A Love Untamed

Cover Page

Excerpt

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Copyright

“You don’t owe me,Olivia.”

No, she didn’t owe him. So why then had she invited him to stay?

A dark flame flickered in Clint’s eyes. “Do you think it would be wise?” he asked softly. “The two of us alone in this house?”

The air was suddenly charged. Her heart began to throb and her throat went dry. She couldn’t tear her gaze away from his eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “Would it be?”

Ever since KAREN VAN DER ZEE was a child growing up in Holland she wanted to do two things: write books and travel. She’s been very lucky. Her American husband’s work as a development economist has taken them to many exotic locations. They were married in Kenya, in Africa, had their first daughter in Ghana and their second in the United States. They spent two fascinating years in Indonesia. Since then, they’ve added a son to the family. They live in Virginia, but not permanently!

A Love Untamed

Karen Van Der Zee

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Raja Kumis

King of the Moustaches

CHAPTER ONE

IN THE silent night Livia heard the low rumble of a car approaching on the country road. There wasn’t much traffic around here, so a car was something you noticed, especially at eleven at night. A cool spring breeze sweet with the scent of lilacs blew in through the open living-room window. She closed it and drew the old-fashioned curtains.

Dressed in a white cotton nightgown, she wandered through the quiet house, examining, for the umpteenth time, the contents—the old furniture, the antique clock, the dusty knick-knacks on the shelves—wondering if she had made a mistake coming here to spend the night by herself. The house seemed filled with ghosts, strange noises and musty smells. More so now that darkness had fallen over the empty countryside.

Well, it was not empty, really. There were cows and sheep and horses and probably rabbits, and frogs in the pond of course, and maybe spirits roaming the fields. But there were no houses containing living primates of the human variety for miles around. However, there would be one or more in the car coming down the road, she reminded herself. She wasn’t sure if this was a reassuring thought or not.

The old house stood alone on a hill with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and it was hers. Livia grinned at herself, feeling a sense of great excitement. It was a beauty, this old colonial country house, albeit that it was slightly ramshackle and needed a lot of work. But once she was done with it…She could feel her hands itch for hammer and saw and paintbrush.

Ever since the closing this morning she’d been sorting and packing books and small items to go to the country auction-house. She’d felt distinctly indiscreet looking through drawers and cabinets and closets, examining all the private things that had once belonged to someone else, an old woman who had recently died and whom she had never known. She had bought the house with all its contents, because there had been no relatives to claim them and she had fallen in love with some of the furniture, some lovely old things, possibly antiques. But most of it was not of much value, just the ordinary slightly worn and shabby furniture of someone who had lived in the same place all her life, someone who’d grown comfortable with her own things and saw no need for replacement when upholstery grew thin or styles changed.

This morning she’d put her sleeping-bag, pillow and overnight bag in one of the upstairs’s bedrooms. She unrolled the sleeping-bag and put it on top of the old quilted bedspread of one of the beds. Tomorrow morning Jack would be here and they’d go over the renovation plans and start clearing out the rooms. She couldn’t wait to get started and her whole body was keyed ups as it always was when she started a new project. Once the rooms were empty, they’d start breaking down walls. She loved breaking down walls, creating light and space.

She heard the car coming closer. Pushing aside the faded flowered curtains, Livia looked out into the night, seeing the headlights approaching on the curving road, illuminating the tall evergreens and the blooming dogwoods, which looked white and lovely as brides. The car was going very fast, or maybe it just looked that way, and then it began to slow down.

It slowed down until it was barely going at all, and then it turned into the long, curving driveway that climbed up to the house.

Her heart slammed against her ribs. No one knew she was here. Why would anyone come here so late at night? It was almost eleven and no decent person would call on someone else at this time uninvited.

Maybe this was not a decent person. The world was full of people with evil intentions. All you had to do was read the papers and turn on the television.

