The Morning After Read online

  Then she gasped as they began to drop like a stone towards the ground. They landed gently, though, her sigh of relief bringing a mocking look from the man beside her before he turned his attention to shutting down the engine and going through some kind of mental checklist before he opened his door and jumped out.

  He came around to help her, having to stoop low beneath the slowing blades and warning her to do the same as his hands circled her slender waist to assist her. Then they were running free, both bent almost double, Annie with a hand covering her eyes to stop the whirls of dust from blowing into them.

  Pulling to a halt about ten yards away from the helicopter, he turned to watch as she dusted down her clothes with her hands. They’d landed on a natural plateau of rock not far away from the house. But, sand being sand, it had found its way up here, blown probably by the trade winds that acted like natural air-conditioning to most of these islands.

  ‘Come,’ he said when she’d concluded her tidy-up by brushing light fingertips over her hair and cheeks. ‘I will bring your luggage later. But now you must be in dire need of a drink.’

  She was and didn’t demur, following him across a neatly kept lawn and up the few steps which took them into the lower veranda’s shade.

  The two solid wood front doors stood open in welcome. He led the way into a deliciously cool entrance hall, where Annie paused to catch her breath and study with still slightly bewildered eyes the blatant luxury of Aubusson thrown down on top of richly polished wood.

  For a mere hallway it was huge—as big as any other room in a house of this size. ‘Grand’ was the word that slid into her mind. Old masters with a nautical theme hung in heavy gold frames on plain, white-painted walls and a great staircase swept up from its central location to a galleried landing that seemed to form a circle around the whole upper floor.

  A woman appeared from the back of the house. Short, thin and wiry, with greying hair swept away from a severe face, she was wearing all black. She greeted her employer with some words in what Annie half-recognised as Spanish, to which he replied in the same language, his voice seeming to grow more liquid, more sensually disturbing to Annie’s agitated mind.

  ‘Margarita,’ he informed Annie, watching as the two women exchanged shy, slightly stiff smiles. ‘Between them, she and her husband Pedro take care of everything here. If you will please come this way—’ he held out an arm in invitation ‘—Margarita will bring us some refreshment.’

  As the woman bustled off towards the back of the house Annie followed her host across the hall and into a large, bright, sunny room with full-length French-style windows standing open to the gentle sea breeze.

  Momentarily diverted, she moved over to look at the view, and stood transfixed by what she saw. Before her lay a dramatic mix of lush green lawns rolling down towards a crescent of silver sand, followed by the pale aquamarine shades of shallow waters deepening to rich gentian-blue. Several beautiful flame-trees with their branches laden with vivid red blooms were scattered around the grounds. The sun was hanging low—a deep golden globe shimmering in a melting turquoise sky.

  And when she heard movement behind her she turned an enraptured smile to the man she found propped up against the closed door, mockery and arrogance in every line of his body as he stood there with one neat ankle crossed over the other, arms folded across his big chest.

  ‘Well, well,’ he drawled. ‘So the notorious Miss Lacey can still experience a childlike enchantment at something beautiful and unspoiled. Who would have thought it?’

  Annie went still, her smile dying as she was suddenly assailed by a cold, dark sense of menace, his lazy masculine stance, his insolent expression and his deriding words all helping to remind her of something that she should have never let herself forget. Men were the enemy. And this particular man was no different.

  ‘Who are you?’ she demanded quietly.

  ‘Who am I?’ he repeated, the mockery hard and spiked. ‘Why, I am Adamas,’ he informed her lazily. ‘Loosely translated, it means diamond-hard—impenetrable. But in this case we shall call me a—rock,’ he decided. ‘A rock on which you, Annie Lacey, have just been neatly marooned.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘MAROONED.’ Annie frowned at him, trying to decide whether he was just attempting a very poor joke. But his face held no hint of humour, only a smile that sent the blood running cold through her veins.

  Marooned, she repeated silently and slowly to herself. Abandoned. Isolated without resources. He had used the word quite deliberately.

