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And Nick was a good driver, she was forced to admit, stealing a sideways glance at him from beneath her lashes. She'd never before accompanied him on a long journey, and had expected their progress to be aggressively conducted, with him cutting a triumphal swathe through the traffic. But she was wrong. He handled his beautiful vehicle with sure skill, driving fast but safely, with surprising tolerance for the vagaries of his fellow motorists.
He'd discarded his jacket and loosened his tie, and his shirtsleeves were rolled back to reveal tanned forearms.
He looked totally relaxed—even as if he was enjoying himself, she thought, biting at her lower lip.
He asked if she wanted music and she agreed, simply because it was preferable to conversation—especially if he had questions she'd no wish to answer. But he seemed to prefer to concentrate on the road, rather than be diverted by contentious issues.
She was aware of die music, a smooth blues combo, but she wasn't listening to it. She couldn't. Not when every mile was taking her nearer to Wylstone, and the associations of misery and humiliation that haunted it. Memories that she would be forced to endure, along with so much else, she thought, swallowing convulsively.
She'd tried to use the last twelve months to wrench them out of her brain and dismiss them for ever. She'd thought she'd succeeded. That she'd cured herself of the virus that was Nick Tempest. Yet she'd only had to see him again and they were all back, clamouring obscenely for her attention.
Telling her that all she'd really done was use a sticking plaster to cover a mortal wound.
How could this have happened to me? she asked herself numbly. Was there nothing—nothing that I could have done?
But she already knew the answer to that. The path of her life seemed to have led her straight to him.
Even the impulse mat had caused her to absent herself to London safely out of Nick's orbit, had been cancelled out by the breakdown in her grandfather's health that had summoned her back so arbitrarily.
I was all my grandfather had, she thought wearily. So what choice did I have—then or ever?
And then, with frightening suddenness, her life had begun to fall apart. Inevitably, Nick had been there with his safety net, offering her grandfather and herself a home and a kind of security. It had been the perfect opportunity for him, she thought. Everything had conspired to bring them together, and he had placed her under the kind of obligation that could only have one ending.
She should have realised that one day some kind of recompense would be demanded from her—if not in cash, because there wasn't any, then certainly in kind. She should have known that Nick had marked her out from the start as his future bride—young, she thought stormily, and biddable. Not a living, feeling girl, but a puppet, easy to manipulate. Or so he'd considered. And she, pitifully, had totally misread his intentions.
Well, at least she'd forced him to think again. To accept that she wasn't the naive push-over he'd originally bargained for. Ready to sacrifice her emotions, her self-respect and her trust in exchange for a roof over her head and his money to spend.
Except that it had not been about money at all. And the knowledge of that had provided the basis for the private tragedy that was beginning to unfold.
7 suppose you know that you're trespassing?' Those were the first words Nick had ever said to her, and she would never forget them.
In a way, it had been a covert warning that he was forbidden territory and she encroached there at her peril. And she'd picked up on it even if it was at some unconscious level. Wasn't that why she'd taken the job in London—in order to put distance between them and recover from the threat to her untried emotional equilibrium?
But where Nick was concerned her instincts had always been heightened, she recognised. Hence the bad dreams over the past year, signalling to her that his net had been spread again. That the search was on in earnest.
I should have listened, she thought. Found another country to live in, even.
Except, of course, that her passport had been left in her hand luggage back at Wylstone Hall, ready for the honeymoon that never was. Stranding her in Britain, within his reach. A mistake she would not make again once she was finally free.
She became aware that they were pulling off the motorway, traversing a roundabout into a smaller country road.
She sat up. 'Where are we going?'
'There's a good pub not far away,' he said. 'And you need food.' She was aware of his swift, sideways glance. 'Or are you going to tell me you're not a lunch person either?'
Actually, she was ravenous, but she wasn't about to admit it.
She lifted her chin. 'Just as you wish.'
