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Her heart wept, but she answered steadily, ‘When funds come through for a plane ticket.’
‘I’m returning to Sant’Rosa three days from now,’ he said. ‘Would you like to spend those days with me?’
Lauren lifted her head to stare into his eyes; she saw the pupils dilate, and the fracture in her heart widened as she pulled back. Although the residual heat of passion still smouldered in the golden depths, she realised that once she left Valanu she’d never see Guy again. At least, she thought painfully, he made no promises, offered no inducements. ‘Here?’
‘A little further along the coast.’
‘On a desert island?’ she asked, putting off the moment of decision.
His smile was a sensual challenge. ‘Deserted,’ he said. ‘Not exactly an island.’
Although she hesitated, she knew what answer she’d give him. ‘Yes. But I’ll have to ring my parents and tell them what’s happening.’
He kissed her collar-bone. ‘Everything?’ he asked wickedly.
And although it hurt, she smiled. ‘Not everything,’ she admitted, and yawned.
‘You can tell them when we get there.’
‘You’ve got a telephone on your deserted not-island?’
He tucked her against his shoulder. ‘Yes. Now, go to sleep. We’ll leave at dawn tomorrow morning.’
But he woke her once more, and towards dawn she woke him, and both times they made love with slow, sweet passion that culminated in white-hot savagery, leaving them sensually replete.
Sputtering across the lagoon in a banana boat, Lauren turned to look at Guy. Something about his stance, his expression as he frowned into the sun and steered, sent a shiver across her nerve ends. Dismissing the momentary unease, she said lightly, ‘Where did you learn to run a departure like a military exercise?’
The canoe met the oncoming wave a little clumsily, splashing a sparkling cascade of water over the bow. ‘I did army training for a couple of years,’ he said. ‘It’s a tradition in my family. Look, can you see the frigate birds?’ He pointed to a pair of long-tailed birds that swooped above the lagoon.
In other words, she thought bleakly, do not go there, Lauren.
That morning she’d woken in his arms, and for a few seconds she’d allowed herself to feel at home there—until common sense took over, reminding her that Guy belonged in some way to Sant’Rosa, and she was a rising executive in her half-brother’s large organisation. Apart from the passion that blazed between them, they just didn’t connect—something Guy clearly understood, and something she had to accept.
Although the house he took her to sprawled alone beneath the coconut palms lining another white beach, there was nothing primitive about it. ‘Does this lovely place belong to you?’ she asked after she’d rung her parents using the latest in communications technology.
‘No. The resort,’ Guy told her. ‘The owner wanted to build a dozen or so along the lagoon, but his plans fell through. Do you like it?’
She gazed around the open, airy room, decorated in the blue of the lagoon, the soft green of the palm leaves and the white of the sand, and smiled a little ironically. Of course a buccaneer wouldn’t have a home.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, her voice dying as he kissed her.
During the next few days Lauren learned how lost in desire she could become; this new capacity for sensation both overwhelmed and scared her. But because these precious days were all that she’d have of Guy, she surrendered to erotic fantasy—and the arms and body of a man who set himself to satisfy appetites she hadn’t known existed.
Time enough to consider the implications when she returned to the workaday world.
He was the perfect lover—intelligent, intriguing, and he could cook. He made her laugh and he talked about anything she wanted to discuss, although by mutual consent neither spoke of their ordinary lives.
And he seemed to know by instinct when she wanted tenderness, when she wanted to walk on the wild side, and when she wanted to sleep. She soon lost any inhibitions about swimming naked in water as warm as her blood, walking back to the house over sand like powdered sugar to shower with him in the huge bathroom.
Sun-warmed, star-silvered, threaded with passion, the days and nights slid through her fingers like pearls on a silken cord, perfect, irretrievable, until at last it was the morning they were due back in Valanu. Just before they left Lauren spoke to her parents again.
Guy left her to check that everything was ready, coming back in the brightening light to hear her say, ‘I thought I might come straight back home instead of going on to New Zealand.’
