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www.millsandboon.co.uk
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER ONE
SOMBRE fir trees crowded against the small stone crypt constructed in the living rock of the mountain, concealing it from all but the keenest eyes.
The man who threaded his way so quietly that even the deer didn’t sense his presence had such eyes, strange, colourless eyes that refracted light like shattered glass. At a muffled sound in the still silence he froze, his big body somehow blending into the gloom, that fierce gaze searching through the trees and up the mountainside.
A hundred years ago an eccentric English gentleman had built a little castle high in the Swiss Alps, but it was his wife who decided that the estate needed something extra, a romantically outrageous touch to set it off properly. A couple of ruined follies sufficed for dramatic impact in the woods, but the pièce de résistance was the crypt, never intended to be used, constructed solely to induce the right mood.
During the past century the carefully laid path had become overgrown, scarcely noticeable, but the crypt had been built by good Victorian tradesmen, and it still stood in all its Gothic gloom, the rigid spikes of an elaborately detailed iron grille barring steps that led down to a solid wooden door.
Frozen in a purposeful, waiting immobility, ears and eyes attuned to the slightest disturbance, the man decided that as an example of the medieval sensibility admired by many Victorians the hidden crypt was perfect. Not his style, but then, his self-contained pragmatism was utterly at variance with the romantic attitudes of a century before.
In spite of the fugitive noise that had whispered across his ears, no birds shouted alarm, no animals fled between the trees. His penetrating gaze lingered a moment on stray beams of the hot Swiss sun fighting their way through the dense foliage.
He hadn’t seen anyone since entering the wood and his senses were so finely honed that he’d have known if he’d been followed, or if the crypt was being watched. The waiting was a mere formality. However, when a man lived on his wits it paid to have sharp ones, and the first thing he’d learned was to trust nothing, not even his own reactions.
A small, bronze butterfly settled on one broad shoulder. Not until the fragile thing had danced off up the nearest sunbeam did he move, and then it was soundlessly, with a smooth flowing grace very much at variance with his size. Within moments he was standing at the dark opening in the shoulder of the mountain.
The iron door looked suitably forbidding, but the old-fashioned lock that would have been, for all its ornate promise, ridiculously easy to pick, had been superseded by a modern one, sleek, workmanlike, somehow threatening. After a cursory glance he fished in his pocket and pulled out a ring of keys. No clink of metal pierced the silence. Selecting one, he inserted it, and as the key twisted and the lock snickered back a look of savage satisfaction passed over his hard, intimidating face.
He didn’t immediately accept the mute invitation. Instead, his eyes searched the stone steps that led down to another door, this one made of sturdy wood. For several seconds the cold, remote gaze lingered on what could have been scuff marks.
Eventually, with the measured, deliberate calculation of a predator, he turned his head. Again his eyes scanned the fir trees and the barely visible path through them, then flicked up the side of the mountain. Only then did he push the iron door open.
Although he knew it had been oiled, he half expected a dramatic shriek of rusty hinges. One corner of his straight mouth tilted in mordant appreciation of the horror films he and his friends used to watch years ago, when he was as innocent as he’d ever been.
Moving without noise or haste, he slipped through the narrow opening between the iron door and the stone wall, relocked the door, and turned, his back pressed against the damp, rough-hewn stone. Now, caught between the grille and the wooden door, he was most vulnerable to ambush.
Still no prickle of danger, no obscure warning conveyed by the primitive awareness that had saved his life a couple of times. Keeping well to the side where the shadows lay deepest, he walked noiselessly down the steps. Some part of his brain noted the chill that struck through his clothes and boots.
A different key freed the wooden door; slowly, he pushed it open, his black head turning as a slight scrabble sounded shockingly in the dank, opaque darkness within.
