by Robyn Donald
Bobo gave her a shrewd glance. ‘He wants to see you again?’
‘He’s probably going to apologise,’ Rowan told her with gloomy foreboding. ‘He said we had to talk.’
More than anything she wanted reassurance, but Bobo frowned. ‘Doesn’t sound good, but, hey, if it was a classic one-night stand he wouldn’t even be thinking about contacting you again. He must be interested.’
‘Even if he is, it won’t work.’
Bobo’s brows shot up so high they were lost in her hairline. ‘Why not?’
Rowan gave an incredulous laugh. ‘I can’t see myself as a billionaire’s girlfriend, can you?’
‘Stop that right now! I can see you as anything you want to be,’ Bobo said trenchantly. ‘Rowan, don’t go running back to Kura Bay; at least give him a chance! It will do wonders for—’ She stopped, looking self-conscious.
Rowan forced a dry smile. ‘Not even for your ten per cent am I going to do something that’s not right for me.’ She stared down into the dark depths of her mug. ‘And this is not right for me,’ she said heavily. ‘It’s so wrong it scares me. He’s everything I swore I’d never get tangled up with again. And he’s far too attractive.’
Bobo sighed. ‘I suppose you’ve fallen for him. OK, it happens. The thing to do is pick yourself up and find another one. There are lots of men out there, and a lot of them are good ones. Did your father try to convince you that everybody has a soulmate, and that you should wait for him?’
Rowan recalled the man who’d never looked at another woman after his bride of less than a year had died giving birth. ‘No,’ she said quietly.
‘But that’s what you’d like,’ Bobo said, nodding. ‘It’s what we’d all like, but it’s not going to happen, Rowan. People who search for soulmates are true romantics—and you won’t find Wolfe Talamantes in that rank. He’s far too tough to believe in pretty fairytales. Besides, what happened to his brother would have put him off the soulmate thing for life.’ At Rowan’s enquiring look she shrugged. ‘Oh, it’s an old scandal. He shot himself because he couldn’t get the girl he wanted. She wasn’t willing, apparently. Rowan—Rowan, what’s the matter?!’
White-lipped, Rowan asked, ‘What was his name?’ When Bobo just stared at her she demanded harshly, ‘Wolfe’s brother—do you know his name?’
‘I don’t—yes, yes, I do. He was his half-brother—Tony Someone—I remember because I was going out with Tony Weatherly then.’
‘Tony Simpson.’ Rowan dropped her face in her hands. ‘Oh, God,’ she whispered, icy with shock and dismay.
Bobo swallowed. ‘You,’ she whispered. ‘Were you the girl? No, I’d have remembered your name.’
‘Rowan is my first name,’ she said thinly, ‘but my father always called me by my second name, Anne. I don’t think he could bear to call me Rowan because my mother chose it before I was born. I decided to call myself Rowan after the—afterwards.’
Stunned, Bobo got up and hugged her fiercely. ‘Oh, what an awful coincidence! And neither you nor Wolfe knew!’
Sheer horror froze the blood in Rowan’s veins. Had he guessed? She tried to recall the moment she’d seen Mrs Simpson in the foyer—where had Wolfe been? Behind her, and to one side, shielded from the seated group by a screen of plants and one of the huge marble pillars. And once Rowan had blundered towards the restaurant he hadn’t looked back—his whole attention had been on her.
No, he couldn’t have seen or heard his mother.
He certainly wouldn’t have made love to Rowan if he’d known who she was. Flooded with ridiculous relief, she said thinly, ‘Neither of us.’
Bobo stepped back, eyeing her with concern. ‘Are you going to tell him?’
She couldn’t. ‘His mother blames me for Tony’s death, so I presume Wolfe does too.’ Painfully relinquishing barely formed dreams and hopes, she said, ‘Bobo, I have to go home. Right now. But if I do, he’ll want to know where I am.’ Of course, he might be relieved.
Bobo was obviously dying to probe further, but something in Rowan’s face stopped her. Instead, she became efficient and brisk. ‘All right, I’ll drive you out to the airport. You can afford to fly—everything sold last night. Georgie’s delighted, and you’ve got enough money to buy some really rare and exotic glazes. Finish that coffee and grab some toast and get packed while I organise your ticket.’
