Page 25 of Desert Barbarian

Again he made that angry sound, his lips tightening, the lean face taut. 'God knows! I didn't intend to come…' He turned away. 'I'm flying to America to­morrow. I suppose I came to say goodbye.'

'Don't you know?' Unconsciously her tone was pro­vocative.

He swung round, took three strides towards her and caught her by her slender shoulders, glaring down at her. 'No, I don't know. I must have been mad to come here. You're a maddening, immature little fool. You have a lot of growing up to do before any sane man would want to get involved with you. I knew it was madness to see you again, but…' He broke off, his face grim.

'But?' Marie's heart was racing, her body turning to water as she stared up at his dark, angry face.

He gave a despairing groan. 'If I had any sense I'd walk out of that door without another word!'

'Then why don't you?' She turned away, her move­ment bringing her hair flicking across his cheek in a scented swathe.

'God help me, I can't,' Stonor murmured under his breath.

Marie felt a suffocating excitement as he reached a hand up to touch her averted face, turning it back to face him, his fingers moving against her skin with the sen­sitivity of a blind man trying to see with his finger tips.

Slowly he traced the shape of her features; the slender straight nose with its faint upturning, the modelling of her cheekbones, the curved pink mouth. Everywhere his fingers rested she felt fiery nerves spring up, beating in response.

He stared down into her wide, very blue eyes, with their flickering lashes constantly hiding the expression the eyes held.

'Can you imagine what it feels like to be split in half?' he asked her suddenly. 'One part of me has always longed for the emptiness of the desert, the silence, the space. The other half is drawn to the neon lights and crowds of the cities. All my life I've had to fight down the impulse to leave the modern world, and all that it means, behind me; to spend my days out there in the freedom of the desert. I waste much of my energy fight­ing myself.'

'Why fight it?' she shrugged. 'Why not go there and give up everything else? You're a very rich man. You don't need to pursue even more wealth.'

He smiled sardonically. 'Why don't I go? Because I'm still a young man and I know that to retreat into the ancient, unchanged world of the desert would be coward­ice. There's no challenge in the desert that I can't face, but the challenge of the business world does scare me. Every day I hang on an abyss edge. One false move and I go down, everything with me.' His eyes flashed excitedly. 'That's why I stay.'

Marie understood that. She watched his face, darkly alive and glittering, and knew far more about him than she had before. This was a man who loved a hand-to-hand struggle with destiny, with danger. He liked to risk everything on one throw of the dice, loved the thrill of the danger.

'You're mad,' she said softy. 'You can't go on playing Russian roulette with life for ever.'

He grinned down at her, his eyes leaping. 'Can't I? Doesn't that attract you, too, Marie?'

Her breath caught as she met his eyes.

'That night I heard you talking outside the hotel, part of me leapt in wild excitement,' he said quickly. 'You said things I've often thought myself, things I was feel­ing right then. I, too, was hankering for the desert. I was sick of luxury hotels and silly, flattering fools who think that money makes a man. I suddenly wanted to play a game, a game of make-believe; live out the role of my life, make you believe it too. I took you out into the desert to fulfil two secret dreams—yours and mine.'

She was breathless, spellbound, as she listened, feeling the hard-muscled strength of his body against the length of hers, his arm holding her captive.

Then his face hardened. 'But the reality of it scared you, didn't it? You're too shallow to meet the challenge of that vast emptiness, too immature to match a man kiss for kiss, hunger for hunger…' His voice was stifled by strong emotion, fires leapt in the dark eyes, there was a sudden terrifying urgency in the strong hands that held her, moving over body and face, touching, caressing.

'You're hurting me,' she protested, beginning to tremble. What had she unleashed ? Now, even more than on that night in the desert, she felt a primitive force in him which, once let loose, might sweep away everything that stood in its path.

'I want to hurt you,' he said fiercely. 'I want to sting you to life. You're like an android, an artificial creation shaped like a woman, with all a woman's beauty and desirability, but lacking the vital spark which lights it up. I told myself that it was folly to come here. It isn't in you to respond to any man.'

'Then why don't you go?' she blazed, flushed with pain and anger at what he had said.

He swore under his breath. The hawk-like face was so close she could see every detail in sharp clarity; the dark, mysterious eyes so deep looking into them was like fal­ling down a well, the strong nose and fleshless cheek­bones, austerely planed, the cruel mouth which was sud­denly moving closer and closer…

'No!' she moaned, suffocating under that ruthless pressure, her hands beating at his chest like white moths against a window.

The world swung in a crazy arc around her, fire sprang up wherever his hands touched her. Her heart beat so fast she thought she must faint, as if her senses were not capable of meeting the demands he made upon them. Stonor ignored her struggles, her stifled protests. Compelling, ruthless, merciless, he kissed her until she was clinging weakly to him as to a rock in the midst of a flooding river, half drowning, half ecstatic.

Behind her closed lids a dazzle of light hypnotised her. She clung to him while he kissed her throat, her ears, pushing aside her blouse to kiss her shoulders and the white softness where her breasts rose, panting, from their confinement.

Abruptly he pushed her away so that she stumbled and fell back against the sofa. Opening her eyes, she stared at him, her hair straying in golden wildness across the cushions, her blouse half unbuttoned, her eyes wide and dazed.

For a moment he stared at her, his face grim. Then he bowed sardonically. 'Goodbye, Miss Brinton. It was an education to meet you. I pity the man who's fool enough to fall in love with you. His will be a frustrating experi­ence, trying to spark a flame from the stony emptiness of your heart.'

Turning on his heel, he slammed out of the room, and Marie burst into scalding tears.

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