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‘Why should I believe anything you say?’ Nina swung her legs off the couch and stood up. ‘You know I can’t remember. For all I know, you could be making all this up.’
His hand on her arm steadied her swaying body, turning her to face him. ‘Why don’t you call Karl, then?’ he challenged. ‘Tell him that I’m here on the island and see what happens.’
Her upturned face paled, her green eyes glowing at him with bewildered mistrust. His rigid face softened, his hand relaxing on her arm, stroking down to cup her elbow and coaxing her gently forward until their bodies were almost touching.
‘Or, better still, why don’t you come back home with me now and find out for yourself?’ he murmured. ‘See if being back in familiar surroundings makes a difference to what you can remember. That book you threw at me—you should read it, Nina. It can help you understand what’s happening to you. It says that physical cues can be a powerful source of spontaneous recall. Cues from your senses—familiar sights, sounds, tastes, sensations…’
Like the sensational impact of his lovemaking! Nina began to shake her head, but he continued inexorably.
‘Seeing your studio, your clothes, your personal things, how we lived…that could help make it real to you.’
‘No, I’m not going anywhere with you!’ she said, her thoughts in a hopeless tangle of panic. ‘If it’s true and I left you…I—I ran away, I must have had a good reason—’
‘Why don’t you come back with me and together we can discover what that is?’
His voice was soft, sombre, infinitely seductive. It promised safety, yet Nina sensed an unspeakable danger in his deliberate gentling.
‘If we were so happy, why would I have left?’ she demanded shrilly. ‘Was it another woman? Did I catch you sleeping with someone else?’
His gentleness dropped away into the well of his frustration. ‘Aren’t you going to ask if I was beating you, too?’
She realised it had never even occurred to her as a possibility. He was undoubtedly tough, even ruthless in the pursuit of his goals, but on some instinctive level she didn’t believe he was abusive. Only too sexy for his own good…
‘You’re avoiding the question,’ she snapped, relieved to be able to turn the tables, albeit only briefly.
‘I was faithful to you every minute we were together—just as I’ve been uncomfortably celibate for the past nine months,’ he snapped back.
Her cheeks stung. ‘Celibate?’ Somehow she had difficulty associating Ryan Flint with the word.
His eyes gleamed wolfishly. ‘Can’t you tell? I’m aching for a woman, Nina. The only drawback is the woman I’m aching for is trying to pretend she doesn’t want to know me.’
She took a deep, shaky breath and walked away to pick up the fallen book and thrust it out at him. ‘I want you to leave.’
He seemed genuinely sympathetic. ‘I know you do. But I can’t, Nina. I never walk out on unfinished business.’
She threw the book down on the couch. ‘If you’re talking about this money you’re claiming I took—’
He named a sum of cold, hard cash that took her breath away. ‘It disappeared from the safe in our bedroom the same day you did your daylight flit, and since you were the only other person to have the combination—’
‘Why do you assume it wasn’t simply a burglary?’ she flung at him.
‘A burglar would have cleared out the safe. There were a lot of other valuable things in there, but all that went missing was the cash and your passport and personal papers.’
She realised that he had trapped her into arguing as if she believed his tale about their being live-in companions.
‘I didn’t have any of those things when I arrived here. You are delusional.’ She paced the room, waving her hands. ‘Look around you. Does it look as if I’m rolling in stolen money? What I have, I earned.’ And she was fiercely proud of the way she had done it!
He shrugged. ‘Maybe you went straight to the casino and gambled it all away. You might have thought that was rough justice, considering the way I originally made my money.’
