Prince Of Lies

There, some hundreds of yards away through the trees, was what looked to be a temple, chastely, classically Greek. Her eyes blurred; she blinked to clear them, but a cloud had passed over the sun, and the tantalising streak of white was gone.

Perhaps it had been a hallucination.

His return startled her. It was uncanny; he seemed to rise out of the ground like a primeval huntsman, so at one with his surroundings that the trees sheltered him in their embrace.

‘Not a soul in sight,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

His arms around her were intensely comforting, like coming home. Sighing, Stephanie leaned her head against his shoulder. He smelt slightly sweaty, so it wasn’t as easy carrying her as he made it seem. Another scent teased her nostrils, faint but ever present, evocative, with a hint of salt and musk. Masculinity, she decided dreamily.

She knew that she must smell hideous, reek with the stale odour of confinement. A pursuer, she thought with a wry twist of her lips, wouldn’t need to search for her; all he’d have to do was follow his nose to find her.

She was still wondering why this seemed so especially unbearable when he said, ‘Right, here we are.’

However, he didn’t go immediately to the car that waited in the heavy shade of a conifer. It wasn’t hidden, but few people would notice it, for it was painted a green that blended with the long needles of the trees.

Just inside the confines of the wood he put her against the trunk of a tree, and stood blocking her from anyone who might be watching, his whole being concentrated on a hawk-eyed, icily patient scrutiny of every tree, every blade of grass, and the big, dark car.

When at last he did move it was with a speed that shocked her. Within seconds she was deposited on the mattress in the boot, choking back a moan as he firmly closed the lid.

The engine sprang into life; with no delay the car drew away from the picnic spot and turned down the road.

Even on the mattress Stephanie was soon profoundly uncomfortable. Her bones seemed to have no fleshy covering to protect them; she ached all over, and she was shivering. She was also worrying. So great had her initial relief been that suspicion hadn’t had room to take hold. Now, cramped like a parcel, trying to ignore the thumping of her head and the tremors that racked her, she began to recall things she had noticed but not questioned. Whoever her rescuer was, he had keys not only to the crypt and the coffin, but also to the handcuffs that had manacled her in the coffin.

Saul, her brother, had an excellent security department, but it was highly unlikely that even the most skilled operative would have been able to get those keys. So unlikely that she had better stop believing that the man driving the BMW had anything to do with Saul.

Her quick, instinctive stab of revulsion warned her that she was halfway into the Stockholm syndrome—falling in with the wishes of her captor.

Think, she adjured her pounding brain. Think, damn it!

There had been no indication that she was a target; if her intensely protective brother had heard the slightest hint that she was in danger, he wouldn’t have let her come to Switzerland without a bodyguard. Or with one, for that matter. The close relatives of billionaires were sometimes at risk; she had long ago accepted the constraints of her world, and co-operated, so Saul had no reason to keep her in ignorance.

If Saul didn’t know, if he hadn’t been warned, then none of his agents would have been alerted. According to her rescuer, she’d been imprisoned for three days. She had no way of checking the accuracy of this, but if it was true, was that time enough for one of Saul’s men to discover who the kidnappers were and get close enough to them to be able to copy the keys?

It didn’t seem likely, unless the kidnappers had left clues the size of houses. And somehow she doubted that; they had been frighteningly efficient.

It seemed important to know exactly how many keys there were. Even understanding that it was a mechanism to push the truth away didn’t stop her from counting them: the keys to the box, then to the handcuffs, keys to both doors. Four sets of keys. And he had them all.

She dragged a deep breath into her lungs. All right, don’t panic! What sort of person was he, this man who had walked into her life?

Although she hadn’t looked at him carefully, so she couldn’t recall the colour of his eyes or even his colouring beyond the fact that he was dark, that first swift glance had seared his features into her brain: a blade of a nose, high, arrogant cheekbones, eyes that had something strange about them. Did he look like a criminal?

Not, she thought bitterly, that looks were any indication. The man whose face she had seen under his torn Balaclava hadn’t looked like a criminal. If he’d been any type at all, it was a small-time shopkeeper.