Oh, stop it, she said to herself. Maybe there was a perfectly simple, innocent reason for someone to come to the house. There had to be. She was basically a cheerful person, and believing in happiness, joy and love was so much more satisfying than being forever worried about evil and disaster. Maybe the driver was lost and had seen the lights, the only lights for quite a distance. This was rural Virginia, hours and hours away from Washington DC, where the day was not complete without a murder and a couple of other assorted crimes.

Nothing ever happened here. So she was told by the plump and pleasant woman estate agent who’d been born and bred in these parts and who knew every living soul within a ten-mile radius. So she had said.

She heard the car door slam shut. Frozen to the floor, she waited for the doorbell to ring. It did not. Instead, she heard the heavy front door creak open, then close again. It had been locked. She’d done it with her own hands ten minutes ago. She should hide in the wardrobe, climb out the window. Instead, she just stood there with her heart in her throat.

Heavy footsteps moved through the hall and living-room, the old wooden floors creaking ominously.

She was supposed to know what to do in situations like this. First: don’t panic. Second: get away.

How? Jump out of a window?

Well, she’d not started taking karate lessons for nothing. She’d decided that if she was going to make a habit of making trips to exotic places around the world she needed to be proficient in some form of self-defence. You could never tell, could you? Maybe this was the time to test its usefulness in a real-life situation. If it failed, maybe she could get her money back. She choked back an hysterical giggle.

‘Anybody home?’ came a male voice. It was deep and gravelly and the sound vibrated in the air.

Her tongue lay paralysed in her mouth and she was too afraid to breathe. Well, almost. She found herself staring at her image in the dresser mirror. Boy, were her eyes big and dark! Her face looked white as the clichéd sheet in contrast to her black hair. Normally her skin was a warm Mediterranean tan, winter and summer, thanks to her Latin genes.

And then heavy steps came pounding up the stairs and there he was, standing right in front of her—the very devil indeed.

CHAPTER TWO

WILD black hair, penetrating black eyes, a bushy black beard. He was huge, looming over her, filling the small room with his bulk and the sense of dire threat. The very air shivered with it. As did her body. He wore faded jeans, disreputable running shoes and a wrinkled denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing brown, muscled arms. All of him was big and strong, emanating a primitive masculine power and virility.

However, she saw no horns, no fangs or whatever else devils were supposed to have. Neither did she see a gun or knife. He stared down at her with his black devil eyes.

This was not a comfortable moment. Standing there barefoot wearing nothing but a long white nightgown, her hair loose, she was not an image radiating power and control, she was quite sure. She must look like a terrified heroine in a Gothic novel. Petrified, she continued to stare at him. It did not bear considering what he might be contemplating as his dark eyes moved over her from top to bottom.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

It was the tone of his voice that got her lungs going again. There was no threat or lechery in that deep voice, merely astonishment. This was extremely reassuring. Astonishment she could deal with. Astonishment was good.

She swallowed, then straightened her back, stretching as far as her meagre five feet four would allow, and put her hands on her hips.

‘Who the hell are you?’ she demanded.

His bushy brows shot up. ‘I believe I asked the question first, angel.’

Angel. And that from the devil. Oh, God.

Her legs began to shake. ‘I own this house and I want you out.’ Her heart was racing but her voice was steady, which was nothing short of a miracle. However, he seemed not impressed.

His brows rose up even further. ‘You own this house? I don’t know where you get that idea. The house is mine.’ He reached into his pocket and fished out a key. ’see? This is my key. It fits very nicely into the lock in the door of my house.’ The hand dangling the key in front of her was big and brown and very strong. The other one was a perfect match. Hands that had seen hard physical labour. Her stomach churned.

‘You may have a key, but I have a deed. The closing was this afternoon. The house is mine—all legal and above board. I signed all sorts of documents and the lawyers signed all sorts of documents and I wrote big cheques and then we all shook hands and smiled a lot. That’s how it’s done when you buy a house.’ Oh, shut up! she said to herself. She always talked too much, but when she was nervous she positively gushed.

