Passionate Retribution

Her satisfaction at this hasty conclusion was somewhat ambiguous. Her body felt too alive, too inflamed for her not to experience a certain perverse frustration which she steadfastly refused to acknowledge.

'I realise I'm a convenient body, Luke,' she said drily, only too well aware that this was the only reason he had even noticed she was female. 'But it would take more than propinquity to induce me to seek dubious solace in your arms.' She kept a firm grip on the sleeping-bag to prevent it obeying gravity.

He listened to her with apparent interest. 'Propinquity wasn't doing badly a few moments ago, infant. I mean, I don't precisely object to being ogled like a sex object…' He watched the hot colour wash over her skin, his lips twisted into a sneer.

Emily was trying desperately to reconcile the truth in his cruel statement with the denial she longed to throw at him. 'You have a lurid imagination,' she said stiltedly. She knew all about imagination. There had been a time when it had been more real to her than reality.

He got up with a fluid movement that made her tense; it was impossible not to be aware of the innate grace that was impressive in such a large man. He exhibited such a harmony of controlled strength that it was difficult, in her state of heightened awareness, not to watch him covertly, almost angrily, from beneath her eyelashes.

'I expect Gavin is finding comfort at this moment in the arms of the delectable Charlotte,' he taunted, his voice apparently savouring the picture this observation conjured up, a picture which made Emily face once more the disaster of her failure…failure to hold the interest of the man she had been set to spend her entire life with. 'If your taste runs to Barbie dolls, she must seem heaven-sent. I was just offering you the opportunity to enjoy the same solace.'

'That's incredibly chivalrous of you, Luke, but I couldn't impose on your good nature,' she replied with savage irony.

He met her angry glare with infuriating blandness as he casually turned the door-handle. 'One thing, Emily. I suggest you put something on—just in case you should happen to succumb to another nightmare.' His eyes slid away from her face and she became aware of a sudden tension in him, in the harsh lines of his face, a raw flicker of blue fire that smouldered into life in his eyes. 'I wouldn't put too much faith in my good nature, if I were you.'

Shivering, Emily sat on the bed, assailed by a torrent of doubts. There had been a definite warning in that parting shot, a hint of the ruthlessness she knew Luke to possess. She was suddenly directly in the firing line in this war of attrition. In this small engagement she had almost become a symbol of overall victory. She was just beginning to appreciate the dangers inherent in such a position.

She might have outgrown childish infatuations, but she knew better than to underestimate youthful passion. To face up to the absurdity of her lurid imaginings had been the most painful experience of her life. What am I thinking? she reprimanded herself. Today is the worst day of my life—how can I possibly compare a humiliation four years old to the wholesale betrayal by the people closest to me?

It was sensible to put down her erratic and explosive awareness of Luke to her shattering discoveries, discoveries which had thrown her life off course. She rejected firmly any other possible explanation.

Comforting herself with this conclusion, she tried to drift back to sleep, her head buried in the sleeping- bag—but not before she'd extracted a nightshirt from her hastily packed case. Her thoughts touched on the moment she'd become aware of the skin-to-skin contact. Her mind soon blanked out the episode, but she had already recalled the texture…the imprint of a hard male body.

If Luke had been serious when he'd suggested they spend the night together, and she had been crazy enough to give in to some aberrant weakness, she doubted whether she'd have spared much time worrying over Gavin, she admitted to herself, unable to deny the fact that there was something about Luke that could make other aspects of life, even crucial ones, fade into insignificance. In the darkness her eyes shot open. She hadn't, though, had she? Her muddled thoughts had been revolving around her disagreeable distant relation, not her former fiancé.

She closed her eyes and determinedly constructed a sensation of self-pity and betrayal, finding this pit of misery less menacing than her previous mental meanderings.

'Tea, and toast.'

Emily blinked. The brief knock on the adjoining door had given her little time to gather her sleepy wits. Luke bore down upon her, balancing a tray on one hand. His comprehensive glance made her conscious of her tousled hair and no doubt ravaged face. She hitched the loose nightshirt up over the shoulder it had slipped down and sat up self-consciously.

The tray was placed across her knees. 'I've not laced anything with hallucinogenic drugs,' he assured her drily as she stared suspiciously at the food. He lifted the lid on a pot. 'Preserve, not arsenic.'