‘Where did you rush off to this morning? I looked for you. I thought we had plans...’
Rosalind could almost smell the ozone in the air, but it wasn’t from the distant lightning. She felt electricity crackling through her veins, but, unlike the storm, her rage couldn’t remain silent for long.
‘I went on a parasailing trip. With the hunk from the pool bar,’ she added with savage bite, not taking her eyes off nature’s fireworks display.
There was a heartbeat’s silence, then he said softly, and without a trace of jealousy, ‘Trying to show me how much you don’t care, in your typically flamboyant fashion, Roz?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself! It had nothing to do with you,’ she lied desperately, appalled at how easily he’d turned her own words against her.
“Then why won’t you talk to me?’
‘Why? So you can make some more notes?’ she spat, her skin crawling at the memory of scrolling through the screens of information about herself—her habits and likes and dislikes, what she’d worn and what she’d said—the conversations with Luke reported almost verbatim.
Until she’d seen it coldly written down she hadn’t realised how much she’d unwittingly revealed during their harmless ‘flirtation’, not only about herself but about her family and friends, a number of whom were famous in their own right. She had trusted Luke at a time when her life was ripe with paranoia and this was how he’d repaid her!
Damn it, he was as bad as Justin...worse, because she knew now that what she had felt for Justin had been a romantic yearning that had ignored reality. She had been in love with the idea of being in love, with the notion of finding her perfect match, and Justin had seemed conveniently to fit the bill.
Luke was far from perfect and he had never tried to be her ideal. He was irritating and engaging, obstinate and agreeable, shy and bold, blunt and evasive...in short, a mass of contradictions that should have sent her screaming in the opposite direction. Instead she had been perversely fascinated, seduced by her growing appreciation of his complexity of character, his breadth of mind and the smouldering power of his subdued sexuality. Somewhere along the line, without even realising what was happening, Rosalind had started falling in love with him!
‘Damn you, you’ve been dissecting me like some character in a play!’ She blinked hard, grateful for the darkness and appalled at her pathetic desire to cry on the shoulder of the very man who had caused her pain.
His sharp counter-attack vanquished the momentary weakness. ‘Oh, come on, Roz, you do exactly the same thing with everyone you meet. A gesture here, a character trait there...they’re all grist to your actor’s mill. As I was going to explain to you this morning, clarifying my thoughts about a person or a problem by writing them down is a habit of mine—my observations were purely for my own benefit. I have—had—no intention of showing my personal jottings to anyone else.’
His grim self-correction told her he now knew that she had not only wiped the file off his hard disk but had also stolen the back-up floppy which had been in the drive.
‘For God’s sake, Roz, surely you can’t still think I’m an undercover journalist?’
She wished she did. At this point she would have been relieved to find out that he was simply an overenthusiastic hack, because a far more disturbing alternative had arisen.
Luke’s word-processing program had been personalized with his full name. When Rosalind had inadvertently opened her file the copyright box had appeared for several seconds, but only later in the day had the impact of it exploded on her consciousness like a bomb.
Luke Peter James.
One of his names was Peter.
It could be just a coincidence. It probably was just a coincidence, she had feverishly tried to convince herself.
He couldn’t be Peter Noble. Peggy’s son was unemployed and on benefit, and even if he had been tracking Rosalind’s movements as precisely as Peggy had claimed he wouldn’t have had access to the kind of information or money that would have enabled him to follow her to Tioman. Unless he included fraud amongst his obsessions...
But what if everything Peggy had told Rosalind about her son was wrong? After all, she only knew what Peter had chosen to tell her. Peggy had been far too afraid of stirring up the murky past to make any independent investigation into his background... she didn’t even know if his story about his adoptive family was true. What if he had told Peggy a pack of lies? What if Luke was telling a pack of lies to Rosalind?
He himself had pointed out the dangers of making assumptions. Just because Rosalind had independent verification that he was a triathlete, that didn’t mean that he couldn’t also be a borderline psychotic. Maybe all that heartbreaking stuff about his wife dying was a scam to arouse her sympathy.
Of course, it was all absurdly unlikely, but the circumstantial evidence was very unnerving: Luke’s name was also Peter, he was adopted and the same age that Peggy’s son would be, he had torn out an article about Rosalind—perhaps to add to his extensive collection at home—and was keeping a detailed account of her every move.
If ridiculing the idea out of existence didn’t work, she could just ask him—but if Luke was Peter Noble she might be safer pretending to be unaware. To acknowledge his obsession might be to validate it. Oh, why hadn’t she spoken to the psychologist whom Jordan had urged her to consult about handling a personal confrontation with her psychotic fan? Because she had been too busy hoping it would never happen...
‘Rosalind?’ Luke persisted. Wasn’t relentless persistence a sign of an obsessive mind? ‘I said, you surely can’t still believe I’m compiling a sleazy kiss-and-tell for some moronic magazine?’
At the reminder of the kisses they had shared an icy thrill of erotic fear coursed down her spine. Even now, wondering if Luke was her stalker, she felt the powerful tug of attraction, the insidious stirring of sexual curiosity.
Maybe she was the one who was deranged! Rosalind scrambled hastily to her feet, away from the temptation.
‘There’s nothing for you to tell anyway!’ she said, hearing the amused contempt ring false in her own ears.
‘Isn’t there?’ He rose more slowly, like a hunter wary of frightening his skittish prey. He seemed larger in the darkness and Rosalind’s heart began to beat up into her throat.
‘We kissed a few times, had a few laughs together—it didn’t mean anything to either of us!’ She quietly put one sandalled foot behind the other and began to shift her weight backwards.