Vendetta (5 page)

‘Here, perhaps these will help.’ He sat up in a flurry of bedclothes, ignoring her automatic cringe as, moments later, he pushed her spectacles on to her wrinkled nose. ‘Better?’

It was a hundred times worse! Vivian stared, appalled, at the photographs scattered like indecent confetti over the bed.

‘Oh, my
God…!
’

‘It’s a little too late for prayers, Vivian. Your sins have already found you out. Quite graphically, too, wouldn’t you say?’

‘How…? I… You—’

He interrupted her incoherent stammering smoothly. ‘I would have thought that the
how
was self-evident. There’s this clever modern invention called photography, you see…’

The sarcastic flourish of his hand made Vivian utter a soundless moan as she saw that what she had myopically mistaken for a clothes-horse was in fact a tripod, topped with a fearfully sophisticated-looking camera, its lens pointing malevolently at the bed.

‘And as for the I and you, well—we appear to be pretty brazenly self-evident, too, don’t we? Here, for instance…’

Vivian’s hypnotised gaze followed his pointing finger. ‘See the way you’re arched across the bed under me, your arms thrown over your head in abandoned pleasure…’

Vivian clamped the blankets rigidly under her arms, freeing her trembling hands to try frantically to push his away as he sorted through the collection and selected another.

‘But this one is my own personal favourite, I think. So artistic…so erotic…so expressive. Don’t you agree that we make a sensuous contrast of textures and patterns? With your ginger-dappled skin and my deep tan, and the way our bodies seem to flow over and around each other…’

Vivian tuned out his honeyed taunts, transfixed by the searing image suspended from his fingers.

She had seen raunchy advertisements for perfume in glossy women’s magazines that were more physically revealing, but it was impossible to be objective now. The couple in this photograph weren’t anonymous models posing for public display. That was
her
caught in an attitude of utter abandon, that was
his
nude body aggressively crushing her to the bed. She went hot and cold at the idea that he had somehow tapped into her forbidden desires.

Even as a tiny, clinical voice of reason was pointing out that the alignment of Nicholas’s fingers on her hip conveniently covered the precise area where the thin strip of her bikini panties would be, Vivian was shattered by a sickening sense of betrayal. The pictures lied; they depicted an act of violation, not of love!

She tried to grab the photograph out of his hand and, when he laughed jeeringly and held it out of her reach, she fell desperately on the others, tearing them into meticulously tiny pieces, all the while trying to protect her threadbare modesty with the slipping covers.

He laughed again, making no attempt to stop her wild orgy of destruction beyond retaining safe possession of his avowed favourite. ‘There are plenty more where those came from, Vivian. It was a very long, exhausting night…’

‘I was unconscious,’ she panted, rejecting his sly insinuation. ‘Nothing happened—’ She stopped, stricken. ‘My God, you were going to do this to
Janna?
’

‘Actually, the original plan was for someone else to play your sister’s partner in sin,’ he drawled. ‘And when they supposedly disappeared together, with the payment for the land, I would send you photos of the lovers and evidence that they had planned the fraud together. You were supposed to come dashing to her defence on the eve of your own wedding, sadly too late to rescue the contract that your company was depending on, but in plenty of time to negotiate the salvage of Janna’s personal and professional reputation—at the price of your own, of course…

‘Your arriving in Janna’s place sabotaged the exquisite complexity of the plan, but I’m nothing if not flexible. As soon as I saw you, I knew I wanted the privilege of handling you to be purely mine…’

She had already guessed much of it, but the callous detachment with which he outlined the bare bones of the plot was chilling.

She gasped, as an even more horrible thought smacked her in the face. ‘Who took the photos? Who else was in
here, watching us—?’ She broke off, shuddering with humiliation at the thought that Frank had been a flint-eyed witness to her degradation…

‘I can promise you, Vivian, you weren’t seen or touched by anyone but me.’ He took a small black wafer of plastic from the table by the bed and pointed it towards the tripod, pressing a button so that she could hear the electronic whirr as the flash momentarily dazzled her eyes. ‘Remote control. It’s a state-of-the-art instant camera—the photos only take a few minutes to develop.’