  It hit her then that this was no simple commission in which the great Adamas employed the notorious Annie Lacey to promote his priceless gems. She had been brought here under false pretences—brought here and isolated from the rest of the world by this man for some specific purpose of his own.

  A sick sense of déjà vu washed over her, filling her eyes with unmistakable horror as Luis Alvarez’s hot face loomed up in her mind, and for a moment—a small moment—she lost control, face paling, breasts heaving, eyes haunted as they glanced around for somewhere to run.

  ‘Perfect,’ he drawled, making her blink at the soft-voiced sensuality that he managed to thread into the one simple word. ‘That look of maidenly panic must have taken hours of practice in front of your mirror to cultivate. Allow that gorgeous mouth to quiver just a little,’ he suggested, ‘and you will be well on the way to convincing me that the well-seasoned vamp is actually a terrified virgin.’

  Margarita used that moment to knock on the door. He moved smoothly, loose-limbed and lazily controlled, to open the door and stand aside while his shyly smiling servant wheeled in a trolley laid out with coffee things and some daintily prepared sandwiches.

  Annie watched, unable to so much as move a muscle as the other woman murmured in Spanish to her employer and he answered in deep casual replies. The trolley was wheeled over to stand beside a low table between two big, soft-cushioned sofas of a pale coral-pink. Then Margarita was leaving again, murmuring what must have been her thanks to her employer for holding the door for her.

  ‘Who are you really?’ Annie demanded once they were alone. ‘And will you kindly explain what this—stupid charade is all about?’

  ‘I am who I said I am,’ he replied with infuriating blandness. ‘I am Adamas. I told you no lies, Miss Lacey.’ Moving gracefully, he went over to the trolley then turned a questioning look at her. ‘Tea—coffee?’ he asked. ‘Margarita has prepared both.’

  Impatiently Annie shook her head. She wanted nothing in this house until she got some answers. Nothing. ‘Is that supposed to make sense to me?’ she snapped out impatiently.

  ‘No,’ he conceded. ‘But then—I never meant to.’ A brief smile touched his mouth before he turned his attention to pouring himself a cup of dark, rich coffee. The aroma drifted across the room to torment Annie’s parched mouth, forcing her to swallow drily, but other than that she ignored the temptation to change her mind. ‘Won’t you at least sit down?’ he offered politely.

  Again she shook her head—for the same reason. ‘I just want you to tell me what is going on,’ she insisted.

  He studied her for a moment, those strange green eyes glinting thoughtfully at her from between glossy black lashes, as if he was considering forcing her to sit and drink.

  Whatever, the look had the effect of pushing up her chin, her blue eyes challenging him just to try it and see what he got!

  Though what he would get if he did decide to force her physically, she wasn’t sure. She was tall, but this man seemed to fill the whole room with his threatening presence. And she couldn’t help quailing deep down inside because she knew that if he did call her bluff she would have no choice but to do exactly what he wanted her to do.

  And it is that, Annie, she told herself grimly, which keeps you standing as far away from him as you can get! He reminds you of Luis Alvarez—the same height, the same colouring, the same arrogance that made men like them believe that they could say, be and do anything they liked!
And if he was Adamas then he also possessed the same money and power in society to have anything nasty about himself that he would not wish the world to hear covered up.

  Like the abduction of unwilling females.

  She shuddered, unable to control herself. She should have known from the moment she laid eyes on him last night—had known! Her well-tuned instincts had sent out warning signals straight away! But she had let his easy manner lull her into a false sense of security. And, dammit, she’d liked him! Actually allowed herself to like him for the way he had behaved!

  She had never been able to say that for Luis, she remembered bitterly. Luis Alvarez had turned her stomach from the moment she’d found herself alone with him. But then, Luis Alvarez had been at least ten years older than this man, his good looks spoiled by ten years’ more cynicism and dissolution.

