Desperate to get past them as quickly as she could, she started to skirt the group—only to be brought to shocked halt when one of the men stepped out in front of her, blocking her way. Anger, disgust and most shamingly of all stomach-gripping fear washed over her in a nauseating spine-chilling surge. He put his hand on her arm as he smiled his cruel crocodile smile at her, the familiar sour smell of his breath closing her throat against the retching movement of loathing tightening it. Anton Gillman. A man she had every reason to loathe and fear. She wanted to turn and run but she couldn’t.
‘Lily, what a delicious surprise—and looking so grown up as well. It’s been so long. It must be—what? —twelve years?’
It was surely deliberate that he was talking to her in that adult-to-child manner she remembered so well. Because he knew what hearing it would do to her.
The temptation to correct him and tell him that it was thirteen years was dangerously strong. She must not let him know that she even remembered, never mind knew to the exact year how long it had been.
Someone bumped into her, jolting her uncomfortably. Her keycard slipped from her hand. Immediately, before she could bend down to retrieve it, Anton released her and did so for her, carefully studying the number of the suite printed on the card before taunting her softly as he held it out to her. ‘If that’s an invitation …’
Horror crawled along her veins.
Almost snatching the keycard from him, she said, half choking on her loathing, ‘No, it isn’t. You know I would never …’ She stopped speaking, not trusting herself to say any more.
The people he was with had moved on into the restaurant. She felt hot and cold, as though she was in the grip of a fever.
But instead of annoying him her rejection seemed only to amuse him, because he laughed and shook his head, shook that mane of dark coiffured hair that curled down his neck just as she remembered it ‘Ah, you should never say never, my dear Lily. After all, there is a great deal of unfinished business between you and I, and it would give me a great deal of satisfaction to bring it to its proper end—especially in such an undeniably sensual setting.’
Even though she knew he would be able to see and feel the shudder that ripped through her, she couldn’t control it. She was fourteen again, and he a grown man, stalking her with one thing on his mind.
‘I’m twenty-seven now,’ she forced herself to point out to him. The past fought inside her with the present, the child she had been with the woman she now was. ‘Far too old to appeal to a man of your tastes.’
He was watching her with amusement, and an open sexual greed that had her only increased her panic. ‘Ah, but you do appeal to me, Lily. You always have. They say there is an extra allure to a lost opportunity. Are you here alone?’
Lily hesitated before saying quickly, ‘No.’
She had waited too long before answering him, Lily knew, and his laughter chilled her with horror. It told her that he knew how she felt.
‘You’re lying to me,’ he told her mock disappointedly, confirming her fear. ‘How delightfully erotic that you still fear me. That will add a divine extra pleasure to my possession of you. And I shall possess you, Lily, because it is what you owe me. How pleasing that you should come back into my life so fortuitously. You are staying in suite number sixteen, I see.’
From the restaurant Marco watched Lily with increasing contempt. It was plain to him that she and the man knew one another very well indeed, from the way in which they were standing so intimately close to one another. The man was mature, at least twenty years older than Lily, and well dressed in a flashy kind of way.
‘Marco,’ Izzie Febretti complained at his elbow, ‘you are not listening to me.’
‘You have a husband who I am sure will be delighted to listen to you, Izzie,’ Marco pointed out, adding, ‘Please excuse me,’ and then walking away from the table. A long time ago he and Izzie had been lovers. Just like Lily and the man with her? Why did that thought stab at him with such vicious fury?
‘Anton,’ called one of the other men from the restaurant, leaving Lily free to make her escape on trembling legs. But there could be no real relief for her now that she knew not only that he was here in the same hotel but also, thanks to her own folly, he knew the number of her suite. He had enjoyed threatening and frightening her tonight, she recognised, just as she remembered him enjoying threatening and frightening the young girls he had pursued and destroyed.