‘It’s all right, Stephanie,’ he said in a voice pitched to reach whoever was in the crypt. Grimly, he locked the door behind him. A hitherto concealed torch sent a thin beam of light slicing through the blackness to settle on a long box, eerily like a coffin, that rested on the flagstones. The man played the light on to the box until the keyhole glittered. For the space of three heartbeats he stood motionless, before, keys in hand, he approached the box.
* * *
Inside her prison she was blind, and earplugs made sure she could hear little. However, another sense had taken over, an ability to feel pressure, to respond somehow to the presence of another living being. For the last few minutes she had known he was near.
Almost certainly he was one of the two men who had abducted her on the road back to the chalet. The memory of those terrifying moments kept her still and quiet, her shackled limbs tense against the narrow sides of the box.
After the initial horrified incredulity she had fought viciously, desperation clearing her brain with amazing speed so that she was able to use every move Saul had taught her. She’d managed to get in some telling blows, scratching one’s face badly as she’d torn off his Balaclava. She had been trying for his eyes, but a blow to her head had jolted her enough to put off her aim.
Not badly enough, however, to stop her from crooking her fingers again and gouging at his face, so clearly seen in the moonlight.
Then the second man had punched her on the jaw.
Two days later the man whose face she’d seen had hit her again in exactly the same place when she’d refused to read the newspaper.
Half-mad with terror, convinced that she was going to die in the makeshift coffin, she had managed to shake her head when he’d forced her upright and thrust the newspaper in her hand, demanding that she say the headlines.
She’d known what he was doing. Saul must want some reassurance that she was alive before he paid any ransom. The torches that had blazed into her eyes had made it very clear that her assailant intended to video her.
Her refusal had made her gaoler angry, and he’d threatened to withhold the food and water he’d brought. Still she’d balked, folding her mouth tightly over the cowardly words fighting to escape, words that were pleas for freedom, craven offers to pay him anything he wanted if only he would let her go.
So he’d hit her, carefully choosing the site of the bruise he’d already made when he’d knocked her out in the street. Pain had cascaded through her but she’d only given in when he’d told her viciously that he was prepared to send a video of him beating her up to her brother if that was what it took.
It had been the only thing he could have said to persuade her. Saul must never know what had happened to her in that crypt.
And now, after an unknown number of days, someone else had returned to the crypt. Her jaw still ached, but that was the least of her worries.
Shuddering, she bent her attention to the person in her dungeon. It was a man; was he the man who had forced her to dramatise her own misery so that her brother Saul would know she was alive?
She lay still, trying to pick up with subliminal receptors some indication of his identity. Strangely, she felt, with a hidden, atavistic shrinking, a strong impression of power and intensity, and beneath that a controlled menace that made her shiver with terror.
The muffled sound of his voice again, low, oddly compelling even through the planks of her prison and the earplugs, sent quick panic flooding through her, humiliating, loathsome, unmanageable. She tried to breathe carefully, counting the seconds, but it didn’t help.
He spoke once more; although the words were somewhat louder they were still distorted by the physical response of her body. Her first reaction had been to will him to go away, but she suddenly wondered whether he was a passer-by who had merely stumbled on her prison. If that was so, he wouldn’t know she was in the box on the floor. He might be her only chance to get out of here.
Nevertheless, it took a real effort of will to move, and when she did she moaned soundlessly at the pain in her cramped muscles. Clenching her teeth, she lifted her hands and hit the manacles sharply against the top of the box, hoping that the noise would be enough to attract his attention.
Strung taut by fear and foreboding, she screamed into the gag as the lid came up silently, yet with a rush of air that hurt her skin and proclaimed a violent energy in the man who stood above her. Ever since she had been locked in this coffin she had been desperately trying to get free, rubbing her wrists raw against the unyielding metal of the handcuffs, yet now she shrank back because the impact of the stranger’s personality—intense, lethal, forceful—hit her like a blow.
Danger, her instincts drummed; this man is dangerous! Some primal, buried intuition warned her that he was infinitely more of a threat to her than either of the men who had kidnapped her. She sensed an icy, implacable authority, a concentrated will that beat harshly down on her.
