until at last it was the morning they were due back in Valanu. Just before they left Lauren spoke to her parents again.
Guy left her to check that everything was ready, coming back in the brightening light to hear her say, ‘I thought I might come straight back home instead of going on to New Zealand.’
He’d heard her voice in so many moods—sultry, playful, sophisticated, determined, and the way he liked best, shaken by craving—but never the warmly affectionate tone she used for her parents.
So? he thought restlessly.
She listened, then said, ‘Well—are you sure?’
A long silence followed, during which her soft mouth tilted at the corners in a smile she’d never bestowed on him. He watched a graceful hand trace a pattern on the table and responded to the familiar heaviness in his loins with tight anger. He didn’t want to feel like this. They had made love so many times he’d lost count; with Lauren he was insatiable and her response was equally reckless, but she had been careful to avoid any reference to the future.
Perhaps she was that rare thing, a woman who treated her lovers with affection, then let them go without any emotional strings.
Until that moment he’d deliberately pushed the shadow of Marc Corbett to the furthest reaches of his mind, but now a jagged pang of jealousy, barbaric in its intensity, thrust through his iron control. Guy had always considered himself a sophisticated man, one who didn’t expect anything more from his lovers than he was prepared to give them—affection, respect and good sex.
Yet the thought of Lauren going from his bed to another man’s summoned a primitive possessiveness that infuriated him.
‘Well, all right,’ she said cheerfully into the telephone. ‘I’m leaving today, but I have a few hours’ stopover in Fiji so I won’t get to New Zealand until late. I’ll spend the night at an airport hotel in Auckland and fly up to the Bay of Islands tomorrow morning.’
She listened again, then laughed. ‘Fusspot. Yes, I’ll ring you as soon as I get to Marc’s house. Goodbye.’ She put the telephone down.
A fierce, elemental anger almost consumed Guy; unlike his normal coldly disciplined response to provocation, this hot outrage seethed under such pressure that it took his entire stock of will-power to restrain it.
‘Everything under control?’ It was all he could trust himself to say, and even then his voice sounded guttural and aggressive.
Grey eyes wary, she looked up. Clearly, she hadn’t heard him come in. ‘Yes, thank you. I wondered if I should go home to reassure them that their darling daughter is safe and healthy, but my father wouldn’t hear of it.’
Guy wrestled his simmering rage into enough of a strait-jacket to say curtly, ‘A thoughtful father.’
So she was going to Marc Corbett’s house. It could mean nothing more than that they were on good terms even though their relationship had ended. It wasn’t so unusual; he prided himself on staying good friends with his previous lovers. He’d have offered a holiday house to any of them.
But it might also mean that the time they’d spent together meant nothing more to her than an exotic interlude.
He tried for a mental shrug, wondering coldly why his usual practical logic had abandoned him. So what? They’d made no commitment; Lauren might be every man’s dream lover, but their idyll was over. She could go wherever she wanted, sleep with whomever she wanted. And so could he.
Her tone deepened. ‘My father’s a darling.’ She joined him on the tiled terrace outside the airy sitting room and said carefully, ‘Guy, it’s been magic. Thank you so much.’
‘You sound like a small child at the end of a party,’ he said, exasperated by the rasping undertone in his voice.
Her face went still. Without moving she met his eyes, her own now as opaque as burnished silver, but her withdrawal hit him, palpable as a blow.
Steadily she said, ‘Probably because that’s what I feel like. It’s been a lovely, lovely party, but like all good times, it’s come to an end.’
Hiding his astonishing anger with the disciplined control he’d fought to acquire, Guy relaxed hands that were curling into fists by his sides. ‘You’d better give me an address so I can contact you if I need to.’
At first he thought she was going to refuse, but she nodded and reached into her bag for a small notebook. He watched her write down the address, tear the page out and hand it over. ‘I’ll be there for three weeks,’ she told him, that seamless poise firmly in place.
Guy wanted to smash it into splinters. Get a grip, he told himself roughly. A few days making love to a woman gave you no claims to her.
‘Right, we’d better go,’ he said, and picked up the bags.
They got back to Valanu not too long before her plane was due to leave. As the banana boat sputtered across the brilliant blues of the lagoon, Lauren gazed around, pretending that nothing had changed, that Guy wasn’t steering with an expression of such concentrated authority it shut her out as effectively as a barred door.
A car was waiting at the docks; Guy must have organised it. He walked her towards it, and as the driver slung her bag into the boot she held out her hand in farewell and said steadily, ‘Goodbye. Thank you for everything.’
Equally formal, his golden eyes dark and unreadable in his handsome face, he bowed over her hand. But there was nothing formal about the way he lifted it to his mouth; his kiss burned against her skin like a brand, quickening her heart and tightening inner muscles accustomed now to enclosing him in their subtle grip.
‘It was,’ he said with silken distinctness, ‘my complete and utter pleasure.’
Colour scorched along her cheekbones; she looked away, blinking at the figure of a man in the distance. ‘Mine too,’ she said uncertainly.
He held open the door and she slid into the back of the car. It drew away and she didn’t look back; she didn’t even notice the man who stared into the vehicle as it passed him, then straightened to examine Guy, a big figure striding into the distance.
During the flight to Sant’Rosa’s capital and then on to Fiji, she fought a savage, unrelenting emptiness, refusing food and anything to drink except water and fruit juice. Once aboard the big jet for New Zealand, she watched the jewel that was Fiji’s main island drop away from beneath the plane’s wings and forced herself to eat something that tasted like a mixture of plastic and sawdust in her mouth.
Afterwards she saw the sun go down in a splendour of blood-red and scarlet, and blamed the sight for eyes that felt heavy and dry, as though if she relaxed they might sting with tears.
Stop that right now, she told herself roundly. You knew right from the start that once you left you’d never see Guy again. You knew, and you accepted it—you can’t renege on the deal now.
She was not in love with Guy Bagaton.
But halfway to New Zealand she finally accepted something she’d been refusing to acknowledge. She had done the exact same thing as her mother—without considering anything other than her own desires, she’d embarked on a wild, defiant, unrestrained affair with a man she didn’t know.
At
