seemed to grow a further six inches. The implacable resistance she sensed in him was converted into a cold, concentrated fury. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he said in an almost soundless voice.
She couldn’t allow herself to be intimidated so completely. ‘Are you prepared to bet on that?’ she asked. ‘After all, anyone with my morals and manners has to be untrustworthy by definition.’
His hands slid around her throat. Fear slithered on evil cats’ feet through Perdita’s body, throbbed in the pulse beneath his fingers, chilled the anger in her veins to elemental ice. She saw pitiless determination in the gaze that fixed on to her mouth, smelt the faint, unmistakable scent of male, aroused and relentless.
Once before Luke Dennison had slipped the leash of his control to reveal the primal male to her. Now she saw it again, and as had happened that last time, an elemental terror turned her bones to liquid.
‘I’ve already warned you,’ he said quietly, a thumb coming to rest over the busy betrayer in her throat. ‘You’ve pushed as far as you’re going to, Perdita. Any more, and you’d better be ready for retaliation.’
Common sense told her that there was nothing he could do to her. This was New Zealand, after all.
Instinct knew otherwise.
Yet she didn’t flinch, even though she felt the colour drain from her skin. ‘Stop trying to frighten me,’ she said, green eyes as cold as his, and every bit as determined. ‘None of this drama is necessary, Luke. If you let me meet the children I’ll go on my way, and you won’t need to be bothered by me any more.’
‘I don’t want you anywhere near them,’ he said, levering her chin upwards to an unnatural angle that stretched her throat towards the frail boundary between discomfort and pain.
His immediate, total rejection scored across her heart like the cruellest of whips. She lowered her lashes so that all she could see of his face was the angular line of his jaw, as obdurate as his character, tough and uncompromising. She should have expected this; she, of all people, knew how hard he could be.
‘You can’t stop me,’ she said, hating the tremor in her voice, trying to summon courage from some deep inner reserve. ‘Be sensible, Luke. You can’t keep them imprisoned forever, and there’s no way you can run me out of town this time.’
‘Go on,’ he said when she fell silent.
‘That’s all. I’m going to see them.’
‘Damn you,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve been haunted by you for bloody years—you must have known that coming back here would put us all in an intolerable situation!’
Then he kissed her.
The fierce possession of his mouth summoned a fire that marked her soul. Searing through the debris and accretions of the past eleven years, it stripped every bit of studied worldliness from her to cast her back into the adolescent turmoil of her first crush, the year she had turned seventeen.
Natalie had given her a watch and a new wardrobe to mark her status as an adult, and, dressed in the clothes his wife had bought for her, Perdita had fallen in love with Luke, helpless in the grip of a blind, unrequited passion.
That same passion, so newly reawakened, thrummed through her now with an intensity she didn’t even try to resist. She melted, her mouth softening, yielding, opening to his like a flower to the sun. Drumbeats pulsed through her in a rhythm of desire. Shivering, she was suffused with heat.
Luke ground his mouth on to hers, but almost immediately the quality of the kiss changed, transformed into seduction pure and simple, as nakedly sexual as the embrace that clamped her hips against his, as the utterly masculine promise that fitted so snugly between the notch in her legs.
Perdita drowned in sensation, sanity and reason wrecked by a flood of carnality.
And then he thrust her from him and said jaggedly, ‘Get the hell out of here, you lying, promiscuous little slut. I don’t ever want to see you again.’
Perdita stared at him from beneath weighted eyelids. Her mouth was tender, slightly too big for its contours, and she was drunk on the taste of him, the scent of him, the feel of him.
Half her brain was shrieking foul, and the other half was cursing because she’d allowed herself to trip into the oldest snare in the world, but below these manifestations of logic lurked a consuming, primitive satisfaction.
‘You’re not going to get rid of me so easily,’ she said, her voice husky and sensual. ‘Like it or not, Luke, you can’t bludgeon me with your money and your power. I mean to see those girls, and there is no way you can watch them so strictly that I won’t.’
His hands were shaking. She watched with awed fascination as he reimposed control, a fascination that had a basis of fear, because she knew what he wanted to do with them.
‘Yes,’ he said when he saw her glance at them, ‘you should be afraid. Get out of here, Perdita, before I do something you might regret.’
‘I’m staying at the Dunromin motel in Manley,’ she told him, and turned and walked away from him through the big, gracious, empty house, out into the sunlight. Constrained by the silk scarf bound around her head, her temples throbbed painfully. She put up a long-fingered hand to draw it off, and with a slow movement shook the flood of hair back.
Tension still ached through her, but she wasn’t going to stretch herself free of it here, where he might be watching. She knew why he had kissed her; it was an unsubtle punishment because she was alive and Natalie was dead. He hadn’t been able to hit back at fate, or cry his despair at the moon, so he had done what men had done to women ever since the world began: used his superior strength and turned anger into sexuality.
She was, she realised with a strange sort of detachment, still shuddering inside, but at least the worst was over. She had seen him. Now all she had to do was find the children.
This voyage into the past had assumed all the qualities of a search for the holy grail. When she saw the children she would know, she was sure, whether they were happy or not.
And if they were happy, that would be it. She’d get into the car and drive away…
Although, sooner or later natural curiosity would drive them to search for their birth mother. Surely, some tempter whispered, that discovery would be less traumatic if she were not a complete stranger. Of course she would never be a substitute for Natalie, but she might make some small place for herself in her children’s lives.
Luke had no right to keep her away from her children. Apart from anything else, he’d behaved very badly, insulting her, manhandling her, kissing her…
The idea was far too enticing. Even as she reminded herself sternly that she had promised Luke she wouldn’t interfere, she knew she was going to consult a lawyer.
Back at the motel she made herself a cup of tea and sat down. Her hand came to rest on the locket around her neck. With a sudden, swift movement she flicked through her purse and found the one photograph she had of her children, a coloured snap one of the nurses had taken of them when they were a week old.
The young Perdita sat stiffly, holding the two babies with such care that she looked terrified, staring straight at the camera. They were both girls, one thirty minutes older than the other, but