But when he spoke his voice was level, almost impersonal. ‘Just lie still for a few seconds, Stephanie,’ he said, his voice pitched to pierce the earplugs.
So he was no casual passer-by.
Stephanie made herself stay quiescent as the gag was removed. This man knew exactly what he was doing, and did it as though he’d been wrenching off gags all his life. Life pulsed through him, an intensity of vigour, of purpose, a sheer, consuming energy that bathed her in white-hot fire.
Get a grip on yourself, she commanded. He still might come from the kidnappers. She said rustily, ‘Who are you?’ and strained to hear his answer.
‘I’ve come to take you out of this. How do you feel?’
Relief was a slow, reluctant warming. ‘I’m all right. Just numb all over.’
‘You’ll hurt like hell when the feeling starts to come back,’ he said.
Her kidnappers had left nothing to chance; they hadn’t intended her to escape. When he felt the steel manacles on her wrists and ankles the unknown man cursed roughly, but his hands on her body were warm and deft and gentle, and after a bit of manipulation the steel fell loose.
Nevertheless, it seemed an aeon before she was out of her coffin. Her legs wouldn’t support her, so her rescuer held her with an arm around her waist and then all she could think of was that she was filthy and naked and that she must smell and look disgusting. She put up a fleshless, quivering hand to remove the plugs from her ears.
‘I’ll do that,’ he said. In a moment the echo of her pulses that had been her sole companion for so many anguished hours was replaced by a rush of silence.
She didn’t have time to appreciate it, for the numbness that held her body in thrall was overwhelmed by an agony so intense, she thought she might faint from it. Biting her lips to hold back mortifying whimpers, she clung convulsively to his broad shoulders as returning sensation surged through her with accelerating agony.
‘How long have I been here?’ she mumbled, trying to keep her mind off the torment.
‘Three days.’
Free from distortion, his voice was deep and infinitely disturbing, detached, yet threaded by an equivocal undertone. English, she noted automatically, although there was something else, some hint of another country’s speech; not an accent, more an intonation, a slight inflexion...
He sounded as though he could have spent enough time in New Zealand or Australia to be affected by their special and particular way of speaking.
Giving it up as too hard, she set her jaw and forced her shaking legs to straighten, her knees to lock so that she could stand upright. Sweat stood out along her brow, settled with clammy persistence into her palms. When the torture receded a little she managed to mutter, ‘I tried to get free, but I couldn’t.’
‘It’s almost over, princess.’ His arm around her shoulders tightened. For several minutes he continued to support her trembling body, until at last he asked brusquely, ‘Can you walk? Here, you’d better get rid of this—’ Hands touched the blindfold.
Jerking her head away, she said, ‘No,’ because it gave her some sort of protection from his gaze. Not even when she had been stripped naked to the lewd sound of one of the kidnapper’s comments had she felt so exposed, so helpless.
‘Yes,’ he said relentlessly. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet—literally. I don’t think the men who snatched you will come back today, but if they do while we’re still here you need to be able to see, and this half-darkness will give your eyes time to get accustomed to the light.’
Ignoring her panted objections, he stripped the blindfold from her shaggy head. Obstinately, Stephanie kept her eyes closed. ‘Have you got any water?’ she asked, running her dry tongue around an even drier mouth. ‘I’m so thirsty.’
‘Don’t drink too much. It will make you sick.’
A metal flask pressed against her lips, and the blessed cool thinness of water seeped across her tongue. She gulped greedily, making a quick, involuntary protest when he took it away.
‘No,’ he said laconically, ‘you can have some more later.’ At her small sound of displeasure he went on, ‘If you have any more now you’ll be retching before you’ve gone fifty yards. Trust me, I know.’
An odd note in his voice coaxed her eyes slightly open. The torchlight barely reached the dank stone walls of her prison, but in its golden glow she saw a big man, tall and well-built, with a dark, angular, forceful face.
