Forbidden Pleasure

Transfixed, she waited while that splintering gaze traveled upward, touching off explosions of honeyed fire deep in the hidden places of her body.

Sexuality, bold and predatory, smoldered in the clear pale depths of his eyes.

Heat stole through Ianthe, coloring her skin. Her eyes widened, became heavy lidded, drowsy with desire and invitation. Alex was watching her with half-lowered eyelids, sending delicious shivers through her.

“You look like a sea nymph,” he said, the words rough and blunt. “I promised myself I wouldn’t touch you, wouldn’t let you get to me, but it was too late the first time I saw you.”

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 one corgi 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.

Forbidden Pleasure

Robyn Donald

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Kai Iwi lakes of Northland exist, and are more beautiful than I can describe, but I’m afraid you won’t find this house beside one. There are no beaches, either, and although there is a motor camp, it doesn’t have a shop. But it’s a wonderful place to camp, and the water is an incredible color.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

THE view, Ianthe Brown decided as she glowered through the window, was picture pretty, everyone’s idea of the tropics—dazzling white sand, water so blue it throbbed against the hot air, gently waving trees. All that was missing was the sound of surf on the reef and the traditional happy-go-lucky attitude of the Polynesians who lived on those smiling, palm-tasselled islands. And the palms.

Not surprising, since they were two thousand kilometres to the north of this northern part of New Zealand.

Ianthe frowned at the fingermarks on her reddened wrist, then stooped to massage her aching leg. The man who’d jerked her out of that haven of tranquillity and escorted her into this house was as far removed from happy-go-lucky as anyone could be; his mission had been to get her inside so someone else could interview her, whether she wanted that or not. Normally she’d have torn verbal strips off him; a sleepless night and the drugged pleasure of having at last closed her eyes and drifted into unconsciousness had temporarily scrambled her brain.

It was back in full working order now, and she was furious.

Of course she could climb through the window and run away, but she had no taste for humiliation; in her present state she’d be ludicrously easy to catch.

She surveyed the room with critical eyes. Luxuriously spare, it oozed the kind of casual perfection that proclaimed both megabucks and a very good interior decorator. What little she’d noticed of the rest of the house revealed the same sophisticated simplicity.

A far cry, she thought ironically, from her spartan quarters of the past few years. The cabin on the schooner had been so small she’d been able to stand in the middle and touch all four sides without too much stretching.

Absently she transferred her weight to her good leg. Five minutes ago she’d been sound asleep in the shade of the pines, only to be hauled off her rug by an idiot with a manner cribbed from the more mindless and violent films, who’d ignored her vigorous objections and frogmarched her the hundred metres to a house she hadn’t noticed.

Had she, Ianthe wondered with a shiver of foreboding as she straightened, stumbled into one of those films?

No, this was New Zealand. Mafia godfathers didn’t exist here.

Awareness prickled across the back of her neck. Without moving—without breathing—she strained to see from the corner of her eyes. On the very edge of her vision waited the tall, lean shadow of a man, intimidating and silent. A mindless panic tightening her skin, she set her teeth and turned.

She’d expected the frogmarcher, but the man who watched her with narrowed, icy eyes—eyes so pale in his tanned face that her stomach jumped—was an infinitely more threatening proposition. Such eyes, Ianthe thought on a swift, involuntary breath, could indicate an Anglo-Saxon heritage, except that the strong, dark features were cast in a far more exotic mould—Italian, perhaps.

‘Who,’ she asked steadily, ‘are you, and what right do you have to kidnap me?’

Although something flickered in the brilliant gaze, his expression didn’t alter. Urbanely he asked, ‘Don’t you have laws against trespassing in New Zealand?’

He spoke like an Oxford-educated Englishman, each clipped, curt word at subtle variance with the deep, rich voice, textured by the maverick hint of an accent she couldn’t place.

About six feet tall, he was startlingly good-looking, the angular, autocratic face emphasised by a forceful jaw and a hard, deceptively beautiful mouth. Yet the ice-blue eyes—piercing as lasers, wholly without warmth—dominated his tanned features, and beneath that uncompromising exterior Ianthe sensed vitality, a fierce energy barely contained by his will-power.