‘You must have the wrong house.’

’that’s crazy! Of course I don’t have the wrong house! I bought this one.’

He frowned, then shrugged, raking a hand through his unruly hair. ‘I’m not going to stand here and pursue a pointless argument with a woman in her nightgown. I’ll find a way to disabuse you of your illusions tomorrow. What I need now is sleep.’

His arrogance infuriated her and she clenched her teeth hard. However, one thing she was noticing: in spite of his disreputable appearance, he spoke in complete sentences and his English sounded educated. Was this reassuring? Did it mean anything? Probably not a thing.

She willed her legs to stop trembling. ‘You’re not sleeping here,’ she said with a conviction she didn’t feel. ‘Find yourself a hotel. There’s a country inn five miles down the road. It’s a lovely place, all white with red shutters, and the rooms have four-poster beds in them and you’ll be perfectly comfortable there and…’ She stopped herself. Here she was doing it again.

He rubbed his beard. ‘It appears to me that you don’t understand,’ he said patiently, as if he were talking to a dimwitted child. ‘Let me be more clear: I’m not going anywhere. This is my house, so you should leave and find yourself a room in the inn. However, I don’t turn women in their nightgowns out into the street at this hour, so be my guest and stay the night.’

The audacity of the man! ‘I’ll call the police,’ she said between clenched teeth.

An amused little grin curved his mouth. He stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘Oh, yes, good old Chuckie,’ he said lazily. ’sure, go ahead. And while you’ve got him on the line, tell him I won the bet and he owes me a hundred bucks.’

Her heart sank. There went that idea. Maybe he and Chuckie the sheriff were partners in crime. These things happened. You heard about it on TV: the nation’s finest seduced by the rewards of crime. It was a disgrace. Calling Chuckie would obviously do no good. Now what? She couldn’t think of a thing.

The man turned around. ‘I’m going to sleep. Goodnight, angel.’ And with that he strode out of the room. She didn’t hear him go down the stairs, and when all became quiet and her legs were more steady, she gathered enough courage to find out where he’d parked himself.

She discovered him in one of the other bedrooms. He lay sprawled on top of the big double bed, fully clothed and out cold. He had taken off his Nikes and socks, and that was about it. Like the rest of him, his feet looked big.

It was easy to see that neither flood, hurricane nor earthquake was going to move this man. He was dead to the world and by the looks of it he was going to stay that way for a while. Which meant she was going to be safe for a while.

She looked at the comatose shape and felt a shiver go down her spine. Where had he come from? Maybe he’d been driving for a long time. Maybe he had escaped from prison, stolen a car…Maybe she should have a look at the car, check out the licence plates.

She tiptoed down the stairs, although there was no need to be so quiet. Her footsteps weren’t going to wake him out of his stupor. In the hall by the front door she saw a huge duffel bag with airline tags. United Airlines. He’d arrived at Washington Dulles, but he could have come from anywhere. The name tag was a coded American Express affair that would only reveal its secrets to a computer. Then she noticed the papers sticking out of a side-pocket. Ticket carbons? It would supply the passenger’s name and flight information. She hesitated.

Why had the gods burdened her with an oversupply of principles? She didn’t snoop in other people’s drawers and she didn’t peep into their bathroom medicine cabinets. She didn’t cheat on her taxes. She didn’t steal ashtrays from hotel rooms; she didn’t even take the little soaps and bottles of shampoo. And she never lied. Well, almost never.

She did not go through other people’s papers, either.

She stared at the corner of grey peeping out from the duffel-bag pocket.

Well, she had the right, didn’t she? Shouldn’t she know the identity of a stranger who’d forced himself into her house and refused to leave? A dangerous-looking stranger now asleep under her roof?

Of course she did.

She went down on her knees, took the oblong booklet out of the pocket and leafed through the flimsy carbons, peering hard at the faint lettering to decipher it. Clint Bracamonte, it said. It seemed to fit him. He certainly didn’t look like a Jimmy Johnson.