Whatever, until she knew for certain, it would be much safer to work on the assumption that either her rescuer was one of the kidnappers who wanted all of the ransom, not merely a share of it, or an associate who knew what they had done, was trusted by them, and had decided to cut himself a piece of the pie. That would explain why he was being so careful not to be seen by the original kidnappers.

It sounds, she thought feverishly, like the instructions in an Elizabethan play: Enter first kidnapper with gag, blindfold and coffin, exit first kidnapper. Almost immediately enter second kidnapper, a large, athletic man with keys and strong arms.

If that was so, she was in just as much danger as before. He could quite easily plan to keep her safe as long as Saul demanded reassurance that she was alive, then kill her when the money had been paid over.

Her heart skittered into a rapid cacophony while her brain veered off towards the messy heights of hysteria.

Calm down. Panic isn’t going to get you anywhere.

With an effort of will that made her teeth chatter she began to breathe slowly, regularly, forcing herself to count the seconds. Eventually the churning flood of fear in her stomach subsided, and with it her inability to think.

Paradoxically, the only thing that comforted her was that he’d used the keys quite openly. If she’d been less of a cynic she might take that to mean he was legitimate.

Of course, he could well be devious enough to use them deliberately so that she’d be confused into accepting him as completely above-board. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had imagined that because her brother was one of the richest men in the world Stephanie Jerrard was incapable of logical thought, with nothing but clothes and jewellery and gossip in her mind.

He could have fallen into that trap. However, in the few moments she had spent talking to him she had gained the impression of a keen, razor-sharp intelligence, the sort of mind that didn’t make obvious mistakes. Apart from the keys, what else was there to base suspicion on?

The tension clamping her muscles began to ebb as she realised how little there was. He’d been evasive when she’d asked about Saul. Or had he?

Questions jostled around her aching head, forcing their way through to her conscious mind, battering her precarious self-control. How long was this journey going to take? She felt as though she’d been in the car for hours. Although they were now climbing quite steeply she couldn’t smell any exhaust fumes. Perhaps when you travelled in the boot of a car you left the fumes behind. No, she told herself, don’t get side-tracked. Think!

While the car twisted and turned smoothly around corners, she decided to do nothing. Her suspicions could be entirely wrong, and anyway, common sense told her she wasn’t going to be able to do any running or hiding until she’d regained some strength. The two men who had kidnapped her were around somewhere, and if she ran away and they caught up with her again, she thought with a shudder, they might kill her outright. After all, she could identify one of them.

So she’d eat and rest, and she’d probe as subtly as she could. If her rescuer was a villain she might be safe while she pretended to take him at face value.

Of course, there might be a perfectly logical explanation for those keys. All she had to do was ask. And if she didn’t like the answer, she could fake belief until she found an opportunity to get away from him.

As the car slid to halt, she froze. Striving to look weak and pathetic and entirely brainless, she coerced her muscles into looseness, wondering despairingly whether she should try to get away now, when he would be least likely to expect it.

Before she had time to make up her mind the lock on the boot clicked. ‘We’re here,’ he said, reaching in and gathering her up.

She said raggedly, ‘Where’s here? And what happens now?’

‘This is where we’re staying.’

‘It looks old,’ she said inanely.

‘Not very. It was built last century.’ He set off for a door across the garage.

Frowning, she looked around. ‘It doesn’t look like the stables.’

‘It’s not. This is the old laundry, which was converted into a garage some time in the thirties.’

Apparently he wasn’t given to fulsome explanations. She said stubbornly, ‘What’s going to happen now?’

‘I’m going to carry you upstairs, where you can shower and go to bed. Then you eat, and after that you sleep.’

It should have sounded wonderful but the greyness she had fought so long and vehemently had finally caught up with her. Blankly she said beneath her breath, ‘Thank you.’

Some emotion sawed through him, but his voice was steady and deliberate as he said, ‘It’s nothing. Think of me as your doctor.’

Her doctor was forty, a married woman wearing her sophistication with cheerful cynicism and an understanding heart. Stephanie smiled wearily.

‘Shower first,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to stay with you, I’m afraid, in case you fall.’