Into her mind sprang the sudden glittering image of a hawk high in a summer sky, poised against the shimmering incandescence for a moment out of time before it plummeted lethally to earth and its prey.

Beautifully cut shirt and trousers fitted him with the casual elegance of excellent tailoring. Irritated, Ianthe realised that if he’d been clad in scruffy jeans and a shirt off the peg he’d be just as imperious and formidable and dangerously compelling.

In old shorts and a loose T-shirt that had faded into shabbiness, she must look downmarket and conspicuous. Her chin lifted a fraction of an inch. ‘Trespassing laws in New Zealand are lenient. Anyway, these lakes are reserves.’

‘Not this one. The land around it is privately owned—as you are well aware. You had to climb over a locked gate to get here.’

Ianthe had wondered, but her need for solitude had been greater than her curiosity. She drew in a deep breath. For the first time since she’d woken in hospital with over a hundred stitches in her leg she felt alive, every cell in her body alert and flooded with adrenalin.

‘Whatever,’ she countered, ‘it still doesn’t give your henchman the right to manhandle me. All he’s entitled to do is tell me to get off your property. If I’d refused to go after that you might have a case, although it’s probably only fair to warn you that you’d have to prove I’d done some damage before any court would take you seriously.’

‘It sounds as though you make a habit of trespassing.’

Ianthe stared at him.

‘You know so much about your rights,’ he elaborated, a lurking note of sarcasm biting into her composure.

Crisply she retorted, ‘I once worked for a summer with the Department of Conservation, where you soon learn all about the laws of trespassing. By dragging me here, your offsider has put himself well and truly in the wrong. The New Zealand police don’t take a kindly view of assault. As he knows, because he’s a New Zealander himself.’

She didn’t hold up her reddened wrist, or even look at it, but the man’s gaze fastened onto her skin and something explosive splintered its cold clarity before the long lashes, dark as jealousy, covered his eyes again. ‘Did he hurt you?’ he asked in a voice that pulled every tiny hair upright over her body.

‘No.’

He came across the room with silent speed. Ianthe watched with bewilderment as he picked up her hand and looked at her wrist. A chill tightened her skin, jerked with sickening impact in the depths of her stomach.

‘He’s bruised you,’ he said slowly.

Feeling strangely sorry for the frogmarcher, Ianthe said, ‘I bruise very easily, and he didn’t hurt me. In fact, he did this when I stumbled. He stopped me from falling into the water.’

Her voice faded. Looking down at the contrast of dark fingers locked around the delicate whiteness of her wrist, she swallowed and pulled away; he resisted a moment, then the long fingers loosened and she was free. Completely unnerved by his reaction, she took a stumbling step backwards and leaned heavily against the windowsill.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said with a frigid remoteness.

Quickly, her voice oddly gruff, she said with stubborn insistence, ‘Besides, I was on the Queen’s Chain.’

‘The Queen’s Chain?’ he asked silkily, pinning her with that laser glance.

Sensation slithered the length of Ianthe’s spine. Doing her best to ignore it, she replied didactically, ‘In New Zealand almost all waterways are surrounded by the Queen’s Chain. The land twenty metres back from the water’s edge, although used by the landowner, is actually owned by the Crown—specifically so that people have access.’

‘Your Queen is a landowner indeed,’ he said softly, not attempting to hide the mockery in his words. ‘And to get to that Queen’s Chain you had to cross private property.’

Your Queen, so he wasn’t English. Her confident tone belying her hollow stomach, Ianthe snapped, ‘Possibly, but I wasn’t trespassing when that idiot decided to prove what a big, tough man he is by dragging me here.’

Ianthe was of medium height, but a year in and out of hospital had stripped flesh from her bones so that she weighed less than she had for the last five years. She’d been no match at all for a frogmarcher built like a rugby forward.

His boss smiled at her. ‘He’ll apologise,’ he said.

