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‘Tell you what,’ she suggested, ‘I really need to powder my nose. If you could find me a long, cool drink in the meantime, who knows?’ And she regained her hand and melted away into the crowd. A quick peep over her shoulder once she was inside told her that another woman had claimed him.
All the better, she thought as she found her bag, unobtrusively scanned the staircase and, seeing it deserted, slipped upstairs. No one knew better than she that there was a downstairs powder room for just these occasions, but surely a guest in a supposedly strange house could be forgiven for going upstairs?
And, in the proverbial twinkling of an eye, she’d let herself into her old bedroom. The room was in darkness but she waited for a few minutes, then moved forward cautiously, feeling for the bed and finding a bedside table. She had her hand on what felt like a lamp when the door opened and the overhead light went on. She froze, then swung round to see the man she’d danced with anonymously standing in the doorway.
‘So,’ he said with soft but unmistakable menace, closing the door behind him without turning, ‘I was right.’
‘I…I…’ Aurora stammered ‘…I…was looking for a bathroom. I couldn’t seem to find the light, that’s all.’
He smiled grimly. ‘Again? I’m only surprised you didn’t bring your torch with you, Little Miss Spain, who didn’t want to tell me her name.’
Aurora blinked and licked her lips. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ She backed away as he moved towards her, and sat down unexpectedly on the bed. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here either. Please leave, and I’ll find the bathroom on my own.’
‘Give me one good reason for not telling me your name,’ he countered.
She swallowed and thought frantically, then decided that the closer she could stick to the truth, the better. She tossed her hair with more spirit than she actually felt. ‘I don’t believe in being bowled over by men on first encounters.’
‘As in allowing yourself to be attracted to them even when it’s already happened?’ he suggested, with a wealth of satire in his dark gaze. ‘Or wearing provocative outfits,’ he added meaningfully.
Damn, Aurora thought, that hadn’t been such a good idea after all; and could think of nothing to say, so she merely shrugged.
‘But tonight was our second encounter, wasn’t it?’ he drawled then. ‘Aren’t you forgetting the way we…bumped into each other at the top of the stairs the last time you invaded my home?’
Aurora’s mouth fell open and her eyes were suddenly huge. ‘Your home! Who…who are you?’ she said in a strangled kind of croak.
‘Luke Kirwan,’ he replied, looking altogether taller, tougher and much more dangerous than she’d imagined earlier. ‘And you’re not getting out of here until you tell me what you’re so determined to steal from me, señorita.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘YOU can’t be!’ Aurora gasped, absolutely thunderstruck.
He studied her narrowly. ‘Believe me, I am. And this is my house, in case you’ve devised a ploy to confuse things somehow or other.’
‘But…but…who’s the other one, then?’ she stammered.
‘Other what?’
‘The man you were standing with next to the piano—the man who looks just like a prof—’ She broke off and bit her lip.
Luke Kirwan frowned and she saw him concentrate for a moment, then look fleetingly amused. ‘Jack Barnard?’ he suggested. ‘He’s my solicitor, but what has that got to do with any of this, señorita?’ he enquired coldly.
Aurora swallowed painfully and closed her eyes as she grappled not only with the folly of judging people on their appearances, but also having that prickling sense of déjà vu explained to her in this manner. She had been in Luke Kirwan’s arms before—not for long before she’d started to pummel and struggle with him, but long enough, obviously, for it to have imprinted itself on her subconscious.
But, it suddenly occurred to her and she clasped her hands together tightly, if that was all he had to go on, a similar sense of déjà vu, then he didn’t have a leg to stand on…
‘I think I know what’s going through your head, my pretty,’ he drawled as her lashes flew up. ‘How do I know it was you at the top of the stairs the last time you tried to rob me? I’ll tell you. Same height, same petite figure, same…’ he paused and looked wry ‘…athleticism but, above all, same unique—as you told me yourself—perfume.’ His dark eyes glinted sardonically.
Aurora’s lips parted and her eyes widened. Then she closed them again and barely stopped herself from saying caustically that, for a man groggy with some kind of virus, he’d taken in an awful lot about her and no one would buy it anyway!
But he spoke again, and this time there was a grim warning underlying his words that caused her to tremble inwardly. ‘Of course, finding you creeping around my bedroom, when there’s a clear sign downstairs directing people to a downstairs bathroom, adds a lot more weight to my evidence, don’t you agree?’
Aurora looked around properly for the first time. It had never occurred to her that the new owner would not use the master bedroom, but that was exactly what Luke Kirwan appeared to have done. Her old bedroom was now definitely, although luxuriously, furnished for a man.
