Vendetta (8 page)

He paused and Vivian held her breath, hoping the fascinating revelations were going to continue.

‘Then Barbara told me she was pregnant and I realised just how permanent was the trap my father had planned for me. Except it wasn’t—the next day she and the baby were killed…’

He reached for his wine-glass again and Vivian couldn’t stop a darting gesture of involuntary protest.

‘Oh, no, please don’t drink that!’ She clumsily tried to knock it out of his hand.

‘Why not? Are you afraid I’ll pass out on you before I finish baring my soul?’ He stopped, his face sharpening as he looked from her stark expression of appalled guilt to his glass, his shrewd brain making the impossible leap in perception.

‘My God, is there something wrong with this?
What
have you put in my wine?
’

He lunged across the table with a roar, scattering the burning candles, and Vivian’s chair crashed over as she jumped to her feet, sending the empty bottle in her lap spinning to the floor.

She didn’t wait to see him recognise it. She fled.

She flew down the hall and crashed through the door into the lighthouse in a blind panic, triggering the sensor lights in the stairwell. She was thundering up the stairs before she remembered there were no locks on the doors, nowhere to hide. It was too late now; she could feel the pounding vibration of his mysteriously delayed pursuit through the steel under her flying feet.

He caught her just below the fourth level, not even attempting to stop her but merely gathering her up in his furious momentum, driving her onwards and upwards with the bulldozing threat of his body. Only when they reached the landing of his room did he actually lay a hand on her, catching her right wrist and using their combined speed to swing her away from the stairs and through the doorway, shoving her back against the wall, anchoring her there with the full thrust of his body, slamming his other hand on to the light-switch so that she was exposed to the full glare of his rage.

‘How much did you give me?’ he snarled, his breath fogging up her glasses, his lips brushing hers in an angry parody of a kiss. ‘The whole damn bottle? How
much
, damn you?’ He rattled her against the wall.

‘I don’t know—a little, a teaspoonful, I don’t
know!
’ she panted desperately. ‘I spilled the rest of it, that’s why the bottle was empty. I’m sorry, Nicholas, I panicked,
you were frightening me…’ She was begging now, but she was beyond caring. ‘Please, I’m sorry—’

‘
Sorry!
’ he ground out. He shook his head violently, as if the drug was already beginning to affect him.

‘Maybe you should sit down before you fall down,’ she said, feeling wretchedly weak herself.

‘Maybe I should,’ he said thickly. He pulled her away from the wall and dragged her over to the bed, pulling her between his spread legs as he sat down, fumbling in his bath-robe pocket. She felt a cold metallic clasp replace the heat of his hand on her wrist, and looked down just in time to see him snapping the other handcuff around his own wrist.

‘My God, what are you doing?’ she asked numbly, staring at their shackled limbs. So this was why she had got such a head start on his superior strength and speed. He had gone to get
chains!

‘Making sure you’ll be here when I wake up,’ he said grimly. ‘
If
I wake up.’

She shuddered. ‘Don’t say that! Please, Nicholas, where’s the key? You don’t need to do this. I promise I’ll stay…’

For an answer he fell diagonally back on the bed, throwing his shackled right wrist forcefully out to his side so that she was brought tumbling down on top of him with a soft scream of terror. He pulled off her glasses and tossed them on the floor in a careless gesture that she found paradoxically even more threatening than his violence.

‘Nicholas, no…’ She struggled to find purchase with her knees against the mattress, conscious that she was straddling him, and the towelling robe was parting over his powerful thighs.

‘Nicholas, yes!’ He pulled her head down, crushing her mouth against his, wrapping his right arm across her back so that her captive arm was forced behind her. He kissed her until she tried to bite him, and then he nudged her face aside with his jaw and sank his teeth into her vulnerable throat. She cried out, struggling weakly as he began to suckle at the bite, murmuring words against her skin that sapped her will and created tiny shocks of pleasure deep in her feminine core. He began to kiss her again, and this time she didn’t fight him and the forceful thrust of his tongue gentled to a slow, seductive glide that made her tremble with yearning.