He rolled off the bed and Vivian uttered a choking cry, closing her eyes a fraction of a second too late to deny herself a glimpse of taut male buttocks and hard, hair-roughened flanks.

‘Prude.’ His mockery singed her burning ears. ‘Here.’

She peeped warily through her lashes and relaxed a trifle when she saw that he had pulled on his jeans. He was holding out the thin red sweater he had worn the previous day.

He shook it impatiently at her immobility. ‘Come on.’ He threw it on the bed. ‘Put that on.’

‘I want
my
clothes,’ she said stubbornly, as she watched him apply his eye-patch, raking his thick, blond-streaked hair over the thin band of elastic that held it in place.

‘Then want must be your master.’ He put his hands on his hips, legs aggressively astride, a bare-chested pirate. ‘Or rather,
I
shall—and as your master I’m quite happy for you to remain without clothes indefinitely. In fact, yes, I rather like the idea of keeping you here naked…’ He invited her to consider the notion in a dark, seductive voice, watching her defiance waver. ‘Nude, you’d be so deliciously vulnerable, so much easier for me to control…’

With a muttered curse, Vivian snatched the sweater and hastily pulled it over her blushing head, contorting herself to arrange it carefully over the top of the bedclothes before she let them go. Thankfully, the sweater came to mid-thigh, although she still felt horribly exposed as she crabbed to the edge of the bed and swung her feet tentatively to the floor.

‘That colour makes you look like a fire-cracker with a lit fuse.’

The faint suggestion of approval confused her. She was acutely conscious of the scent of him clinging to the sweater, mingling with her own, and of the soft brush of the thin fabric against her bare breasts. She licked her lower lip, and then fingered it nervously. It felt fuller than usual.

‘What are you going to do—with the photographs, I mean?’

‘Why, there’s only one honourable thing
to
do with them.’

Hope flared briefly. ‘What’s that?’

He plucked her hand from her mouth and mockingly kissed the backs of her fingers.

‘Have them delivered to the church on Saturday, of course. Your poor fiancé must be given some reason for being left stranded at the altar!’

His tongue flicked against her knuckles, stroking her with a brief sting of moist fire that distracted her from his bombshell. She jerked her hand away, but not before he had caught her wrist and with a savage twist removed Peter’s ring from her finger.

‘We’ll send this bauble along with the pretty pictures, just to make sure he gets the message that he can’t have you.’

He tossed it in the air and caught it, flaunting his possession before thrusting it casually into his pocket.

‘You can’t do that…’ Vivian whispered, her first thought of the havoc he could wreak on an already tense situation; that was, if the wedding hadn’t already been cancelled. Had Janna and Peter taken her advice seriously and gone ahead with the arrangements, or were they still stubbornly wallowing in joint guilt and remorse?

‘Marvel will never marry you now, Vivian. Learn to accept it.’

‘No, Peter loves me!’ she declared desperately, jumping to her feet. On one level, at least, it was still true. It was because of his deep affection and respect for Vivian that he and Janna had put themselves through such torture over the past few weeks. Vivian hadn’t even been able to maintain a righteous fury over the betrayal, for it was obvious that the guilt-stricken pair had suffered agonies trying to ignore and then deny their love, in order not to hurt sweet, gentle, defenceless Vivian.

She had bluntly told them to stop being so nobly self-sacrificing. The practical thing to do would be to forget the huge hassle of calling off the elaborate wedding-arrangements and returning all the presents, and just switch brides. Janna and Peter had looked so appalled that Vivian had burst out laughing. It had been the laughter more than anything that made her realise that perhaps she wasn’t as heartbroken as a jilted woman should be.

So, when the first opportunity had presented itself for her to prove that she wasn’t the sweet, gentle, defenceless creature everyone was going to feel sorry for, she had grabbed at it defiantly with both hands.

‘Marvel’s going to take one look at those pictures and
know it’s all over between you.’ Nicholas continued his ruthless attack. ‘He’ll never be able to forget the sight of you burning in your lover’s arms—’

‘We’re not lovers!’ Vivian shrieked. ‘Those pictures—they’re all fakes. You just… You posed me, like a
mannequin
—’

‘Did I really, Vivian?’ he taunted softly. ‘You were very willing. Don’t you remember telling me how I made you feel all soft and hot and buttery inside, and grumbling that it wasn’t fair you had to miss out on the thrill of being ravished by a sexy villain…?’

