Breaking/Making Up: Something Borrowed\Vendetta (20 page)

She sluggishly instructed her head to turn and her arms to rise and fall, rise and fall, in the rhythmic stroke that had won several long-distance ocean swims at the surf club she had belonged to in her late teens.

The wet-suit that she had taken from among the diving-gear in the lighthouse storeroom was providing her with extra buoyancy and some protection against the cold, but she knew that mental stamina would be her greatest asset in the gruelling swim.

She turned on her side, checking that she was still moving in the right direction, heading towards the uneven lurch against the horizon that Frank had let slip one day was the nearest inhabited island. Thank God the weather was good and the sea not too choppy, but even if there had been a cyclone Vivian wouldn’t have cared.

She had woken just before dawn and looked at the man lying next to her in a deep, drugged sleep and acknowledged with a thrill of despair that she was in love with her capricious captor.

In the space of a few days the morals of a lifetime had been swept away. Instead of drawing Nicholas into the sunlight of reason, she had been drawn into the shadows. Something dark in herself was called forth by the darkness in him. She could protest all she liked, but all Nicholas had to do was touch her and she melted. And he knew it.

Last night he had admitted that he had never loved his wife. That called into question everything she had come to believe she knew about him. It made his motive for revenge not one of honest emotional torment, which could be appeased, but of cold-blooded, implacable malice.

The realisation that Nicholas must have uncuffed her before he fell asleep was merely confirmation of her bleak theory that he believed he had won their battle of wills. The empty steel bracelet dangling from his own still-manacled wrist was a mute testament to his confidence in her sexual subjugation.

Protest had exploded in her brain.
No
! She wouldn’t let him distort her love into something that she was ashamed of. She had to be out of his reach before he woke up. Before he could touch her again...

Fool, fool, fool, Vivian chanted inside her head, in rhythm to her stroking through the water. To believe that you could play with fire and not be burnt. Fool, fool...

‘Little fool! What in the hell do you think you’re doing? Of all the ridiculous, theatrical stunts!’

She suddenly realised that the new voice was much deeper than the one in her head and far more insulting, and the loud slapping sound wasn’t the rising waves hitting her face; it was the sound of oars striking the water.

Water sheeted down her face from her sopping hair, sticking her eyelashes together and getting in her swollen eyes as she stopped to tread water and was nearly run down by a small aluminium dinghy rowing furiously towards her.

Nicholas was shipping the oars, leaning over the side, yelling, cursing, trying to grab her slippery wet-suited arm.

Vivian swam away, coughing and spluttering as she briefly sank. When she struggled to the surface again, Nicholas was standing silhouetted against the crisp morning sky, the boat rocking dangerously. ‘For God’s sake, Vivian,’ he cried bleakly. ‘Where in the hell do you think you’re going?’

Still choking on salt-water and shock, Vivian didn’t bother to answer; she just pointed in the direction of the distant island.

Nicholas exploded in another series of explicit curses. ‘Do you
want
to bloody drown? You can’t swim that far! Get in this damned boat
now!’

For an answer Vivian rolled over and began swimming with renewed energy. Each time she turned her head to breathe, she saw Nicholas pulling on the oars, keeping on a parallel course, his grim mouth opening and shutting on words she couldn’t hear through her water-clogged ears.

Gradually Vivian’s false burst of strength drained away and the next time that Nicholas veered close she didn’t have the energy to pull away.

He leaned over and caught her by the zip-cord trailing from the back of her neck, forcing her to tread water as she clung to the side of the boat, gasping air into her burning lungs. ‘That’s enough! You’ve made your point, Vivian,’ he said roughly. ‘You want me to beg? I will:
please
get into the bloody boat. We’ll talk, and then I’ll take you anywhere you want me to...’

Her green eyes were enormous in her exhausted face. ‘I’m not that gullible any more,’ she choked, fighting her pathetic desire to trust him, even now.
‘You’re
the gullible one. You never fooled me at all. I knew even before I came here who you were!’

He looked thunderstruck. ‘You
knew?’

