but there was nothing else to see. She felt all alone—a beacon of burning desire adrift on a darkling ocean.
There was a whirr and click from the jukebox as one track ended and another one began. She moaned softly as she recognized it. Nina Simone—'I Put a Spell on You'.
The music was like a match to a petrol-soaked rag and the longing she had been trying to extinguish inside her burst instantly into flame. Slowly, languorously she reached out and grasped the chrome pole at the front of the deck and leaned outwards, swinging lazily around it, automatically hooking her legs up and snaking around in a sinuous arc.
She hadn’t practised all summer. But she hadn’t forgotten the moves.
Walking around the pole, she grasped it high up and stretched her legs out wide, twisting her body around and spinning gracefully to the ground. She repeated the move, this time curling around the pole in a foetal position, her knees tucked up. The music informed her movements—slow, indolent, but ripe with sensuality. Shinning to the top of the pole, she wrapped her thighs tightly around it, gasping in exquisite pain at the pressure of the cool chrome on her burning flesh. The memory of Angelo’s hands on her waist as they danced last night filled her head, driving her to the brink of oblivion. Eyes closed, head tipped back in an agony of remembrance she spread her legs wide and swivelled down before climbing up again.
Her body pulsed with longing for his touch, the warmth of his breath on her neck. The music held her in thrall, throbbing through her as she let her body twist and curve almost of its own volition, every move an expression of desperate need. Dropping backwards in a sinuous arc, she gripped the pole near the floor and cartwheeled back to her feet as the music finished.
For a second there was silence.
Then Angelo’s voice, cold and steel-edged.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
He was on the deck above, waiting for another call from London, when he heard the music. Recognizing it, he gave a wry smile as remembered sensations from last night crowded into his mind, driving out all thoughts of business.
He got up and walked over to the railing, leaning his back against it, reliving the dance. How long had they swayed together like that, oblivious to the rest of the world? Minutes? Hours? He didn’t have a clue, he realised, and in his rigidly timetabled, efficiency-driven world that was unheard of. He’d let go of everything, in a way that was completely alien to him. He’d felt young. Carefree.
And Angelo Emiliani had never done young or carefree.
He couldn’t afford to do them now either, he reflected ruefully, trying to re-focus his brain on the matters in hand. Countless phone calls to just about every contact in his address book had failed to come up with anything concrete on an Anna Field, and Ifford’s solicitors were being extremely vague about when the contract on the château could be signed. French law dictated that the signatures of all interested parties had to be obtained, and it was taking some time to make the necessary arrangements. Angelo sneeringly assumed that the English aristocracy didn’t work to the same imperatives as the rest of the business world.
Rubbing a hand over his eyes, he turned to look out over the serene ocean, and that was when the light from below caught his attention.
Or not the light, exactly. The shadow.
The lamps from the saloon spilled out on to the deck below, throwing a perfect silhouette of Anna on to the smooth boards, like a screen projection.
She was dancing.
Not just dancing … She was …
Dio mio …
It should have been sleazy, but it wasn’t. Watching her, he was astonished by her graceful strength, by the smooth, elegant precision of her moves. She snaked around the pole with catlike neatness. Like a ballerina.
She’d surprised him again, he thought bleakly as the music came to an end. Surprised him and intrigued him, while all the time evading him. The girl was like a nuclear explosion in the centre of his well-ordered life.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
She scrambled to her feet, her chest rising and falling quickly, a thin sheen of sweat on her skin. Angelo crossed the deck with swift, savage strides. His face was as impassive as always—glacial in its calm—but she could see a muscle flicker in the lean plane of his jaw.
He stopped in front of her.
She tilted her chin defiantly, but behind her back her hands gripped the pole to stop her knees from giving way beneath her. The look in his eyes was blistering.
‘I was bored.’
He gave an incredulous rasp of laughter and ran a hand through his unruly mane of gold.
‘Bored?’
And then their mouths met and his hands were on the pole above her head, trapping her in a cage of his body. Her fists flew to his rock-hard chest, beating against the solid wall of muscle, while their tongues fought and meshed in the hot cavern of their mouths. She felt her hands slide round his back, her fingers helplessly kneading his silken flesh, her nails convulsively digging themselves into his skin.
Still he held on. Apart from his mouth, he wasn’t touching her at all, his arms braced against the metal pole, his head bent to hers. But his kiss was hot, savage and full of hunger.
Suddenly she ducked under his arm, stooping low and swinging out from the pole as he had seen her do as she had danced. Straightening up on the other side, she looked at him with naked desire.
‘Yes. Bored. You’re always working.’
He took a step backwards and gave her a hard, appraising smile. His eyes glittered with lust.
‘I have to try to stay one step ahead of you and your friends.’
Idly, slowly, lazily she shinned up the pole and swung around at the top, arching herself down towards him.
‘You’re wasting your time.’
‘Am I?’
He reached out a hand and traced a languorous finger around her belly button, flicking the silver bar there, never taking his eyes off her face. He saw her eyes darken and her eyelids flutter at his touch and was ready for her as she shivered and faltered. Snaking an arm around her waist, he lifted her down. Her legs closed around his waist as tightly as they had gripped the pole, her strong dancer’s muscles squeezing him.
‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t wast any more time, then,’ he said harshly, carrying her through the saloon. His mouth was set in a grim line, his fingers hard on her ribs. She felt a delicious flutter of fear and anticipation as he kicked open the door to her cabin. He looked down at her for a moment, his expression dark and savage.
‘I might not know who you are, Anna Field, but I know what you want.’
She whimpered. And then, almost without knowing how, her hands were in his hair, her mouth crashed and ground against his as he dropped her on the bed and tore at the fastening of his shorts. Her fingers closed around the back of his neck and she pulled him down beside her. Holding his face in both hands, she looked into his eyes with an expression that threatened to tip him over the edge of desire into total abandonment.
Her mouth closed over his again while her hands slid down the length of his arms to his wrists. Her fingers circled them in a steely grip as she hauled herself up so she was sitting on top of him. Without tearing her mouth from his, she edged her hips upwards until her knees rested on his outspread arms. The kiss deepened. They were tearing at each other’s face with their mouths, grinding, rasping, devouring.
Then suddenly she threw her head backwards, gasping triumphantly. Her knees pinioned his arms to the bed on either side of him. Eyes glittering, she looked down on him.
‘Got you’ she whispered throatily.
He gazed up at her as a slow smile curved his bruised lips, making those little brackets at each corner of his mouth. Sinuously he edged downwards beneath her, so that her
crotch was centimetres from his mouth.
He breathed out. Heavily.
She moaned as the heat of his breath fanned the fire raging through her pelvis and caressed her more intimately, more delicately, more thoroughly than she had thought possible. Her eyes closed in blissful submission, then flew open again as she felt the first stroke of his tongue.
‘Oh, God. Oh—oh, Angelo—’
He felt the shudder that shook her whole body.
‘Take them off,’ he breathed.
Her hands went to her bikini bottoms and she rose up on her knees as she frantically tugged them downwards. He watched her, waiting for the moment when she would have to lift her knees to remove the tiny scrap of white fabric, and as she did so he flipped her over so she rolled on to the bed beneath him.
In one fluid movement he was astride her.
‘Got you.’
She jerked and bucked under his thighs, half rising up on her elbows, wanting to fight, but wanting to surrender more. He inserted a knee between her hot, writhing thighs, separating her legs and spreading them wide open. Growling, snarling, she pushed her hips upwards, questing for the hardness of him that she could see but not touch, almost deranged with the need to feel him inside her.
Watching him slide on a condom was almost more than she could bear.
With one slow thrust he entered her, and felt a sudden shock, like lightning through his veins at the momentary look of vulnerability that passed across her face, the soft gasp that sprang from her sweet mouth. Surely she couldn’t be…?
‘Anna?’
He withdrew, and she let out a cry of pure desperation, arching her hips up towards him again. Her eyes locked into his, any trace of hesitation vanished in the blistering heat of her need. Sensing his uncertainty she pressed her fists against his chest, clawing, beating, every blow an expression of her longing. He thrust slowly into her again.
‘Who are you?’ he whispered harshly, almost despairingly.
Her eyes were a dark abyss from which she looked at him with hopeless desire.
‘I don’t know. I’m—oh, God—’ He thrust into her again. ‘I’m whatever … you want me … to be.’
He leaned forward, low over her face, brushing her lips with his as he withdrew again.
‘Or everything I don’t want you to be.’
He thrust into her again. Through a haze of ecstasy she looked up at him.
‘That’s …’ she breathed out, closed her eyes and slid a hand around his neck, pulling his head down to hers so that her lips caressed his ear ‘… that’s what you like. That’s why I’m here.’
With a primitive growl he gathered her to his chest and then they were rolling and fighting and writhing together in a tangle of limbs and hands and mouths, until finally Anna arched her back and let out a shout of rapture that drifted across the dark ocean. In silent joy Angelo held her shuddering body and let go, feeling his own release like a triumph.
Her hair fanned out on the pillow, black and pink. He looked down at her, at her heart-shaped face, her flushed cheeks, her swollen mouth with its perfect Cupid’s-bow lips smudged and reddened. Silently she looked back. Defiant, but defeated by her own need.
She must have slept, or at least fallen into that deeply relaxed state of total, contented submission. The next thing she knew Angelo was gently easing his arm out from beneath her head and tugging the sheet over her naked body.
‘Hmm? What are you doing? Where are you going?’
He leaned over her, his perfect face as blank and pale as marble in the moonlight.
‘I’m going back to my cabin.’
‘No! Stay! You can’t just leave like that, after we … after that.’ She stretched out a hand towards him, suddenly bereft. He captured it and kissed her fingertips, then placed her hand softly down on the bed.
He stood upright, looking terrifyingly remote and heartbreakingly gorgeous.
She struggled into a sitting position, clutching the sheet to her breasts as she watched him walk towards the door. ‘Angelo—’ she called out, unable to stop herself. He turned.