‘I may pass out, but not before I’ve had a taste of you…not before you’ve given me everything I want…’ His mouth moved to the other side of her throat, nibbling and sucking with tender savagery as his hips and thighs began to undulate beneath her. ‘I’m going to devour every lovely inch of you…use my lips and teeth and tongue on you in ways that you’ve never even imagined…brand you all over with my mark so that anyone who looks at you will know you’ve come from my bed…’

Vivian knew he was talking about Peter. Briefly surfacing from her passion-drugged state, she tried to arch away, but Nicholas shifted his hand from the back of her neck to the front of her silk blouse, slipping his fingers into the prim neckline and ripping it open with a single downward stroke that scattered the pearl buttons like lustrous tears across his chest.

‘Nicholas!’

Her gasp was lost in a spasm of violent sensation as he flicked open the tiny plastic catch between her breasts and allowed them to tumble free of the confining lace. The
ginger freckles were stretched over their swollen fullness, the soft pink tips swaying against the hard contours of his chest, contracting instantly into tight points that scraped and caught on his own peaked masculine nipples.

His chest heaved and he uttered a harsh sound, violently tilting his hips to roll her on to her side and then her back, hefting her up against the pillows, rising up and over her on his braced hands. In almost the same motion he loosened the belt of his robe so that it fell open around her, baring the full length of his body to her restless gaze. He was hugely aroused and shuddering with a fierce tension, for all the world as if she had given him an aphrodisiac instead of a sedative.

He looked triumphantly down at the lavish bounty he had exposed, his nostrils flaring as he caught the enticing scent of her body, and recognised the subtle signals of her arousal.

‘Yes—
Nicholas
,’ he ground out. ‘Not Peter,
Nicholas
. Admit it. You couldn’t give a damn about him when you’re with me!’

He cupped her breast with a possessive movement of his manacled hand, the narrow chain connecting their wrists dragging in a cold caress against the skin of her ribs as he moved deliberately, his fingers contracting and relaxing, his thumb rubbing against the rigid nipple.

He bent his head and his tongue darted out to curl around the tip he was cherishing, dragging it up into his mouth, moistening it with tender care then releasing it to the cool night air.

‘You don’t love him; you don’t want to marry him.’ The words were muffled by her flesh. ‘You don’t want to cling to your safe, unadventurous past…you want the fierce ex
citement only I can give you…you want this…and this…’ He held her pleasure-drenched gaze as his mouth closed over her, slanted softly, sucked lightly, twisted, lifted and lowered again…

‘I’m…not…the one who won’t let…the past go,’ she panted, biting her lip as he repeated the voluptuously unsatisfying action over and over, clenching her chained hand helplessly against her side, groaning with sweet agony as he finally used his teeth and suckled her with the rough urgency that she needed, marking her as he had promised with his erotic brand of possession. Her extravagant response made him explode into action, pushing heavily between her thighs, moving jerkily on her as if the fabric between them didn’t exist, as if he was already buried deep inside her, pleasuring them both beyond imagining…

‘Say it, Vivian…stop holding yourself back…stop pushing me away.’ She was suddenly aware of a settling heaviness in his body as his head sank down on her shoulder. ‘Don’t let me go down into this damned darkness without a prayer…’

‘Stop talking about dying!’ she cried frantically, tugging at his hair to try and keep him awake.

‘I’m not talking about dying. I’m talking about living. I can’t let him get you… Gotta keep you with me,’ he said with a blurred illogicality that Vivian knew from experience was the drug tightening its grip on his mind, but she sought to drag him back to her with desperate words of truth.

‘Peter won’t ever get me because he doesn’t
want
me, damn you. Do you hear me, Nicholas Thorne? You were right. I don’t love Peter and Peter doesn’t love me. He
loves my
sister
. It’s
Janna
he’s going to marry on Saturday, you big, gullible oaf, not me!’

For a moment he remained still, a dead weight, and she thought he had lapsed into unconsciousness, but then he suddenly rolled off her in a tangle of white towelling.

‘What did you say?’

The face beside hers on the pillow suddenly looked completely wide awake. But no, his pupil was almost a pinpoint. He was conscious through sheer force of will.

She moistened her lips and nervously tucked her blouse across her breasts one-handed as she said in a husky little voice, ‘I cancelled our engagement last week. But not the wedding. You see, I found out Peter and Janna had fallen in love, and, well—they were sort of mired in the inertia of their guilt. They didn’t deliberately set out to hurt me, and I realised I hadn’t ever really been in love with Peter, not the way that Janna is. So I told her to go ahead and get married in my place and I’d dance at their wedding.’

She smiled to show how bravely she had accepted the crushing blow to her feminine pride, but the smile began to waver under his sombre stare and, to her horror, her eyes began to fill.

