Beyond Reach. Sandra Field

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СКАЧАТЬ on his fingers. Lucy remembered how they had dug into her arm and shivered.

      Troy said with icy precision, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mr Blogden—you should be thankful Miss Barnes isn’t at the police station charging you with assault… Go get your case, Lucy. You’re quite safe this time.’

      The house was shaded and cool and very quiet. Lucy scurried down the hall to the bedroom that was to have been hers, finding her blue duffel bag exactly where she had left it on the tiled floor. She picked it up and ran back to the foyer. Raymond Blogden’s complexion was several shades redder than when she had left. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me your name, young man?’ he was saying, and to her horror Lucy saw his right hand inching toward his pocket.

      ‘Troy, he’s got a weapon!’ she cried.

      In a blur of movement Troy went on the offensive. Three seconds later Raymond Blogden’s arm was twisted behind his back and Troy was saying calmly, ‘Search his pocket, would you, Lucy?’

      As gingerly as if a tarantula inhabited Raymond Blogden’s pocket, Lucy inserted her fingers and came up with a pearl-handled knife that was disconcertingly heavy. ‘We’ll take that,’ Troy said cheerfully. ‘And since I’m rather fussy about those with whom I associate, Mr Blogden, I think I’ll keep my name to myself.’

      ‘She’s nothing but a hooker,’ Raymond Blogden spat. ‘She dresses it up with fancy words, but that’s all she is.’

      ‘Shut up,’ Troy said, very softly, ‘or I’ll have your hide for a car seat… Ready, Lucy?’

      She was more than ready. She opened the door and heard Troy say, in a voice all the more effective for its lack of emphasis, ‘If I ever see you within fifty feet of Miss Barnes again, I’ll wipe the floor with that pretty white suit of yours… Goodbye, Mr Blogden.’

      The sunlight almost blinded Lucy. Troy gunned the motor and surged down the driveway. He was whistling between his teeth and looked extremely pleased with himself. ‘You enjoyed that,’ Lucy said shakily.

      ‘Damn right I did.’ With casual skill he took the first of the turns. ‘What in heaven’s name made you think you could work for a man like that?’

      ‘I never met him,’ she said defensively. ‘The interview was in Toronto, with his personnel adviser.’

      ‘And what do you do that led him to call you a prostitute?’

      ‘I’m a massage therapist,’ she said. ‘There are certain people who seem to think that massage has everything to do with sex and nothing to do with healing—I get so tired of all the innuendoes and off-color jokes.’

      ‘It’s a very useful profession,’ Troy said mildly.

      She shot him a suspicious glance. ‘Do you really mean that?’

      ‘Kindly don’t equate me with the likes of that creep up in the villa!’

      Only wanting to change the subject, Lucy looked distastefully at the knife in her lap. ‘What am I going to do with this?’

      ‘Keep it. In case you’re ever silly enough to work for someone like him again. Naivete doesn’t pay in any job, but particularly not in yours, I would have thought.’

      Troy had spoken with a casual contempt that cut Lucy to the quick. I won’t cry, she thought, I won’t. If I didn’t cry when it happened, why would I cry now?

      But the hibiscus blooms that bordered the driveway were running together in big red blobs, as red as Raymond Blogden’s face. She stared fiercely out of the side window of the Jeep and felt Troy slow to a halt as they reached the highway. Then his hand touched her bare elbow. ‘Don’t!’ she muttered, and yanked it away.

      ‘Look at me, Lucy.’

      ‘No!’

      ‘Lucy…’ His fingers closed on her shoulder.

      She turned to face him, her eyes brimming with fury and unshed tears, her mouth a mutinous line. ‘You’re only the skipper when you’re on the boat,’ she choked. ‘Let go of me!’

      If anything, his hold tightened. Lines of tension scoring his cheeks, his gray eyes bleak, he said, ‘I owe you another apology, don’t I? You’ll have to forgive me, I’m—out of touch with the female sex. You did well to get away from him; he’s as nasty a piece of work as I’ve come across in a long time.’

      A tear dripped from her lashes to fall on his wrist. ‘I—I was so f-frightened.’

      ‘Of course you were, and rightly so. That charming little object in your lap is a switchblade.’ As she regarded it with horror, Troy asked, ‘How did you get away from him?’

      ‘He has a collection of jade in the hallway. I picked two pieces up and told him I’d drop them if he didn’t stay where he was. I g-guess he didn’t believe me. So I dropped one on the floor and it s-smashed. I felt terrible, but I didn’t know what else to do.’ She gave a faint giggle. ‘You should have seen the look on his face. He said he’d paid nine thousand five hundred and forty dollars for it. Once I’d climbed out the window I put the other piece on the sill and ran for my life.’

      The look on Troy’s face was one she hadn’t seen before. Admiration had mingled with laughter, and with something else she couldn’t name but that sent a shiver along her nerves. She said fretfully, ‘Let’s get out of here—I want to go back to Seawind.’

      Troy checked for traffic and turned left. ‘The supermarket’s going to be an anticlimax after this.’

      Knowing her lack of culinary skills, Lucy wasn’t so sure that he was right. Although wrestling with menus would certainly beat wrestling with Raymond Blogden. ‘I need to blow my nose,’ she mumbled.

      Troy fumbled in the pocket of his shorts and produced a small wad of tissues. He checked them out, then said, grinning at her, ‘No engine grease—I thing they’re okay.’

      It would be a great deal safer to dislike Troy Donovan, Lucy thought, swiping at her wet cheeks then burying her nose in the tissues and blowing hard. When he grinned like that it not only took years off his age, it put his sexual quotient right up there with Robert Redford’s. She blew again, reminding herself that violence was what had put the grin there in the first place. A physical confrontation with another man. She’d do well to remember that.

      She put the tissues in her skirt pocket and said, before she could lose her nerve, ‘Thank you for going with me, Troy. I was dreading having to explain the whole situation to the police.’

      ‘You’re entirely welcome,’ he replied. ‘Haven’t had as much fun in months.’

      ‘You’d have made a good pirate,’ she snapped.

      ‘Blondbeard?’ he hazarded.

      Smothering a smile, she went on severely, ‘You like violence?’

      ‘Come on, Lucy—that was a situation straight out of a Walt Disney movie. He was the bad guy, I was the good guy coming to the rescue of the beautiful maiden, and because I was bigger than him and, I flatter myself, in better condition, right triumphed. How often in these days of moral ambiguities СКАЧАТЬ