shower, water stinging her eyes. She had no way of knowing if it was the flow from the shower or the tears that threatened, only that she was half blinded by it, groping roughly for her towel before snatching from the rail at it and rubbing her face hard.
How was it possible that she had gone into the shower to feel clean, to wash away the scent of Zarek’s body on hers, the feel of his touch, and yet now she felt worse than before, tainted, marked for ever? It was as if his caresses had been a brand, his kisses scarring her for life. She would never be free of the darkly sensual hold he had over her, the fetters of sexuality that had bound her to him from the very first.
And was that all that it was? she couldn’t help wondering now. She had fallen head over heels for Zarek when she had first met him, and she had truly believed herself in love at first sight. But had it been anything more than a hugely powerful crush, the first stirrings of her female sexuality? She hadn’t known what sexual desire really meant and so she had only thought of the way she had felt for Zarek in terms of love and giving her heart.
But her time married to this man had taught her that he, at least, was capable of claiming her as his in purely sexual terms. Of wanting her only for the wild and white hot passion that flared between them every time they touched. Every time they kissed. He had wooed her, won her, seduced her, married her, made her his, without a single trace of love for her. He had wanted her in his bed, to warm and satisfy his body and to create an heir for the company that was really the only thing that touched his heart, or what part of a heart he actually possessed.
‘I married you for a child!’ The last angry words he had flung at her before leaving for the Troy came back to haunt her once more. ‘If you want this marriage to continue then that is non-negotiable.’
A sensation like the trickle of something slow and icy slipped down her spine at the thought. And that sense of creeping cold was made all the worse by staring out at the moonlit sea and remembering all those other nights she had sat out here on the terrace, doing exactly that. Then she had had to fight so hard against the nightmarish thoughts of Zarek’s lifeless body tossed overboard from the pirates’ boat and left abandoned in the water. Just the memory she had of those thoughts made Penny shiver convulsively in spite of the warmth.
‘Cold?’ Zarek shocked her by the speed and focus with which he reacted, turning his attention—the attention she had believed was fixed on the view before them—onto her in the space of a heartbeat.
‘No—not really,’ she managed on an awkward laugh. ‘Someone just walked over my grave.’
Then, when his dark brows drew together in a frown of confusion and incomprehension, she had to force herself to continue and explain the superstition.
‘When you get a shiver like that it’s said to mean that someone somewhere is walking over the spot where you’re going to be buried. It’s just an old wives’ tale. I think the scientific explanation is that the shiver is a response to the release of stress hormones.’
She was rambling and betraying her nervousness by doing so. She could see it in the darkness of Zarek’s eyes, shadowed in the flickering light of the candles she had set on the table around them. He was back to watching her too closely for comfort and the steady, intent observation he subjected her to made her shift uncomfortably in her seat.
‘And are you?’ he asked at last, lifting his wine glass to his lips again but not swallowing as he studied her over the top of it. ‘Stressed, I mean.’
‘Of course I am!’
This at least she could answer with total honesty, for a moment or two anyway. She still found it almost impossible to believe that he had come back from the dead. That he was here, sitting with her in the warmth of the evening with the sound of his breathing in her ear, the scent of his skin in her nostrils.
‘Why wouldn’t I be stressed? I started this morning as I have done for the past two years, thinking that I was alone—a widow—that my husband was dead. And then suddenly the door opens and there you are—large as life and twice as ugly. And—and…’
‘And?’ Zarek prompted when she stumbled over the words, unable to go on. Setting his glass down on the wooden table top, he leaned towards her, elbows resting on his thighs, chin supported on his hands. ‘And?’
He was too close. Too dangerously close in every way. She could see the way that his chest rose and fell with each breath, the shadow at his jaw line of the growth of that black beard even though he must have shaved only that morning. This close, and looking into his eyes, she could see how they were not totally dark but the deep brown was flecked with gold, like sparks flying up from a fire. And the scent of his body was like some spice in her nostrils, making her blood heat, her heart pound.
‘And now my life is upside down and inside out and I don’t know where I’m going or who I am.’
‘My wife.’
He inserted the words with smooth precision, like sliding the point of a stiletto into her ribs, so smoothly and easily that at first, at the start, she didn’t actually feel any of the pain it was inflicting on her.
‘You are my wife.’
It was so calm, so controlled, so totally sure that that was all that mattered. And the absolute certainty, the note of dark possessiveness, made her skin chill once more, the tiny hairs at the back of her neck lifting in tension as she managed to control another of those shivers this time.
‘Nothing has changed.’
‘Oh, but it has!’
Talking with Zarek now was rather like skating over a deep, murky pond that was just covered with thin ice. She was sliding every which way, unable to quite get her grip on what was really happening, while all the time being aware that under the ice were the coldest, blackest, most dangerous depths, just waiting for the moment that her foot went through the surface and she tumbled in. Then she had the desperate feeling that the waters would close right over her and the icy cold would steal all her breath away and leave her to drown.
‘Things have to have changed. It’s been two years since I saw you—a lot has to have happened in that time. Two years in which I don’t know where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what has happened to you.’
‘I could say the same for you.’
Was that darker note that threaded his voice the result of the same sort of careful control she was imposing on herself, the fight not to let the discussion tumble over into the anger that had destroyed them the last time? Or was it one of warning, telling her she was treading on treacherous ground?
‘Oh, I’ve just been here, all the time. But you…’
‘All you have to do is ask.’
Could it really be that simple? But life with Zarek had never been simple anyway. So why should it start being so now, with the weight of the complications of his disappearance added to the way things had been before?
Ask. OK, then…
‘You said you had amnesia. You didn’t remember anything?’
‘Not a thing.’
Was she imagining things or had he actually leaned just a little closer? She was drowning in his eyes, her senses seduced by the warm, clean scent of him. But she couldn’t allow herself to be enticed that way.