‘I hate to leave you to deal with Wolfe.’
‘Don’t worry, I can cope with anyone,’ Bobo boasted, adding slyly, ‘I might even seduce him myself!’
Repressing a stab of violent jealousy, Rowan gave her a fake smile. ‘Don’t give him my address, please.’ She waited tensely for the answer.
It came without hesitation. ‘I won’t,’ Bobo promised.
Three weeks later, eyeing an ominous, murky sky, Wolfe murmured sardonically, ‘An appropriate setting, Rowan—wild and extraordinarily beautiful.’
Had he been superstitious he might have wondered at the furious flash of lightning that spiked from cloud to cloud when he said her name. But he wasn’t superstitious, and as thunder rolled and reverberated around the horizon he was too busy wrestling the yacht through another vicious squall to concern himself with lighting effects.
According to the chart he should be—yes, there it was, the fold in the bush-covered hills and the twist of the channel that indicated the winding, dangerous entrance to Rowan’s hideaway.
Controlling a wheel made almost unmanageable by the gale that powered the slashing rain, he eased the craft into the opening, keeping an alert eye for wind changes and currents and rocks. Such risky sailing exhilarated him, but not into rashness, although when the harbour opened out before him he permitted himself a tight, hard smile of aggressive satisfaction.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, allowing a fugitive sun to bathe sea and coast in a sullen green glow. Shaking the water from his hair, Wolfe turned the bow into the wind before leaving the wheel to drop the mainsail. Under jib alone the craft slipped across leaden water towards a beach, bone-white beneath the violent sky. Almost directly ahead, set back from the rim of a low, tree-covered cliff, crouched a house, small and old and badly in need of a coat of paint.
Rowan’s home.
From the corner of his eye Wolfe caught movement on the beach. Yes—even at this distance he recognised her, striding out of the grove of pohutukawas that bordered the beach. He narrowed his eyes, noting the dog at her heels and the shotgun over her arm. A sardonic smile curved his mouth. So the passionate, seductive ceramic artist had been out shooting. Rabbits, probably, as it was evening. Her confidence with the gun was another nail in the edifice he was beginning to build around her.
She hadn’t taken two strides when she saw the yacht. Without checking she turned with the fluid grace that still starred in his hungry dreams and disappeared into the shelter of the trees, leaving the beach echoing and empty.
Wolfe smiled again, fancying he could feel her angry resentment blast across the water to strike him with fierce, elemental force.
But this time she wasn’t going to get away from him.
When another round of thunder muttered behind the sombre hills, Wolfe took a quick glance at the chart and brought the yacht up into the wind. Like the lady she was, Circe responded instantly to his skilled handling, and within seconds he had the jib furled and the anchor down.
His skin prickled in the uncanny, age-old signal that warned him he was still under surveillance. Working to secure the yacht, he thought of the bowl he’d bought at the gallery—number 47.
Its subtle restraint reached some untouched part of him. Somehow Rowan had worked clay on the wheel to create an intense emotional experience.
To his own ironic astonishment, Wolfe had paid the very high price and installed the bowl in his home, where it gleamed like some rare and precious artefact, reminding him every time he saw it that the woman who’d made it had been responsible for his brother’s death—and, through that, his mother’s decline.
&n
bsp; Rowan Corbett might be a genius with clay and the woman whose passionate response had damned near robbed him of his wits, but she was also the next best thing to a murderess.
Which made his own total lack of control where she was concerned all the more irresponsible. Especially as he’d had Tony’s tragedy to forewarn him.
He suspected that she’d known who he was. Tony had been insecure enough to boast about his brother, and her abrupt departure was suspicious, as was her agent’s shiftiness when he’d asked her for Rowan’s address.
So she made love like an innocent houri; it would be interesting to see whether she’d deliberately used her beautiful body to soften him up.
If she had, she’d underestimated him badly.
It wouldn’t be the first time a woman had made love to him with an ulterior motive, although he’d never before been hit by this lethal combination of rage and frustration and contempt both for her and for himself. He was armed against it now; he wouldn’t fall again into the honeyed trap of sexuality.