A week ago she would have refused point-blank, but it didn’t matter now. She didn’t think she would ever be modest again.

She forced herself to look around as he carried her across a high, mock-Gothic hall and up some narrow stairs.

‘This looks like a castle,’ she said.

‘Seen plenty of them, have you, princess?’ His voice was dry.

‘A few,’ she admitted. It couldn’t hurt. He knew who she was. What he might not know, she thought vengefully, was how formidable Saul was. On the first suitable occasion she’d make sure he learnt.

However, not even Saul was invincible, and she’d have to try to get herself out of this situation. So, she decided with an odd lurch in her heartbeat, she had better take a good look at the man who might well be her greatest obstacle. Fractionally turning her head, she sent a sideways glance through her lashes.

He wasn’t handsome, but strength and a compelling and concentrated authority marked the slashing lines of his face. Not a man you would forget, she thought, wishing her head didn’t ache so much that she couldn’t think clearly. Surely kidnappers didn’t look as though they strode through the world forcing it to accept them on their own terms? The two who had snatched her certainly hadn’t. The one she’d seen was short and thin, inconspicuous except for his flat, emotionless black eyes, and the other had behaved with all the flashy arrogance of a small-time criminal.

This man couldn’t have been taken for a small-time anything.

Stephanie felt physically ill; her whole body was screaming with pain, she was tired and hungry and frantic with thirst, and in spite of her efforts to keep a calm head she was terrified with the sort of fear that only needed a touch to spill into panic, yet her first reaction to eyes where the light splintered into scintillating energy was a sensation of something heated and unmanageable racing through her with the force of a stampede. Some hitherto inviolate part of her shattered in a subtle breaching of barricades that left her raw and undefended.

Eyes locked on to his face, she was thinking dazedly, What’s happening to me? when the corners of that ruthless, equivocal mouth tilted a fraction. ‘Do you think you’d recognise me again?’ he asked, his tone imbuing the words with a hidden meaning.

‘I’m sure of it.’ Self-protection impelled her to add, ‘I believe it’s a well-known syndrome; people do tend to remember those who rescue them from durance vile. Incidentally, how did you get into that cellar?’

He shouldered through a small door off a landing at the top of the stairs, walked across a room dimmed by heavy curtains, through another door, and stood her on her feet, turning her at the same time so that she had her back to him.

They were in a bathroom, neat, white, with a startlingly luxurious shower, all glass and modern fittings. As his hands supported her for the first agonising moments, he said calmly, ‘It’s not a cellar, it’s a fake crypt. The locks on the doors are not brand-new, and the men who put you there didn’t bother to change them. Your brother wields a lot of power, and it didn’t take long for me to get a complete set of skeleton keys.’

‘And the handcuffs?’

His mouth tightened, but his eyes held hers steadily as he said, ‘There are techniques for picking them.’

Stephanie almost sagged with relief, her reassured brain spinning into dizziness. Of course; she had read of skeleton keys often enough; she should have thought of them herself. And hadn’t Saul’s chief of security told her once that there was no lock invented that couldn’t be picked, given time, equipment and a deft hand?

Before she had time to say the incautious words that came tumbling to her lips, the man who had rescued her began to strip her as efficiently and swiftly as he had dressed her.

‘No,’ she muttered, trying to stop his hands.

‘You can’t do it yourself.’ He unzipped the jeans and pushed them down around her hips.

He was right, but in spite of her previous conviction about her lack of modesty she actually felt intense embarrassment. She had her back to him, but there was a mirror, and for a breathless second she saw their reflections, her pale, thin, hollow-eyed face beneath a wild tangle of rusty curls, the swift movements of his long-fingered hands unbuttoning her shirt.

Hastily she looked away, confusion and shame battling for supremacy. Although he was gentle, those tanned fingers branded her skin, leaving it hot and tender, connected by shimmering, glittering wires to her spine and the pit of her stomach. A lazy, coiled heat stirred there, as though his touch summoned something forbidden but irresistible.

Stephanie bit her lip, trying to use pain to drown out those other, treacherous sensations. It didn’t work, and in the end she gave in, her eyes caught and held by the strange power of his.