  This man did not turn her stomach in that same way, she realised worriedly. And maybe that was one of the reasons why he frightened her perhaps more than Alvarez had ever done. He frightened her because she was reluctantly attracted to him. His calculating study of her frightened her. His softly spoken words that held so many hidden messages frightened her. But, above all, the actual air she was breathing was frightening her—simply because it was filled with the appealing scent of him.

  Did he know it? she wondered anxiously. Could he tell what kind of effect he was having on her? His eyes were burning over her—burning in a way that told her that, whatever else was going on here, he too liked what he saw.

  The air thickened, became impossible to breathe as the silence between them grew hot and heavy. Then, without warning, he looked down and away.

  It was like having something vital taken from her, and Annie had to measure carefully the air she dragged into her suddenly gasping lungs in case she should hyperventilate.

  ‘OK,’ he conceded coolly. ‘We talk.’

  He brought those green eyes to hers again, and there was something overwhelmingly proud in the way his chin lifted along with the eyes.

  ‘My name,’ he announced, ‘is César DeSanquez. Adamas is merely a name under which I trade…’

  DeSanquez, DeSanquez, Annie was thinking frowningly. The name rang a rather cold bell inside her head. It was a name that evoked an image of great wealth and power—an image wrapped in oil and gold and diamonds and—

  ‘I am American-Venezuelan by birth, but my roots are firmly planted in my Venezuelan links.’

  And it hit. It hit with a sickening sense of understanding that made her sway where she stood.

  ‘Ah,’ he murmured. ‘I see you are beginning to catch on. Yes, Miss Lacey,’ he softly confirmed, ‘Cristina Alvarez is my sister. And you made the quick connection, I must assume, because your—affair with my brother-in-law took place in the DeSanquez apartment. The media made quite a meal out of these—juicy facts, did they not? In fact, their attention to detail was quite remarkably concise—the way they told of Annie Lacey lying with her lover in one bed while her lover’s wife lay asleep in another bedroom of her brother’s apartment. My apartment, Miss Lacey,’ he enunciated thinly. ‘My bed!’

  Annie sank tremulously into a nearby chair, his anger, his contempt and his disgust breaking over her in cold, sickening waves while she fought with her own sense of anger and disgust—disgust for a single night in her life that would always, it seemed, come back to haunt her for as long as she lived.

  She had gone to that apartment by invitation, to a party being held by a man called DeSanquez—a wealthy young Venezuelan who had expressed a desire to meet the sweet Angel Lacey, as everyone had called her then. She never had actually met the Venezuelan, she remembered now in surprise, because she hadn’t given him a thought after meeting Alvarez instead.

  Alvarez. She shuddered.

  ‘Quite,’ he observed. ‘I acknowledge your horror. It was a revolting time for all of us. Not least my sister,’ he pointed out. ‘Having to walk into my bedroom and find you in my bed, not with me—it would not have mattered if it had been me,’ he drawled. ‘But to find you with her own husband was a terrible shock. It effectively ruined her marriage and ultimately almost ruined her life.

  ‘For this alone,’ he explained with a hateful coolness, ‘I feel perfectly justified in demanding retribution from you—and indeed would have done so at the time this all happened if my sister had not begged me to let it be. So, for Cristina’s sake, and for Cristina’s alone,’ he made absolutely clear, ‘I went against my personal desire to strangle the unscrupulous life out of you right there and then. But—that is not the end of it.’

  Turning, he moved to place his coffee-cup on the top of the white marble fireplace then rested his arm alongside it. Every move he made, every unconscious gesture was so incredibly graceful that even in the middle of all of this Annie found herself drawn by him.

  ‘I mentioned my dual nationality for a good reason,’ he continued, his tone—as it had been throughout—utterly devoid of emotion. ‘For although my father was Venezuelan my mother was, in actual fact, American. Now,’ he asserted, as though relaying a mildly interesting piece of history, ‘her name before she married my father was Frazer—Ah, I see you are quick. Yes.’ He smiled thinly as Annie licked her suddenly dry lips. ‘Susie is my cousin. Quite a coincidence, is it not, that you should happen to be the woman trying to ruin her life just as carelessly as you ruined my sister Cristina’s?’