‘I preferred the view from this room,’ he said, as if reading her thoughts.
Damn, she thought again, and forcibly prevented herself from wiping her face.
‘Well, Mr Kirwan,’ she said after a moment’s thought, ‘I am sorry for inadvertently invading your bedroom but you’re mistaken. I didn’t see the sign downstairs so it couldn’t have been so very clear. As for all the rest of it, whatever it is, I…’ she tilted her chin and gazed at him imperiously ‘…I’m happy to forget about it if you would be so kind as to direct me to a bathroom. I’ll even leave your party then, since you cherish these amazing suspicions about me. In fact, nothing would induce me to stay,’ she finished proudly.
He laughed softly as he took in the hauteur of her expression, the set of her small chin, her very straight back and the outraged bearing of her slender figure—even seated on a bed. ‘You’re a rather brilliant actress, aren’t you?’ he commented. ‘But the only thing that’s going to get you out of here is telling me who you are and why you’re here—’
‘I’ve told you that!’ she interrupted.
‘So you have. It doesn’t wash, though.’ He studied her comprehensively, right through her clothes again, in fact, so that she started to boil beneath that dark, insolently intimate gaze. ‘What is beginning to wash is something a little different,’ he continued leisurely. ‘Could you even be a groupie, señorita, who devised a rather novel way of getting through my secretary’s net?’
Aurora’s mouth fell open. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about!’
‘No?’ The scepticism in his expression was chilling. ‘Never heard of student groupies? Girls? Believe me, it’s an occupation for some of them; it would appear to be the only reason they’re at university in the first place,’ he said with damning scorn.
Several things suddenly came clear to Aurora, including his secretary’s manner and why he never answered the phone himself, but the shock of it all rendered her speechless.
Giving him the opportunity to continue with lethal satire, ‘Why, yes. Heaven alone knows what bizarre scheme you’d concocted the other night—looking for something to steal from me to blackmail me into bed with you, perhaps?’ He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘But your actions tonight have been loud and clear—coyly refusing to tell me your name, being a seductively mysterious guest—and so on,’ he finished flatly.
To be thought of as a coy, student groupie throwing herself at his feet in a rather ‘novel’ manner caused Aurora to lose her temper completely. ‘Look here—’ she bounced off the bed ‘—I’ve had enough of this. Will you get out of my way before I scream the place down?’
‘Scream away,’ he invited. ‘The only thing that will achieve is to have me call the police.’
‘What?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘In fact, you have a choice. I’ll leave you here for a period of sober reflection. When I come back, either you tell me the truth or I do get the police.’
‘If you think I have any intention of staying here,’ she spat at him, ‘you’re mistaken!’
‘No, I’m not. I propose to lock you in, you see.’
Aurora flew at him, prepared to scratch his eyes out, only to find herself caught in a grip of steel. ‘Let me go!’ she gasped through pale lips.
‘I’d rather let an enraged tigress go.’ He pinioned her hands behind her back. ‘I’ve also got something of a score to settle with you, Miss Spain. Let’s see if you kiss as well as you do—other things.’
‘I never kiss under these circumstances. I’m perfectly capable of biting, however,’ she warned through her teeth.
He smiled crookedly. ‘What circumstances do you kiss under?’
‘I need to be in love or on the way to it, like any normal girl,’ she replied scathingly. ‘The last thing I can imagine with you, Professor. For one thing, you’re too old for me, for another the mere thought of doing it under duress turns me right off!’ Her green eyes were proud and defiant.
‘OK.’ He released her pinioned hands but transferred his hands to her waist. ‘In exchange for no duress, could I get a promise that you’ll keep your fists to yourself?’
‘I’m not promising anything!’
‘Then how about…’ there was the glint of wicked amusement in his dark eyes although he spoke gravely ‘…proving to me that I am too old for you?’
‘You must think I’m still in my cradle,’ Aurora retorted, ‘to fall for that old line!’
‘On the contrary, before I discovered you sneaking around my bedroom, I thought you were gorgeous, certainly of the age of consent—’ his gaze roamed up and down her figure ‘—and quite stunning.’
Aurora’s lips parted and, before she could think of a suitable rejoinder, he drew her into his arms. She breathed once, jerkily, but, to her horror, the spell of Luke Kirwan once again began to weave itself around her. And no twelve-year age difference was going to save her, she realised—not that she’d said it as anything but a crushing, heat-of-the-moment snub.
To make things worse, she also realized from the smile twisting his lips that her thought processes were about as easy for him to read as an open book. ‘Look,’ she began uneasily, ‘this is insane! You can’t just do it…’
‘I can and I’m going to, so save your breath,’ he recommended. ‘Don’t tell me there isn’t the slightest curiosity on your side?’
