Niall’s face went absolutely blank. His hands flew away from her as if she had stuck a pin in him. He stepped away from her with exaggerated courtesy.
She walked out of the light without a backward look.
She did not see the man who detached himself from the crowd and slipped after her. But Al did.
‘Hey,’ he said.
But the man had gone.
He looked round for his wife. ‘Ellie,’ he said urgently. ‘One of the guests has just taken off after Jemima Dare.’
His wife was charming the Chair of the Chamber of Commerce. ‘Lucky man,’ she said.
‘No, I mean she’s gone off on her own along the beach. And he followed her. I don’t think she knew he was there.’
Ellie knew an emergency when she saw one. She detached herself gracefully from the Chamber of Commerce.
‘Along the beach? And you didn’t stop him?’
‘I called out. But he didn’t hear me.’
‘Or didn’t want to.’ She began to weave her way purposefully through the crowd. ‘Who is he? Gambler or diver?’
‘Neither. The character who arrived this morning off the Barbados plane.’
They looked at each other with deep foreboding. Ellie spoke for both of them. ‘We need Niall.’ She hopped up onto a wooden box and peered into the crowd. ‘He’s there.’ She waved wildly. ‘Niall, Niall. Over here. Quickly.’
Niall strolled over. ‘Emergency? Do you want me to get some more beer?’ The dark face looked as if he had been in prison for twenty years but he was making an effort.
What has she done to him? thought Al, indignant.
But Ellie had launched into an account of the stranger from the Barbados plane.
Niall’s face changed, came alive. ‘God damn it, he’s a stalker. That’s what she meant. Why the hell didn’t she tell me? I’ll wring her neck.’ Then, to Al, ‘Which direction did they take?’
‘Away from the casino.’
To the loneliest part of the beach, in fact.
‘Ouch,’ said Ellie.
But Niall was already off and running.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE breeze was full of the scents of the sea. The sky was like diamond-encrusted velvet. Jemima ignored both.
Try harder, indeed. Cynical bastard! She had been doing quite well, countering his questions, until he’d hit her with that.
‘I’ll give him try harder,’ she muttered.
Did he think that he could strip her down to her darkest secrets? Did he think that one sexy afternoon entitled him to know everything there was to know about her? Just to keep himself amused?
Well, she wasn’t playing. It was the devil’s game.
I’m not available, my heart is given to a woman who won’t have me—oh, but I’ll take you on a little dance round the maypole, you lucky thing. Was that what he said to every woman? And they still came back for more? Honestly, sometimes she was ashamed of her own sex.
She ground her teeth audibly.
That was when she heard the sound of running feet behind her. Furious, she swept round, hands on hips.
‘You sicken me,’ she yelled. ‘It’s people like you who get men a bad name.’
She thought he would stop. Maybe yell right back at her. More likely give one of those infuriating superior laughs of his and tell her where she was getting it all wrong.
Only he didn’t. Didn’t yell. Didn’t laugh. Didn’t stop!
As the shadowy figure pounded down the beach towards her Jemima began to get a very bad feeling about it. The urge to scream at him died abruptly.
‘Niall?’ she said uncertainly.
In the moon shadows her pursuer could have been anyone. He was just a dark blur of greys moving steadily across the sand towards his target. There was something menacing in the way he had locked on to her and was just ploughing towards her, not fast, but somehow relentless.
‘Niall?’ she said again, hoping against hope. Knowing it wasn’t.
He fetched up a few feet from her.
‘Who’s Niall? Your latest sucker?’ said Basil Blane, panting.
Jemima drew a harsh breath. It was almost drowned by the rattle of the wind in the palm trees and the swish-swish of the tide at her back. But to her it sounded as loud as a scream.
To Basil too. He did laugh then. An ugly crowing laugh that made her skin crawl.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘“Whither thou goest…”’ Basil swaggered forward. ‘I told you I wouldn’t let you go, babe. I found you. You’re mine.’