‘That Nicholas Rose was Nicholas Thorne,’ she threw into his haggard face. Her frigid lips and tongue shaped the words with increasing difficulty. ‘But I came anyway, because I knew that if this was some kind of vicious v-vendetta, then the only way to stop you was to confront you face to face...so I let you d-drug me...I only
pretended
to w-want to escape... Everything you did to me you were only able to d-do because I
chose
to let you... Because I wanted t-time to b-be with you and c-convince you that r-revenge is n-not the way for y-you t-to find p-peace...’

Her teeth were chattering so much that she could hardly get the last defiant words out, and Nicholas made an abrupt growl and rammed his hands under her arms, hauling her over the gunwale and dumping her into the bottom of the boat.

‘Thank you for
letting
me rescue you!’ he said sardonically. ‘I take it you weren’t simply
pretending
this time.’

Vivian suddenly felt blessedly numb all over. Even her bleeding heart was cauterised by the cold. ‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why did you b-bother to come and get me?’

‘Why in the hell do you think? Because I love you, damn it!’ he snarled savagely, not even bothering to look at her as he swivelled his torso to signal with his upraised arm. Automatically following his gaze, a stupefied Vivian saw the blurry image of a white launch that looked as big as an ocean liner foaming down on them.

‘Coastguard?’ Her mouth seemed to have split from her mind.

‘No. Mine. The
Hero
. It’s been out doing a marine survey for the last few days. As soon as I found your clothes on the beach, I called her up and used her radar to track you. Ahoy! Derek! Send down that sling, will you?’

She screwed her eyes shut as she was strapped and hauled and bundled, and passed from hand to hand like an unwanted package until she felt the familiar arms taking possession of her again.

Nicholas carried her down a brightly lit companionway and into a spacious white cabin, kicking the door shut before rapidly stripping the over-large wet-suit from her numb body.

His mouth quirked when he saw the emerald-green bra and panties she wore underneath. His smile thawed a tiny slice of heart. Maybe she wasn’t hallucinating, after all. Maybe he really had said it.

‘My favourites,’ he murmured, fingering the saturated lace. ‘Underwear that matches your eyes.’ And then he peeled them off too, smothering her protests at his rough handling with a thick, blue towel, rubbing her vigorously until she cried out at the pain of the blood returning to the surface of her icy skin.

‘Don’t be such a baby!’ he said, planting a kiss on her blue lips as he finished a strenuous scouring of her hair, which had turned the dripping tails to dark red frizz. ‘We have to get you properly thawed out.’

He stripped off his own clothes and walked naked with her to the wide berth, lying down on it and mounding the patterned continental quilt over them both as the boat’s powerful engines throttled to full power and the sky began to whip past the brass port-hole above their heads.

‘Stop cringing, this is all very scientific. I’m a scientist—I know what I’m talking about,’ he said, cuddling her close, warming her with the sensual heat of his body, breast to breast, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. He shuddered and buried his face in her neck. ‘Oh,
God
, that feels good.’

Vivian knew what he meant. Tears of exhaustion and confusion trembled on her still-damp lashes.

He lifted his head and kissed them away. I’m sorry, Ginger—first things first. If you had bothered to wait for me to wake up this morning, you would have known this already...in fact, you would have known last night if you hadn’t sabotaged my good intentions. My name is Nicholas James Thorne...the Second.’

‘The Second?’ she whispered, bewildered. Was he suggesting they start all over again? A second chance?

‘To distinguish me from my father—Nicholas James Thorne the
First,
’ he said deliberately.

Her brow wrinkled soggily. ‘Your father has the same name as you?’

‘No,
I
have the same name as
him,’
he corrected urgently, as if the fine distinction was important. ‘Just before I was born he had an illness that rendered him sterile, which was why he was so obsessive about me marrying and perpetuating the name. There are two Nicholas Thornes, Vivian, but only one was driving the car that night—my father.’

Vivian’s bleached face stormed with vivid emotion as she realised what he was telling her. ‘But, your son—’

His fingers across her mouth hushed her confused protest, and the riot of blood in her veins became a visible tumult that bloomed across her skin. ‘I have no son. Your “boy” in the back seat was me. To the doctor who patched me up, a twenty-five-year-old probably did seem like a boy—he certainly seemed old to me, although he was probably only in his late fifties.

