Purchased For Revenge. Julia James

Чтение книги онлайн.

      It was the footsteps she heard first. With instinctive alarm, Eve whipped her head round at the sound of someone approaching. The hotel and grounds were private, and with so many wealthy people here security was high, if unobtrusive. But she was at the far end of the gardens, a place no one was likely to be at this time of night. So who on earth was—?

      As he stepped out of the deep shadow of the pine trees her breath caught, and held. For a moment she thought it could not be real. That she’d simply conjured the tall, lean figure out of the air, out of her memory. But the man walking towards her now wasn’t a fantasy.

      He was very, very real.

      ‘You shouldn’t have run,’ he said.

      He spoke French. There was an underlying accent, she could tell, but she couldn’t identify what his native language might be. The part of her brain that was capable of any kind of rational thought was not functioning.

      She gazed at him helplessly as he walked towards her. Her heart had started to beat. Not racing, but with slow, heavy beats that seemed to take an eternity. Time seemed to be slowing down around her.

      He came up to her.

      She could not see his face properly in the dim light. The moonlight slanted across his face, turning it to planes and shadows. Turning her limbs to sponge. Her hands tightened on the stone balustrade. She ignored the cold that bit into her flesh.

      It was the only part of her that was cold. In the rest of her a slow heat was burning.

      ‘Why did you? Run?’

      The sound of his voice, with its low-pitched, accented timbre, caught at her senses.

      ‘I don’t know.’

      It sounded to her ears such a stupid answer to make. But it was an honest one. It drew a slight smile from him. An indentation of his mouth. Her eyes went to it, drawn irresistibly. It did something to her. Something that fanned the slow-burning heat inside her and sucked the breath out of her lungs. She felt herself stepping back from the balustrade, letting go of it. Her arms fell helplessly to her sides.

      What was happening? What was happening here, now, with this man who had drawn her eyes like a magnet as he’d approached her, and from whom she had run, fled, sensing an imperative that she must if she had any sanity obey, because he was only a fantasy, could only be a fantasy, nothing more? And yet he had come after her, followed her here, now…and she did not know why…

      ‘I just knew that I had to run…’

      Her voice was still low, strange even to her ears.

      He took another step towards her.

      ‘You don’t have to run from me,’ he said.

      Eve looked at him. The shadowed light was still etching his face, the moonlight glinting off his eyes. There was something in his eyes…

      He murmured something. She did not understand it. It was not French, or English. There had only been a few words, and she could not identify the language. Then he was speaking again, this time in English.

      ‘Who are you?’

      Expression flickered in her face. Her lips parted, but she did not speak. She did not want to speak. Did not want to tell him who she was. It didn’t matter whether this man had or hadn’t heard of her father—and anyway, why should he have? There were a lot of rich people in the world and they did not all know each other. It was because suddenly, urgently, she wanted to be…someone quite different. A woman who could, if she wanted, walk out under the Mediterranean sky and gaze into the eyes of a fantasy come to life…

      Prevarication came to her.

      ‘Why do you think I’m English?’ she answered, sticking to French.

      The smile indented at his mouth again, and yet again she felt her breath catch.

      ‘Aren’t you?’ he mocked, very gently, keeping to English.

      His words, accented as they were, with that strange, elusive accent, resonated through her. She gave a tiny shrug of her shoulders.