‘I suppose now you’re going to tell me I got what I deserved,’ she whispered, and burst into a flood of tears.

But instead of gloating, as she had always dreaded that he would, Nicholas quietly gathered her shuddering body against his warm length and stroked her wild ginger mane, uttering soothing murmurs while she sobbed out all the wretched details against his chest.

It took a long time to expend her storm of stored-up tears, and repeated assurances from Nicholas that he had no interest in wreaking his savage revenge on her damned
sister’s damned wedding, before Vivian finally hiccupped herself into exhausted sleep. Only then did the man holding her allow his mind and body to go equally lax, finally relinquishing his formidable will to the powerful seduction of the drug in his veins.

V
IVIAN
took another frigid slap in the mouth and felt her throat burn with the salty abrasion as she coughed the seawater out of her lungs.

She sluggishly instructed her head to turn and her arms to rise and fall, rise and fall, in the rhythmic stroke that had won several long-distance ocean swims at the surf-club she had belonged to in her late teens.

The wet-suit that she had taken from among the diving-gear in the lighthouse storeroom was providing her with extra buoyancy and some protection against the cold, but she knew that mental stamina would be her greatest asset in the gruelling swim.

She turned on her side, checking that she was still moving in the right direction, heading towards the uneven lurch against the horizon that Frank had let slip one day was the nearest inhabited island. Thank God the weather was good and the sea not too choppy, but even if there had been a cyclone Vivian wouldn’t have cared.

She had woken just before dawn and looked at the man lying next to her in a deep, drugged sleep and acknowledged with a thrill of despair that she was in love with her capricious captor.

In the space of a few days the morals of a lifetime had been swept away. Instead of drawing Nicholas into the sunlight of reason, she had been drawn into the shadows. Something dark in herself was called forth by the darkness in him. She could protest all she liked, but all Nicholas had to do was touch her and she melted. And he knew it.

Last night he had admitted that he had never loved his wife. That called into question everything she had come to believe she knew about him. It made his motive for revenge not one of honest emotional torment, which could be appeased, but of cold-blooded, implacable malice.

The realisation that Nicholas must have uncuffed her before he fell asleep was merely confirmation of her bleak theory that he believed he had won their battle of wills. The empty steel bracelet dangling from his own still-manacled wrist was a mute testament to his confidence in her sexual subjugation.

Protest had exploded in her brain.
No!
She wouldn’t let him distort her love into something that she was ashamed of. She had to be out of his reach before he woke up. Before he could touch her again…

Fool, fool, fool, Vivian chanted inside her head, in rhythm to her stroking through the water. To believe that you could play with fire and not be burnt. Fool, fool…

‘Little fool! What in the hell do you think you’re doing? Of all the ridiculous, theatrical stunts!’

She suddenly realised that the new voice was much deeper than the one in her head and far more insulting, and the loud slapping sound wasn’t the rising waves hitting her face; it was the sound of oars striking the water.

Water sheeted down her face from her sopping hair, sticking her eyelashes together and getting in her swollen
eyes as she stopped to tread water and was nearly run down by a small aluminum dinghy rowing furiously towards her.

Nicholas was shipping the oars, leaning over the side, yelling, cursing, trying to grab her slippery wet-suited arm.

Vivian swam away, coughing and spluttering as she briefly sank. When she struggled to the surface again, Nicholas was standing silhouetted against the crisp morning sky, the boat rocking dangerously. ‘For God’s sake, Vivian,’ he cried bleakly. ‘Where in the hell do you think you’re going?’

Still choking on salt-water and shock, Vivian didn’t bother to answer; she just pointed in the direction of the distant island.

Nicholas exploded in another series of explicit curses. ‘Do you
want
to bloody drown? You can’t swim that far! Get in this damned boat
now!
’

For an answer Vivian rolled over and began swimming with renewed energy. Each time she turned her head to breathe, she saw Nicholas pulling on the oars, keeping on a parallel course, his grim mouth opening and shutting on words she couldn’t hear through her water-clogged ears.

Gradually Vivian’s false burst of strength drained away and the next time that Nicholas veered close she didn’t have the energy to pull away.

