Sanchia's Secret

It was like an earthquake.

Shattered by the violence of her response to Caid’s seeking, demanding mouth, Sanchia gave up trying to think and surrendered to the astonishing pleasure his kiss summoned.

Some time later she surfaced, locked in his arms. Appalled, she tried to pull away, but he lifted his head and said harshly, “It’s too late for that.”

“Oh, no, it’s not,” she muttered, beating back the first icy trickle of fear. “I must be mad. Caid, let me go!”

“So nothing has changed,” he said coldly, releasing her immediately. “Kissing is all right, but I must go no further. Why, Sanchia?”

“I won’t let this happen again!”

“Hell, isn’t it?” he agreed sardonically. His eyes glinted. “Perhaps you have such a powerful effect on me because I spent several frustrating summers watching you grow up. And one infinitely frustrating holiday when I tried to get past the ironclad barriers that slammed in my face whenever I touched you. What’s your excuse?”

ROBYN DONALD has always lived in Northland in New Zealand, initially on her father’s stud dairy farm at Warkworth, then in the Bay of Islands, an area of great natural beauty, where she lives today with her husband and an ebullient and mostly Labrador dog. She resigned her teaching position when she found she enjoyed writing romances more, and now spends any time not writing in reading, gardening, traveling and writing letters to keep up with her two adult children and her friends.

Sanchia’s Secret

Robyn Donald

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

‘SHE won’t sell? Why not?’ Caid Hunter barked into the telephone. Eyes narrowing into intense slivers of blue, he propped a muscular thigh against his desk and stared unseeingly through the window at the twin towers that dominated the business district of Kuala Lumpur.

‘I don’t know. Her letter simply said Waiora Bay wasn’t for sale.’ His manager in New Zealand sounded startled—his boss didn’t normally overreact to setbacks.

Summoning the cool intelligence that made him respected and feared throughout the Pacific Rim countries, Caid leashed his anger and leaned over to punch a couple of computer keys. His electronic diary opened out on the screen of the laptop. ‘It’s what—two months?—since her aunt died?’

‘I went to Miss Tregear’s funeral on the twenty-eighth of September, so it’s just over two months.’ The manager spoke crisply. ‘Ms Smith was quite adamant that Waiora Bay wasn’t for sale. I can fax you her answer if you want to see it.’

A hot urgency stirred Caid’s senses as he visualised Sanchia Smith—a stubborn chin, hair the colour of midnight shimmering over pale shoulders, and a body that had changed from lanky slenderness to elegant, innocent seduction between one Christmas and the next.

A girl who kissed like a sinful angel, then froze in his arms.

It took most of his will-power to thrust the memories into the past where they belonged. ‘No, I’ll deal with it when I get back.’

He put the receiver down and stood gazing out over the humid, congested city. Presumably Sanchia was hanging out for a better offer. Caid’s smile hardened. When she discovered she couldn’t screw him for one cent more than her inheritance was worth, would her greenstone eyes blaze, that passionate, sultry mouth tighten into anger?

Squinting against the ferocious January sun, Sanchia eased her foot onto the brake, skilfully negotiating potholes and drifts of gravel as she turned onto the Waiora Bay Road.

Half a kilometre later, on the boundary of the highway system and Caid Hunter’s land, gravel and potholes gave way to well-kept tarseal. Everything on Caid’s big cattle station breathed good husbandry backed by a vast amount of money.

Of course, the principal of a large, international corporation could afford to seal his farm roads!

Deliberately Sanchia persuaded her tense joints to relax. Since Great-Aunt Kate’s funeral she’d made the four-hour drive from Auckland to Waiora Bay several times so the loneliness was nothing new, and the slow curl of apprehension that flooded her body with fight-or-flight hormones was completely familiar; she was always afraid that Caid Hunter would be there.

Which was mild paranoia; after the fiasco of three years before he’d probably made sure their paths hadn’t crossed, and there was no reason to expect him to be in residence now.

And once she’d had this last holiday at the Bay, she’d never return.

Perhaps she should have followed her first instinct and come back for Christmas, toughed it out instead of giving in to friends who’d persuaded her to stay in Auckland for the festivities.

