Vendetta (3 page)

‘The captain won’t leave until he’s checked with me first.’ He effortlessly cut the ground from under her feet.

‘I’m really not hungry—’

‘And if I said that I hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday and was far too ravenous to concentrate on anything but feeding my appetite?’

Your appetite for what? thought Vivian as she silently weighed up her options…which proved to be extremely limited.

‘I’d say
bon
appétit
,’ she sighed. Maybe he’d be easier to handle on a full stomach.

‘On the principle that it’s better I take bites out of food than out of you?’ he guessed wolfishly, coming a little too close to her earlier, forbidden meanderings.

‘Something like that,’ she said primly.

‘While I arrange something suitably light for you and filling for me, why don’t you get those papers out so I can look them over?’

Looking them over was a long way from signing, but Vivian hastened to do as he instructed while he was gone. He had shut the door behind him, and opened it so quietly
on his return that she wasn’t aware of him until he loomed over her at the desk. The first she knew of him was the hot, predatory breath on the back of her neck.

‘You move very quietly—’ she began, in breathless protest at his consistent ability to surprise her.

‘For a cripple?’ he finished with biting swiftness.

‘That wasn’t what I was going to say!’ she protested, sensing that sympathy was the last thing he would ever want from her.

‘You were going to use a more diplomatic term, perhaps?’ he sneered. ‘Disabled? Physically challenged?’

She was suddenly blindly furious with him. How dared he think that she would be so callous, let alone so stupid, as to taunt him, no matter what the provocation!

‘You move quietly for such a
big
man is what I was going to say before you rudely interrupted,’ she snapped. ‘And an over-sensitive one, too, I might add.
I
didn’t leap down
your
throat when you drew attention to the fact I was blind as a bat, did I? And I have two supposedly undamaged legs and yet I never seem to be able to coordinate them properly. I dreamed of being a ballerina when I was a girl…’ She trailed off wistfully, suddenly remembering who it was she was confiding in.

‘A ballerina?’ He looked at her incredulously, his sceptical eye running over her five-feet-ten frame and the generous curves that rumpled the professional smoothness of her suit.

‘It was just a childish thing,’ she said dismissively, inexplicably hurt by his barely concealed amusement.

He tilted his head. ‘So you dreamed of becoming a perfect secretary instead?’

‘I wasn’t qualified for much else,’ she said coldly.
Academically she had been a dud, but she was responsible and willing and got on well with people, her final-year form-teacher had kindly pointed out to her concerned parents, and weren’t those things far more important in attaining happiness in the wider world than the mere possession of a brilliant brain?

Of course some people—like Janna and their younger brother, Luke, who was a musical prodigy; and her mother and father, an artist and a mathematician respectively—managed to have it all…good looks included. Not that her family ever consciously made her feel inadequate. Quite the reverse—they sometimes went overboard in their efforts to convince her that she belonged, that she was the much-loved special one of the family. The Chosen One—because she had been adopted as a toddler, and had proved the unexpected catalyst for the rapid arrival of a natural daughter and then a son.

‘No other thwarted ambitions?’

‘No.’ She didn’t doubt he would laugh like a drain if she told him that her greatest desire was to be a wife and mother. It was her one outstanding talent: loving people—even when they made it very difficult for her. Sometimes almost impossible.

She looked down at the documents on the desk, concentrating on squaring them off neatly, aware of a nasty blurring of her eyesight that had nothing to do with foggy glasses.

The papers were suddenly snatched out of her fingers. ‘This is what you want
me
to sign?’

‘Mmm?’ Distracted by her thoughts, she took no notice of the faint emphasis. ‘Oh, yes.’ She pulled herself together, certain that her ugly suspicions were correct and
that he was now going to announce dramatically that he had no intention of doing so.

Four months ago, when Nicholas Rose had signed a conditional agreement to sell his Auckland property, his lawyer had cited tax reasons for his client wishing to retain legal title until the end of April. Peter had been happy with the extended settlement date, for it had given him time to chase up the other parcels of land that had been part of the lucrative contract Marvel-Mitchell had entered into with a commercial property development company. Nicholas’s property had been the most critical, being a corner lot at the front of the planned shopping mall development, providing the only street access to the larger site. With that in his pocket, Peter had felt free to bid up on one or two other lots, whose owners had demanded much more than current market price.