‘That was the drug talking, not me! There’s a big difference between being barely conscious and being
willing
,’ she pointed out with smouldering force. ‘And—and, anyway—if I… If we
had
done anything…I’d
know
…’

‘How?’ He seemed sincerely curious.

She practically melted her spectacles with the glare she gave him. ‘I just would, that’s all,’ she said stubbornly.

‘Not if I was very skilful and very tender, and you were very, very receptive… Not if you were all soft and buttery inside,’ he said, in a satin murmur that slithered over her skin.

‘Stop it! I won’t listen!’ she cried childishly, covering her burning ears with her hands. His eyes dropped to the sharp rise of the hem of his sweater as it flirted against her upper thighs, and she hurriedly lowered her arms. ‘No one else will listen to your lies, either. They’ll believe
me
…’

‘But you won’t be there to tell them the truth,’ he said smoothly. ‘You’ll be here with me. You don’t think I’m going to let you go so easily, do you?’

‘But you have to let me leave eventually.’ She tried to sound confident.

‘
Eventually
, you may find that you don’t
want
to leave…’

His insinuating murmur filled her with alarm. What was he suggesting—that he intended to turn her into some kind of…
sex
-slave, addicted to the forbidden pleasure that he could provide?

‘You can’t keep me imprisoned here forever…’ she protested faintly.

He shrugged. ‘Who’s keeping you prisoner? You came here of your own free will. In fact, you’ve already sent a fax to your office saying that everything is fine and that you’ll be back with the contract the day before the wedding. So don’t think anyone’s going to come flying to your rescue.’

That much was true. She had been too secretive, too determined to solve the problem herself.

When she had gone to visit Nicholas Rose’s lawyer, to plead that her sister’s illness made it impossible for her to deliver the settlement papers personally, as arranged, Vivian had been still reeling from what she had discovered on her visit to Janna’s flat.

Then she had bumped into a secretary over-loaded with files, and glimpsed among the scattered papers a letter addressed to Nowhere Island—but to Nicholas Thorne, not Nicholas Rose.

Some fast and furious digging for information had brought answers that had shocked her out of her self-pitying depression and sent her charging off in a spirit of reckless bravado.

Only now was she realising how ill-prepared she was
for her mission. Nicholas Thorne had shown no sign so far of being open either to intimidation or to reason.

Vivian swallowed. Damn it, she couldn’t afford to let negative feelings undermine the determination that had brought her here!

‘Look, I realise that you genuinely feel that you have some justification for hating me, but don’t you see that what you’re doing is
wrong
. That car crash was an
accident
. The police investigated it thoroughly at the time—’

‘Your sister claimed that our car skidded as we came around the corner,’ he said neutrally.

‘Yes, but Janna wasn’t
accusing
you of anything,’ Vivian explained eagerly. ‘She was just describing what she saw. The police said the skid-marks confirmed that neither of us was speeding…it was just the way the gravel had been shifted by the rain, making the road unstable—an act of God…’

Then she added gently, because she knew the tortuous ways that guilt could haunt the innocent, ‘Neither of us was to blame for that night. Not me and not you. We’ll never know if we could have prevented it by doing something slightly faster or reacting differently, but being human isn’t a
crime
…’

She broke off because he was looking at her extremely oddly. ‘You think I blame
myself?
’

She hurriedly changed her tack. ‘When I wrote to you back then, I just wanted you to know that I was sorry for the accident…I didn’t mean to taunt you with your grief, if that was what you thought. I—I never showed your reply to anyone else. I didn’t think you meant those terrible threats. I thought it was just your grief lashing out.
I can’t believe you’ve nursed that mistaken grudge all these years. Surely, for the sake of your son, you should have put the tragedy behind you—’

‘My
son?
’

The floor suddenly seemed to heave beneath her feet as Vivian realised what his arrested expression could mean. ‘I—I know he was injured, and it’s all a bit hazy now, but at the hospital I remember the doctor saying he was a very lucky boy to be in the back seat… H-he
is
still alive, isn’t he?’