Satisfied that the sea-bed provided good holding, he released the anchor warp and went down the three steps into the cabin, where he picked up a set of military field-glasses and surveyed the house.
Old, steep-roofed, with a verandah clinging to the front, it huddled behind the huge pohutukawa trees that clung with belligerent tenacity to the cliff-face, their long fibrous roots washed by the spray.
On either side of the headland curved two small beaches, pale semicircles reverberating in the uncanny, intense light. A third, larger bay swung away to the south, clogged with sinister grey-green mangroves.
If the land had ever been farmed it had defeated the settlers; fringed by more pohutukawas, primal bush brooded against the shore and clad the hills behind. After a swift, keen survey, Wolfe returned his gaze to the place where Rowan had disappeared.
A flash of movement saw him swing his glasses towards the other end of the beach. Yes, there she was, the big dark German Shepherd trotting at her heels as she headed towards a small boathouse at the base of the cliff.
An unexpected surge of adrenalin kicked him in the stomach, contracting his muscles for a split second, pouring unruly power through him. He disciplined it, smiling humourlessly as he tossed the field-glasses onto the upholstered seat and went back up into the dramatic turmoil of the day.
Thunderclouds massed again on the horizon, sharpening the sulphurous quality of the light, but the wind had dropped, leaving the air oppressively still. He lifted his face to the sky, satisfying some profound inner compulsion in a silent communion with the unfettered forces of nature.
An alien intensity jagged through his nerves and his sinews. Of course this wasn’t some manifestation of Rowan’s surveillance, yet it took all of his concentration to stay still, not to swivel and exchange stare for stare with the woman who watched him from the shelter of the trees.
He remembered the shape and size of her eyes, remembered their unusual, glowing colour—gold and copper and bronze, set in lashes and brows the same sable as her hair.
Remembered the look in her eyes when she’d lifted those heavy, slumbrous eyelids and said his name with him buried deep in her slim, tantalising body…
No wonder Tony had become obsessed by the seductive bewitchment of those eyes and that mouth. Wolfe controlled the stir of forbidden sexuality in his groin; Rowan’s eyes hid dangerous secrets, but now that he understood the extent of her power he was armoured against her.
Three days before he’d seen Laura Simpson’s doctor, who had said simply, ‘I don’t have anything more to offer. We have tried everything.’
‘But there’s nothing physically wrong with her?’
The doctor had shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘We don’t know that. We do know that we can’t find anything physically wrong, but ME is not easy to diagnose, and stress is hugely important in managing it.’ He’d looked at Wolfe’s hard face and added, ‘She’s not likely to die.’
Brutally Wolfe had said, ‘She might as well be dead. She used to be vibrant and happy, eager to get up each day. Now everything is such a huge effort that she’s giving up.’
As he pulled on the painter of the small, inflatable dinghy that bobbed behind the yacht, and climbed down into it, he knew that whatever it took, whatever he needed to do—even if he had to kidnap Rowan Corbett—she was going to meet his mother and give her the information she so desperately needed.
By the time he reached the beach she was walking towards him, German Shepherd at her heels, both woman and dog bristling with antagonism. No sign of the gun. She’d probably stashed it in the boatshed.
Smiling humourlessly, he remembered her claimed prowess in martial arts. It would take more than a few fancy throws for her to deal with him.
More thunder was on its way, but for several moments spring was at her fickle and flirtatious best. The uncanny green light had transmuted into summery kindness, gilding the sand, transforming the water to glimmering turquoise, and illuminating the residual rain on the bush so that it glittered silver, like an enchanted forest.
Magnificent, but he wasn’t here to enjoy the scenery—any scenery. Welcoming the splash of water around his legs, Wolfe stepped out of the dinghy just before it grounded. As he grabbed the rope and hauled the little inflatable up onto the sand the big dog barked and surged towards him, its raised ears and drawn-back lips an unmistakable signal of aggression. In one flowing movement Wolfe turned sideways to minimise his bulk. He could deal with the dog.
‘Heel,’ Rowan said sharply, her eyes enormous in her white face.