Then Nicholas Rose had suddenly cancelled his appointment to sign the settlement in Auckland, citing a clause in the conditional agreement that gave the vendor the right to choose the time and place, and Janna had got sick, and Vivian had tried to be helpful and discovered two appalling truths: one, that Nicholas Rose was potentially an implacable enemy, and two, that her cosy dream of love and babies with Peter was shattered beyond redemption.

For long minutes there was no sound but the quiet swish of paper turning, and Vivian’s heart thundered in her ears as she waited for her enemy to reveal himself.

‘Where do I sign?’ He flicked cursorily back through the pages. ‘Here? Here? And here?’

‘Uh…yes.’ He bent and she watched disbelievingly as he uncapped a fountain pen and scrawled his initials in the right places, ending with a full, flourishing signature. The
solid gold band on his ring-finger caught her eye as his hand paused, and she stared at the etching of snake and rose, the same crest that she had seen on the letterhead in his lawyer’s office.

‘Now you.’

She numbly took his place as he stood aside. The shaft of the expensive pen was heavy and smooth, warm from his touch, and she was so nervous that she left a large blob after her name. He blotted it without comment.

‘We’ll need this properly witnessed, won’t we?’

He didn’t wait for an answer but went to the door and bellowed for ‘Frank’.

The man in the dark suit came in. He gave Vivian a single, hostile, sharply assessing look, then took the proffered pen and co-signed the document with a tight-lipped frown.

‘Satisfied?’ he asked gratingly as he straightened up, throwing the pen down on to the desk.

‘Thank you, Frank.’

Frank grunted.

‘Lunch ready?’ Nicholas Rose asked, seemingly undismayed by his employee’s surly air of disapproval.

‘In the kitchen. Just as you ordered,
sir
. Just don’t expect me to serve it!’

‘We’ll serve ourselves.’ He turned to Vivian, who was watching the by-play with slightly dazed green eyes, still stunned by the inexplicable reprieve. Could she have been wrong about him, after all? ‘Frank heats up a mean soup. Frank is my right-hand man, by the way. Frank, this is Vivian.’

Another grunt and a bare acknowledgement.

‘I think Vivian has something to give you before you go, Frank.’

‘I do?’ She looked at them both blankly.

‘The money, Vivian,’ Nicholas reminded her helpfully. ‘If you haven’t brought the cash and the bank-cheque, then this contract of sale isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.’

‘Oh!’ She blushed. How unprofessional. She was surprised he hadn’t asked to see the money earlier. ‘Oh, yes, of course. It’s right here.’

She unfastened a locked compartment of her satchel, drawing out the thousand-dollar bundle of notes from a cloth bank-bag, and the crisp slip of paper that made up the balance. She was about to put them down on the desk when she hesitated, eyeing the settlement papers still splayed out in front of him, her fears blossoming anew. Her colour drained away as she nibbled her lip.

With a sardonic look, Nicholas Rose silently gathered up the papers and handed them to her. She tucked them hastily into the satchel before she gave him the bundles. She couldn’t quite hide her relief at getting rid of the oppressive responsibility and was chagrined when he tossed the money casually to Frank, who stuffed it in his suit pockets and stumped out, muttering something about the pilot.

‘This is all very unorthodox,’ she said disapprovingly.

‘I’m a very unorthodox man.’ If that was a warning, it had come far too late to be of any protection. ‘Did it make you nervous travelling with such a large sum of cash?’

She thought of her sweaty drive and the almost sleepless night in the motel with a chair propped under the doorknob. ‘Very.’

‘Poor Vivian, no wonder you look so pale and tense.’ He casually brushed her cheek with his thumb and she
nearly went through the roof at the bolt of electricity that sizzled her senses.

They looked at each other, startled. His gaze dropped to her soft naked mouth, open in shock, then to the sliver of thickly freckled skin revealed by the modest cleavage of her blouse and the faint suggestion of lace hinted at by the trembling rise and fall of her lush breasts against the cream silk. In that single, brief glance he stripped her naked and possessed her.