‘You have eyes like cornflowers,’ he astounded her by saying. ‘That brilliant, rare, clear sapphire. It must be a Jerrard trait.’

So he had met Saul. Stephanie’s suspicions fell from her like an ugly, discarded shroud. Bewitched by the new and unusual responses of her body, pulses jumping, she waited until he moved away to turn on the shower before shrugging off the shirt and stepping out of her jeans. A quick flick of her wrist hooked a towel from the rail to wrap around herself.

She stumbled, and he caught her, pulling her against the solid length of his body. Stephanie flinched, that insidious, unwanted awareness reinforced by his nearness. Although she was tall and not slightly built, against him she felt tiny, delicately fragile, an experience intensified by the unexpected burgeoning of a languorous femininity.

Her rescuer’s austere face was intent as he juggled with the shower controls, but that concentrated attention was not bent on her; he showed no signs of a reciprocal response.

You’re mad, she told herself as steam began to fill the shower stall. Look in the mirror—your bones stick out, you’re filthy, and you smell. The sort of first impression no one ever overcomes. Who in their right mind would be anything but casual and very, very detached?

‘There, that should be right,’ he said, urging her into the big, tiled, warm shower with its glass doors now tactfully obscured by steam. He didn’t move away from the door, but at least he couldn’t see much through the hazy mist.

A singing, surging relief persuaded her to release the bonds of the obstinacy that had held her together for so long. Only for a few hours, she thought as with eyes tightly shut she tried to wash herself. She could give up for a few hours and use some of this man’s strength until she regained her own.

The water was like nectar over her skin, but its heat drained her waning energy, and her hands shook so much that she couldn’t get soap on to the flannel. As tears squeezed their way beneath her lashes she continued grimly on, aware of the man who stood so close, a large, dim figure through the glass doors.

The cake of soap plummeted between her fingers and landed on her foot. Unable to prevent a soft cry of pain, she cut it short and crouched to pick up the wretched thing. It took a vast effort to push herself upright, and when she got there she could feel her legs trembling. Refusing to look at the man who watched, hating him for not leaving her alone, she gripped the flannel and passed it over the cake of soap.

He asked tonelessly, ‘Do you want me to wash you?’

Lethargy enmeshed her, but she said, ‘No, I can do it.’

Only she couldn’t. Her arms ached, and her fingers wouldn’t obey her, and her legs felt as though the bones had been replaced by sponge rubber.

He waited until she dropped the soap again, then said curtly, ‘Here, give me that flannel. When you’ve as much strength as a cooked noodle courage and determination will only get you so far.’

Stephanie turned her face away, saying stiffly, ‘I’m all right—’

‘Shut up,’ he said, interrupting her by taking the cloth from her lax fingers.

CHAPTER TWO

HOSTILITY flared brightly inside Stephanie, matched by a crackle of antagonism from him. A searing glance from those colourless eyes warned her that she wasn’t going to win this one. Squeezing her eyelids shut, she stood mutinously while the flannel slipped slowly, gently over skin that was stretched and too sensitive.

Her blood gathered thickly in her veins. No matter how much she tried to concentrate on relief at being safe, all she could feel was the elemental nearness of the man who had brought her out of hell. His presence was a sensuous abrasion on her skin, electric, tingling, charging the shower stall with a fierce, primal vitality, setting acutely responsive nerves alight. Dazed, she set herself to endure what she couldn’t change.

He didn’t hurry. The flannel laved her body in subtle, diligent torture. He even shampooed her hair, working suds through the rust-coloured strands, seeming to understand that she needed it rinsed over and over until it was glowing against her head. Luxuriating in the purifying spray of water, she thought that he was surprisingly patient. She suspected that it wasn’t an inherent part of his character, but had been hard-won by the exercise of will. Whatever, she was grateful for it.

Sudden exhaustion robbed her bones of strength, and she swayed, her hands whipping up to grab his forearm as she fell. Unwillingly her eyes popped open. A wide, bare chest filled her vision, fine wet hair slicked in a tree-of-life pattern over olive skin clearly in the best of health, a shocking contrast to her own sunless pallor.