Shock hit her like a blow, followed by a strange, compelling recognition, as though she had always known he was out there, waiting. She would never forget him, she thought dazedly. He had rescued her from hell, and until the day she died she’d remember his warrior’s countenance, stark in the earthy dampness of her prison, as well as his curt, understated consideration.
‘That’s better,’ he said bluntly. ‘Put these on.’
He had brought clothes—jeans and a shirt in muted camouflage colours. Gratefully, she struggled a few moments with limp hands and weak wrists, before saying on a half-choked note of despair, ‘I can’t.’
Without impatience, he said, ‘All right, stand still.’
Competent hands pulled the clothes on to her thin body; he even managed to fit a pair of black trainers on her feet. Although the garments felt amazingly good after the soaked blanket she’d been lying on, she knew that she wouldn’t feel clean until she had washed herself free of this place.
In a hidden recess of her mind she wondered whether she would ever feel really clean again.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.
Nothing in his tone indicated a need for hurry, but Stephanie suddenly realised that the longer they stayed in the crypt, the more dangerous it was.
Compliantly she tried to follow him across to the door, but her feet refused to obey her will. She began to shake.
‘I can’t walk,’ she said angrily.
‘You’ll have to.’
Although the words were completely unsympathetic, he grasped her hand in his lean, strong one, and somehow she could move once more. Each step felt like knives in her flesh. Abruptly the story of the little mermaid and the sacrifice she had made to gain a human soul flashed into Stephanie’s mind. When her mother had read it to her she hadn’t liked the tale, finding it too sad, but until that moment she hadn’t understood what a truly awful torture Hans Christian Andersen had devised for his heroine.
Tightening her lips, she held back any expression of pain. But when her rescuer switched off the torch and the blackness pressed in again, she couldn’t prevent a choked cry.
‘If you can’t keep quiet I’ll have to gag you again,’ he said, each word stark with the promise of retribution. ‘Walk softly, and don’t talk. If anything happens to me, climb a tree and stay there. Most people don’t think to look upwards.’
The next second she was stumbling behind a man who moved without sound. The door swung open silently, letting in a flood of dim light. At first it hurt her eyes, but as she squinted tearfully she saw stone steps leading up to bars, and beyond them a forest of firs, their trunks and thick foliage blocking out the sun.
Closing the door behind them, her rescuer locked it before leading her carefully up the steps, his back to the wall, his head turned towards the entrance so that all she could see of his face was the stern line of jaw above a hint of square chin, the sweeping angle of cheek, the dark, conventionally cut hair. His hand still engulfed hers; although it was warm and insistent, she understood with a purely female recognition that it could be cruel.
At the top of the steps he waited so long that she began to drift into a kind of trance. Then, apparently satisfied that the woods held no lurking enemies, he unlocked the bars and slipped through, shielding her with the graceful bulk of his body.
It was like all the thrillers she had ever read—the gallant, aloof hero, the abused heroine, the dangerous trek to safety. Perhaps if she could have viewed the situation as popular fiction she’d have been able to cope with the sick dismay that washed through her when he turned up the mountain and began to climb, half pulling her along behind him.
Gasping within seconds, exhausted in minutes, she knew she had to keep going, so she gritted her teeth and ignored the pain. He helped, hauling her over rocks, stopping occasionally to let her regain her breath. Her heart was thumping too heavily in her chest for anything but its erratic beating to be heard, and in a very short time she was engulfed by a headache and a spreading nausea that almost subdued her.
But anything was better than being locked in a box, unable to free herself. With the characteristic doggedness that came as a surprise to most people, Stephanie scrambled behind her unknown rescuer, grateful for the trees that sheltered them.
At last the steep slope levelled out. ‘Stay here,’ he said in a quiet, almost soundless voice, pushing her unceremoniously into a crevice beneath a rock.