‘After Barbara was killed, my father said it didn’t matter that I was crippled, as long as my genes were healthy. We had endless rows about my refusal to marry again. In the end I turned my back on it all-my father, his money, the business I was supposed to take over, the whole concept of Being A Thorne. I didn’t realise that after the accident his dream had become a ruthless obsession, and the obsession had developed into a dangerous fixation with you...’

Vivian struggled to sit up, but Nicholas held her down with implacable gentleness. ‘Are you saying this was all
his
idea?’ she asked hoarsely through her salt-scored throat.

‘I had no idea what he was planning,’ he said emphatically. ‘Not until I paid a long-overdue duty visit last week. As usual, our discussion turned into a furious row. He suddenly started shouting the most ridiculous things...about how it was all your fault his son had turned against him and how he was finally going to make you and Janna pay for murdering his grandson. How he had waited years for just the right moment to get you where he wanted you... He was boasting about how he was going to do it when he had a massive stroke—’

‘Oh, God...’ Vivian’s fist came up to her mouth and Nicholas eased it away, unsurprised by her horrified compassion for the man who had tried to hurt her.

‘No, he’s not dead, but he’s in an extremely bad way,’ he said sombrely, wrapping her fist reassuringly in his. His body shifted against hers, enveloping her in a fresh wave of blissful warmth.

‘As soon as he was taken to hospital, I scoured his desk and files in case his incredible ravings were true. I found his dossier on you and a load of legal transactions with Marvel-Mitchell, and I got a shock to find it was actually on the verge of happening—and on Nowhere of all places—while I was scheduled to be away in Florida. Here!’ His voice hardened and she felt the muscles of his chest tense as if against a blow to the heart. ‘On
my
island... the place I used to come to get away from his insidious interference in my life. That was part of his sick delusion, you see,’ he added tiredly. ‘That he was doing this for
my
sake. So I fired the sleazy hireling who was supposed to do all the dirty work, and flew down here myself to...’ He hesitated uneasily.

‘To take his place?’ she challenged painfully.

He leaned up on one elbow and said ruefully, ‘Actually, I came hot-foot to rescue you. To apologise and try to smooth things over and explain about my father’s condition—’

‘Rescue me?
Apologise? By drugging
me and photographing me naked in bed with you and threatening to make me have your
baby?’
Vivian squawked at him incredulously. ‘You expect me to believe that was your idea of
smoothing things over?
’

To her fascination he flushed, adjusting his eye-patch in the first unconsciously nervous gesture she had ever seen him make. ‘Yes, well, you weren’t quite naked. And, anyway, that was partly your fault.’

‘
My
fault?’

‘I was expecting your sister. I had intended to be very civilised and restrained and then use my power of attorney to sign the settlement contract and wave Janna a grateful goodbye, but I took one look at you and went off like a rocket.’ His voice roughened as he began to play with her damp ginger curls. ‘I wanted you more than any woman I’ve wanted in my life. I can’t explain it. I just saw you, touched you, and knew that we were made for each other, that you felt the same, powerful attraction that I did...

‘But I knew from my father’s file that you were due to get married in a week, so I didn’t have much time. I decided to take some drastic short cuts, use every despicable tool conveniently placed at my disposal, to keep you here and break down your resistance to the notion of breaking up with Marvel. I thought that my pretending to be my father would buy me the time I needed to build on the potent physical chemistry between us. Of course, I didn’t realise that you were also doing some bidding for the same reason...’ he added slyly.

She placed her hands flat against his bare chest. ‘Not quite the same reason,’ she teased.

To her surprise he didn’t smile. ‘Are you trying to let me down lightly?’ he asked quietly.

She suddenly realised that she hadn’t told him. She traced his tight mouth with her forefinger. ‘I woke up this morning horrified to admit I’d fallen in love with you,’ she said softly. ‘My heart skewered on the sword of an emotional pirate. You can’t blame me for choosing the deep blue sea over the devil. You should have been more honest with me from the start...’