The Kiss of the Devil by Barbara Cartland

Author:Barbara Cartland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782136569
Publisher: Barbara Cartland Ebooks Ltd
Published: 2015-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The early dawn, brilliantly golden, came seeping through the curtained window before El Diablo said,

“I must let you go to bed.”

He looked down at her as she lay on the couch.

Her face was very pale, her lips like the crushed petals of a flower, while her hair against the cushions was even in the half-light as golden as the sun outside.

El Diablo put out his hand to touch the curls, smoothing them backwards from the oval of her white forehead.

Restlessly she turned her head away from him.

“I should have – killed you,” she said, speaking without violence in a low voice husky with tiredness.

“You need fire in your veins to hate, as well as to love,” El Diablo replied.

His hand slipped lower to the white roundness of her throat.

“Fire not ice,” he went on, speaking quietly with what might almost have passed for gentleness. “I seem to remember a Fairytale about an ice maiden whose heart never beat until the thaws came.”

His hand rested over her heart and then, unexpectedly, he lifted her up in his arms and carried her into her own cave. He set her down gently on the bed and as she looked up at him, too weary even to feel afraid, he bent his head and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

“Sleep well, Ice Maiden,” he murmured and left her.

Skye slept late to wake with that querulous, irritating feeling that something had gone wrong. As she opened her eyes to find Neengai waiting patiently in the corner, she remembered what had happened the night before.

She wanted in that moment to wail aloud as the Indian women would wail when they were bereaved or upset.

How, she asked herself, could she have been so stupid, so weak and so futile as to have victory within her grasp and let it escape her?

She could hardly credit her own foolishness. To think at this moment she might have been safely in Jācara having breakfast aboard the yacht!

Then she remembered the other alternatives – of being shot down by El Diablo’s guards or, worse still, captured.

She shook herself mentally. He had played on her feelings and he had outwitted her with a cunning and a cleverness that it shamed her to remember.

And then, when she was once again his prisoner and in his power, he had lovingly touched her with a mixture of passion, charm and self-control that left her utterly and completely bewildered.

Why did he not force himself upon her and make her completely his?

He desired her, she was sure of that and yet he denied himself what was his right by law and conquest.

When Neengai brought in her breakfast tray, the first thing Skye saw were two letters lying on it. For a moment she stared at them as if they were ghosts and then she remembered that in the forged letter El Diablo had sent in her name to Captain Maclean he had said that letters would be called for at regular intervals.

Excitedly Skye opened the first envelope, which was addressed to her in Captain Maclean’s writing.

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