He’d heard her voice in so many moods—sultry, playful, sophisticated, determined, and the way he liked best, shaken by craving—but never the warmly affectionate tone she used for her parents.
So? he thought restlessly.
She listened, then said, ‘Well—are you sure?’
A long silence followed, during which her soft mouth tilted at the corners in a smile she’d never bestowed on him. He watched a graceful hand trace a pattern on the table and responded to the familiar heaviness in his loins with tight anger. He didn’t want to feel like this. They had made love so many times he’d lost count; with Lauren he was insatiable and her response was equally reckless, but she had been careful to avoid any reference to the future.
Perhaps she was that rare thing, a woman who treated her lovers with affection, then let them go without any emotional strings.
Until that moment he’d deliberately pushed the shadow of Marc Corbett to the furthest reaches of his mind, but now a jagged pang of jealousy, barbaric in its intensity, thrust through his iron control. Guy had always considered himself a sophisticated man, one who didn’t expect anything more from his lovers than he was prepared to give them—affection, respect and good sex.
Yet the thought of Lauren going from his bed to another man’s summoned a primitive possessiveness that infuriated him.
‘Well, all right,’ she said cheerfully into the telephone. ‘I’m leaving today, but I have a few hours’ stopover in Fiji so I won’t get to New Zealand until late. I’ll spend the night at an airport hotel in Auckland and fly up to the Bay of Islands tomorrow morning.’
She listened again, then laughed. ‘Fusspot. Yes, I’ll ring you as soon as I get to Marc’s house. Goodbye.’ She put the telephone down.
A fierce, elemental anger almost consumed Guy; unlike his normal coldly disciplined response to provocation, this hot outrage seethed under such pressure that it took his entire stock of will-power to restrain it.
‘Everything under control?’ It was all he could trust himself to say, and even then his voice sounded guttural and aggressive.
Grey eyes wary, she looked up. Clearly, she hadn’t heard him come in. ‘Yes, thank you. I wondered if I should go home to reassure them that their darling daughter is safe and healthy, but my father wouldn’t hear of it.’
Guy wrestled his simmering rage into enough of a strait-jacket to say curtly, ‘A thoughtful father.’
So she was going to Marc Corbett’s house. It could mean nothing more than that they were on good terms even though their relationship had ended. It wasn’t so unusual; he prided himself on staying good friends with his previous lovers. He’d have offered a holiday house to any of them.
But it might also mean that the time they’d spent together meant nothing more to her than an exotic interlude.
He tried for a mental shrug, wondering coldly why his usual practical logic had abandoned him. So what? They’d made no commitment; Lauren might be every man’s dream lover, but their idyll was over. She could go wherever she wanted, sleep with whomever she wanted. And so could he.
Her tone deepened. ‘My father’s a darling.’ She joined him on the tiled terrace outside the airy sitting room and said carefully, ‘Guy, it’s been magic. Thank you so much.’
‘You sound like a small child at the end of a party,’ he said, exasperated by the rasping undertone in his voice.
Her face went still. Without moving she met his eyes, her own now as opaque as burnished silver, but her withdrawal hit him, palpable as a blow.
Steadily she said, ‘Probably because that’s what I feel like. It’s been a lovely, lovely party, but like all good times, it’s come to an end.’
Hiding his astonishing anger with the disciplined control he’d fought to acquire, Guy relaxed hands that were curling into fists by his sides. ‘You’d better give me an address so I can contact you if I need to.’
At first he thought she was going to refuse, but she nodded and reached into her bag for a small notebook. He watched her write down the address, tear the page out and hand it over. ‘I’ll be there for three weeks,’ she told him, that seamless poise firmly in place.
Guy wanted to smash it into splinters. Get a grip, he told himself roughly. A few days making love to a woman gave you no claims to her.
‘Right, we’d better go,’ he said, and picked up the bags.
They got back to Valanu not too long before her plane was due to leave. As the banana boat sputtered across the brilliant blues of the lagoon, Lauren gazed around, pretending that nothing had changed, that Guy wasn’t steering with an expression of such concentrated authority it shut her out as effectively as a barred door.
