Czytaj książkę: «A Love Untamed»

CHAPTER TWO

WILD black hair, penetrating black eyes, a bushy black beard. He was huge, looming over her, filling the small room with his bulk and the sense of dire threat. The very air shivered with it. As did her body. He wore faded jeans, disreputable running shoes and a wrinkled denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing brown, muscled arms. All of him was big and strong, emanating a primitive masculine power and virility.

However, she saw no horns, no fangs or whatever else devils were supposed to have. Neither did she see a gun or knife. He stared down at her with his black devil eyes.

This was not a comfortable moment. Standing there barefoot wearing nothing but a long white nightgown, her hair loose, she was not an image radiating power and control, she was quite sure. She must look like a terrified heroine in a Gothic novel. Petrified, she continued to stare at him. It did not bear considering what he might be contemplating as his dark eyes moved over her from top to bottom.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

It was the tone of his voice that got her lungs going again. There was no threat or lechery in that deep voice, merely astonishment. This was extremely reassuring. Astonishment she could deal with. Astonishment was good.

She swallowed, then straightened her back, stretching as far as her meagre five feet four would allow, and put her hands on her hips.

‘Who the hell are you?’ she demanded.

His bushy brows shot up. ‘I believe I asked the question first, angel.’

Angel. And that from the devil. Oh, God.

Her legs began to shake. ‘I own this house and I want you out.’ Her heart was racing but her voice was steady, which was nothing short of a miracle. However, he seemed not impressed.

His brows rose up even further. ‘You own this house? I don’t know where you get that idea. The house is mine.’ He reached into his pocket and fished out a key. ’see? This is my key. It fits very nicely into the lock in the door of my house.’ The hand dangling the key in front of her was big and brown and very strong. The other one was a perfect match. Hands that had seen hard physical labour. Her stomach churned.

‘You may have a key, but I have a deed. The closing was this afternoon. The house is mine—all legal and above board. I signed all sorts of documents and the lawyers signed all sorts of documents and I wrote big cheques and then we all shook hands and smiled a lot. That’s how it’s done when you buy a house.’ Oh, shut up! she said to herself. She always talked too much, but when she was nervous she positively gushed.

‘You must have the wrong house.’

’that’s crazy! Of course I don’t have the wrong house! I bought this one.’

He frowned, then shrugged, raking a hand through his unruly hair. ‘I’m not going to stand here and pursue a pointless argument with a woman in her nightgown. I’ll find a way to disabuse you of your illusions tomorrow. What I need now is sleep.’

His arrogance infuriated her and she clenched her teeth hard. However, one thing she was noticing: in spite of his disreputable appearance, he spoke in complete sentences and his English sounded educated. Was this reassuring? Did it mean anything? Probably not a thing.

She willed her legs to stop trembling. ‘You’re not sleeping here,’ she said with a conviction she didn’t feel. ‘Find yourself a hotel. There’s a country inn five miles down the road. It’s a lovely place, all white with red shutters, and the rooms have four-poster beds in them and you’ll be perfectly comfortable there and…’ She stopped herself. Here she was doing it again.

He rubbed his beard. ‘It appears to me that you don’t understand,’ he said patiently, as if he were talking to a dimwitted child. ‘Let me be more clear: I’m not going anywhere. This is my house, so you should leave and find yourself a room in the inn. However, I don’t turn women in their nightgowns out into the street at this hour, so be my guest and stay the night.’

The audacity of the man! ‘I’ll call the police,’ she said between clenched teeth.

An amused little grin curved his mouth. He stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘Oh, yes, good old Chuckie,’ he said lazily. ’sure, go ahead. And while you’ve got him on the line, tell him I won the bet and he owes me a hundred bucks.’

Her heart sank. There went that idea. Maybe he and Chuckie the sheriff were partners in crime. These things happened. You heard about it on TV: the nation’s finest seduced by the rewards of crime. It was a disgrace. Calling Chuckie would obviously do no good. Now what? She couldn’t think of a thing.

The man turned around. ‘I’m going to sleep. Goodnight, angel.’ And with that he strode out of the room. She didn’t hear him go down the stairs, and when all became quiet and her legs were more steady, she gathered enough courage to find out where he’d parked himself.

She discovered him in one of the other bedrooms. He lay sprawled on top of the big double bed, fully clothed and out cold. He had taken off his Nikes and socks, and that was about it. Like the rest of him, his feet looked big.

It was easy to see that neither flood, hurricane nor earthquake was going to move this man. He was dead to the world and by the looks of it he was going to stay that way for a while. Which meant she was going to be safe for a while.

She looked at the comatose shape and felt a shiver go down her spine. Where had he come from? Maybe he’d been driving for a long time. Maybe he had escaped from prison, stolen a car…Maybe she should have a look at the car, check out the licence plates.

