Dark Victory

Cheska flushed. In folding her arms, she had pushed up the high breasts which sprang from her narrow body and now the honeyed curves seemed in imminent danger of spilling from her low-cut neckline. Hastily dropping her arms, she waded two or three steps across the muddy floor of the pool to the side, but when she reached it she frowned. The bank, which was covered with ferns and stones and yellow wands of loosestrife, was almost vertical. How did she climb up it?

Looming above, Lawson Giordano made a tall silhouette against the dazzle of the morning light. ‘May I give you a hand?’ he offered, in the low, smoky voice which she remembered so well.

When he held down a golden-skinned arm covered with a floss of black hair, Cheska eyed it warily. She did not want to touch him. She did not want to have any physical contact with the man. No, thanks. Never again.

‘I can manage on my own, thank you,’ she informed him, with the grand hauteur of a duchess.

Lawson shook his head. ‘You can’t,’ he said.

After undertaking a more detailed scrutiny of the bank, Cheska gave a silent scream. While she was loath to admit it, he seemed to be right. Her teeth ground together. She not only balked at touching him, she also objected to Lawson Giordano’s taking control of the situation—as he had always been so magnificently in control of situations before. But what was the alternative? She was damned if she would scramble up to him on her hands and knees.

Cheska forced a grit-eating smile. ‘I can’t’ she agreed, and clasped the large hand which he had continued to hold down.

It would serve him right if, instead of him pulling her out, she pulled him in, Cheska reflected, as her rescuer planted his long legs apart and prepared to haul. A dipping would be no more than he deserved and apt punishment, in view of his laughter, and his cruel manipulation of her in the past. Indeed, nothing would give her greater satisfaction than to manipulate him, by jerking at his hand so that he hurtled past her down the bank, to splash headlong into the water. And if he should sink for the regulation three times—tough luck! She had no badges for life-saving.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Lawson warned.

Cheska was looking at him in astonishment, wondering if she had a plate glass forehead, when with one powerful pull he yanked her out of the water, up the ferny slope and on to the side. Her legs skitter-skattered like pistons until—wham!— she thudded up against the firm-muscled wall of his chest.

Oh!’ she gasped.

In reflex, she clutched at his shoulders, and in reflex his arms went around her waist. Breathing hard, they stood together, body pressed against body, eyes gazing into eyes.

‘You always were a bloody-minded, uncooperative little bitch, and you haven’t changed,’ Lawson said roughly, then his dark head came down, blotting out the sun, and he kissed her.

Taken by surprise, Cheska opened her mouth to protest. That was her first mistake, for, as her lips parted, his tongue thrust between them, a predatory invader. Her second mistake was not to push him away. But how could she, when he had begun a seductive exploration of her mouth, when he was tasting her—and she was tasting him? A clean, male, intoxicating taste which revived all kinds of memories. As the kiss deepened, Cheska’s head started to spin and her knees seemed to buckle. She clung tighter to his shoulders; it was vital if she was to remain upright. But clinging to him had been her third mistake, she realised, for when Lawson drew back a minute or two later he was smiling, a confident, amused, knowing smile.

‘I—I have changed,’ Cheska stammered, needing to break the spell which he seemed to have cast, desperate to stifle the frenetic thump-thump of her heart. Letting go of his shoulders, she placed her arms stiffly down by her sides. ‘I have,’ she repeated, her voice firmer this time.

A brow lifted. ‘You’re no longer susceptible?’

‘Susceptible?’ she queried. To what?’

Lawson traced the tip of a tapered index finger slowly across her bare midriff, leaving a trail of heat tingling in its wake.

‘Me.’

Cheska took a brisk step in retreat. ‘No way,’ she said tartly.

‘That wasn’t the impression I received a moment ago.’

Her fingers curled into balls, their nails biting into her palms. She was furious with herself for having reacted so unthinkingly, so naively—and furious with him for daring to comment on it. It had seemed odd that Lawson Giordano should kiss her, but now she knew why. He had been testing her. He had been checking whether the sexual fire which he had once ignited with such casual ease could still be coaxed into flame. And she had obligingly boosted his male ego by providing the answer!