A car was waiting at the docks; Guy must have organised it. He walked her towards it, and as the driver slung her bag into the boot she held out her hand in farewell and said steadily, ‘Goodbye. Thank you for everything.’
Equally formal, his golden eyes dark and unreadable in his handsome face, he bowed over her hand. But there was nothing formal about the way he lifted it to his mouth; his kiss burned against her skin like a brand, quickening her heart and tightening inner muscles accustomed now to enclosing him in their subtle grip.
‘It was,’ he said with silken distinctness, ‘my complete and utter pleasure.’
Colour scorched along her cheekbones; she looked away, blinking at the figure of a man in the distance. ‘Mine too,’ she said uncertainly.
He held open the door and she slid into the back of the car. It drew away and she didn’t look back; she didn’t even notice the man who stared into the vehicle as it passed him, then straightened to examine Guy, a big figure striding into the distance.
During the flight to Sant’Rosa’s capital and then on to Fiji, she fought a savage, unrelenting emptiness, refusing food and anything to drink except water and fruit juice. Once aboard the big jet for New Zealand, she watched the jewel that was Fiji’s main island drop away from beneath the plane’s wings and forced herself to eat something that tasted like a mixture of plastic and sawdust in her mouth.
Afterwards she saw the sun go down in a splendour of blood-red and scarlet, and blamed the sight for eyes that felt heavy and dry, as though if she relaxed they might sting with tears.
Stop that right now, she told herself roundly. You knew right from the start that once you left you’d never see Guy again. You knew, and you accepted it—you can’t renege on the deal now.
She was not in love with Guy Bagaton.
But halfway to New Zealand she finally accepted something she’d been refusing to acknowledge. She had done the exact same thing as her mother—without considering anything other than her own desires, she’d embarked on a wild, defiant, unrestrained affair with a man she didn’t know.
At least, she thought tiredly, she wasn’t married, as her mother had been. And there would be no pregnancy—Guy had seen to that. A hollow sadness took her by surprise, and was hastily banished.
But Isabel Porter had known more about her lover than Lauren knew about hers. The genetic father Lauren shared with Marc Corbett had been a businessman of note, a lover of beautiful women and a rampantly unfaithful husband notorious for his affairs. Although her mother had known he was married—and been married herself—she’d been unable to resist his powerful magnetism.
Just like me, Lauren thought, hands tensely locking together in her lap. I am truly my mother’s daughter.
And my father’s!
Well, her genetic father’s. Her true father was Hugh Porter, who discovered that the daughter he had considered his own was the result of his wife’s adultery only when Lauren was in her early twenties. As he was already fighting heart disease, the shock had almost killed him, but he had forgiven Isabel and reassured Lauren of a love that had never faltered.
Her mouth setting into a straight line, she steered her thoughts away from that period. Guy could be a planter of some sort; rice, or indigo or copra—whatever planters produced on tropical islands. He could be a scout for one of the forestry companies that were buying tropical hardwoods; he’d been scathing enough about the sali nut scheme to make this possible.
Half-pirate, half-warrior, he lived on an island marooned in the endless blue waves of the Pacific Ocean. Apart from sharing a blazing sexual attraction, they had nothing in common. She lived and worked in London. She loved her career, and her favourite city was Paris—about as different from the steamy heat of Sant’Rosa as any place could be.
Her lips formed the words nothing in common as they echoed in her mind with cold resonance. A giant fist squeezed her heart into a painful knot.
Of course she had to repay the money he’d lent her, but that wouldn’t need personal contact. She didn’t have his address, but she’d soon find one; everyone was traceable on the Internet. And even if he wasn’t, any letter addressed to him in Sant’Rosa would find its way to him. Everyone there seemed to know him.
And he had her address…
For the rest of the journey to New Zealand she stared unseeingly ahead while her treacherous mind replayed images of the time she’d spent in Guy’s arms.