‘Although I can so see why you want to go,’ one had crooned, gazing sultry-eyed at the television screen as the credits rolled up on a documentary on high-flying businessmen. ‘I’d be up there like a shot myself if I had a neighbour like Caid Hunter.’ With a low growl she fanned herself vigorously with a newspaper. ‘Talk about a splendid beast! When he smiled at the interviewer I swear her contact lenses fogged up. I bet he goes through women like a harvester at haymaking. Doesn’t the camera love him? Is he really as sexy as that?’

Sanchia managed a laugh. It sounded a bit cracked, but neither of the other two women seemed to notice. ‘Sexier.’

‘I bet women fall at his feet in droves.’

‘Oh, they do.’

Every summer girls had fluttered around Caid—glorious, self-assured creatures with pretty laughs and beautiful faces and bodies. Before she could stop herself Sanchia glanced surreptitiously down at the slight mounds beneath her thin shirt. How she’d envied those girls, their voluptuous, brazen breasts! And their confident sexuality.

Her flatmate sighed. ‘Yeah, you could see the testosterone pounding through his veins. It’s not fair that one man should have so much—an indecent amount of money, a face that’s handsome enough to make your mouth water, and a brilliant business brain too!’ She undulated sexily across the room, shaking her head so that her hair swung around her like a shampoo commercial. ‘As well as being tough enough to grab a huge conglomerate like Hunter’s by the neck when he wasn’t much more than a kid, shake it out and strip it down into the leaner, more efficient, infinitely more profitable business that’s taking on the world today. Where does this gorgeous man live? I might go looking for him.’

Rose, the owner of the house, laughed. ‘Didn’t they say he’s based in Australia?’

Sanchia shrugged. ‘He has houses all over the world.’ Yes, she’d achieved the right casual, mildly amused tone.

‘I could cope with a man who has houses all over the world,’ Jane decided generously. ‘And because I’m always suspicious of pampered heirs, I thoroughly approve of the fact that Caid Hunter had to fight to get his father’s company back on its feet. I do love a powerful, masterful, dynamic man!’

‘I don’t think he was ever pampered,’ Sanchia told her, smiling with irony.

‘He must have a thumping great character flaw,’ Jane said, frowning. ‘There has to be a catch. Does he cheat at Monopoly?’

‘I’ve never played Monopoly with him.’ They’d played for much more dangerous stakes. ‘We said hello whenever we met on the beach, and his mother used to ask us up to dinner every holiday, but the Hunters were well out of our league.’

Until the summer she’d finished university…

Rose asked, ‘Is he likely to be at the Bay?’

Sanchia’s stomach muscles knotted again. ‘Possibly.’

‘If he’s not, will you mind being alone there without a phone?’

‘I won’t be alone.’ Two questioning glances persuaded her to expand, ‘The farm manager and the caretaker both live nearby. For heaven’s sake, both of you, I’ll be fine—I want one last holiday there, that’s all.’

Rose asked, ‘A kind of pilgrimage?’

‘Exactly,’ Sanchia said gratefully. A pilgrimage to say a private, final farewell to Great-Aunt Kate, the only person who’d ever loved her unconditionally, and to the only place she’d ever called home.

And a pilgrimage that would achieve some sort of closure on the love affair she’d never really had.

So now her elderly car was leaving the smooth road across Caid’s land to rattle down the hill through a remnant of coastal bush where tree-ferns cast starkly primeval shadows on the rutted track. Narrowing her eyes behind her sunglasses, Sanchia drove across the iron bars of the cattle-stop and over the grassy flat towards the small cottage.

On a short sigh of relief she braked and came to a stop. Small, rugged, wearing its eighty years with a jaunty, unashamed air, the cottage—never renovated and so called a bach—contrasted blatantly with the opulent mansion on the low headland to the west. To Sanchia’s fury, her heart skipped a beat.

‘You had a crush on him, but you grew out of it. It’s dead, done and gone,’ she pronounced firmly, dragging her gaze away from the trees that surrounded the Hunter mansion.

Her flatmates might admire a man who’d survived and won after being thrust into the cut-throat world of big business—but men like that were dangerous. And Caid Hunter wanted Waiora Bay. He had both power and the resources to fight her great-aunt’s plans for it.