Reluctantly the dog returned to her, settling into its correct place. Although its gaze never left Wolfe’s face he was satisfied it wasn’t malevolent. No pit-bull intransigence there; the dog was simply doing what it had been trained to do—protect its mistress.
With a cold, fierce, anticipatory pleasure, Wolfe stopped where he was, forcing her to come up to him. He was establishing an advantage—something he needed, he admitted. His gut clenched, resisting a ferocious charge of pure sexual energy.
She’d lost weight, although her long, superb legs, narrow waist and full breasts were concealed beneath a faded, clay-spattered sweatshirt and trousers in a mustard shade that turned her eyes to pure gold. A gust of wind whipped a lock of hair across a face finer-boned than it had been three weeks ago.
Wolfe was assailed by a searing, white-hot memory of himself lying naked with that black hair around him in a clinging mass of silk, its texture and the slender heat and smoothness of Rowan’s lush body drowning him in sensory overload while her sultry lips…
Stop right there! he ordered, clamping down on his rioting reactions until he was once more fully in command of himself.
Pacing behind her, the dog’s lips lifted to show large, efficient teeth as though he recognised the trend of Wolfe’s thoughts.
In an undertone Rowan ordered, ‘Stay,’ as she came to a halt about three metres away, her heart jumping with a complex mixture of panic, joy and sheer shock.
Wolfe Talamantes had courage. Most men confronted by Lobo in aggressive mode did their best to get out of the way. Although he’d moved to minimise his size, and therefore his threat to the dog, the cool assurance in his stance told Rowan he was confident he could deal with Lobo.
Had he found out who she was? A slither of apprehension iced her spine but she met his eyes fearlessly. ‘What do you want?’
‘That talk you ran out on.’ He watched her with flat, unreadable eyes.
Rowan’s pulses motored into overdrive. As the fickle sun disappeared behind another cloud, she mastered her agitation enough to say, ‘I haven’t got anything to say to you. I thought I’d made that plain.’
‘I wonder what made you think I was so easy to get rid of. I’ve got a lot to say to you.’
A frown pleated her brows. She didn’t know him in this mood—formidable, enrobed in a menacing energy that set off alarm bells. For three weeks she’d gone over every moment they’d spen
t together, even fantasised about their meeting again. In her imagination he’d listened when she’d told him of Tony’s death, and he’d understood her part in it.
Imagination made fools of everyone. Somehow he’d found out who she was. Head erect, hoping that Bobo hadn’t told him, she said, ‘No.’
Wolfe watched as, hackles raised and teeth bared, Lobo nudged in front of her, a big beast both jealous and more conscious than she of the danger the intruder represented.
Given time, Wolfe thought, he could arrive at some sort of friendship with the dog. Friendship wasn’t possible with Rowan, yet behind the icy barrier he sensed the secret signals of sexual awareness, signals his own body was responding to with damned inconvenient timing.
Driven by an inner demon, he said, ‘Do you realise that you and your dog have identical colouring? Hair as black as the pits of hell, and eyes like tawny gems. Is he your familiar?’ Later he’d try to work out what he’d been playing at, but for now the dilating darkness at the centre of her eyes was his reward.
‘I don’t find that amusing,’ she said frigidly. ‘Please leave.’
His answering smile was poised on the knife-edge of antagonism. ‘Not until we’ve talked about old times,’ he said gently.
She lost colour, her heavy eyelids hiding those amazing eyes. ‘Old times?’ White-lipped, she managed to dredge up enough self-command to return, ‘I don’t have anything to say to you.’
‘Whereas I,’ Wolfe said, walking towards her, ‘have a lot to say to you, and you’re going to listen.’
Low growls bursting from his throat, Lobo shook with angry defiance, but without a signal from Rowan he remained where he was.
‘He’s well trained,’ Wolfe said, his gaze flicking up to imprison hers. ‘Are you going to give him the command he’s desperate to hear?’
Cold rage iced her voice. ‘Not at the moment,’ she said, biting out the words because she wouldn’t be able to order Lobo to attack, and Wolfe knew it. ‘I’ll hear what you have to say first.’
Clearly, contemptuously, he asked, ‘Why didn’t you answer my mother’s letter?’