He leaned over and caught her by the zip-cord trailing from the back of her neck, forcing her to tread water as she clung to the side of the boat, gasping air into her burning lungs. ‘That’s enough! You’ve made your point, Vivian,’ he said roughly. ‘You want me to beg? I will:
please
get into the bloody boat. We’ll talk, and then I’ll take you anywhere you want me to…’

Her green eyes were enormous in her exhausted face. ‘I’m not that gullible any more,’ she choked, fighting her pathetic desire to trust him, even now. ‘
You’re
the gullible one. You never fooled me at all. I knew even before I came here who you were!’

He looked thunderstruck. ‘You
knew?
’

‘That Nicholas Rose was Nicholas Thorne,’ she threw into his haggard face. Her frigid lips and tongue shaped the words with increasing difficulty. ‘But I came anyway, because I knew that if this was some kind of vicious v-vendetta, then the only way to stop you was to confront you face to face…so I let you d-drug me…I only
pretended
to w-want to escape… Everything you did to me you were only able to d-do because I
chose
to
let
you… Because I wanted t-time to b-be with you and c-convince you that r-revenge is n-not the way for y-you t-to find p-peace…’

Her teeth were chattering so much that she could hardly get the last defiant words out, and Nicholas made an abrupt growl and rammed his hands under her arms, hauling her over the gunwale and dumping her into the bottom of the boat.

‘Thank you for
letting
me rescue you!’ he said sardonically. ‘I take it you weren’t simply
pretending
this time.’

Vivian suddenly felt blessedly numb all over. Even her bleeding heart was cauterised by the cold. ‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why did you b-bother to come and get me?’

‘Why in the hell do you think? Because I love you, damn it!’ he snarled savagely, not even bothering to look at her as he swivelled his torso to signal with his upraised arm. Automatically following his gaze, a stupefied Vivian saw the blurry image of a white launch that looked as big as an ocean liner foaming down on them.

‘Coastguard?’ Her mouth seemed to have split from her mind.

‘No. Mine. The
Hero
. It’s been out doing a marine survey for the last few days. As soon as I found your clothes on the beach, I called her up and used her radar to track you. Ahoy! Derek! Send down that sling, will you?’

She screwed her eyes shut as she was strapped and hauled and bundled, and passed from hand to hand like an unwanted package until she felt the familiar arms taking possession of her again.

Nicholas carried her down a brightly lit companionway and into a spacious white cabin, kicking the door shut before rapidly stripping the over-large wet-suit from her numb body.

His mouth quirked when he saw the emerald-green bra and panties she wore underneath. His smile thawed a tiny slice of heart. Maybe she wasn’t hallucinating, after all. Maybe he really had said it.

‘My favourites,’ he murmured, fingering the saturated lace. ‘Underwear that matches your eyes.’ And then he peeled them off too, smothering her protests at his rough handling with a thick, blue towel, rubbing her vigorously until she cried out at the pain of the blood returning to the surface of her icy skin.

‘Don’t be such a baby!’ he said, planting a kiss on her blue lips as he finished a strenuous scouring of her hair, which had turned the dripping tails to dark red frizz. ‘We have to get you properly thawed out.’

He stripped off his own clothes and walked naked with her to the wide berth, lying down on it and mounding the patterned continental quilt over them both as the boat’s
powerful engines throttled to full power and the sky began to whip past the brass port-hole above their heads.

‘Stop cringing, this is all very scientific. I’m a scientist—I know what I’m talking about,’ he said, cuddling her close, warming her with the sensual heat of his body, breast to breast, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. He shuddered and buried his face in her neck. ‘Oh,
God
, that feels good.’

Vivian knew what he meant. Tears of exhaustion and confusion trembled on her still-damp lashes.

He lifted his head and kissed them away. ‘I’m sorry, Ginger—first things first. If you had bothered to wait for me to wake up this morning, you would have known this already…in fact, you would have known last night if you hadn’t sabotaged my good intentions. My name is Nicholas James Thorne…the Second.’

‘The Second?’ she whispered, bewildered. Was he suggesting they start all over again? A second chance?

‘To distinguish me from my father—Nicholas James Thorne the
First
,’ he said deliberately.

Her brow wrinkled soggily. ‘Your father has the same name as you?’

‘No,
I
have the same name as
him
,’ he corrected urgently, as if the fine distinction was important. ‘Just before I was born he had an illness that rendered him sterile, which was why he was so obsessive about me marrying and perpetuating the name. There are two Nicholas Thornes, Vivian, but only one was driving the car that night—my father.’