She tiptoed down the stairs, although there was no need to be so quiet. Her footsteps weren’t going to wake him out of his stupor. In the hall by the front door she saw a huge duffel bag with airline tags. United Airlines. He’d arrived at Washington Dulles, but he could have come from anywhere. The name tag was a coded American Express affair that would only reveal its secrets to a computer. Then she noticed the papers sticking out of a side-pocket. Ticket carbons? It would supply the passenger’s name and flight information. She hesitated.

Why had the gods burdened her with an oversupply of principles? She didn’t snoop in other people’s drawers and she didn’t peep into their bathroom medicine cabinets. She didn’t cheat on her taxes. She didn’t steal ashtrays from hotel rooms; she didn’t even take the little soaps and bottles of shampoo. And she never lied. Well, almost never.

She did not go through other people’s papers, either.

She stared at the corner of grey peeping out from the duffel-bag pocket.

Well, she had the right, didn’t she? Shouldn’t she know the identity of a stranger who’d forced himself into her house and refused to leave? A dangerous-looking stranger now asleep under her roof?

Of course she did.

She went down on her knees, took the oblong booklet out of the pocket and leafed through the flimsy carbons, peering hard at the faint lettering to decipher it. Clint Bracamonte, it said. It seemed to fit him. He certainly didn’t look like a Jimmy Johnson.

It took a few minutes to piece together his itinerary from the collection of ticket carbons, but then she had it and it made her heart beat faster—not with fear this time, but from pure excitement.

Balikpapan-Jakarta-Hong Kong-San Francisco-Washington DC.

Balikpapan! Balikpapan was a town in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, a wild place full of jungle and rough rivers and tiny villages and tribal people living traditional lives. She knew her geography, which was not so surprising since she had lived in many places in the world due to a globetrotting father who was a career diplomat. They’d resided in Jakarta, Indonesia, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in Dares Salaam, Tanzania, in Geneva, Switzerland, and other places of which she had no memory because she’d been too young.

She put the papers back in the duffel-bag pocket and straightened. She opened the heavy door. The hinges squealed in agony and she winced at the sound. The perfumy fragrance of lilacs greeted her. She stepped on to the front porch and the old wood creaked under her feet. Everything was making noise, setting her nerves on edge. She took a look at the car. As expected, it was a rental he’d procured at the airport, a silver-grey Ford Taurus.

She shivered in the cold night air and went back into the house, tiptoed up to her own bedroom and sat on the side of the bed. Jack would come early tomorrow morning. For now she should just go to bed. Mr Bracamonte had flown straight from Balikpapan to Washington without a stopover—two days without sleep, across the international date line and many time zones, his body clock gone haywire. He wasn’t going to wake up for a while.

Why did he think the house was his? It was crazy, impossible. She couldn’t think. She was simply too tired. A long afternoon of hard physical labour topped off with a big dose of heart-stopping terror tended to be exhausting.

She crawled into the sleeping-bag and closed her eyes. She should have lain awake anxious and afraid, but, strange as it might seem, she didn’t. She drifted right off and slept like a baby.

* * *

She awoke with the birds, which sang euphorically in the trees. She’d left the window open and the April morning was glorious, the air crisp like chilled champagne. For a moment she luxuriated in a sense of wellbeing—a very short moment, because her mind suddenly produced the image of the dark stranger who’d found his way into the house late last night. Black eyes, black hair, black beard.

Oh, God. She closed her eyes. Well, she was alive and well and she hadn’t even had to employ her meagre karate skills.

She locked the bathroom door and had a quick shower, then dressed in jeans and a bright red cotton sweater. Red was good. It made a statement. It showed confidence and power. She had a hunch she’d need some once Clint Bracamonte was awake. Hopefully that wouldn’t be until Jack had arrived.

She put on socks and trainers and tied her hair back in a ponytail and made up her face. It was no genetic accident that she had straight black hair and brown eyes. She was American by upbringing and citizenship, but her ancestral background sported Greeks, Italians, Hungarians, and even an outcast gypsy woman who’d had the audacity to fall in love with a gorgio. Her mother had researched the family tree with true passion, travelling to Europe to find out as much as she could, discovering long-lost relatives—a dentist, a goatherd, a butcher, a housewife, and, lo and behold, a toothless Greek great-great-grandma of one hundred and seven wearing black, totally lucid and not about to depart. She drank two shots of ouzo every day.

The family tree revealed many things. It was not so strange that her dearest passion was travel: gypsy genes. Also, she loved colourful clothes and dangling earrings, and she’d discovered a taste for ouzo. Her friends insisted it had to be genetic, because how else was it possible to like that vile stuff?