‘You always were an arrogant bastard and you haven’t changed,’ Cheska declared, in a sharp reworking of his earlier condemnation of her.

At the back of her mind, it registered that he had not changed physically, either. His hair was still black and wavy, worn a mite too long for fashion and curling over his shirt collar. His eyes continued to be heavy-lidded and a lustrous yellow-flecked brown. His mouth remained…well, beautiful. The granite-cut upper lip hinted at imperiousness, the lower was full and sensual. Cheska felt an irritating and totally unwelcome frisson. Five years ago, his dark Latin looks and muscular physique had meant that Lawson Giordano had been almost insolently masculine. He still was.

‘You’re saying you’re not susceptible?’ he drawled.

‘I’m saying that the only reason you weren’t kicked on the shins just now, or kneed in the groin,’ she added, with a razor of a smile, ‘was because you took me unawares.’

Lawson moved his shoulders in a leisurely shrug. ‘I was taught never to contradict a lady—even when she’s lying through her teeth. But what are you doing here?’ he went on, not missing a beat. ‘How come you’re wandering through the woods alone before breakfast, wearing a revealing top,

and’ dark eyes dipped momentarily down to her

hips in the elasticated shorts ‘—no knickers?’

Cheska forced herself to meet his steady gaze with an equally steady one of her own. He might just have got the better of her, but he would not be allowed to do so again. Whatever he said, whatever he did, she refused to be fazed. She would let him know that the gauche, biddable girl of so long ago had become a sophisticated and self-assured young woman.

‘It was hot,’ she declared, tossing back her mane of long brown hair in a couldn’t-care-less gesture.

‘And you don’t wear knickers when it’s hot?’ The corner of his mouth tweaked. ‘Now that’s intriguing.”

Cheska jabbed a hand up the rolling lawn to where the windows of the house reflected the pale yellow of the morning sun. She had absolutely no wish to continue this discussion about her underwear—or lack of it.

I’m here because Hatchford Manor is my home,’ she said.

‘Your home?’ There was a long moment of silence before Lawson next spoke. ‘But I understood that Rupert Finch, the owner, lived there alone. Apart from a housekeeper and her husband.’

‘He does, most of the time—but I arrived back yesterday. Rupert is my brother.’

Lawson seemed to recoil in shock. ‘Brother?’ he repeated.

Cheska cast him a puzzled glance. She had never seen him thrown before, but his voice had been filled with horror and his tense expression made it plain that he was now working his way through all manner of difficulties and doubts. Yet why should the relationship be of any possible concern, pose any possible problem, to him?

‘But he’s Finch and you’re Rider,’ Lawson protested, raking back the strands of black hair which fell over his forehead. ‘Besides, the guy’s in his early fifties whereas you can only be…twenty-five?’

‘Twenty-six,’ Cheska amended. ‘To be accurate, Rupert’s my stepbrother, hence our different names and the gap in ages, but we’re close and I always think of him as my brother.

‘So you’re not blood relations, he said, with what could be recognised as blatant relief.

She shook her head. ‘His father married my mother. He married her late in life after his first wife, Rupert’s mother, died. And my mother was a widow,’ she explained.

‘When we were talking last week, he did make a reference to a “Cheska”,’ Lawson recalled, frowning, ‘but I thought he said you were abroad.’

‘I was, until yesterday. However, I quit my job unexpectedly—’ a shadow crossed her face ‘—and—’

‘You were working abroad?’ he cut in.

‘What did you think I was doing, holidaying at length in glitzy abandon?’ Cheska demanded. ‘Cruising the Caribbean or living it up at a house party on the Côte d’Azur?’

‘Something like that’ His eyes flickered over her. ‘After all, you have a deep tan which couldn’t have been acquired overnight, so’

‘Although I may have tended to swan around once, I now work hard for my living,’ she informed him curtly.

‘But you’re no longer a model?’

‘No, I stopped modelling shortly after we last met. To continue, I quit my job and—’