Dark Paradise (13 page)

'No,' he said. 'When she worked for me, she did what she was told with reasonable efficiency, but with very little effort she could have developed into a pain in the neck. I made sure that didn't happen while she was still employed by the television company, but I couldn't control what she did once she'd left, and she seems to have been having an emotional field-day. I have little sympathy for that, and none at all for the way she's involved me.'

Kate was feeling bitter herself, but just the same she was glad Alison wasn't around to hear that. However foolishly she had behaved, that tough intolerance would have bruised her.

She said slowly, 'You don't forgive easily?' and she was no longer thinking of Alison.

'You feel that I should?' He looked at her, his lip curling mockingly, as if he read a plea for clemency into her words, and she flushed.

'I suppose it would depend on the extent of the injury.' And how much, she wondered, would it cost for the blow to his masculine pride that she had dealt? She wrenched her thoughts back hurriedly to the original topic. 'Are you going to say anything to Ally?'

For a moment, he looked surprised, and she knew that Alison couldn't have been further from his thoughts either. Then he shrugged again. 'Probably not. She would seem to have enough troubles already.' Fortunate Alison, Kate thought, her heart pounding, because the glitter in the blue eyes was warning her that she couldn't hope to escape so lightly, as she was already more than aware.

In spite of the heat of the sun, she shivered suddenly and sat up.

'I—I think I'll go for a swim.'

Tine,' he said. 'Don't get out of your depth.'

She gave him a brittle smile. 'Please don't worry about me,' she said, just as if he had actually been expressing real concern about the strength of her swimming. 'I'm a survivor.'

She walked down the beach towards the water, feeling his eyes on her with every step she took, her hands clenching in tension at her sides.

His warning was too late, she thought. She was already well out of her depth, and floundering.

From her seat in the stern, Kate watched the snowy wake of the boat foaming behind them as they sped across the water.

She wasn't particularly accustomed to speed on land, let alone the ocean, and the first few times she had been a little nervous. But seeing how calmly and expertly Matt and Winston, the coloured skipper front whom they had chartered the boat, handled the powerful craft, she had grown rapidly to enjoy these outings.

The level of Matt's expertise had surprised her. She hadn't expected him to be so much at home on the water, and had said so, and he had laughed.

'I was brought up beside the sea. The family business was a boatyard, and my brother runs it now.'

It was shattering to reflect how little she really knew about him. She had only been aware of the public image, and it had angered her, enabling her to ignore the possibility of the private man behind that image. Not that Matt seemed keen to make that aspect of himself known to her. Any details about his background, his likes and dislikes, were divulged almost reluctantly.

Even after a week of the closest proximity, it was evident that he still didn't trust her particularly, Kate thought bitterly.

For instance, she still had no clearer idea of what they were doing on the island, apart from having a wonderful time, or pretending to do so, she amended.

She didn't know how he usually went about investigating his victims, but she had a shrewd idea that it was not by water-skiing or scuba-diving, or exploring the island in the jeep hired to them by Winston's brother-in-law. He took photographs, but so did every other tourist, and Kate herself featured in most of them.

She had fully expected to be left to her own devices while he pursued his own private enquiries, but it had never happened. If his aim was to convince some unseen watcher that they were inseparable, then he had certainly succeeded, she thought irritably.

She didn't know which was the harder to bear—the long daylight hours when other people were around, and she had to act the part of Matt's holiday lover, or the nights when she lay in bed, staring sightlessly at the passage of the moonlight across the floor of their room, and listening to Matt's deep regular breathing.

But all the agonising was on her side, she knew. Matt was totally casual about the proximity he'd forced on them both, even though sharing a room and not a bed must have been a new experience for him, too.

In the circumstances, he had been considerate, she thought. If he had wanted to go on punishing her, he could have created all kinds of difficulties, embarrassed her a dozen times a day, but he hadn't. In fact he had gone out of his way to ease any small awkwardnesses that threatened, and she knew she should have been grateful.

But it was a fact that the pleasant yet aloof courtesy he showed her when they were alone could signal only one thing—his indifference.

It was easy for him to be polite because he didn't care—because he didn't want her. He wasn't even sufficiently interested in her to persuade her into a casual affair, and although Kate might assure herself vehemently that it was the last thing she wanted, it was nevertheless humiliating to realise she didn't even possess that much attraction for him.

