He was doing this, Sanchia thought, as though he was seeking respite from something. She guessed that he wasn’t usually so rough or possessive as he caught her wrists above her head and ground his lower body against hers in hard domination, but whatever unknown entity was driving him, she didn’t want to know or care. He was dark and dangerous, and she needed the excitement he offered to obliterate her savage misery.
He made little work of dispensing with her white lacy string, his hands hard and uncompromising, but when his fingers slid into her softness, checking her readiness to receive him, they were unexpectedly gentle.
She whimpered her need, her body contracting around his fingers in a way that made Alex groan with frustration. He heard her moan softly in protest as he withdrew them, clenching his teeth in throbbing anticipation as he moved, adjusting his position before plunging into her, hard and deep.
She uttered a deeply choked sound that was lost beneath the chorus of the night creatures in the luxuriant foliage, and started to climax immediately, each deepening thrust of his body bringing her bucking and sobbing beneath him through the agonising ecstasy of his own release.
When Sanchia started to think again, she couldn’t believe what she had allowed to happen.
Why had she done it? she berated herself mercilessly. She had never been so stupidly reckless in her life!
She groaned a protest under his pinioning weight, so that he moved away from her immediately.
She couldn’t look at him as she readjusted her dress over her virtual nakedness, then groped for her errant string on the crumpled bedspread.
‘Are you looking for this?’ He was on his feet on the other side of the bed, amazingly in control again. Not as she felt. Shocked by her actions. Cheapened by them. Ashamed.
She grabbed the scrap of lace from his tanned hand, unable to meet his eyes.
Dear heaven! He hadn’t even undressed! Such had been their urgency for each other. Grief and betrayal had driven her into his arms, she realised bitterly, but it had been a purely animal coupling, nothing more.
Now pangs of self-disgust, and one Martini too many after days of too little food, had her rolling off the bed and stumbling instinctively towards his bathroom, where she was physically sick.
What type of man took a woman without any preliminaries, she wondered, groping for a towel. Just out of pure need to sate his lust? But she knew she had been a willing participant, and she had shrugged off his attempt at those preliminaries, craving only the oblivion from her screaming emotions that she knew she would find in his arms. So what type of woman did that make her?
‘Are you all right?’
Her eyes hurt from the light he had snapped on.
She didn’t look at him, grateful for the hair that fell forward, hiding the mess of her make-up and her blotchy face as she wiped her mouth on a towel that smelled too keenly of his aftershave lotion. ‘Fine.’ It came out flat and muffled.
‘I hadn’t realised you’d had that much to drink. I thought you were in total control of what you were doing. I’d never have brought you up here if I had.’
He was blaming himself. That deep note of remorse in his voice told her all too chillingly that he didn’t normally give in to his animal urges with such basic disregard. And now he regretted it.
‘Don’t feel too bad about it.’ Unable to unload what had driven her to behave in a way that was grossly out of character with this total stranger—because he was still a stranger, for all the intimacy they had just shared—she didn’t even bother to explain that she hadn’t been drinking to excess, that she wasn’t proud—any more than he was—of what she had allowed to happen. He must think her a promiscuous, half-inebriated fool, and the quicker she got away from him, the better.
Matter-of-factly, he said, ‘It shouldn’t have happened like that.’
‘No.’
‘I should have put you in a cab and sent you home.’
She looked at him squarely at last, her stomach turning over even now from the impact of his devastating looks, that mouth that had kissed her senseless, his dominating, hard-edged masculinity.
‘Yes.’ What had she imagined? she wondered, feeling the pangs of a wounded injustice that seemed to anaesthetise all her other emotions. That a man like him would have wanted her in any other way than for her body?
‘I’ll get you some coffee,’ he said.
When he came back a few minutes later to check up on how she was, the bedroom was deserted. So was the bathroom, and the light that was still on illuminated his way as he strode purposefully back into the sitting room.
The door to the suite was ajar, he noticed, and quickly stepped out into the quiet corridor. The lift was in use, the illuminated buttons indicating its occupation, its movement on a lower level of the hotel.
It could be her, he realised, knowing he stood a cat in hell’s chance of catching her. Brow furrowing, his attention slid automatically to the Emergency Exit door at the end of the corridor, just past his own.
Something other than his five basic senses drew him towards it. The night-scented air greeted him with a rush of humid warmth as he pushed it open, bringing with it the continuous whistling of lizards and the restless surge of the sea.
He saw her then, some way off in the distance—a shadowy figure, illuminated by the beach lamps, sandals hanging from her fingers, racing away over the soft pink sand.
She had been so keen to get away from him she hadn’t waited for the lift. She had used the fire escape instead.
Inside, Alex felt numb. He knew he’d never catch her. She’d be lost to him even if he sprang after her now, jumped the steps below him two by two.
She had come to his bed and then left, unable, he felt sure, to face him. To face anyone, he suspected now. Which could be another explanation for her not using the lift.
But she could be carrying his child…
The thought jolted him like a whiplash and he cursed himself for his irresponsibility, for letting his raging hormones rule him instead of his head. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that she was taking the Pill.
He wanted to yell after her. To stop her in her tracks. To drag her back—at least until he knew one way or the other. But a group of guests had wandered out onto the restaurant terrace way below. He could hear the muted strains of their conversation, their oblivious laughter, and as he watched the girl being swallowed up by the shadows of the Bermudian night he realised for the first time, and with another, much more shocking jolt, that he didn’t even know her name.
CHAPTER TWO
THE jury were being sworn in.
When her turn came Sanchia knew she would have to stand up, and a small dart of panic shot through her.
It wasn’t enough that the courtroom, with its high arched windows and dark paneling, was oppressive. Or that she could sense the eyes of the awesome-looking defence barrister who was standing nearest the jury box boring into her in a way that was making her feel decidedly self-conscious. No, it was the unsettling feeling on top of all that that she had done something similar before; there was some weird déjà vu in sitting here among the sculpted halls and corridors of this majestic building that was sending spears of pain across her temples, making her palms hot and clammy.
Perhaps she should have claimed exemption when she had been summoned here today. But, having been selected at random under English law, she had wanted to do her duty like any up-standing citizen, believing that she was well enough, keen to start functioning normally again. Putting her few photographic jobs on hold to take two weeks’ compulsory jury service was just another stepping stone towards that normality—another small opportunity to pick up the tenuous threads of her life.
The