Trying to ignore the cold emptiness beneath her midriff, Sanchia switched off the engine and sat for a moment, letting her tired eyes feast on the scene before her.

Huge, crimson-tasselled pohutukawa trees sprawled between a newly mown lawn—for which she’d have to thank Will Spence, the Hunters’ caretaker—and a glittering, sultry sea. Beneath the violent sun, sand blazed incandescently white. The tension behind her eyes began to wind more tightly as her gaze travelled to the leonine bulk of the island that sheltered the beach from northerly winds. A scattering of sails hinted at destinations beyond the horizon.

Tears aching in her throat, she pushed open the door of the car. Eventually she’d be able to remember the good times without grief, but she suspected it wasn’t going to happen easily or quickly.

With an inelegant sniff, she manoeuvred her long legs out of the car and stood up.

Heat hit her like a blow, sucking the air from her lungs and pasting her thin cotton T-shirt to her back and breasts. After a swift tug at the clammy material, she accepted the sun’s prodigal radiance on her shoulders and head, almost swaying with a poignant mixture of pain and mute relief.

With the soft hiss of the sluggish waves filling her ears, she bent to open the back door. As she touched the hot metal she yelped and leapt back, shaking her tingling hand.

‘What the hell—?’ A male voice, forceful and harsh and sexy.

Strong hands jerked her away from the car and Caid Hunter interposed his big, rangy body between her and the vehicle in a movement as unexpected as it was protective. ‘What happened?’ he demanded, lifting her hand and scrutinising it.

The foreboding that had lodged itself under Sanchia’s ribs over the past weeks—ever since she’d received the offer for her great-aunt’s property—expanded into an iceberg. Words clogging her tongue, she stared mindlessly up into eyes the intense blue of industrial strength cobalt.

Caid frowned. ‘Did you burn yourself?’

She shook her head.

Handsome as the gods his mother’s ancestors had summoned to rule the olive-silvered heights of Greece, Caid had inherited their fiercely compelling authority and self-assurance, their dark aura of power. During her adolescence she’d watched him with curious, fascinated eyes, secretly fantasising about him because he’d been unattainable and therefore safe.

Three years previously she’d crashed and burned against the difference between romantic fantasies and reality. Since then she hadn’t seen him except in photographs and on television, usually with a glamorous woman clinging to his arm.

Although he still stole her breath away she lifted her chin and met his gaze squarely. Caid Hunter might have beauty and power, status and brains and money, but to her he was nothing more than an obstacle.

No, not an obstacle—the obstacle, the only person who stood between her and her great-aunt’s dearest wish.

He persisted, ‘If nothing happened why did you yelp?’

Forcing herself to sound briskly practical, she answered, ‘I’m fine—you can let me go.’

Five foot ten tall herself, Sanchia didn’t have to crane her neck to look into that spectacular face, although her eyes lifted six inches or so. Yet, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with long, heavily-muscled legs, Caid swamped her. Already she could feel her stomach knotting, the stress from taut muscles.

Frowning, he dropped her hand and stepped back with a lithe grace that revealed effortless physical dominance. ‘I’ve let you go,’ he said laconically. ‘You can relax.’

Across the short distance that separated them she saw his pulse beat strongly in the brown column of his throat, the slight sheen of moisture on his tanned skin.

Sanchia’s heart gave a frantic shudder. In some distant region of her mind she thanked whoever had invented sunglasses for their minor protection. Her low-pitched voice sinking into huskiness, she explained, ‘The car gave me a shock.’

He switched his gaze to the car. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Not it, me,’ she said. ‘Cars often shock me when I touch them after I get out. It’s something to do with my body’s electricity, I think.’

Oh, God! It sounded ominously close to a flirtatious come-on. She set her teeth in a smile that probably made her face look like a death-mask. ‘I’m on a different wavelength from cars, and they let me know it.’

He was too sophisticated to openly eye her up and down, but the curve of his beautiful mouth—a trap for impressionable women—was tinged with satire. ‘It must make life interesting.’

That smile smashed what was left of her composure with the energy of a well-aimed stone crashing through a bubble. ‘Shocking, actually,’ she said, despising herself for her total lack of cool. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here. How are you…’ She hesitated a mini-second before ending, ‘…now?’