The old familiar terror seemed to sweep round her like a cloak. It muffled all sounds but her own frantic breathing…his…
She said, bravely enough, ‘I don’t owe you anything.’ But it seemed to die on the Caribbean breeze.
‘Not true. And we both know that isn’t true. You were a stick insect in a badly fitting uniform when you came to me.’
‘I didn’t come to you,’ protested Jemima, temporarily stung out of her fear by the sheer injustice of it. ‘You chased me.’
‘I discovered you,’ he corrected.
‘I never asked to be discovered. You saw me in the school play and you wouldn’t let go until my parents agreed to me doing those studio shots.’
‘And you never looked back, did you?’
‘Maybe I should have,’ said Jemima slowly. ‘I missed a lot of school because of you.’
‘And you made a lot of money.’
She was silenced. She couldn’t deny it. Her father had been made redundant. He hadn’t complained, and he’d kept on looking for work, but everyone had known that he wouldn’t find it. Not at his age. The bills had piled up; the mortgage had slipped. Then seventeen-year-old Jemima had started to earn session fees.
‘Your family survived because of me,’ he said intensely.
‘I accept that everyone was grateful because I could earn some money—’
‘Your damned sister wouldn’t have finished college if I hadn’t got you onto the teen circuit.’ The anger flared out. ‘And now she looks down her nose at me.’
That wasn’t the whole truth and they both knew it.
Jemima began, ‘You can’t blame Izzy—’
He steamed straight over that. ‘And you’re worse. Now you’ve hit the big time you can’t wait to get rid of me.’
‘It’s not like that.’ Oh, God, she was doing the same thing as always: falling back on self-justification, as if he were in the right. Jemima heard the apologetic note in her voice. She hated it.
‘Don’t tell me what it’s like.’ Basil’s voice was choked with rage. ‘I know what it’s like.’
He took a step forward. In the moonlight she could not make out his expression. But she could see that he was shaking.
‘You used me. And now you think you can dump me?’
‘I didn’t!’
He wasn’t listening. ‘I did everything for you.’
‘Altogether too much,’ said Jemima dryly, though she was trembling
The lights of the party she had left were as far away as the moon. The sound of the steel band came and went on the breeze. She was all alone on the beach with a man who hated her.
Basil’s hand flashed out. Jemima thought he was going to hit her and jerked away. But he caught her wrist instead. She put her full weight into straining against his hold. But he didn’t seem to notice.
‘Oh, it’s that again, is it?’ he said grimly. ‘Wicked Basil, trying to run little Jemima’s life!’
She tried to stay calm. ‘Let me go, Basil,’ she said quietly.
He didn’t even seem to hear. ‘What the hell was I supposed to do? It was my job!’
‘Basil, let me go and we’ll talk.’ She hated the pleading note in her voice. But she had never seen him like this before. She did not know what he might do.
He glared at her. His frustration, like a weapon, flourished in her face. ‘You were my client. You paid me to run your life.’
He was clearly beyond reason. Jemima tu
gged her hands, but his grip was like iron.
‘Only your bloody sister wasn’t having it. She always hated me.’
His head was moving from side to side like a snake’s. Suddenly she began to feel really afraid.
Jemima abandoned sweet reason. ‘Stop it, Basil,’ she said sharply.
It startled him enough to make him loosen his grip just a fraction. Jemima tugged her hands out of his and started to run. But she was wearing those wedge-heeled espadrilles again and she stumbled in the sand. She fell to one knee.
At once Basil was on her, grabbing and scrabbling, panting like a starving monkey. She felt Ellie’s pretty dress twist to breaking point. Then tear. She fought back, but she was off balance and she had never hit anyone in her life. She did not succeed in doing much beyond protecting her face.
Basil was absolutely mindless. He tore at her as if she was a house he wanted to break into. And all the time he was muttering crazy things, phrases and half-sentences that made no sense.
Jemima tried to cry out. But she was so busy defending herself that she could not get enough breath or force her vocal chords into obedience. It was like the worst sort of nightmare.
