Beguiled by Her Betrayer

‘Quin,’ she cried as he took her over the edge and back into the whirlpool. ‘Quin!’

* * *

‘I am here,’ Quin said and moved to gather Cleo’s quivering body into his arms. ‘I’m here.’

She had been so beautiful in the throes of passion, so intense, so abandoned and primal. And so responsive. He ached, but pushed the need away. It was a nagging reminder that he should not have done this, that it had given him satisfaction when it should all have been for her.

Cleo’s eyes opened and she smiled at him, a sweet, trusting caress of a look that had him smiling back, frustration and conscience forgotten. ‘Mmm, that was so good.’ She stretched like a cat in his arms and he thought of the goddess Bastet, feline, feminine and powerful. Then her fingers found the waistband of his breeches and she began to tug at his shirt. ‘How can I make love to you if you won’t take your clothes off?’

‘You can’t. I do not want you to.’ Quin set her on the bed and stood up. ‘This was not about me.’

‘Not about...’ She sat curled up on the rumpled bunk completely naked, still flushed with passion, and stared at him. ‘Why?’ she murmured as though to herself. Then her furrowed brow cleared and her eyes that had been inward-looking with thought became sharp and angry as she focused on his face. ‘Of course. Make love to me and I’ll stop making demands. Befuddle my brain with sex and I’ll curl up like a well-stroked cat and not ask that you engage with my anxieties and my desires. Commit physical intimacies and you will not risk me trying to create mental ones.’

‘Cleo, it is not like that.’ Hell, is that what I was doing? Surely not. His conscience stirred, uneasy. I gave her pleasure, I showed her I return her feelings of attraction. No, that is not enough to justify it.

‘Is it not?’ She was flinging on clothing as if a fire alarm had been raised. Quin winced at the sound of tearing cotton as her nails caught in a stocking, but she dragged it on regardless and knotted her garters with a jerk. ‘Whenever I tell myself I was wrong about you, that I was foolishly suspicious, you have the perfect knack for destroying my trust in you.’ Cleo cast around, one shoe in her hand. ‘Oh, where is my other shoe?’

‘Here.’ Quin handed it to her and bit back the words that were forming. It would be hopeless to explain what he did not understand himself, pointless to apologise when he could not decide whether she was being utterly unreasonable or not. He had never met another woman like her.

Cleo cast a distracted look at the mirror hanging on the bulkhead, pushed her fingers through her hair and whirled round to confront him. ‘Will you kindly let me out?’

For a long moment Quin stood there, his hand on the bolt, and thought about letting common sense go to the devil. Something far more powerful than lust was urging him to take her in his arms, kiss her, undress them both and to hell with the consequences.

The moment of recklessness lasted only seconds. Quin unbolted the door and stood back as Cleo swept out without looking at him, then closed it behind her with meticulous care. He was closer to completely losing his temper than he could ever recall and he was not too sure who he was most angry with: himself for being a bloody fool or Cleo for asking far more than he was prepared to give her, or any woman. Or perhaps it was the nagging instinct that he had just lost something important.

Quin scrubbed his hand across his aching head, then flung open his trunk and rummaged until he found the thin cotton trousers and galabeeyah he had worn in the desert. He changed and went barefoot up on to deck.

‘How long before we sail?’ he asked the captain, ignoring the man’s raised eyebrows.

‘Four hours at least, my lord. Several of the water casks need replacing.’

‘Can you lend me the small skiff and someone to sail it? I want to go along the coast to swim.’

‘Certainly, my lord.’ The idiosyncrasies of aristocratic passengers were obviously to be tolerated, given the price the man had extracted for their passage.

It took only minutes to find a sailor and for the skiff to be sailing out from the harbour and along the coast to a shallow bay. The man, who obviously thought he was mildly deranged, threw the anchor over and dropped the sail while Quin stripped off his clothes. He took a shallow dive into water that was clear, calm and cool to the skin, warmed only by the spring sunshine, not the heat of summer.

Quin surfaced and began to swim, hard and fast, parallel to the beach. He was grateful for the salty freshness, even as it stung the grazes from his collision with a wall that morning.

He pushed himself hard, working on speed and the accuracy of his strokes, focused on nothing but the physical sensation, the burn and stretch of the newly healed scar on his arm, the slide of the water, silky over his naked skin.