It took a few minutes to piece together his itinerary from the collection of ticket carbons, but then she had it and it made her heart beat faster—not with fear this time, but from pure excitement.

Balikpapan-Jakarta-Hong Kong-San Francisco-Washington DC.

Balikpapan! Balikpapan was a town in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, a wild place full of jungle and rough rivers and tiny villages and tribal people living traditional lives. She knew her geography, which was not so surprising since she had lived in many places in the world due to a globetrotting father who was a career diplomat. They’d resided in Jakarta, Indonesia, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in Dares Salaam, Tanzania, in Geneva, Switzerland, and other places of which she had no memory because she’d been too young.

She put the papers back in the duffel-bag pocket and straightened. She opened the heavy door. The hinges squealed in agony and she winced at the sound. The perfumy fragrance of lilacs greeted her. She stepped on to the front porch and the old wood creaked under her feet. Everything was making noise, setting her nerves on edge. She took a look at the car. As expected, it was a rental he’d procured at the airport, a silver-grey Ford Taurus.

She shivered in the cold night air and went back into the house, tiptoed up to her own bedroom and sat on the side of the bed. Jack would come early tomorrow morning. For now she should just go to bed. Mr Bracamonte had flown straight from Balikpapan to Washington without a stopover—two days without sleep, across the international date line and many time zones, his body clock gone haywire. He wasn’t going to wake up for a while.

Why did he think the house was his? It was crazy, impossible. She couldn’t think. She was simply too tired. A long afternoon of hard physical labour topped off with a big dose of heart-stopping terror tended to be exhausting.

She crawled into the sleeping-bag and closed her eyes. She should have lain awake anxious and afraid, but, strange as it might seem, she didn’t. She drifted right off and slept like a baby.

* * *

She awoke with the birds, which sang euphorically in the trees. She’d left the window open and the April morning was glorious, the air crisp like chilled champagne. For a moment she luxuriated in a sense of wellbeing—a very short moment, because her mind suddenly produced the image of the dark stranger who’d found his way into the house late last night. Black eyes, black hair, black beard.

Oh, God. She closed her eyes. Well, she was alive and well and she hadn’t even had to employ her meagre karate skills.

She locked the bathroom door and had a quick shower, then dressed in jeans and a bright red cotton sweater. Red was good. It made a statement. It showed confidence and power. She had a hunch she’d need some once Clint Bracamonte was awake. Hopefully that wouldn’t be until Jack had arrived.

She put on socks and trainers and tied her hair back in a ponytail and made up her face. It was no genetic accident that she had straight black hair and brown eyes. She was American by upbringing and citizenship, but her ancestral background sported Greeks, Italians, Hungarians, and even an outcast gypsy woman who’d had the audacity to fall in love with a gorgio. Her mother had researched the family tree with true passion, travelling to Europe to find out as much as she could, discovering long-lost relatives—a dentist, a goatherd, a butcher, a housewife, and, lo and behold, a toothless Greek great-great-grandma of one hundred and seven wearing black, totally lucid and not about to depart. She drank two shots of ouzo every day.

The family tree revealed many things. It was not so strange that her dearest passion was travel: gypsy genes. Also, she loved colourful clothes and dangling earrings, and she’d discovered a taste for ouzo. Her friends insisted it had to be genetic, because how else was it possible to like that vile stuff?

Quietly she slipped down the stairs into the kitchen, only to find that she had miscalculated. The man was standing by the sink, filling the kettle. The same huge male that had walked into her house last night—black eyes, black hair, but minus the bushy black beard. Her heart turned over. He looked fantastic. She couldn’t help thinking it. It was the truth. The evil had gone out of his appearance and what was left was a lot of very disturbing male sex appeal. He plunked the kettle on the stove and turned on the burner.

‘Well, good morning,’ he said, noticing her stand by the door.

