Vendetta by Susan Napier

Author:Susan Napier
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9781408904336
Publisher: Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd.
Published: 2008-05-25T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

‘LOST something, Ginger?’

Stomping out of the dilapidated old boat-house, which it had taken her half an hour to break into, Vivian stopped dead.

Yes, my sanity, she wanted to say. She must be mad to allow him to play these games with her; crazier still to be enjoying it.

Nicholas Thorne had threatened her in the most elemental way a man could threaten a woman, and yet it wasn’t fear that made her heart race and her stomach churn whenever he was near…

She looked up, squinting against the slanting rays of the setting sun.

He was leaning against the corner of the salt-encrusted wooden building, a familiar, infuriating smile of mockery twisting his narrow mouth, an oilskin jacket flapping open over his grey fisherman’s sweater and the usual pair of jeans. Somehow she had difficulty picturing him in a conventional suit, yet he must wear one all the time in his role as ruthless head of a sprawling business empire.

‘A boat, perhaps?’

‘You have to have one somewhere,’ she growled, disturbed as ever by his wicked humour. ‘You can’t live on an island without owning some kind of boat.’

‘Feel free to look around,’ he replied with another quirk of his lips.

‘Thank you, I will,’ she said cuttingly.

She was glad she was muffled up in the bulky knitted jumper and her green woolen trousers for around Nicholas she was uncomfortably aware of her body. It was the way he looked at her—complacement, possessive, knowing…

At least she had clothes to cloak her self-consciousness. After staking his nerve-shattering claim on her womb, Nicholas had calmly directed her to her suit, blouse and bra lying crumpled under the bed and led her, clutching them in a bundle, down the iron stairs to the room below, where she had found her empty briefcase and the small suitcase she had left back at the motel at Port Charles. It held only toiletries, her nightdress and a single change of clothes, but it was enough to give her a slight sense of false security.

The sweater she was wearing, however, was his, reluctantly accepted as a necessity if she was to tramp around the island in the blustery weather and not die of exposure. It had amused him to lend it to her, just as it amused him to follow her around so that she couldn’t just sneak off and pretend to search for an escape, she had actually to do it, thoroughly exhausting herself in the process. He was always hovering, offering irritatingly helpful suggestions and teasing her with intriguing little titbits of information about himself that increased her curiosity about him to a dangerous craving.

The more that she found out about him, the more Vivian’s compassionate heart whispered that Nicholas was basically a good man whose fixation with brutal revenge was a cry from the wilderness of his frozen emotional landscape. He had found the loss of his beloved wife and unborn child unacceptable, so, in the nature of a competitive man used to winning, he hadn’t accepted it, and the long years of denial had formed a barrier against natural healing.

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