But it was hardly surprising, she told herself. She'd behaved badly towards him since day one, and Matt Lincoln had no need to bother about ladies who consistently gave him a hard time. There were plenty who would be only too eager to please, and Kate could name several staying at the hotel right there and then. Imogen had departed a couple of days before, still trailing her discontent like a shadow, but there were still covetous glances being directed from any number of directions, and the ambiguity of her position made them oddly hard to bear.

If she and Matt had been lovers, then their relationship would have provided her with some kind of security. She could have been able to signal tacitly, This is my man—so hands off!' But she had neither the confidence nor, she felt, the right to do any such thing.

And if she had been able to go on hating him, resenting him as she had done originally, then predatory glances from other women could have been shrugged off as typical, justifying all her prejudices against him.

But she couldn't accuse him of encouraging them, she acknowledged reluctantly. He took his part in the flirtatious banter that went on, but he never initiated it, and he shielded Kate from the goodhumoured ribaldry of some of the other men.

Not that they spent much of their time with the other guests at the hotel. They were out most of each day, contenting themselves with a simple lunch of fruit, or, if they were on the boat, fish which Matt and Winston had caught, cooked deliciously over a driftwood fire in some secluded cove. And they didn't always dine at the hotel either, which Kate found a relief, because invariably after dinner there was dancing, and she found that a candlelit table for two overlooking the water in one of the Anchorage restaurants was infinitely less threatening to her peace of mind than moving slowly to music, held close in Matt's arms.

Matt knew about body language—it had been the subject of a lighthearted discussion during one lunchtime that they had spent at the hotel, and he had talked about how he could read whether he had managed to put his television interviewees at their ease or on their guard from their physical attitudes as he talked to them. There had been a lot of laughter, and taking up exaggerated stances of relaxation and aggression by the others, but for Kate it had been a warning.

Because soon, if she wasn't careful, Matt was going to read the growing desperation in her, the uncontrollable yearning as she melted into his arms, and then she would be in trouble.

Because he would either take what she was aching to give him, or he would reject her, letting her down gently, no doubt, but firmly just the same, and she didn't know which would be the most damaging.

With each day and night that passed, the desire to belong to him was increasing, and she was ashamed of the urgency of her response each time Matt came near her. For so long she had held her emotions under such strict control that she was shocked to discover how fragile her defences were. She had remained unscathed in the past, because there had never been any real threat.

Not even, she was beginning to realise, from Drew.

She could even look back with detachment now, remembering every painful detail—but, for the first time, without wincing.

Drew had arrived at the art college during her second year. He was a visiting lecturer, on an exchange visit from America, and he had a confident, sexy Californian gloss which had knocked them all off their feet.

Fancying him had been more than fashionable—in fact, a positive epidemic, Kate recalled, and she had joined in like all the others, although she never made one of the admiring crowd which usually gathered round him in the college canteen, or at social functions. She had her own circle of friends, her own passion for work to absorb her.

She still couldn't fully understand why Drew had singled her out, unless, initially, it had been a genuine recognition of her talent. He had made it seem so, but she could never be sure. She had been flattered by his praise, and by the increasing attention he'd paid her.

With the distance of time, she could acknowledge that flattery had played a bigger part in her infatuation than she had realised at the time. But then she had only known that she blossomed each time Drew looked at her with that smile in his eyes, or spoke to her with that special warmth. None of her previous experiences with the male sex had taken her further than a few kisses. She was almost pitifully naive, aware for the first time of the urgings of her body, but unsure how to cope.

She had begun to meet Drew outside college hours. He took her to exhibitions and concerts, and introduced her to the kind of small Italian and Chinese restaurants that she would never have found on her own. They seemed to talk about everything in the world—or perhaps she talked, and he listened—but in spite of her shy probing, he said little about California and his own work there. He wasn't evasive so much as dismissive— as if the here and now were all that mattered. It was heady stuff.

And it deafened her to the warnings that were beginning to come her way. Someone hinted that Drew had a wife back in California, and there were rumours that Kate wasn't the only girl in his life here either. 'One of Drew's harem,' she heard herself described as, and it stung, even though she didn't believe it. She had had to put up with a lot of jealousy and spiteful remarks ever since it had become known that she was seeing Drew. So it was easy to dismiss the latest warnings as mere envy, instead of asking herself if there couldn't be a grain of truth in her friends' guarded remarks, because by now she was too bemused by love to care.

She wanted desperately for Drew to tell her he loved her too. She had a favourite fantasy where they married and went back to California together. She saw them living in a house overlooking the ocean. There would be a terrace, she thought dreamily, where she could paint…

But the declaration she longed for did not come, although the pressure on her to make love with Drew was increasing all the time.