Vivian’s bleached face stormed with vivid emotion as she realised what he was telling her. ‘But, your son—’

His fingers across her mouth hushed her confused
protest, and the riot of blood in her veins became a visible tumult that bloomed across her skin. ‘I have no son. Your “boy” in the back seat was me. To the doctor who patched me up, a twenty-five-year-old probably
did
seem like a boy—he certainly seemed old to me, although he was probably only in his late fifties.

‘After Barbara was killed, my father said it didn’t matter that I was crippled, as long as my genes were healthy. We had endless rows about my refusal to marry again. In the end I turned my back on it all—my father, his money, the business I was supposed to take over, the whole concept of Being A Thorne. I didn’t realise that after the accident his dream had become a ruthless obsession, and the obsession had developed into a dangerous fixation with you…’

Vivian struggled to sit up, but Nicholas held her down with implacable gentleness. ‘Are you saying this was all
his
idea?’ she asked hoarsely through her salt-scored throat.

‘I had no idea what he was planning,’ he said emphatically. ‘Not until I paid a long-overdue duty visit last week. As usual, our discussion turned into a furious row. He suddenly started shouting the most ridiculous things… about how it was all your fault his son had turned against him and how he was finally going to make you and Janna pay for murdering his grandson. How he had waited years for just the right moment to get you where he wanted you… He was boasting about how he was going to do it when he had a massive stroke—’

‘Oh, God…’ Vivian’s fist came up to her mouth and Nicholas eased it away, unsurprised by her horrified compassion for the man who had tried to hurt her.

‘No, he’s not dead, but he’s in an extremely bad way,’ he said sombrely, wrapping her fist reassuringly in his. His body shifted against hers, enveloping her in a fresh wave of blissful warmth.

‘As soon as he was taken to hospital, I scoured his desk and files in case his incredible ravings were true. I found his dossier on you and a load of legal transactions with Marvel-Mitchell, and I got a shock to find it was actually on the verge of happening—and on Nowhere of all places—while I was scheduled to be away in Florida. Here!’ His voice hardened and she felt the muscles of his chest tense as if against a blow to the heart. ‘On
my
island…the place I used to come to get away from his insidious interference in my life. That was part of his sick delusion, you see,’ he added tiredly. ‘That he was doing this for
my
sake. So I fired the sleazy hireling who was supposed to do all the dirty work, and flew down here myself to…’ He hesitated uneasily.

‘To take his place?’ she challenged painfully.

He leaned up on one elbow and said ruefully, ‘Actually, I came hot-foot to rescue you. To apologise and try to smooth things over and explain about my father’s condition—’

‘Rescue me?
Apologise?
By
drugging
me and photographing me naked in bed with you and threatening to make me have your
baby?
’ Vivian squawked at him incredulously. ‘You expect me to believe that was your idea of
smoothing things over?
’

To her fascination he flushed, adjusting his eye-patch in the first unconsciously nervous gesture she had ever seen him make. ‘Yes, well, you weren’t quite naked. And, anyway, that was partly your fault.’

‘
My
fault?’

‘I was expecting your sister. I had intended to be very civilised and restrained and then use my power of attorney to sign the settlement contract and wave Janna a grateful goodbye, but I took one look at you and went off like a rocket.’ His voice roughened as he began to play with her damp ginger curls. ‘I wanted you more than any woman I’ve wanted in my life. I can’t explain it. I just saw you, touched you, and
knew
that we were made for each other, that you felt the same, powerful attraction that I did…

‘But I knew from my father’s file that you were due to get married in a week, so I didn’t have much time. I decided to take some drastic short cuts, use every despicable tool conveniently placed at my disposal, to keep you here and break down your resistance to the notion of breaking up with Marvel. I thought that my pretending to be my father would buy me the time I needed to build on the potent physical chemistry between us. Of course, I didn’t realise that you were also doing some bidding for the same reason…’ he added slyly.

She placed her hands flat against his bare chest. ‘Not quite the same reason,’ she teased.

To her surprise he didn’t smile. ‘Are you trying to let me down lightly?’ he asked quietly.

She suddenly realised that she hadn’t told him. She traced his tight mouth with her forefinger. ‘I woke up this morning horrified to admit I’d fallen in love with you,’ she said softly. ‘My heart skewered on the sword of an emotional pirate. You can’t blame me for choosing the deep blue sea over the devil. You should have been more honest with me from the start…’