‘Good morning,’ she returned, feeling the very air around her quiver with sudden tension.

He wore clean clothes—cotton trousers and a blue T-shirt. His hair was damp from the shower, still too long but tamed by the water, at least temporarily. His eyes were still the same penetrating black and the part of his face where yesterday had flourished the bushy beard now revealed a strong, square jaw. His face was all hard angles, his features well-defined. Energy radiated from him.

His gaze swept over her, then back up to her face. ‘Are you the same woman I met last night, the one wearing that long, lacy nightgown? Or was that merely a lovely vision in my dreams?’

Her stomach tightened and her pulse leaped. ’that was me,’ she said, not being able to think of anything more brilliant or profound. It was a pretty nightgown, true, but she wished she’d been wearing functional unisex pyjamas instead. Only she didn’t own any. She liked beautiful lingerie—possibly because it felt good to put on something soft and feminine after spending a long, hard day in old jeans and a T-shirt covered with dust and paint and wallpaper paste.

He took two mugs out of one of the cabinets. ‘Coffee?’ he asked politely.

’thank you, yes,’ she answered, equally politely. Well, that was the way she’d been brought up. It sort of came out automatically, but she realised the absurdity of the whole situation as soon as she heard her own courteous reply. The man had invaded her house and now he was playing host.

The groceries she’d bought yesterday had been taken out of the paper bags and spread out on the table. Instant coffee, chocolate bars, bread, peanut butter, thick orange marmalade, strong French mustard. He’d obviously taken charge and acted as if he had every right to be here in this kitchen.

He opened one of the cabinets, took out two plates and put them on the table, then opened a drawer and found knives and forks. It did not escape her that he didn’t search for these items. He knew exactly where they were. It was not a good sign. A tiny flame of apprehension began to flicker in her mind. She suppressed it. Maybe he’d checked things out earlier.

‘Make yourself at home,’ she said coolly.

‘I am at home,’ he returned. ’so tell me, what is your name?’

‘What is yours?’

‘May I point out to you that a question requires an answer, not another question?’

‘You may point all you want. What’s your name?’

His mouth curved in faint mockery. ‘Clint Bracamonte. What’s yours?’

‘Olivia Jordan.’

‘Olivia.’ He spoke her name as if tasting it, narrowing his eyes, considering. ‘Nice name. I like that. Now, Olivia, is this all there is for food? What were you planning to eat for breakfast? Peanut butter sandwiches?’

’something wrong with that?’ In Kalimantan people probably ate rice for breakfast, as they did in much of the Far East.

‘Nothing at all,’ he said calmly. ‘I was only asking.’

She opened the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and extracted a couple of frozen breakfast burritos in paper wrappings. ‘Actually, I was going to have one of these.’ She put them on the counter and turned on the small toaster oven.

‘Breakfast burritos?’ He examined the frozen food, reading the information printed on the wrapper. ‘Good God, what are they going to come up with next?’

’they’re good,’ she said. ‘Eggs, cheese, ham, the works. All the protein you need.’ And all the choles-terol you didn’t. ‘And they’re real easy. All you do is heat them up in the oven. Haven’t you ever seen these before? Where have you been?’ She couldn’t help herself.

‘Not anywhere in the so-called civilised world,’ he said promptly.

So she had discovered from his ticket carbons, but of course he didn’t know that, and she wasn’t about to admit that she’d been snooping through his papers.

‘And where was that?’ she asked casually.

‘Nowhere you’d know.’

That’s what you think, she told him silently, annoyed with his arrogance. She looked at him squarely. ’try me.’

Obviously he didn’t deem this a worthy challenge, because he simply ignored it. Instead he poured boiling water into the mugs and handed her one.

Well, how many people in rural Virginia had ever heard of Balikpapan? Not too many. Yet his condescending attitude was definitely insulting. Mr High and Mighty, Mr Globetrotter with an attitude problem.