He moved his hands on her hips and she went to say something, stopped with her lips parted as all sorts of sensations started to run through her—and not only physical. Knowing that part of the dangerous attraction of this man for her was that she was playing with fire, for example. See if you can be unaffected by this, Little Miss Spain, she mimicked in her mind, because she had no doubt that was the gauntlet Luke Kirwan was throwing down. But it would be madness to take it up…
He did it for her. He took advantage of her confusion to withdraw his hands from her hips and cup her face lightly at the same time as he captured her green gaze so that she was unable to look away. ‘Small, neat and stylish—whatever else it is you are, my would-be robber, and, I suspect, delicious. Let’s see.’ He lowered his head.
Aurora trembled as his lips touched hers, but he said against the corner of her mouth, ‘I was right: sweet as a peach, señorita.’ And started to kiss her properly.
The crazy part about it was that he made her feel as sweet as a peach while he kissed her lingeringly, but not only that. He himself felt so amazingly good it was almost impossible to remain unaffected. How did he do it? she marvelled as he ran his hands down her back and laid a trail of feather-light kisses down her neck. With great restraint, she answered herself. This was no stolen, victory kiss—he was far too clever for that, damn him, she thought.
This was a skilled assault that made her skin feel like silk as those cool, dry lips wandered across it, and the way his hands found the curves of her body made her heartbeat triple. This was a man who made not one blunder while her senses rioted and she began to drink in the feel of him through her pores.
His height, those broad shoulders, the interesting hollows of his face, which she found herself wanting to touch, the crisp cotton of his shirt, the hard, taut length of him that she was now resting against as he stopped kissing her, with not an ounce of defiance left in her but one embarrassingly girlish word on her lips—Wow!
To her everlasting gratitude, she managed to stop herself from actually saying it as he put her away from him and steadied her before releasing her.
‘Well?’ There was sheer devilry in those dark eyes as he posed the question.
Aurora breathed deeply and had to suffer the indignity of him restoring some tendrils of hair behind her ears and straightening the collar of her blouse before she could think of a response. Then she could only fall back on the truth. ‘I’m speechless,’ she said huskily and licked her lips.
He raised an eyebrow at her with a mixture of amusement and mockery. ‘I’ll take it as read, then. And I’ll leave you to—compose yourself.’
‘I didn’t necessarily mean I was bowled over or anything…’ she began to protest not quite truthfully, but stopped with her eyes darkening. ‘You’re not still going to lock me in!’
‘Oh, yes, I am, sweetheart,’ he said coolly, then looked amused. ‘By the way, there’s an en-suite bathroom through there.’ He pointed. ‘Never let it be said I inconvenienced a guest even if they are burglars or groupies—and I’m now quite sure it was you that dark and stormy night.’ He turned on his heel and walked out and Aurora heard the key turn in the lock before she was able to think of a thing to do.
‘I don’t believe this!’ she said through gritted teeth, then sank back onto the bed to drop her face into her hands as she marvelled bitterly on her sheer bad luck and wondered what to do next. Of course, it was obvious, she thought. She had no choice but to come clean, yet it went supremely against the grain to be outwitted by this man and there was no guarantee he wouldn’t insist on reading at least some bits of her diaries…
Several minutes later she got up and went into the bathroom, where she washed her face and had a drink of water. Then she returned to the bedroom and went straight to the fireplace. The brick came out easily; her diaries were still in the cache. She removed them, put them into the plastic bag from her shoulder bag and tied the fishing line to the bag. She turned off the light and went to the window that was so impossible to climb out of because of the wrought-iron bars—apart from being one floor above the ground.
Five minutes of silent, intense scrutiny of the shrubbery and surrounds below yielded nothing, no movement at all. Her old bedroom was not directly above any window on the ground floor, so she felt quite safe as she manoeuvred the rubbish bag awkwardly through the bars, lowered it to the ground to be swallowed up amongst some flourishing hydrangea bushes, and threw the line down after it.
Then she switched on the light again and looked around. Despite the luxuriousness of the bedroom, a thick-pile silvery blue carpet, matching curtains and bed cover, there was only one chair, a wooden antique that matched the marvellous bureau but looked highly uncomfortable.
She shrugged, slipped her shoes off and retired to Luke Kirwan’s bed, where she propped the pillows up behind her and picked up the book on his bedside table—a murder mystery, as it happened. And she’d finished the first chapter when she heard the key in the lock. She made no move to get up and that was his first sight of her as he came into the room—propped against his pillows, looking gravely at him over the top of his book.
