Although perhaps it wouldn’t be as tedious as he’d first feared, he mused, visualising the delectable Dr Maitland.
He had told her the truth—the only time he intended to do so—when he’d admitted that she was different from his expectations of her. Holly was a stunning brunette, but he had imagined her as a matronly figure, possibly wearing a tweed suit—rather like the vicar’s wife in Little Bardley, who had always been kind to him when he’d been an angry teenager and constantly at loggerheads with Ralph Saunderson, his adoptive father.
But Holly looked nothing like a vicar’s wife, and even her uninspiring clothes couldn’t hide her gorgeous curvaceous figure. The sight of her too-tight blouse straining across her breasts, affording him a tantalising glimpse of creamy flesh where the material gaped around the buttonholes, had sent a rush of heat straight to his groin.
Frankly, she had rendered him speechless—which was not a condition Jarek often suffered from. He was clever with words, and always knew the right things to say—to women especially. That was why he could not understand why he had blurted out to Holly that she was beautiful. He’d sounded like an adolescent on a first date. Usually he was the king of cool, and the funny thing was that the more he acted as if he didn’t care the more interested women were in him.
The truth was he really didn’t care about anything or anyone apart from his sister, whom he had protected since she was a baby. But Elin was married to Cortez now, and they had a son, Harry. Soon their second child would be born. Jarek had accepted that Elin’s life had moved on and, although they would always share a close bond, that her priorities were her husband and family. Hell, he’d even accepted that Cortez, who was actually Ralph Saunderson’s secret son and heir, was a decent guy.
But, while his sister deserved to be happy, Jarek knew he would never come to terms with what he had done, and the grief he had caused to both Elin and Ralph Saunderson. It was his fault that Lorna Saunderson had died, and the raw pain inside him was his punishment—it was what he deserved.
He steered his mind away from the dark path of memory, which inevitably led to the self-destructive behaviour his sister had begged him to seek help for. The truth was no one could help him. He pictured Dr Maitland’s doe eyes and her serenely lovely face. He’d nicknamed her ‘angel-face’ but there was nothing angelic about her sinfully sexy mouth. He’d found himself longing to taste and explore it with his tongue.
At another time—even a month ago—he would have viewed Holly as an enjoyable distraction, and nothing would have stopped him from taking advantage of the awareness of him that she had unsuccessfully tried to hide.
But the letter he had received three weeks ago had made him question everything he’d believed he knew about himself. It had even made him wonder...who was Jarek Dvorska?
JAREK STARED OUT of the car window at the stunning Alpine landscape. All around him majestic snow-white mountains touched the sky and were reflected in a gentian-blue lake. The pine trees growing on the slopes looked as if they had been dusted with icing sugar, and here and there quaint Hansel and Gretel chalets peeped out from beneath snow-covered roofs.
The mountainous scene was exquisite, but there was also an inexplicable familiarity about it that he found puzzling. Ever since his adoptive parents had taken him on a skiing holiday in Chamonix, when he was twelve, Jarek had felt ‘at home’ in the mountains. But that did not make sense, because he had spent the first nine years of his life in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. He had no recollection of his family’s home in the city, but he remembered the grim grey orphanage where he and Elin had lived after their parents had died.
Why did he feel a sense of recognition when he skied down a mountain? he had once asked Lorna Saunderson, when he’d been trying to make sense of the images inside his head that he thought must be snatches of dreams—because how could they be real memories? For that matter, how had he known instinctively how to ski, without any help from an instructor, on that trip to Chamonix?
His adoptive mother—the only woman he had ever called Mama, since he had no idea who his real mother was—had reminded him that Sarajevo was surrounded by mountains. She’d suggested that perhaps staff at the orphanage had taken the children on a trip to the mountains and he had forgotten it.
Jarek thought it was unlikely. His memories of early childhood were of fear and hunger and regular beatings from the staff—although he had no idea what he might have done to merit such severe punishment. He certainly did not remember being taken out of the orphanage, and his recollections of Bosnia were only of the war that had taken place there in the nineteen-nineties, when Sarajevo had been besieged by Serbian soldiers.
His boyhood memories were of the sound of machine gun fire and the loud explosions when bombs had fallen into the compound outside the orphanage, where the children had played. He and the other orphaned children had huddled together in a damp cellar while Sarajevo had been under fire. Sometimes the few staff who had not deserted the orphanage or been killed had been in such a rush to get down to the cellar that they’d left the babies upstairs in their cots when the bombing started.
But Jarek had always refused to abandon his little sister, and had constantly risked his life to take her down to the cellar, where she would be safe. Elin had been about a year old when the war had begun, and even then she had been remarkably pretty. When a wealthy English couple—Ralph and Lorna Saunderson—had decided to adopt a Bosnian orphan they had chosen a golden-haired angelic little girl. But Elin had become so distressed when they’d tried to separate her from her older brother that Lorna had insisted on rescuing Jarek too, and so the children had escaped hell and gone to live at stately Cuckmere Hall on the Sussex Downs.
For years Jarek had not thought too deeply about his strange affinity with mountains. He did not take anything too seriously, because he was afraid that if he did the darkness in his soul might devour him. But that goddamned letter—from a man who had allegedly worked for Vostov’s royal family over two decades ago—had unlocked Pandora’s Box. The only way he could prevent the nightmares which had plagued him recently was to drink enough vodka so that he did not so much sleep as sink into oblivion for a few hours, if he was lucky.
He had convinced himself that the letter was a hoax and ignored it. But when he’d arrived at the Frieden Clinic and seen that newspaper headline about Vostov something had flashed into his mind that he might have believed was a deeply buried memory—if it hadn’t been so crazy. Unthinkable. He didn’t want to think, and he certainly wasn’t going to allow Dr Holly Maitland access to the innermost secrets that his instincts warned him were best kept hidden.
‘Hey, Gunther.’ Jarek leaned forward to speak to the driver. ‘How far is it to the chalet where I will be staying?’
‘We should be there in approximately ten minutes, sir,’ Gunther replied in perfect English. ‘We will soon come to a town and ski resort called Arlenwald. Chalet Soline is on the other side of the town, a little higher up the mountain.’
‘Does Arlenwald have any good bars?’
‘Bibiana’s Bar is a popular place with young people who like to drink Schnapps and watch the dancing girls. Or the Oberant Hotel is very charming. I believe they have a string quartet who play music while guests enjoy afternoon tea.’
‘Hmm...tea or Schnapps—what is your preference, Gunther?’
‘I am not fond of tea, sir.’
‘Nor me. How about we stop at Bibiana’s Bar so I can buy you a drink?’
‘Dr Maitland instructed me to take you straight to