How could a mere movement of muscles transform aloof arrogance into something so charismatic? He looked like a Renaissance princeling, at once blazingly attractive yet dangerous, cultured yet barbaric, his handsome features strengthened by the disciplined ruthlessness underpinning them.

‘You are,’ he went on, ‘quite right, and I apologise for Mark’s rather officious protection of my privacy. He had no right to touch you or haul you in here.’

Ianthe suspected that behind that spell-binding face was a keen brain that had rapidly chosen this response, knowing it would soothe her. In other words, she thought sturdily, she was being manipulated.

After returning his smile with one of her own—detached, she hoped, and coolly dismissive—she said, ‘New Zealanders love their country, and one reason is because they can go almost wherever they like in it.’

‘Subject, one assumes, to the laws of the countryside? Closing gates and so forth?’

‘Of course,’ she said, knowing that she’d left no gate undone behind her.

Dark lashes drooped, narrowing the pale gaze. ‘To make up a little for Mark’s unceremonious intrusion into your life, can I offer you a drink? Tea, perhaps, or something alcoholic if you’d prefer that? And then I’ll take you back to your car.’

Stiffly, nerves still jangling from the after-effects of that smile, Ianthe said, ‘No, thank you. I’m not thirsty.’

‘I can understand that you have no wish to stay in a house where you underwent such an unpleasant experience,’ he said smoothly, ‘but I’d like to show you that I’m not some Mafia don on holiday.’

Her glance flashed to his unreadable face. Could he read her mind? No, of course not. She’d barely articulated the thought.

Off balance, she said hastily, ‘I’m sure you’re not—’

‘Then let me make whatever amends I can.’

Charm was a rare gift, and an unfair one. When backed by pure steel it was almost unforgivable. Reluctant, angry because her leg was threatening imminent collapse, Ianthe said, ‘You don’t need to make amends, but—I’d like a cup of tea, thank you.’

‘It would be my pleasure.’

She eased herself away from the window and limped towards him, waiting for signs of shock. But the ice-blue gaze remained fixed on her face, although he took her elbow in an impersonal grip.

He’d probably blench when he saw the scar, she thought savagely, but she was used to that.

The long tanned fingers at her elbow lent confidence as well as support. They also sent a slow pulse of excitement through her. Of course she didn’t allow herself to lean on him as he escorted her through the door, across a hall floored with pale Italian ceramic tiles and into a breathtaking room where the light from the lake played across superb angles and planes and surfaces.

‘Oh!’ Ianthe said, abruptly stopping.

His fingers tightened a moment on her elbow, then relaxed. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’ Feeling foolish, she explained lamely, ‘The lake looks wonderful from here.’

He urged her across to a comfortable seat. ‘It looks wonderful from any vantage point,’ he said. ‘I’ve travelled widely, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the colour of this water.’

Ianthe sat down, keeping her face averted. Glass doors had been pushed right back to reveal a wide terrace and the brilliant beach. ‘It’s because it’s a dune lake,’ she said. ‘The white sand reflects the sky more intensely.’

‘Whatever causes it, it’s beautiful,’ he said, sitting down in a chair close by. ‘But then, New Zealand is a glorious country. So varied a landscape, usually with mountains to back up each magnificent vista.’

‘Mountains are all very well in the background, but that’s where they should stay. Give me a nice warm beach any day.’ A year ago she’d have meant it.

His considering glance fomented a disturbing, forbidden pleasure deep within her. They were so distant, those eyes, so dispassionately at variance with his warm Mediterranean colouring. Bronze skin and blue-black hair sharpened the impact of their frosty intensity, until she felt their impact like an earthquake, inescapable, terrifying.

In an amused voice he said, ‘You don’t look as though anything much frightens you.’

‘I like to be warm,’ she said, thinking, If you only knew! ‘I was born in Northland, so I’m not used to snow.’

‘Yet water can be cold.’

He still hadn’t looked at her leg, but Ianthe wished fervently that she’d chosen to wear trousers rather than shorts. She had no illusions about the ugliness of the puckered, distorted skin that ran almost the full length of her leg. Although future plastic surgery would tidy it up, it would always be there, a jagged, unlovely reminder of past pain.