Inwardly, Luke Kirwan was amused. This girl had enormous nerve if nothing else. Not that she lacked other qualities, he conceded. A delicate figure, unusual beauty—her hair and eyes alone were stunning—a flair for clothes and the kind of joie de vivre that was infectious. The fact remained, he reminded himself, that discreet enquiries downstairs had shed no light on who she was, and the story of coming with someone who’d deserted her for an ex-girlfriend was most likely another invention.
‘I do hope you’re comfortable—or, after what passed in here before I locked you in, is that an invitation to join you?’ he said with an undercurrent of sarcasm.
‘Not at all.’ Aurora closed the book, got up and slipped on her shoes. She added, as she shook out her beautiful skirt and ran her hands through her hair, ‘It was your idea to lock me in, not mine, so I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t make myself comfortable. How do you do, by the way? I’m Aurora Templeton.’ She held out her hand.
He crossed the room to take it, and felt it tremble briefly in his. It was the only sign of inner nerves he could detect, however. Her back was as straight as ever, her chin elevated and those stunning green eyes proud.
‘Why do I get the feeling this is not to be a—penitent confession—brought on by sober reflection?’ he murmured a little wryly.
Aurora took her hand back. ‘Because you really have only yourself to blame, Mr Kirwan. You and your secretary, that is. This preoccupation with guarding you from “groupies” is what brought this all about. I find it a little hard to believe that any kind of a real man needs to go to those lengths anyway, but, be that as it may—if I could have got in touch with you by any other means, I would not have had to resort to this.’
‘Hang on—resort to robbing me, do you mean?’ he queried quizzically.
‘No. Reclaiming my property,’ she stated.
‘Really, you’re going to have explain better than that, Aurora Templeton.’ He paused and narrowed his eyes. ‘Why does that name ring a bell?’
‘From the number of messages I left on your answering machine that you ignored?’ she suggested with irony. ‘But you also bought this house from my father,’ she explained. ‘This was my bedroom.’
Luke Kirwan blinked.
‘And this,’ Aurora continued, turning towards the fireplace, ‘was my secret cache from the time I discovered it when I was about twelve.’
He followed her across the room and ducked his head to look into the fireplace. He observed the brick and the empty cavity in the wall, put his hand into it and whistled softly. ‘I see,’ he said as he straightened.
‘Good!’ Aurora said briskly. ‘Now, you may or may not have been aware that I was overseas at the time the house was sold—’
‘I had no idea Ambrose Templeton had a daughter,’ he said, and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his hands.
‘Well, he does,’ she said flatly, ‘and I can prove it. But I didn’t even know the house had been sold until I got home, just a few days before he took off on his round-the-world voyage. And it was only after he’d left that I remembered the cache and something that was very precious to me in it.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you just say so?’ Luke Kirwan demanded.
‘I would have, if I could have got here first—to make sure no one got to it before I did.’
‘What was this precious something?’ he asked with a frown. ‘A heroin haul or the crown jewels?’
‘Very funny, Mr Kirwan.’ She eyed him sardonically. ‘No, but precious enough to me. And when I couldn’t get past your secretary, not to mention being treated as if I were a piece of rubbish even after telling her who I was; and when I could never find you home, I remembered I still had a laundry key, and I decided to take matters into my own hands. Don’t you think you might have done the same?’ she asked gently.
He blinked. ‘So—you didn’t use the front door?’
‘I didn’t have a front door key,’ she said simply. ‘I’d left all my other keys with my father. As a teenager, the laundry door was my—’ she grimaced ‘—preferred way of coming home when I was late.’
He was silent for a long moment, watching her narrowly. Then he said abruptly, ‘Did you know I was supposed to be away that night?’
Aurora took her time. This was the tricky bit because if she didn’t tread carefully, she could involve Bunny. She frowned at him. ‘Were you? What a pity you weren’t. I was kicking myself for not taking into consideration that you had to be an extraordinarily light sleeper. I swear I didn’t make a sound and, believe me, I’ve had a bit of practice at it, but…’ She shrugged.
‘You didn’t make a sound,’ he said slowly. ‘And I came home early because I was ill. I got up to go downstairs to find an aspirin or something when I saw this strange light at the bottom of the stairs.’
Aurora smiled suddenly. ‘I haven’t had much luck, have I?’
He considered, then gestured with his forefinger. ‘There’s still something that doesn’t quite gel, Aurora Templeton. What was it you thought you left behind in that cache that was so precious you couldn’t tell anyone about it? I really think I need to see it,’ he said pensively, ‘before I can believe this story.’