‘Mine,’ Basil was saying again and again. ‘Stupid. Ungrateful. Bitch. Mine. I’ll show them. Mine.’
And then, amazingly, there were more footsteps, running towards them. Basil did not hear them. But Jemima did. With a great effort she heaved him off, scrabbled herself to her knees and cried out.
‘Jay Jay?’ called the voice.
Niall!
‘Oh, thank God!’ she exclaimed, half weeping.
Basil leaped back, snarling. This time he flung her onto the sand. She could smell the rum on his breath and the leather of his fashionable Italian jacket. He was pinning her flailing arms above her head, leaning heavily on her breasts. She thought he was going to suffocate her.
And suddenly she had the strength to fight back.
‘Get off me,’ she shouted, gasping for breath. ‘You’re vile. I hate you.’
‘Jay Jay!’ said the voice, a lot nearer. It sounded grim.
Basil was beyond noticing.
But Jemima wasn’t locked in her voiceless nightmare any longer. She flung her head aside and yelled at the top of her lungs, even though her ribs felt as if they were on fire.
‘Over here. Help. Help!’
The pain in her ribs stopped as if someone had taken the lid off a pressure cooker. She could feel the night air on her face again. She drew great gasping gulps of air into her lungs, eyes shut.
There were ugly sounds. Jemima struggled up onto her elbow, still breathing hard. A tangle of flying punches and wicked kicks writhed on the sand, grunting. She could not tell who was who—or who was winning.
‘Niall,’ she cried out, in quick alarm.
She hauled herself to her feet and looked around for a way to stop the fight. Her side hurt. She put a hand to it instinctively but it was not important. Somehow she had to stop the fight now, before someone got seriously hurt and it was all her fault.
Clearly there was no point in shouting at them. She looked round for a hose to douse them, a weapon to bring them to their senses. There was nothing. Not so much as a child’s discarded bucket and spade. Not even a piece of driftwood.
And then she saw the little heap of darkness. Niall must have shrugged out of his dinner jacket before he plucked Basil off her. She picked it up. There was an ominous crackling and she thought—the glass! He put my glass in his pocket and it must have broken. Oh, well, it can’t be helped.
She threw the jacket over the struggling pair. She tried to avoid their faces, though she wasn’t sure whether she’d succeeded or not. The noises changed to frustrated rage.
Basil emerged first, spitting. But almost at once Niall was up too. He launched himself at Basil in a flying rugby tackle. It brought him down with a cruel thud. Niall crashed down on top of him, then consolidated his position with a knee in the small of Basil’s back.
He looked up at Jemima. ‘You’re hurt.’ His chest was heaving but he sounded totally in control.
She shot the hand away from her bruised ribs as if she had been burnt. ‘No. I’m fine.’
‘You don’t sound fine,’ said Niall, getting his breath back with startling rapidity. ‘What did this piece of garbage do to you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I saw him,’ said Niall flatly.
She looked away. The lights of the party were bobbing about, smearing the fathomless sky. She blinked hard. It was no good. They were still more diffuse than they ought to have been.
And Niall was still waiting.
‘Well, nothing major,’ she muttered at last. She hoped—no, prayed—that the stupid tears didn’t sound in her voice. She couldn’t bear it if he thought she was one of those drippy women who needed to be rescued all the time.
‘Really?’ He was politely incredulous. ‘I don’t think we agree on what is major, here.’ His voice roughened. ‘He had you on the ground.’
Basil stirred, muttering. Niall jabbed his knee and Basil subsided.
‘Well?’ he challenged Jemima.
She pushed her hair off her face. ‘It’s—complicated.’
‘Complicated? Ah. So this is the not-boyfriend you couldn’t handle.’
For some reason the hundred per cent accuracy of that infuriated her. ‘Have you been taping our conversations?’
‘I have a good memory.’
‘For counting cards,’ she said scornfully. ‘Have you been counting my mistakes as well?’
Even in the shadows she could see his bafflement. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
Tears pricked her eyes. Reaction, she told herself. Aloud she said sharply, ‘There’s no need to shout at me.’