Stephanie collapsed, peering through the bushes that concealed the narrow cleft, but he disappeared before she had time to query him, so she put her head on her knees, stiffened her jaw to stop the shameful whimpering she could barely control, and let her body do whatever it needed to recover. She was still panting when he slid back through the whippy, leafy branches with as little fuss as an animal.
Still in the same low voice he asked, ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’ve felt better,’ she said quietly, avoiding the cold clarity of his gaze. ‘On the other hand, just recently I’ve felt worse. I’ll be all right. How much further?’
‘About a mile.’
As she struggled out he said, ‘I think it should be safe enough to carry you,’ and in spite of her automatic recoil he picked her up and set off.
Keeping her face rigidly turned away, she wondered why liberty didn’t taste as good as she’d imagined it would in those nightmare days of imprisonment. She should have been ecstatic, because she’d expected death, and now there was a future waiting for her. At the very least she should have been relieved. Instead, an icy chill eddied through her, robbing her of everything but a detached recognition that she had been imprisoned and was now free.
Freedom was easy to say, she thought with a scepticism that hurt. Common sense told her that her body would mend quickly enough, yet as she lay there in the powerful arms of the man who had released her she wondered whether some part of her mind would be incarcerated in that box for the rest of her life.
‘My car’s not too far away. When we get there I’m going to have to put you in the boot,’ her rescuer told her, his voice reassuring but firm enough to forestall any protest. He still spoke as though they could be overheard. ‘It will be bloody uncomfortable, but it’s necessary, and I’ve put a mattress in there to make it a bit easier. I’m almost certain no one’s been watching me, but we’ll be going through several villages and the last thing we want is someone remembering that I had a passenger. So you’ll have to stay hidden.’
Although her skin crawled at the thought of further confinement, Stephanie understood the need for caution. Mastering the flash of panic, she said, ‘Yes, all right.’ She thought his words over before asking slowly, ‘Will S—will my brother be there?’
‘No.’ He paused before explaining, ‘He’s busy dealing with the men who did this to you. You and I will have to lie low for a while until it’s over. I can’t even get a doctor for you in case they have a local contact, but I have some experience in this sort of thing.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said automatically, wondering where he’d gained this experience. First-aid training? A book on how to look after kidnappees?
Being rescued, she decided, closing her eyes, must have addled her brain.
He climbed for what seemed ages. Mostly Stephanie lay in a kind of stupor, accepting without thought the novelty of being carried, the controlled, purposeful toughness of the man. It did occur to her that he must be immensely strong, for he moved without any visible signs of exhaustion. And although he might not think there was anyone watching she could feel his alertness, a fierce concentration on every signal sent by the world around them. Several times he stopped and listened.
Whenever that happened she made herself still and quiet, trying to slow her heartbeat, calm her racing pulses and the rattle of air in her lungs, the interminable thud and throb of her headache. Although she too listened hard she could hear nothing but the sounds of the forest—an occasional bird, the soft rustling of a breeze in the trees.
Once she roused herself to whisper, ‘Are we there?’
‘Not quite.’ When he went to put her down she surprised herself by clinging. ‘It’s all right,’ he said gently. ‘I’m just going to scout around and make sure no one is about.’
‘Don’t leave me.’ Although she despised the note of panic in her voice, she couldn’t control it.
‘I’ll be keeping a good eye on you.’
A small, childish noise escaped her lips.
‘That’s enough,’ he said sternly, bending to thrust her into a cleft beneath a rock that broke through the bushes. ‘I haven’t gone to all this trouble to lose you now. Just sit there, princess, and I’ll be here again before you’ve had time to get lonely.’ He stepped behind a tree and disappeared, far too silently for a man of his size.
Disgusted by her feebleness, Stephanie waited, wishing she could point her ears like an animal to get a better fix on his whereabouts. A tangle of summer-green leaves hid her from any stray passer-by, but not, she knew, from a determined searcher. Her rescuer’s familiarity with this mountain slope surely meant that he had spent some time reconnoitring.