‘I’m fine, Sanchia.’ A lazy mockery simmered just below the words. ‘And you?’ This time the blue eyes skimmed her from head to feet.

Although his glance didn’t linger enough to be impertinent or threatening, intent male interest smouldered like a shuttered flame behind it.

Terrified and exhilarated, she wished she’d worn jeans instead of exposing her long legs in shorts. Using a deliberately formal tone to distance herself, she said crisply, ‘I’m very well, thank you.’

‘I was sorry to hear that your great-aunt had died.’

The deep, almost harsh voice with its sensual undertone even sounded sorry. The Hunters had been very kind; his mother had sent flowers with a sympathetic note that had made Sanchia cry, Caid had written a brief but genuine letter of condolence, and a representative from the Auckland office of his firm had attended the funeral.

‘It’s the way she’d have chosen to go,’ Sanchia returned gruffly.

‘Dying peacefully in your sleep the night after your eightieth birthday party is the way we’d all choose to go,’ Caid Hunter observed, ‘but it’s hard on the ones left behind.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, as though saying it often enough could make it true.

‘Grief takes time, but eventually it becomes bearable.’ There was an odd pause, a kind of hesitation in the atmosphere, before he resumed blandly, ‘So here you are, Sanchia, all grown up and more lovely than ever.’

And again he let his gaze wander, if such a leisurely survey could be likened to anything as indecisive as wandering. Heat and ice chased each other across her skin when his blue eyes narrowed and turned molten.

Apart from good skin and long legs, and her eyes, big and darkly green in their fringe of black lashes, Sanchia knew she had no claim to beauty, so the interest and speculation in his scrutiny were false. Although he couldn’t guess at the darts of excitement arrowing through her, he understood the effect he had on the opposite sex. It was there in his stance—formidable, self-confident—in the smile that tucked up the corners of his mouth, in the amusement glinting in the dense blue depths of his eyes.

‘So,’ she said sweetly, ‘have you. Grown up, I mean. And very nicely. Your mother must be proud of you.’

‘Mothers are noted for their pride in their offspring.’ The half-closed eyes darkened. ‘What did I say?’

He saw far too much. Sanchia let her lashes droop and infused her voice with mock innocence. ‘Simply that mothers are noted for pride in their children. I agree.’

His expression hardened. A glint in his eyes sent an unmistakable warning as he said silkily, ‘Mockery gives your mouth an entirely too seductive pout, did you know? So why did you flinch? Wasn’t your mother proud of you?’

In a reflex action as automatic as the emotion that caused it, Sanchia stiffened her spine. ‘She died before I was interested in anything except her love.’

His mouth straightened but he left the subject, although she’d bet he’d filed her response somewhere in that formidable brain. Under ‘To be Revisited’ probably.

Glancing at the back seat of her car, piled high with three weeks’ necessities, he asked smoothly, ‘Can I help you carry that inside?’

A smile pasted onto her lips, Sanchia said, ‘It’s no use, Caid; I’m not going to sell Waiora Bay to you.’

There was a moment’s silence. His thick black lashes focused the glance that cut through her defences like the blue blade of a sword, lethally probing. Any show of weakness might awaken an instinct for conquest. A chilly trickle of sweat inched down Sanchia’s spine. Caid hadn’t made a success of a huge international business without being a very keen predator indeed, and it was in the nature of the beast to hunt down anything that ran.

Crisply, her face still and proud, she added, ‘Not now, not ever.’

‘Why not?’

Sanchia bit off the words hesitating on the tip of her tongue. Summoning her flattest, most uncompromising tone, she said, ‘Because it’s not for sale.’

His cobalt eyes grew even keener. ‘I’ve made you a fair offer. I don’t plan to raise it.’ His voice stood the hairs across the nape of her neck to attention.

‘Whether you raise it or not is irrelevant,’ she stated, snatching back her composure as it took to its heels. A heady sexual attraction warred with prudence; she ignored both to say recklessly, ‘I hate the thought of the Bay being carved up so rich people can build ostentatious beach houses that are only used a couple of weeks each year.’

‘My mother and I spend more than two weeks a year here.’

