Dark Fever

He was married, that was the important fact. He was not free.

‘Bianca, wait!’ he called from behind her, but she didn’t look back, she merely walked faster, almost running.

A couple of minutes later she was safely in her apartment and locked the door, leaning on it in the darkness, groaning.

He was a married man. She put her hands over her darkly flushed face, humiliated and ashamed. If I’d known...

Well, thank God he doesn’t know how I have felt ever since I first set eyes on him. And I’ll make sure he never does know, either...

CHAPTER THREE

Bianca found it hard to sleep that night; her mind was obsessed with images, contradictory and disturbing, filled with fear. However hard she tried she couldn’t banish memories of Gil Marquez climbing up from the pool outside her apartment, his golden skin dripping with water, his black hair slicked back on his seal-like head. She turned over and tried to think of something else; her mind simply conjured up another, darker memory— the dark street, the sound of the motorbike, the black-clad figure, the steel flash of the knife...

She sat up and switched on the light, sipped some water, rubbed her scalp vigorously with both hands as if trying to erase the memory of those moments, then clicked off the light again and lay down.

At once Gil’s face filled her mind—the har

d jawline, the powerful features, the direct, assured grey eyes.

‘Oh, go away!’ she said aloud angrily, and she finally fell asleep in the early hours.

If she had dreams she didn’t remember them when she woke up next morning. Through the closed shutters sunlight carved bars of gold across her room and she heard the splashing of someone in the pool outside, children’s voices, the high morning calling of birds among the trees. She lay in bed staring at the wall, at the shifting shadows of branches cast there by the golden light, and felt as weary as if she hadn’t slept at all.

Turning her head, she looked at the clock and was horrified to see that it was nearly ten. She hadn’t got up this late for so long that she couldn’t even remember the last time. There was always too much to do at home-six days a week she had to get up to open the shop, and on Sundays she had to get up early to clean the house from top to bottom and do her personal washing. Her life was too crowded for her to have time for the luxury of sleeping late.

She could hear the hotel maids cleaning in the apartments above her: the drone of their vacuum cleaner, their voices, the slam of doors as they went in and out. They would want to clean her apartment next; she had to get up.

She groaned and slid out of bed, went into the bathroom. She felt better when she had showered; she put on her swimsuit and over that a short yellow cotton tunic. She decided to skip breakfast and have a coffee down on the beach; there was a bar down there which served a continental breakfast of croissant, orange juice and coffee. Bare-legged and wearing white sandals, she walked down through the hotel grounds, under tropical palms and exotic trees, to the beach, and found it half-full already.

Under striped blue and white umbrellas the matching loungers were laid out in rows. The young boy who was looking after the beach showed her to a place right at the front, near the sea, and put up an umbrella for her, adjusting the position to give her the right amount of shade over her mattress. Bianca asked him to bring her breakfast, tipped him, took off her tunic, folded it neatly, spread her towel over the striped cover of the mattress and sat down on top of it to smooth suntan lotion into her skin while she waited.

He was quick and efficient—he was back very quickly with a tray which he placed on the small plastic table beside her. She paid him and he went off whistling while she drank her juice and then ate her croissant and drank her black coffee, which was strong and very hot.

When she had finished she felt more alive. Lying down, she closed her eyes and let the sun permeate her pale English skin.

‘Good morning.’

The voice made her stiffen. She reluctantly opened her eyes and saw him standing over her, his body blocking out the sun.

Her pulses went crazy at the sight of him in those brief black swimming-trunks; the sunlight glinting on those smooth, tanned shoulders gave his skin a wonderful glow. Her eyes slid from them to the powerful muscled chest, lean hips, strong thighs and those long, long legs with their dusting of fine black hair.

She swallowed and managed a reply. ‘Good morning.’

‘How are you this morning? Got over last night’s shock?’ He coolly sat down on the empty mattress beside her, only a foot away, and she was overwhelmed by physical sensations that appalled her. They were on a beach full of other people, but she felt as if they were alone.

‘Yes, thank you.’ She was suffering another kind of shock now; she had the feeling that it would be a long time before she got over this one. She wished, urgently, that she hadn’t come down to the beach this morning, that she were somewhere else, anywhere but here. What if he picked up on the turmoil inside her? The very idea of it made her burn with angry self-disgust.

‘You still look nervous, though,’ he said, studying her with narrowed grey eyes.

‘I’m fine,’ she muttered.

He looked unconvinced. ‘You haven’t forgotten that you have an appointment at half-past eleven?’

Bianca stared at him blankly. ‘What?’

His brows rose. ‘You obviously have! The police asked you to go down and identify their suspects at noon.’

Agitated, she looked at her watch—it was a quarter to eleven. ‘How long will it take me to get to the police station?’