Without her volition her gaze travelled down; she realised he still had his trousers on.

‘You’re getting wet,’ she said foolishly, trying to curb a harsh, unbidden response, elemental and unwanted.

‘I didn’t think you’d like it if I came in without any clothes on,’ he returned, a satirical note edging his tone.

Blood stung her cheeks and throat. Feeling much younger than her eighteen years, she stammered, ‘No—well, no, I wouldn’t.’

She had wanted to stay beneath the water until her skin was wrinkled and pale, washing off the results of being locked in a coffin for three days, scrubbing herself free from the taint and the terror and the evilness of it. But now she needed to get out of there.

Quickly, she said the first words that came into her head. ‘I’m cold.’

‘All right.’ He turned off the spray.

Swallowing a lump that obstructed her throat, and apparently her thought processes too, Stephanie watched through lashes beaded with drops of water as he pushed open the glass door and stepped out on to the mat. Muscles moved in his back—not the smooth, sculptured works of art nurtured in a gym, but tautly corded, with the flowing vigour and hard, tensile power of rigorous work.

‘Here,’ he said, handing her a large, warm white towel.

Battling the treacherous feelings that surged through her, she accepted it and began to dry herself. He pulled another towel from the holder and started to wipe the glistening water from his arms.

Her last vestiges of energy evaporated as fast as the water on his skin. Stumbling once more, Stephanie would have fallen if he hadn’t sensed her predicament and whirled around to catch her, moving with a speed and accuracy that obscurely frightened her. For the second time in as many minutes, she was supported against a taut male body.

‘My legs won’t hold me up,’ she muttered, unable now to hide her panic with anger. Sensation bludgeoned her; acutely aware of the heated, silky dampness of his skin, the potency barely leashed in the tall body that supported her, she swallowed.

‘Stand still,’ he said in a cool, crisp voice, and began to blot the water from her shoulders.

Beneath the white towel his hands were careful yet completely impersonal. By the time she was dry Stephanie was shivering, engulfed by a fatigue that was only partly caused by her ordeal. Dimly she realised that she was being put into a huge T-shirt, thick and soft and enveloping, before being lifted and carried and lowered into a bed, and then sheets were pulled over her and she sank gratefully into the sleep that claimed her...

Until the nightmares came like evil wraiths, tormenting with the terrors she hadn’t allowed herself to feel while imprisoned, slyly sneaking through the unguarded gates of her unconscious mind and into her brain, vivid, horrifying, so real that she could feel herself screaming.

‘Stop that right now,’ a masculine voice ordered, compounding her fear.

A reflex action filled her lungs with air. Opening her mouth to scream again, she flung herself on to the other side of the bed. The sound was cut off instantly by a hand clamping across her mouth. Bucking with terror, she lashed her tired limbs to greater efforts, wrenching at iron fingers, trying to bite, to claw, to scratch.

‘Stop it, you little spitfire,’ he commanded.

It was the impact of his body rather than his voice, low and gritty and threatening, that restored her to her senses. Suddenly she realised where she was, and that this man had taken her from darkness and horror and cleaned her and soothed her, as well as giving her water several times already that night when she’d woken gasping for it.

A convulsive shudder shook her and she stopped fighting. Amid the fading panic and confusion she registered the change in his tone as he repeated, ‘Stop it, Stephanie. You’re safe, and no one is going to hurt you again.’

Silenced, the only sound the heavy pounding of her heart, she nodded feebly. The hand across her mouth gentled, relaxed, and slid down to the pulse that beat ferociously in her throat. ‘Poor little scrap,’ he said, his deep voice vibrating with a barely curbed anger.

Somehow the simple remark called her back from the frightening world of her memories. She didn’t want to be pitied, pity weakened her, yet for a moment she let her craving for security pacify her back into childishness.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘It was just a dream.’

Perhaps because that long walk in his arms had desensitised her, or perhaps because of his total lack of response to her nakedness in the shower, she forgot any reservations she had and followed her simple need for reassurance by burrowing into him. As his arms tightened her panic eased into a strange contentment. She pressed her cheek against a bare chest, the slight roughening of his hair on her skin a profoundly comforting sensation.