Heat stung her skin. ‘I know. I didn’t mean you—’

He interrupted, ‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t intend to develop the Bay.’

‘You won’t develop it because I’m not selling it.’

‘Are you planning to live here?’ He flicked a razor-sharp glance at the cartons in the back of the car.

Gently, each word clear enough to shatter crystal, Sanchia said, ‘I work in Auckland. I’m up here on holiday.’

‘Sanchia, why don’t we forget that three years ago I wanted to make love with you and you ran away as though you’d found yourself wanting to go to bed with a werewolf?’ he said, his deep voice rasping across her nerves with shaming erotic effect. ‘The letter you left made it quite clear that you didn’t want to go down that road. It’s over, and I don’t bear you any ill will. Let’s move on from there.’ He held out a strong, long-fingered hand.

Even though Sanchia had always known she’d been merely a summer diversion, his acceptance of her abrupt decision to leave had shattered some vulnerable part of her. For a couple of months—oh, why not admit it? For at least a year!—she’d hoped that he might care enough to follow her. But he hadn’t.

This, however, was different; this was business, and he wanted more than her untried body.

Great-Aunt Kate had always said that a gentleman waited until a woman indicated she wanted to shake hands. If the slow, heart-shaking smile Caid gave her was any indication, his mother had taught him the same thing, but his hand remained steadily out-thrust until Sanchia reluctantly put hers into it.

He didn’t mash her bones together as some men did, and neither did his clasp linger, yet the touch of those lean, powerful fingers reached all the way to secret places inside her body, sent a mysterious knowledge shivering through her.

Damn, she thought frantically. Oh, damn! It was happening again, and even though she knew her response was a pathway to disillusionment, she couldn’t control it.

When he released the swift, sure pressure, it felt like deliverance and abandonment at the same time.

Sanchia’s weighted lashes lifted. He wasn’t smiling; his blue gaze was fixed on her mouth. Beads of sweat sprang out at her temples, dampened her palms.

Lazily, almost noiselessly, he murmured, ‘I have an odd desire to see my name on your lips, to hear your throaty, summery voice say it again.’

Caid wondered how she’d respond to the open provocation in his tone, his words, even as he wondered what the hell had got into him.

No, he knew what had got into him. From the moment he’d watched her long, long, superb legs unfold from the car he’d been ridden by a need so brutal he’d barely been able to control his own mind.

Not that his mind had much to do with this elemental aberration prowling his body with all the deadly determination of a tiger on the hunt. Why didn’t she take off her sunglasses? By hiding those exotic green eyes, the dark lenses concentrated his attention on her luscious mouth.

What would it taste like now? What would she taste like? Incredulously he realised that his skin was tightening in a primitive warning, his muscles flexing in readiness. Fighting to subdue the hunger that threatened to drown his intelligence in a flood of lust, he waited for her reply.

It came with an infuriating dignity that should have quenched the heat gathering in his groin. With a return of the baffled frustration only she aroused, he remembered anew the way she’d taken refuge behind a distant, self-contained remoteness.

‘Caid,’ she said coolly. ‘Satisfied?’

‘No, but I’ll settle for your signature on an option form,’ he said, watching her intently.

That enticing mouth compressed as she hesitated.

Cynically aware that he’d left himself open to an attempt at extortion, he waited. It would be interesting to see what she’d do if he offered her a good lump sum of money right now.

His eyes skimmed her clothes, read chainstore. Such an exquisite body should be draped in silk. And there had to be something wrong with that elderly car. Was she a woman to be seduced by instant money?

No; if she was, she’d have slept with him three years previously.

Even as he wondered about the rush of altruism to his brain, he drawled, ‘I would, of course, pay for that assurance.’

She paused, her square chin lifting a fraction. ‘What’s the going rate for an option?’

A dollar.

Negligently, his tone casual and off-hand, he mentioned a sum of money—enough, he guessed, to give her a considerable jolt.

She took her time to answer, turning her head to survey the beach. A neat profile, but not exactly beautiful, not even pretty, although her features were fine and regular. Caid had always liked cool, restrained women, but what stirred his hormones when he looked at Sanchia Smith was the repressed passion he knew existed beneath that reserve.