He leaned over and caught her by the zip-cord trailing from the back of her neck, forcing her to tread water as she clung to the side of the boat, gasping air into her burning lungs. ‘That’s enough! You’ve made your point, Vivian,’ he said roughly. ‘You want me to beg? I will: please get into the bloody boat. We’ll talk, and then I’ll take you anywhere you want me to…’
Her green eyes were enormous in her exhausted face. ‘I’m not that gullible any more,’ she choked, fighting her pathetic desire to trust him, even now. ‘You’re the gullible one. You never fooled me at all. I knew even before I came here who you were!’
He looked thunderstruck. ‘You knew?’
‘That Nicholas Rose was Nicholas Thorne,’ she threw into his haggard face. Her frigid lips and tongue shaped the words with increasing difficulty. ‘But I came anyway, because I knew that if this was some kind of vicious v-vendetta, then the only way to stop you was to confront you face to face…so I let you d-drug me…I only pretended to w-want to escape… Everything you did to me you were only able to d-do because I chose to let you… Because I wanted t-time to b-be with you and c-convince you that r-revenge is n-not the way for y-you t-to find p-peace…’
Her teeth were chattering so much that she could hardly get the last defiant words out, and Nicholas made an abrupt growl and rammed his hands under her arms, hauling her over the gunwale and dumping her into the bottom of the boat.
‘Thank you for letting me rescue you!’ he said sardonically. ‘I take it you weren’t simply pretending this time.’
Vivian suddenly felt blessedly numb all over. Even her bleeding heart was cauterised by the cold. ‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why did you b-bother to come and get me?’
‘Why in the hell do you think? Because I love you, damn it!’ he snarled savagely, not even bothering to look at her as he swivelled his torso to signal with his upraised arm. Automatically following his gaze, a stupefied Vivian saw the blurry image of a white launch that looked as big as an ocean liner foaming down on them.
‘Coastguard?’ Her mouth seemed to have split from her mind.
‘No. Mine. The Hero. It’s been out doing a marine survey for the last few days. As soon as I found your clothes on the beach, I called her up and used her radar to track you. Ahoy! Derek! Send down that sling, will you?’
She screwed her eyes shut as she was strapped and hauled and bundled, and passed from hand to hand like an unwanted package until she felt the familiar arms taking possession of her again.
Nicholas carried her down a brightly lit companionway and into a spacious white cabin, kicking the door shut before rapidly stripping the over-large wet-suit from her numb body.
His mouth quirked when he saw the emerald-green bra and panties she wore underneath. His smile thawed a tiny slice of heart. Maybe she wasn’t hallucinating, after all. Maybe he really had said it.
‘My favourites,’ he murmured, fingering the saturated lace. ‘Underwear that matches your eyes.’ And then he peeled them off too, smothering her protests at his rough handling with a thick, blue towel, rubbing her vigorously until she cried out at the pain of the blood returning to the surface of her icy skin.
‘Don’t be such a baby!’ he said, planting a kiss on her blue lips as he finished a strenuous scouring of her hair, which had turned the dripping tails to dark red frizz. ‘We have to get you properly thawed out.’
He stripped off his own clothes and walked naked with her to the wide berth, lying down on it and mounding the patterned continental quilt over them both as the boat’s powerful engines throttled to full power and the sky began to whip past the brass port-hole above their heads.
‘Stop cringing, this is all very scientific. I’m a scientist—I know what I’m talking about,’ he said, cuddling her close, warming her with the sensual heat of his body, breast to breast, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. He shuddered and buried his face in her neck. ‘Oh, God, that feels good.’
Vivian knew what he meant. Tears of exhaustion and confusion trembled on her still-damp lashes.
He lifted his head and kissed them away. ‘I’m sorry, Ginger—first things first. If you had bothered to wait for me to wake up this morning, you would have known this already…in fact, you would have known last night if you hadn’t sabotaged my good intentions. My name is Nicholas James Thorne…the Second.’
‘The Second?’ she whispered, bewildered. Was he suggesting they start all over again? A second chance?
‘To distinguish me from my father—Nicholas James Thorne the First,’ he said deliberately.
Her brow wrinkled soggily. ‘Your father has the same name as you?’
‘No, I have the same name as him,’ he corrected urgently, as if the fine distinction was important. ‘Just before I was born he had an illness that rendered him sterile, which was why he was so obsessive about me marrying and perpetuating the name. There are two Nicholas Thornes, Vivian, but only one was driving the car that night—my father.’
Vivian’s bleached face stormed with vivid emotion as she realised what he was telling her. ‘But, your son—’
His fingers across her mouth hushed her confused protest, and the riot of blood in her veins became a visible tumult that bloomed across her skin. ‘I have no son. Your “boy” in the back seat was me. To the doctor who patched me up, a twenty-five-year-old probably did seem like a boy—he certainly seemed old to me, although he was probably only in his late fifties.
‘After Barbara was killed, my father said it didn’t matter that I was crippled, as long as my genes were healthy. We had endless rows about my refusal to marry again. In the end I turned my back on it all—my father, his money, the business I was supposed to take over, the whole concept of Being A Thorne. I didn’t realise that after the accident his dream had become a ruthless obsession, and the obsession had developed into a dangerous fixation with you…’
Vivian struggled to sit up, but Nicholas held her down with implacable gentleness. ‘Are you saying this was all his idea?’ she asked hoarsely through her salt-scored throat.
‘I had no idea what he was planning,’ he said emphatically. ‘Not until I paid a long-overdue duty visit last week. As usual, our discussion turned into a furious row. He suddenly started shouting the most ridiculous things… about how it was all your fault his son had turned against him and how he was finally going to make you and Janna pay for murdering his grandson. How he had waited years for just the right moment to get you where he wanted you… He was boasting about how he was going to do it when he had a massive stroke—’
‘Oh, God…’ Vivian’s fist came up to her mouth and Nicholas eased it away, unsurprised by her horrified compassion for the man who had tried to hurt her.
‘No, he’s not dead, but he’s in an extremely bad way,’ he said sombrely, wrapping her fist reassuringly in his. His body shifted against hers, enveloping her in a fresh wave of blissful warmth.