‘Only if you’re silly enough to keep swimming after you start to shiver,’ she said, adding drily, ‘And unless you’re swimming in the Arctic, it’s nowhere near as cold as snow. Of course, where you come from the mountains all have either a rack railway up the side or a hotel perched on top. Or both. It makes them hard to take seriously.’

Strong white teeth flashed for a second as he smiled. ‘So you didn’t enjoy the European Alps,’ he said blandly. ‘Although I was born in Europe, I spent much of my youth in Australia.’ His eyes glimmered. ‘No mountains there, nothing much but sky.’

‘I’ve never been to either place, but I’ve seen photos.’

‘Perhaps it’s a human characteristic to want to tame those things that threaten us.’ His gaze moved slowly over her face, rested a tingling fraction of a second on her soft mouth, then flicked to the tumbled bounty of her hair, its gentle, honey-coloured waves streaked with natural highlights the colour of untarnished copper. In a cool, speculative voice he continued, ‘I don’t think mountains in New Zealand have either railways or restaurants, do they?’

Her nerves jumping, she said huskily, ‘Not to the summit, no.’

The door opened. Ianthe watched warily as Mark the frogmarcher, fair and with the solid, blocky body of a surfer, carried in a tea-tray. Her host—whoever he was—must have given the order before he’d seen her, Ianthe thought, wondering why she let herself be irritated at such blatant damage control.

Mark set the tray down on the table close to her chair, then moved the table so that she didn’t have to reach. Both tea and coffee, she noticed. He’d left nothing to chance.

‘I hope you will pour,’ the owner said.

‘Yes, of course.’

Standing back, Mark said woodenly, ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you, but you were trespassing.’

With equal formality, Ianthe said, ‘Property rights don’t confer manhandling privileges, but I accept your apology.’

Summoning her most limpid smile, she directed it at him until colour rose in his skin. He sent a swift, frowning glance to his employer, who said, ‘Thank you, Mark.’ With an abrupt nod the younger man turned jerkily and left the room.

Her host laughed quietly. ‘You New Zealanders!’ he murmured. ‘I’d say the honours went to you that time.’

With an unwilling smile Ianthe poured tea with a strong, tarry smell. When she asked what sort it was, he answered, ‘Lapsang souchong—Chinese tea. Don’t you like it? Shall I get another—?’

‘No, no,’ she interrupted. ‘I just haven’t come across it before. I like trying new things.’

He waited while she sipped it, and smiled lazily when she said, ‘It’s different, but I like it.’

‘Good,’ he said, and picked up the cup he’d collected from her. ‘Are you a local, or holidaying like me?’

‘I’m on holiday.’

‘At the camping ground?’

‘No, I’m staying in a bach.’ His lifted brows led her to enlarge, ‘In New Zealand a bach is a small, rather scruffy beach house.’

His scrutiny shredded the fragile barrier of her confidence. Ianthe stopped herself from blinking defensively; whenever he looked at her something very strange happened in the pit of her stomach, a kind of drawing sensation that hardened into an ache.

Dourly she told herself that he probably had an equally powerful effect on any woman under a hundred. Those eyes were hypnotic. Perhaps he was conducting a subtle interrogation; if so, he’d mistaken his adversary. He hadn’t told her who he was, so she wouldn’t tell him anything about herself.

Childish, but she felt threatened, and defiance was as good a reaction as any.

He broke into her thoughts by saying, ‘Ah, those small houses near the camping ground.’

‘Yes.’

‘I heard that they’re under threat.’

Ianthe nodded. ‘They’re built on what’s now reserve land. The owners aren’t allowed to alter the buildings beyond any necessary repairs, and when they die the baches will be torn down and the land returned to the Crown.’

‘And is yours a family bach?’

She said warily, ‘It’s owned by friends.’

He changed the subject with smooth confidence. ‘I hope the weather stays as idyllic as it’s been for the past couple of weeks.’