‘I am not shouting,’ he yelled.
Jemima looked away again. And this time there was no doubt. It was not just the shamefully girly tears in her eyes distorting her vision. One of the party lights was definitely bigger.
Not just bigger, moving.
‘Someone’s coming,’ she hissed.
‘Good. Then maybe we can get some sense here.’ Niall looked over her shoulder and raised a hand in greeting. ‘Hi, Al. What kept you?’
Al was carrying one of the flaming torches. It illumined a worried face before he lifted it high to survey the scene.
‘Jay Jay, is that you? Are you okay?’
She nodded, suddenly terribly tired.
‘It was real a stroke of luck that we saw that guy follow you,’ said Al with feeling. ‘What a relief for you.’
Niall was ironic. ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’
Basil had stopped struggling or even muttering. Niall removed his knee and stood up. A little stiffly, Jemima saw.
Her conscience smote her—rather late, admittedly. ‘Did he hurt you?’
‘What do you care?’
Al said hurriedly, ‘Look, kids, let’s continue the fight inside. I’ve got the island’s great and good mingling back there. I don’t want them thinking Pirate’s Point is where you go for a fight on a Friday night. Be discreet, okay?’
Niall hauled Basil to his feet. ‘How are you going to be discreet when Jemima charges this guy with assault?’
Al shifted from foot to foot. ‘Can we talk about that indoors?’
Niall shrugged. But he applied a hand to Basil’s collar and frogmarched him in Al’s wake, pausing only to scoop up his jacket from the ground, where they had kicked it in their struggles.
Jemima followed wearily. She found that the borrowed blouse was sagging badly, leaving one shoulder bare. It skirted indecency by a whisker. Even in the shadows Niall would have seen the gleam of exposed flesh. It was almost the last straw. She held the front together convulsively, as if she could rewrite the last few minutes by sheer force of will.
Al took them to the terrace of his private cottage.
‘Discreet, indeed,’ said Niall dryly. ‘But I warn you now—no cover-up. This thug—’
he pushed Basil up the steps onto the decking ‘—could have injured Jemima seriously.’
In the light of the terrace lamp Basil looked pasty and rather sick. But he managed to pull himself together enough to say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Niall looked at him with contempt. ‘So explain it to me.’
Basil jerked his head at Jemima. ‘Ask her,’ he said sullenly.
Al seemed to think that was reasonable. But Niall’s mouth thinned.
‘I’m asking you,’ he said with deceptive mildness.
Basil snorted. ‘Got you hooked too, has she?’
Jemima sank into a rattan chair, wincing. Her ribs were really throbbing now, and she could feel a graze on the side of her face. Her naked shoulder was chilled under the breeze from the sea. She shivered.
Niall shook out his jacket and dropped it round her. Oh, hell, she must look really indecent, she thought.
‘Thank you.’ It was no more than a murmur.
He settled the coat about her shoulders, bunching her hair and pulling it over the collar. That made her wince too. He stepped away at once.
So much for her vainglory about her shining tresses this evening, she thought with irony. After her tussle on the beach, the lush waves were back to sand-filled tangles all over again.
Still, at least Niall was not looking at her now. Eyes narrowed to black slits of malevolence, all his attention was focused on Basil.
‘Excuse me? ‘ he said softly
His tone chilled Jemima to the marrow. But Basil was not so alert to Niall’s moods.
‘Her,’ he growled. ‘The face of Belinda. God, I got that deal for her. And look what she did to me.’
‘Basil, I—’
Niall ignored her. ‘I’m looking at what you did to her,’ he told Basil softly. ‘And it tempts me to kick you all the way back down to the beach again.’
Basil sat down rather fast.
Al said hastily, ‘Now, let’s talk this through, Niall. We don’t know the full story.’
Basil turned to him with eagerness. ‘You are so right. This girl was nothing until I found her. I worked my guts out for her. Gave up all my other clients. And what did she do? Ditched me the moment she got the big contract.’
Jemima closed her eyes. It sounded so plausible.
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