Once she got to Marc’s house in New Zealand she’d be fine. She’d recover from this inconvenient and heady rush of blood to the loins, and be her normal self again.
Well, she thought drearily, I now know what happens when you hit the tropics—madness.
Lauren stroked the elderly golden retriever’s insistent head.
‘No, Fancy,’ she said patiently, ‘I don’t want to go for a walk along the beach, and no, I don’t want to row you around to Cabbage Tree Bay, and no, I don’t want to climb the hill either. Nor do I want to throw your ball or feed you treats.’
All I want to do, she finished silently, is lie here in the sun and mourn a man I won’t see again.
Tail wagging, Fancy sighed, gave her a forgiving lick on the fingers, and flopped down in the sun beside the lounger. Lauren’s eyes narrowed against the glare as she gazed out across the bay; although this was a distant reach of the huge Pacific Ocean, it was much cooler and more green than the warm tropical seas surrounding Valanu and Sant’Rosa.
‘But just as beautiful,’ she said sternly.
Fancy’s tail thumped agreement. Now and forever, Lauren knew, she’d measure every island against Valanu, where Guy had taught her the exquisite pleasures of sex.
For long forbidden minutes she lay still and remembered—as she’d been remembering for the past two days. Two days and four hours, actually. At least, she thought drearily, she wasn’t counting the minutes…
Fancy sat up, ears pricked and alert as she stared into the sky.
‘What is it, girl?’ But Lauren too had heard it by now—a helicopter, coming fast and low.
Her half-brother, Marc? No, he and Paige were still enjoying a second honeymoon in the Seychelles, having left their adorable twin daughters with Marc’s doting mother in Paris.
Some secret instinct shortened Lauren’s breath. Telling herself not to be an idiot, she sprinted inside to change her brief shorts and top for linen trousers and a silk shirt.
‘Just in case,’ she murmured, and gave a dreary little laugh. Of course it wouldn’t be Guy.
And if by some miracle it was Guy, she’d send him away. Even if he wanted her to, she couldn’t see herself spending the rest of her life on a tropical island.
‘Oh, you idiot,’ she muttered, hastily masking her face with a discreet film of cosmetics. ‘When did you start thinking in terms of the rest of your life? He certainly wasn’t considering permanence.’
Combing her hair into place, she wondered what on earth had happened to her normally disciplined brain.
‘You let yourself be ambushed by temptation. You blatantly let him know you were available, and you didn’t put up even a minor objection when he carried you off for days of hot sex and wild passion,’ she muttered.
OK, so other people did things like that all the time, but she’d been utterly irresponsible. She should have fled to New Zealand the minute he handed over her passport on Valanu.
Even then, it was too late. That hasty fake marriage conducted under gunfire was just the sort of human-interest story a journalist would love. To save her mother humiliation and her father the stress that worsened his precarious health, she and Marc had always been careful not to attract attention to their relationship.
Frowning, she slid on small gold earrings as the chopper eased down towards the pad behind the house.
She’d been lucky because it didn’t seem that her recklessness had compromised the old, hidden scandal of her conception. Surely, if any journalist had got a sniff of her time with Guy—or of that fake marriage—it would have turned up in the papers by now. They’d been having a great time with the heroic, unknown ‘Englishman’ who’d fought side by side with the Sant’Rosan forces.
A knock on the door announced the housekeeper. ‘Lauren, it’s a Mr Bagaton,’ she said, looking both intrigued and slightly put out. ‘He insists on seeing you.’
Lauren’s stomach clenched, a chaotic surge of joy wiping everything but anticipation from her mind. Trying hard not to beam, she said, ‘Thanks, Mrs Oliver. I know him.’
He was waiting in the morning room, completely relaxed in casual trousers that clung to his long, muscular legs. The rolled sleeves of his shirt revealed tanned forearms. He had shaved.
Yet there was nothing casual in the way he watched her come across the room; narrowed, intent eyes in an impassive face examined her as though she was some rare specimen he’d been searching a lifetime for.
Sensation slammed through her, hot and unashamedly primeval.
