Flirting With Danger

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Recalling Evan’s behaviour on the previous night, Catherine couldn’t suppress a faint shudder at the thought of the hard-faced determination with which he had ignored her request for privacy, the controlled force behind his action as he’d cut off the phone call from Ellie, the ruthless, cold ferocity that had been in his face and his voice when he had spoken to Joe.

‘Don’t you think we need someone tough? Look, Cathy, this stalker is ruining your life, making each day a misery. You have to be protected from that, and to my mind it’s time he got some of his own medicine—time we started fighting fire with fire.’

‘But that’s just what I’m afraid of. Isn’t fighting fire with fire more likely to end up causing a raging inferno rather than actually extinguishing anything? After all, what do we know about this Evan Lindsay, other than that he’s some sort of security man?’

‘Personally, nothing at all. But he’s more than just a security man. As I said, he’s an expert, and the company he set up has won a worldwide reputation and respect. He doesn’t do this for the money, Cathy—he doesn’t need to.’

‘But I thought—’ And she had referred to him as just a security man!

‘That he was one of the workmen? Not Evan; he’s the big boss. He could leave everything to the men he employs, but that’s not his way. After all, he didn’t have to check those things through with me last night—though I must say that that turned out for the best.’

So, did this new knowledge change her perception of Evan? Catherine wondered. It certainly went a long way towards explaining the aura of arrogant power and command that seemed to permeate every bone in his body. But money wasn’t everything. He was still Evan Lindsay, who, apart from that arrogance and a total ruthlessness that had shown through the polite social veneer, was very much an unknown quantity.

‘After all, if he hadn’t suggested that he came back here with me then he wouldn’t have been around when that phone call—’

‘Evan suggested—but I thought he said that you invited him here.’

‘You must have heard him wrong, darling. It was all his idea.’

The sound of a car door slamming in the drive outside brought Lloyd to his feet in a rush, twitching aside a bit of the curtain to peer through the crack. Catherine watched tensely, her fingers tightening on the handle of her cup.

‘It’s all right—it’s Evan. Oh, come on, poppet—get rid of that glum face. He’s on our side, remember.’

Which was supposed to make her feel a lot better, Catherine reflected worriedly as her father left the room in order to let Evan in at the front door, but somehow it had exactly the opposite effect. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what was wrong. She knew she needed help—she had even, in a moment of weakness, turned to Evan and begged him to look after her—but that didn’t mean that she was happy about him taking over her life in the way he had done last night.

‘I’m in charge now,’ he had said, and had proceeded to demonstrate precisely how strongly he meant that, moving into action with a speed and force that had made her feel as if she had been hit by a whirlwind. He had checked every aspect of the house and gardens with a thoroughness that even she had privately thought excessive, and issued a stream of instructions to herself and her father before he had finally departed, promising to be round as soon as possible the next day.

‘But not this early!’ Catherine said aloud, belatedly becoming aware of the fact that, with no appointments planned for the day ahead, she had come straight down to breakfast in her nightclothes, pausing only to pull on a white, short-sleeved broderie anglaise robe over the matching baby-doll-length nightdress. As a result, she was hardly suitably dressed to receive an unknown man as a visitor, and she certainly didn’t want him getting the wrong impression.

Because that was where the problem lay. After all, Evan Lindsay was a stranger. He was every bit as unknown to her as the hateful tormentor who called himself Joe, and under normal circumstances there was no way she would have considered giving him a free rein in running her life.

‘Come along in, Evan. I’m sure you could do with a cup of coffee.’

Her father clearly shared none of her doubts—but then why should he? she asked herself with a touch of asperity. As she had told Evan last night, no man—not even her beloved father—could understand fully how it felt to be persecuted in this way, to look at every man who passed and wonder, Is that him?

‘It’s Evan, darling,’ Lloyd announced—quite unnecessarily as the younger man had preceded him into the room, seeming to fill it with his size and strength.

‘Obviously,’ Catherine muttered, embarrassment at her state of undress making her voice waspish. She hadn’t even combed her hair, she now realised as that cool sea-green gaze swept over her in a swift, assessing survey, and its usual sleek elegance was roughly tousled, falling in pale, disordered waves around a face that was shadowed from lack of sleep.

‘You’re not dressed!’ he said, not even bothering with a greeting, and she bridled at the sharpness of his tone.

‘And good morning to you too!’ she retorted, her earlier embarrassment evaporating in the heat of her flaring irritation.

Had she really been worried that Evan might read something she didn’t mean into her state of undress? She couldn’t have been more wrong. The cold fire of the look that had seared over her had held nothing sexual, or even anything that could be termed a response to her appearance. Instead, his eyes had blazed with an icy contempt that made her grit her teeth in fury.

‘No, I’m not dressed—but then we didn’t expect you to appear on our doorstep at the crack of dawn!’

She knew she sounded shrewish, but it was impossible to impose any degree of control on her voice because the anger that she felt had now combined with a sudden, unexpected sensual reaction that exploded in her mind, making her thoughts reel as she took in Evan’s appearance properly for the first time. Gone was the tailored suit of the day before, and in its place was a black T-shirt and black jeans that clung to the powerful lines of his body in a way that made her mouth dry simply to see it.

This was not the businessman of the day before—the man whose restrained, formal clothing seemed to belie the force of the body beneath it, whose sleekly conservative outfit was very much at odds with the powerful, primitively potent masculinity he possessed. This man had a lethally attractive, devastatingly sexual impact that was like a blow straight to her stomach.

‘I did say first thing.’ Evan turned a pointed glance on the clock on the mantelpiece—a clock which showed the time as being only just past eight. ‘I’ve been up for almost two hours.’

‘And I suppose you’ve jogged twelve miles, done a hundred press-ups and eaten a perfectly low-fat, highfibre breakfast—after you’d showered and shaved, of course.’

‘Something like that.’ A grin appeared briefly—so briefly that it was only when it had gone again that she realised how dramatically it had transformed his face, softening the hard lines and bringing a warm light to those aquamarine eyes. ‘Actually, I swam this morning, but the rest of your guess was pretty accurate.’

‘All right, so you’re perfect, but you’ll have to allow the rest of us mere mortals to be rather more humanly fallible. After all, I am usually up and on my way to work around this time, but circumstances are rather different these days—and this is my home.’

‘Your father’s home—in which you are currently hiding from a psychotic stalker who has threatened to harm you and anyone close to you,’ Evan returned bluntly, the cold incisiveness of his tone making the words seem all the more frightening. ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense to be up and dressed, ready for any eventuality, rather than flaunting yourself in—’

‘I am not “flaunting” myself!’

‘No?’

Once more that changeable gaze swept over her, drawing hot blood into her cheeks and into the exposed skin of her arms and legs as it passed downwards, almost as if she had been exposed to the burning rays of the sun.

She might have been piqued earlier by the lack of interest in the way he looked at her, but that was no longer true of the scrutiny to which he subjected her now. There was no warmth in it at all, but nevertheless it was as blatantly sexual as any lascivious ogling she had ever endured, making her draw the fragile protection of her thin robe more closely around her—though she was well aware of the fact that there was so little of it that it had hardly any effect on the amount of her body that was exposed to those probing eyes.

‘No?’ Evan repeated, one eyebrow drifting upwards in sardonic mockery of her attempts at concealment. ‘From where I’m standing, that scrap of material looks calculated to inflame any red-blooded man’s erotic fantasies—and, believe me, that’s just how Joe would see it.’