be more to life than this…
A shadow passed across the dipping sun, darkening the extravagant pink and gold evening. Walking across the lawn in search of Scarlet, Lily was aware of a throbbing in her head; a steady, rhythmic pulsing, like a second heartbeat, which only seemed to intensify her edginess.
This year the theme of the party was Myths and Legends, and as the sun cast long shadows across the grass silken-clad girls with elaborate, shimmering fairy wings were mingling with Greek gods and screen icons. Several large marquees stood around the fringes of the lawn, with a space in the centre where, according to Scarlet, a troop of semi-naked stunt riders were going to perform later.
On unicorns, apparently.
A warm breeze was stirring the leaves of the stately horse chestnut trees, making them bend and sigh. By this time tomorrow she would be half a world away in the arid heart of Africa, and all of this would seem more like a dream than ever, if that were possible. Perhaps it was normal to feel like this just before a trip like the one she was about to embark on? She was branching out from the safe confines of the shallow, superficial life and plunging straight into the depths of a world that until now she had only read about in the papers and seen on TV news reports. Being nervous was probably completely understandable. Except that nervous didn’t quite describe the feeling she had…
Restless.
The word flashed into her head from nowhere, echoing round it, amplified by the throbbing that was growing louder all the time. She tipped her head back, suddenly aware that the evening air held a kind of tension; a pulsing energy that resonated inside her, filling her with a sense of anticipation. A helicopter was suspended high above and, mesmerised, she watched its blades slicing through the soft apricot sky as it circled like some dark, powerful predator.
Suddenly she jumped as the mobile phone she was clutching tightly in her hand rang, breaking the spell. She answered quickly, pressing it tightly to her ear so that the shrieks of laughter and the sporadic bursts of ear-splitting music from the rock band that was tuning up in the marquee couldn’t be heard on the other end of the line by the director of the African children’s charity with which she was going to be working.
‘Yes, fine, thank you, Jack. All ready for tomorrow, I think….’
The noise persisted, all but drowning out Jack Davidson’s voice, and Lily walked quickly across the lawn away from the party in the hope of finding somewhere quiet to talk.
‘Yes, I’m still here…’ she said loudly. ‘Sorry, it’s a bad line.’
She kept her head down, focusing all her attention on the voice in her ear. Jack was running through the itinerary for the trip, and the words ‘orphanage’ and ‘feeding station’ seemed utterly incongruous in her present luxurious surroundings. She kept walking, rounding the corner of the castle with its massive stone turret and heading out across the open ground beyond. She had left behind the lush greenness of the formal gardens and was now crossing an area of rough, parched grass behind the castle. The sounds of the party were muted here, but the noise of the helicopter blades was getting louder, pulsing insistently through the honeyed afternoon, whipping up the heavy air until Lily felt as if she were standing in the eye of the storm.
High above, Tristan Romero smiled as he watched her.
The reason he hadn’t seen her earlier, he realised, was that her pale golden colouring had made her melt perfectly into the drought bleached grass of the field. She was like a goddess of the harvest, he thought with a stab of curiosity as he hovered above her. She was wearing some kind of delicate crown of golden leaves on her head, but this didn’t stop her long, wheat-coloured hair rippling out in heavy streamers in the wind from the rotor blades. She stood still, struggling to hold down her dress as it billowed up around her, but her efforts were hampered by the fact that she was holding a mobile phone to her ear with one hand and a glass of champagne in the other, and simultaneously trying to control her wind-blown hair.
He came down just in front of her and couldn’t resist keeping the blades going for a minute longer than was necessary, so he could enjoy the delicious spectacle of her long, long brown legs beneath the flyaway dress, which was being flattened against the most incredible body.
There was something familiar about her, he thought as he pulled off his headset and jumped down from the cabin. In the sudden stillness she had shaken back her heavy hair and as he walked towards her he got a proper look at her face. He wondered whether he’d slept with her before.
No. With a body like that he would almost certainly have remembered. She was tall, but there was a slow grace in her movements that told him that bedding her would be an unforgettable experience. Tristan felt desire uncurl somewhere low down in his exhausted body. She was still on the phone, her head bent, clearly totally preoccupied with the conversation she was having. As he got closer he heard her say, ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry, I know it’s important, but I’m writing it all down. I’ve got all the details here in front of me.’
A beautiful girl with an outrageous disregard for the truth. How intriguing, he thought as she finished her conversation and looked up at him.
He felt a small shock jolt through his body, as if he had just touched a live wire. Against the golden tones of her hair and skin and dress, her eyes were a cool, clear silver; the colour of the mist that hung over the lake first thing in the morning.
‘Eight-thirty,’ she said out loud. Her voice was slightly breathless, and she was looking straight at him, but almost as if she weren’t seeing him. ‘Eight-thirty, tomorrow morning. Heathrow Terminal One.’
He smiled, quirking an eyebrow as he carried on walking towards her. ‘I’ll remind you when we wake up,’ he said dryly.
It was a joke. A throwaway remark. He had made it without even intending to stop walking, but the moment the words left his lips two things happened.
Firstly, he heard it: the quiet cicada whirr of a camera shutter, and from the corner of his eye caught the glint of a lens in the shadow of the trees. And secondly, he saw the instantaneous darkening of those extraordinary silver eyes.
Tristan Romero had many skills. Heading up the list had to be seducing women and manipulating the press. He didn’t even have to think about it. Before she could utter a single word of protest he had put his hand around her waist and was pulling her towards him.
The first thing she had noticed about him was his eyes.
His dark hair was cut close into his perfect neck, a couple of days of stubble emphasised sculpted cheekbones and his skin was tanned to a deep, even gold that made the blue of his eyes seem almost shocking. Looking up into them, desperately trying to imprint on her memory the instructions she’d just been given for meeting the rest of the African expedition tomorrow, Lily felt her throat tighten as sharply as if someone had wrapped a cord around her neck and pulled it. Hard.
Blue.
Blue you could float in.
Drown in.
She’d spoken out loud because she knew that all the information that she’d just been given was in danger of evaporating from her brain like water hitting hot stone. His answering remark was clearly a joke, but her body didn’t seem to get the humour. The world stopped and time vanished into a vortex of cinematic, freeze-frame intimacy as the blueness pulled her down. In the deep underwater world of his eyes everything slowed. Lily could hear nothing but the drumming of her pulse in her ears, feel nothing but the bloom of heat beneath the surface of her skin,