‘Come into the kitchen,’ he said quietly. ‘I know just what to give you to relax.’

He ushered her before him and she moved awkwardly, shaken by the most profoundly erotic experience of her life. And yet he had scarcely touched her! She felt confused, fearful and yet achingly alive, aware as never before of the feminine sway of her full hips and the brush of her thighs beneath her skirt. Her spine tingled in delicious terror. Was he stroking her again with that spiky look of hunger? Imagining how she would look moving in front of him without her clothes? She blushed in the dimness of the hall and chastised herself for her dangerous fantasies. Either it was all in her own mind, or Nicholas Rose had decided to set her up for a very personal form of humiliation. He couldn’t possibly be genuinely attracted to her, not a man who, despite his physical flaws, possessed a raw magnetism that probably gave him his pick of beautiful women, not a man who showed every sign of being bent on vengeance.

The kitchen was small and compact and clearly the preserve of someone who enjoyed cooking. The bench-top was wooden, slicked with the patina of age, in contrast to the microwave and modern appliances, and in the small
dining-alcove was a well-scrubbed kauri table and three chairs. Evidently Nowhere Island was not normally used for business entertaining.

The table was set with rush place-mats and solid silver cutlery, and the steaming bowl of thick, creamy, fragrant soup that was set before her made Vivian’s tense stomach-muscles uncoil. There were bread rolls, too, which Nicholas got from the microwave, cursing as he burnt his fingers on the hot crusts.

The relaxant turned out to be a glass of champagne. And not just any old bubbly, but Dom Perignon. Vivian watched as he deftly opened the wickedly expensive bottle over her murmured protests that wine in the middle of the day made her sleepy, and turned his back to pour it into two narrow, cut-crystal flutes he had set on the bench.

Vivian drank some more soup, and when she was handed the chilled flute with a charming flourish accepted it fatalistically.

‘Have you ever tasted Dom Perignon before?’ he asked, seating himself again, and this time applying himself to his soup with an appetite that definitely wasn’t feigned.

‘Why, yes, I have it every morning for breakfast, poured on my cornflakes,’ she said drily.

‘You must be a lively breakfast companion…albeit a more expensive one than most men could hope to afford,’ he said, with a provocative smile that was calculated to distract.

But not you. It was on the tip of her tongue to say it, but she manfully refrained. ‘I pay my own way.’

His eyes dropped to her hand, nervously tracing the grain of the table, and the smile was congealed.

‘Yes, that’s right, you do, don’t you. Even to the extent of bank-rolling your fiancé’s grand property schemes. I suppose you could say he gained a sleeping partner in more than one sense of the word…’

As she gasped in outrage, he lunged forward and trapped her left hand flat on the table-top, his palm pressing the winking diamond ring painfully into her finger.

‘You’ve been working for him since you left school, haven’t you? What took him so long to realise you were the woman of his dreams? It was around about the time you got that little windfall, wasn’t it? Did he make it a condition of his proposal that you invest your inheritance in his business, or did you do it all for love?’

‘How dare you imply it had anything to do with money?’ she said fiercely, fighting the sudden urge to burst into pathetic tears and throw herself on his mercy. ‘Peter asked me to marry him before he ever knew about the trust!’ The release, on her twenty-third birthday, of funds from a trust set up by her natural parents had been a surprise to everyone, including her adoptive parents, who had refused to accept a cent of it. It was for Vivian to use how she wished, they had said—so she had.

‘The wedding’s this Saturday isn’t it? Your twenty-fifth birthday?’

Her eyes lowered, her hand curling into a white-knuckled fist as she pulled it violently from under his and thrust it down into her lap. His investigations must have been appallingly extensive. How much more did he know? Please God, not enough!

‘Yes.’

Her curt response didn’t stop his probing as he leaned
back again in his chair. ‘You must be looking forward to it after such a very long engagement? And only four days to until death do you part. No wonder you look slightly…emotionally ragged. It’s going to be a big church wedding, I understand. I’m amazed you could spare the time to dash down here…or was this a welcome distraction from the bridal jitters?’

Vivian lifted her chin and gave him a look of blazing dislike. At the same time she lifted her champagne glass and took a defiant sip.