stopped abruptly. Silence seemed to fold around them like fog. Rachel felt her hands fly to her mouth, her eyes widening in horror as the implications of that silence sank in.
They knew. They’d found she was missing. And Carlos… Carlos would be…
Frantically she pushed her fingers through her hair, looking wildly about her as terror gripped her once again. Without knowing what she was doing, she wrenched open the car door.
Orlando was beside her in a flash, his arms closing around her waist, pinning her own arms to her sides and stopping her escape. She struggled against him, twisting her shoulders frantically, but his strength was enormous. Effortlessly he held her against him.
‘Let me go! I have to go now! They’ll come after me and—’
‘No!’ His voice was like sandpaper. He swung her round to face him, his hands holding her upper arms again, as they had this morning in the churchyard. ‘You’re not going anywhere in this state. You’re staying here.’
He felt the fight go out of her. She slumped into his hands, so that he was holding her up. Over her head his eyes were fixed on an unseen point in the distance as he gritted his teeth and fought to control the emotions that warred within him—impatience, hostility, exasperation, resentment.
And the prickle of arousal that had fuelled at least some of those.
He felt his mind shut like a steel trap against it. Those feelings had no place in his life now. But it was the scent of her hair that had done it, the weight and warmth of it as she thrashed in his arms that had made him feel momentarily as if he had been punched in the solar plexus.
She raised her head, so he could make out the milk-white curve of her cheek. ‘I couldn’t stay…’ she said dully. ‘It’s too much to ask…I can’t…’
He let her go and took a step away, slamming the car door with unnecessary force. ‘Do you have anywhere else to go?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then,’ he said with biting sarcasm, ‘let’s skip the part where you put up some token resistance, shall we? I think this is one instance where you really don’t have a choice, and it’s not as if I don’t have room.’
Rachel looked up at the house, noticing it properly for the first time. Built of red brick, with a central grey stone porch, its blank windows stretched away from her on both sides, and she could make out a steeply pitched roofline and vast elaborate chimneys against the heavy sky. It was beautiful, but huge and dark and utterly forbidding. Just like its owner.
He had started back towards it, and now looked impatiently over his shoulder.
‘What are you waiting for?’
The acid in his tone stung her raw emotions. ‘I can’t leave the car here…someone might see it… And my things…’ she wailed, aware that she sounded like a hysterical child, but too distressed to care.
He stopped and came wearily back towards her, his hand outstretched. ‘Give me the keys and I’ll get someone to move the car.’
She handed them to him and watched numbly as he went round to the boot and took out her large designer case.
‘You planned your escape well,’ he said wryly.
‘No…I didn’t plan it at all. This was packed yesterday. For tonight…’ Her voice trailed off and he gave her a wintry smile.
‘Your wedding night. Of course.’
He had to consciously turn his thoughts away from imagining what was in there, selected in anticipation of a very different night from the one that now awaited her. Whatever it was, whatever expensive, seductive confections of silk and lace lay folded carefully inside, she’d have no need of them here. The wing where he intended to put her hadn’t been used in a year at least. It was freezing.
It was also as far away from his room as possible.
Following him up a flight of steps and through a hugely high door, Rachel shivered. She felt like Beauty entering the castle of the Beast.
And then she caught sight of her dim reflection in an ornate gilt mirror in the hallway and let out a breath of ironic laughter at the thought.
Beauty? Who was she kidding? Her hair, brushed and tamed by dedicated professionals only a couple of hours ago, had since been swept by both wind and her own frantic fingers, and was now tumbling over her shoulders and around her face, giving her a slightly deranged appearance. Her eyes, expertly made up by a make-up artist, were huge and glittering with unfamiliar shadow in the ashen oval of her face. The dress only added to her appearance of a nineteenth-century waif on her way to the asylum.
Ahead of her, Orlando hesitated in a doorway at the end of the dark hallway, tall, effortlessly elegant, with broad, straight shoulders and that aristocratic upward tilt of his head. She felt a sharp twist somewhere inside her as she glanced up at him.
There was something about him that touched nerves in her that were too sensitive. Too sensual. And that terrified her.
Courage…
‘This way.’
The imposing entrance hall opened onto a smaller hallway from which the stairs rose in a graceful sweep around two walls. He had started to ascend, keeping close to the wall and brushing his fingers against the painted panelling as he went. Mesmerised, she watched, feeling her flesh tingle almost as if it could feel that feathery touch. At the top of the stairs he turned to the right, along a dark corridor. Rachel glanced around her, noticing the silk-shaded wall-lights at intervals on the emerald-green walls, wondering why he didn’t turn them on. At least the gloom inside allowed her to get a good view of what lay outside, and she paused to look out of one of the windows. It overlooked a courtyard whose walls were formed by the house, built in a square around it. The courtyard was divided into quarters by four dark, square flowerbeds in which nothing grew.
He’d gone ahead, and she had to hurry to catch up, guided only by the echo of his footsteps on the polished oak floorboards. Even in her frozen mental state she was stunned by her surroundings. The house was astonishing.
‘In here,’ he said curtly, opening a door. Rachel followed him into a large room dominated by a huge marble fireplace and containing little more than a vast canopied bed upon which he threw her case.
‘You’d better get out of that dress.’
The dusky afternoon threw deep shadows into the edges of the room. Instantly alarmed and on her guard, she let her gaze fly to his face questioningly. His expression was glacial.
Seemingly oblivious to her distress he strode over to the windows and pulled the curtains shut, plunging the room into velvet blackness.
Inside her chest, her heart hammered a frenzied tattoo.
He couldn’t mean…? Was her mother right? Did all men just want to…like Carlos?
She wrapped an arm around a thick wooden bedpost, half clinging to it, half shrinking behind it. Her mouth was dry, her stomach quivering with fear. She felt the air vibrate with his nearness as he passed her in the darkness, heard the soft rustle of his movements, and couldn’t quite smother her small