  Annie closed her eyes, shutting out the crucifying blandness of his expression as he watched her. She had been wrong before when she’d believed him to be of the same ilk as Luis. He was in actual fact very different, if only because Luis had cared only for his own rotten neck while this man seemed to hold himself personally responsible for the necks of others.

  Which in turn made him very dangerous because, in deciding to make himself an avenger, it was obvious that he was quite prepared to endanger his own neck to get retribution for those he loved. Blindly loved, she added heavily to herself. And she suddenly felt very, very sorry for him.

  To each his Achilles heel, she mused starkly, opening her eyes to show him a perfectly cool expression. Luis Alvarez’s Achilles heel had been his inflated ego, and the arrogant belief that power and money could buy for his bed any woman he’d desired. Cristina’s had been her blindness to what her husband actually was. And Susie’s was her need to have everything her selfish heart desired.

  This man’s was his fierce love for his family.

  She then found herself wondering what her own Achilles heel was. She didn’t know, but she had a horrible feeling that in this man’s hands she was going to find out.

  ‘You have nothing to say?’ Her calmness was irritating him; she could see the annoyance begin to glint in his strange green eyes.

  Green. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘Not a single thing.’ And another realisation hit her squarely in the face. Susie had green eyes—the same green eyes. Which seemed to tie the whole situation off neatly for her. She didn’t have a cat-in-hell’s chance of making this man with those eyes see anything from her point of view, so she wasn’t even going to try. ‘Perhaps you would, therefore, like to continue?’ she invited, knowing with certainty that he had not offered her all of this information just for the fun of it.

  His sudden burst of angry movement at her seeming indifference took her by surprise, because he had been so purposefully controlled up until then. His hand flicked down from the mantel, his body straightening tautly. ‘Has nothing I have said managed to reach you?’ he demanded harshly.

  ‘It would seem not,’ she said. ‘All I’ve heard until now is a potted description of your family tree. Very interesting, I’m sure,’ she drawled, ‘but nothing for me to get fired up about.’

  He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the fact that she could maintain a cool façade and even go as far as mocking him.

  It served him right, she thought, for his arrogant supposition that he had a right to speak to her like this! If he had taken the trouble to find out about her—really find out instea
d of restricting his knowledge to pure tabloid gossip and the malicious judgement of his thankless family—then he would have discovered that few people managed to rile Annie Lacey with mere words. Out of sheer necessity she had grown a thick skin around herself to protect her from the cruel thrust of words, and it would take a better man than he to pierce that protective skin.

  ‘When they say you possess none of the finer senses they are right, aren’t they?’ he muttered. ‘Do you feel no hint of compassion for others at all?’

  ‘It would seem not,’ she said again, fielding his contempt with blue eyes that gave away nothing of what she was thinking or feeling inside. Then sheer devilment made her cock a golden eyebrow at him. ‘Is there any in you?’ she challenged right back.

  ‘For you, you mean?’ He shook his sleek dark head. ‘No, Miss Lacey, I am sorry to inform you that I harbour not an ounce of compassion for you.’

  ‘Then you have no right to expect more from me than you are willing to give yourself,’ she said, and got up, her slender body no less sensuous in movement because it was stiff with control. He couldn’t know, of course, that she had been through this kind of character-slaying before, and at far more lethal hands than his, or he would not be trying this tactic out on her.

  ‘Where do you think you are going?’ he demanded as she walked towards the door.

  ‘Why, to the one place you obviously expect me to go,’ she replied. ‘To the devil. But by my route, Mr DeSanquez, I will do it by my own route.’

  He moved like lightning, had to to reach the door even before she had a chance to turn the handle. His hand, big and slightly callused, closed around her own. Even with the light clasp he exerted, the hand managed to intimidate her.

  ‘And how do you mean to get there?’ he enquired silkily. ‘Fly on your broomstick as witches do? Or are you more the snake, Miss Lacey, prepared to slither your way across the ocean to your devil’s lair?’