Quietly she slipped down the stairs into the kitchen, only to find that she had miscalculated. The man was standing by the sink, filling the kettle. The same huge male that had walked into her house last night—black eyes, black hair, but minus the bushy black beard. Her heart turned over. He looked fantastic. She couldn’t help thinking it. It was the truth. The evil had gone out of his appearance and what was left was a lot of very disturbing male sex appeal. He plunked the kettle on the stove and turned on the burner.

‘Well, good morning,’ he said, noticing her stand by the door.

‘Good morning,’ she returned, feeling the very air around her quiver with sudden tension.

He wore clean clothes—cotton trousers and a blue T-shirt. His hair was damp from the shower, still too long but tamed by the water, at least temporarily. His eyes were still the same penetrating black and the part of his face where yesterday had flourished the bushy beard now revealed a strong, square jaw. His face was all hard angles, his features well-defined. Energy radiated from him.

His gaze swept over her, then back up to her face. ‘Are you the same woman I met last night, the one wearing that long, lacy nightgown? Or was that merely a lovely vision in my dreams?’

Her stomach tightened and her pulse leaped. ’that was me,’ she said, not being able to think of anything more brilliant or profound. It was a pretty nightgown, true, but she wished she’d been wearing functional unisex pyjamas instead. Only she didn’t own any. She liked beautiful lingerie—possibly because it felt good to put on something soft and feminine after spending a long, hard day in old jeans and a T-shirt covered with dust and paint and wallpaper paste.

He took two mugs out of one of the cabinets. ‘Coffee?’ he asked politely.

’thank you, yes,’ she answered, equally politely. Well, that was the way she’d been brought up. It sort of came out automatically, but she realised the absurdity of the whole situation as soon as she heard her own courteous reply. The man had invaded her house and now he was playing host.

The groceries she’d bought yesterday had been taken out of the paper bags and spread out on the table. Instant coffee, chocolate bars, bread, peanut butter, thick orange marmalade, strong French mustard. He’d obviously taken charge and acted as if he had every right to be here in this kitchen.

He opened one of the cabinets, took out two plates and put them on the table, then opened a drawer and found knives and forks. It did not escape her that he didn’t search for these items. He knew exactly where they were. It was not a good sign. A tiny flame of apprehension began to flicker in her mind. She suppressed it. Maybe he’d checked things out earlier.

‘Make yourself at home,’ she said coolly.

‘I am at home,’ he returned. ’so tell me, what is your name?’

‘What is yours?’

‘May I point out to you that a question requires an answer, not another question?’

‘You may point all you want. What’s your name?’

His mouth curved in faint mockery. ‘Clint Bracamonte. What’s yours?’

‘Olivia Jordan.’

‘Olivia.’ He spoke her name as if tasting it, narrowing his eyes, considering. ‘Nice name. I like that. Now, Olivia, is this all there is for food? What were you planning to eat for breakfast? Peanut butter sandwiches?’

’something wrong with that?’ In Kalimantan people probably ate rice for breakfast, as they did in much of the Far East.

‘Nothing at all,’ he said calmly. ‘I was only asking.’

She opened the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and extracted a couple of frozen breakfast burritos in paper wrappings. ‘Actually, I was going to have one of these.’ She put them on the counter and turned on the small toaster oven.

‘Breakfast burritos?’ He examined the frozen food, reading the information printed on the wrapper. ‘Good God, what are they going to come up with next?’

’they’re good,’ she said. ‘Eggs, cheese, ham, the works. All the protein you need.’ And all the choles-terol you didn’t. ‘And they’re real easy. All you do is heat them up in the oven. Haven’t you ever seen these before? Where have you been?’ She couldn’t help herself.

‘Not anywhere in the so-called civilised world,’ he said promptly.

So she had discovered from his ticket carbons, but of course he didn’t know that, and she wasn’t about to admit that she’d been snooping through his papers.

‘And where was that?’ she asked casually.

‘Nowhere you’d know.’

That’s what you think, she told him silently, annoyed with his arrogance. She looked at him squarely. ’try me.’

Obviously he didn’t deem this a worthy challenge, because he simply ignored it. Instead he poured boiling water into the mugs and handed her one.

Well, how many people in rural Virginia had ever heard of Balikpapan? Not too many. Yet his condescending attitude was definitely insulting. Mr High and Mighty, Mr Globetrotter with an attitude problem.

‘You’re giving me the evil eye,’ he said with a sardonic twist of his lips.

‘It’s my gypsy blood,’ she said lightly, and took a drink from her coffee.

‘Ah,’ he said slowly. ‘Gypsy blood. Very intriguing. Is that what gives you the fire in your eyes?’ He flicked a finger at her ponytail. ‘And that gorgeous dark hair?’