‘It should, but Northland—all of New Zealand, in fact—is a forecaster’s nightmare. The country’s long and narrow, and because it’s where the tropics meet the cold air coming up from the Antarctic we get weather from every direction. Still, it’s high summer, so with any luck we’ll have glorious weather until the end of February.’ The pedantic note in her voice was her only defence against his speculative, probing gaze.

She added, ‘Unless another cyclone comes visiting from the north, of course. We’ve already had two this holiday season, although neither of them amounted to more than heavy rain.’

‘Let’s hope the tropics keep their cyclones to themselves,’ he said, giving no indication of how long he intended to stay.

After that they spoke more generalities—conversation that meant nothing, revealed nothing, was not intended to be taken seriously or recalled. Yet beneath the surface casualness and ease there were deeper, questionable currents, and whenever she looked up he was watching her.

Eventually Ianthe put down her empty cup and said, ‘That was lovely, thank you. I’d better be getting back.’

‘Certainly.’ He got to his feet with loose-limbed masculine grace. ‘I’ll drive you to your car.’

‘I can walk,’ she said automatically.

Without taking his eyes from her face he asked, ‘And make your leg even more painful?’

She grimaced, because it had now begun to throb, and she knew that the only way to keep it from getting worse was to lie down. ‘All right,’ she said reluctantly, adding, ‘Thank you very much.’

‘It’s very little recompense for Mark’s officiousness.’

He’d come to take her elbow again. Ianthe knew that his fingers didn’t burn her skin as he helped her up, but that was what it felt like. ‘Mark’s responsible for that,’ she said tersely, tightening her lips against the odd, shivery sensations running through her.

‘He’s employed by me,’ he said, ‘so I’m responsible.’

Ianthe took a few stiff steps, her limp becoming more pronounced as the ache in her leg suddenly intensified.

He said something under his breath, and with an economy of movement that shocked her, lifted her in his arms.

‘Hey!’ she exclaimed, unable to say anything more as a secret, feverish excitement swallowed her up.

‘Perhaps you’d rather Mark carried you,’ he said, locking her against his hard-muscled torso with casual strength as he strode with surprising ease towards the wide hall that led to a big front door.

The promise of masculine power hadn’t been an illusion. The self-control that gave authority to his spectacular, hawkish good looks had been transmuted into sheer, determined energy.

An alarming combination of flame and ice electrified Ianthe. Striving to sound level and prosaic, she said, ‘I don’t need to be carried.’

‘You’re as white as a sheet and sweat is standing out on your forehead. Please don’t try to make me feel worse than I already do.’

Because Ianthe hated being pitied she returned coldly, ‘I’m not. My leg hurts, but I’d get there.’

‘Even if you had to crawl,’ he said with caustic disapproval. ‘Cutting off your nose to spite your face not only wastes time, it turns perfectly legitimate sympathy into intense irritation.’

Which left her with nothing to say. Clearly he did feel responsible for his henchman’s behaviour, but Mark’s macho hijacking no longer concerned her.

Her heart jumped as she stole a glance at the splendid profile, outlined by an unexpected blaze of gold as they stepped out of the door beneath a skylight. Attraction, she told herself with contemptuous bravado. It’s just attraction—that common meeting point between male and female. It means nothing.

Bracing herself against it, she forced her attention away from him and onto her surroundings.

Whoever had designed the house had understood Northland’s climate. A porte-cochère extended from the door across the gravel drive, offering shelter from summer’s heat as well as from the downpours that could batter the peninsula at any season. In its shade waited a Range Rover, large and luxurious and dusty.

‘I’ll have to put you down,’ her host said, and did so with exquisite care.

She clutched at the handle of the vehicle, and for a second his arms tightened around her again. Her bones heated, slackened, melted in the swift warmth of his embrace and the faint, potently masculine tang she’d been carefully not registering. He waited until she let go of the door handle and straightened up, then stepped back.

‘Can you manage?’ he enquired evenly as he opened the door.

‘Yes.’ Refusing to acknowledge the ache in her leg, she climbed in, took a deep, steadying breath and reached down to clip on her seatbelt. She didn’t look at the man who walked around to his side and got in.