‘Did I do something wrong?’ He shook his head, unsmiling. ‘Sex is for sharing. But I sleep alone.’ And with that he was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
OPENING her eyes, Anna found the cabin flooded with sunlight. She stretched luxuriously, feeling the pleasurable ache in her thighs, the delicious throb at their apex, then she frowned.
In spite of the brightness of the day, a shadow lurked at the edge of her mind. Her thoughts roved over the events of last night, to the point where Angelo had left her, and she felt a little flip in her stomach as she remembered his distance, his beauty.
God, he was amazing …
But that wasn’t what was bothering her. If anything, his remoteness intrigued her. She respected it.
No, something else …
She got up and padded over the thick carpet into her en suite bathroom. In the mirror her face looked hopelessly young, but that vagueness, that vacuum that she often felt when she looked at herself was absent.
Who are you … ? he had asked.
She closed her eyes and tipped her head back as the remembered words shivered through her consciousness. She had found somewhere where she felt she belonged. Here. Out in the middle of nowhere with this man who called up feelings and responses in her that she had never had before. That she had never even suspected she was capable of.
It felt as if this was what she had been born for.
Her eyes snapped open.
Oh, God, that was it. The shadow at the back of her thoughts.
It was her birthday today.
Resolutely she stared at herself in the glass, holding tightly on to the edge of the basin. Her birthday, and the anniversary of her mother’s death, when Lisette had been killed as she’d sped through the countryside, bringing back the cake she had ordered from the caterers for Anna’s party. It had been the first summer they hadn’t been at the château, as Lisette had decided that Anna should be at home and have a proper party for the girls from her school.
She’d been at St Catherine’s for a term by then and had hated every minute of it. The lessons had bored her, the rules had horrified and confounded her and the other girls had teased her—delighting in provoking her fiery temper. Used to being an only child and perfectly happy in her own company, Anna had found the enforced proximity of the dormitories suffocating. She had been small and way behind the other girls, some of whom had already started wearing bras and talking about boys. Scared of showing her naiveté Anna had kept herself aloof from them, earning herself a reputation for being ‘stuck-up'.
It hadn’t been a good start.
Keen to improve matters before term started again in September, Lisette had planned a lavish party at Ifford, which Anna had been ferociously against. The thought of all her hated classmates coming to Ifford had filled her with utter horror. Ifford was huge and had once been extremely grand, but it had long since fallen into shabbiness. There had never been enough money to keep the rain out and the furnishings up to date and her parents were of the bohemian artistic persuasion that considered wall-to-wall carpets and videos and CD players to be completely irrelevant. Anna had known that her friends would find it all deeply pitiful, and had prayed fervently in the weeks leading up to the party for some surprise deliverance from the dreaded event.
She had got it.
Snatching up her toothbrush, she began to brush her teeth with savage thoroughness. Ten years ago. Of course she was old enough now not to blame herself, and to realize that she hadn’t brought about the accident herself. Of course she was.
She stopped brushing.
But if only they had gone to the château as normal that year …
She thought of the wedding dress, still lying in the dusty attic, and felt tears prickle at the back of her eyes. It was almost as if a part of her refused to believe that Lisette was really gone, for ever, and that by hanging on to the château she might, someh
ow, find some way of turning the clock back and reversing that decision. Persuading Lisette out of the idea of the party. Spending another carefree summer swimming and dancing and inventing more games …
Keeping up the pretence that they were a normal family.
She spat toothpaste into the sink and rinsed out her mouth with water.
Twenty-one today, she thought desolately, and still dreaming of the impossible.
‘I’ve found one.’
Angelo squinted into the sun and pressed the phone a little closer to his ear so he didn’t miss what his PA was about to say.
‘Go on, Helen.’
‘Anna Field. Arrested in October 2003 for animal rights activities in Oxford, released with a caution.’
Angelo was very still. ‘That sounds likely.’
‘Lives in London,’ Helen continued, ‘works in a vegetarian café, aged forty-five, divorced—’
Angelo let out a single Italian expletive, which stopped Helen in her tracks. ‘I’m sorry, Signor Emiliani, should I continue?’
The image of Anna’s lithe, petite body winding itself around the pole last night swam in front of his eyes.
Again.
‘No,’ he snapped. ‘It’s not her. Not unless she’s the most youthful forty-five-year-old on the planet. You’re sure about the age?’
‘Yes, signor. It’s on her police records.’
‘OK, well, keep looking. The solicitors in Nice are still waiting for Ifford to send someone to sign the papers, and the longer it takes the more chance these bloody eco-warriors have of complicating the whole process immeasurably.’ He couldn’t keep Anna on board indefinitely, however tempting that prospect seemed after her performance last night.
Precisely because of her performance last night … Who knew what might happen if he spent much longer with her?
Angelo switched the phone off and threw it down on to the cushioned deck couch beside him. He picked up the plain brown folder that was lying there and leaned back on one elbow to leaf through it.
Last night when he’d left Anna’s cabin he’d come out here, as he often did, to work. He slept little, and badly, which he guessed went back to his days of sharing a room with twenty other children. Twenty other abandoned children, each with their own personal demons who visited nightly and made sure the hours of darkness were never peaceful.
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