Instinctively, she took a step back. It had been a casual gesture, the way he had touched her hair, yet it had set off instant sparks of fire inside her. ‘Watch it,’ she said. ‘I do spells, too.’ She walked out the back door into the bright spring morning, taking her cup with her. His presence was dark and disturbing and made her long for light and cheer. He made her uneasy with those black, mysterious eyes and that big, muscled body, all male virility and power. She didn’t want him in her house.

Yet it was not fear for her physical well-being that made her uncomfortable. She saw power, strength and energy, but no violence. There was something else that disturbed her, that made her heart beat faster, her senses sharpen. Something that set off strange vibrations and tremors.

The back porch was big and had a view of the grounds with its many blooming white and pink dogwoods, and numerous azaleas in a luxuriant riot of colour. It was a fairy-tale garden. She leaned on the wooden railing and watched the squirrels racing up and down the large oak trees just starting to bud into leaf. Everywhere birds chirped in exuberant harmony. Spring was springing and all was light and cheer.

She loved this place. She’d remodel it as a big family home, but it would be perfect as a bed-and-breakfast, a hideaway where stressed-out yuppie couples could come for rest, relaxation and romance.

She sighed. Romance. She wouldn’t mind a little romance herself. Actually, she wanted a lot more than a little romance. She was twenty-eight and she wanted a man for the long haul, meaning that she wanted a lot of romance for a long time, preferably for the rest of her life, another fifty years or so. A half-century. Finding a man good enough to last you for a half-century wasn’t an easy proposition.

The kitchen screen door squeaked and Clint appeared next to her, leaning brown muscled arms on the railing.

He was awfully close, or maybe it just seemed that way. Her body reacted instantly, tensing, as if her every cell was aware of his presence. She smelled soap. She stared straight ahead at the oak tree, fighting the impulse to move away. She didn’t want him to know he disturbed her.

‘We need to talk,’ he said. ‘My mind was not exactly crystal-clear last night, and it unfortunately did not retain the information about the reason for your presence in my house.’

Her hands clamped hard around her coffee-cup. ‘It’s my house. I bought it, I paid for it, I own it, it’s mine. Is that clear enough?’

He shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, it’s not clear at all. If I didn’t sell it, you couldn’t have bought it.’

‘I’ve never met a man who owned a house furnished like this one unless he was an eighty-year-old widower.’ Doilies on the backs of chairs. A collection of porcelain figurines, needlepoint cushions, ruffled curtains, cabbage-rose wallpaper. Good Housekeeping magazines twenty years old.

He observed her calmly. ’then you’ve learned something today and it’s only seven in the morning. Congratulations.’

She wanted to throw her coffee at him, but only barely controlled herself. ’the house belonged to an old lady. She died. I bought the house.’

’the old lady was my grandmother and she left the house to me. I have a will to prove it.’

For a moment she felt panic. Had she been the victim of some crooked scheme? It was true that she’d got the house for a good price, but not such a good price as to make it suspiciously low. In her mind’s eye she saw the round, friendly face of the estate agent who had sold her the house. The lady who had told her that there was no crime in these parts, the lady who had shown her the picture of her baby granddaughter—a beautiful baby, not at all the sort of baby that would have a criminal for a grandmother.

She was not the victim of a crooked deal. She could not afford to believe it. If the sale had been a fraudulent one, she might lose everything. There’d be nothing left—no money, no trip to the Amazon jungle. In fact, she’d be in debt. It was enough to make you panic and break out in a sopping sweat. Only, she refused. She simply refused to panic.

All the papers had been in order. The whole process had been completely ordinary and routine and she was no dummy. This wasn’t the first time she’d bought a house. In the past five years she’d bought, fixed up and sold five residences in all. This was the sixth. She knew what she was doing. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and gave him a stony stare.

‘I suggest you check with your lawyer about that will,’ she said, as coolly professionally as she could manage in the circumstances, ‘and with Boswell and Armis in Charlottesville. They dealt with the estate.’

His mouth curved fractionally. ‘Oh, I certainly will.’ And you’re not going to get away with anything, his tone implied. He took a swallow of his coffee and surveyed the view with obvious appreciation. He did not say anything, but she could tell from his face. A good face. Strong, determined, yet with a certain undefinable sensuality…Good lord, what was she thinking?

He turned to face her again. ‘You said you bought the house. Anyone else involved in this little scheme? A husband perhaps?’

She glared at him. ‘Nobody is involved in any kind of a scheme. And I don’t have a husband.’ Why had she said that? It was none of his business.

He was too close for comfort. She finished the last of her coffee and pushed herself away from the railing. In the kitchen she opened a carton of orange juice, filled two glasses and put them on the table.

This was not a good situation. What was she going to do with this man in her house? How was she going to get rid of him? Here she was, having breakfast with the intruder. It was completely absurd.