Charlotte Lamb: Compulsion

She felt a strange shiver run down her back as the dark shadow of the stranger fell across her. She looked up, her eves enormous, and met his eyes

His were a fierce dark blue which was made deeper by the golden bronze of his skin. He was the same colour from head to foot, indicating that he spent a lot of time in the sun, although not as much as a native of the island would do, since his colour was lighter than theirs. Some of the local men had skin like mahogany from hours in the sun and surf, their bodies constantly exposed to wind and drying heat. This man had smooth, polished skin which rippled like liquid gold over sinews and muscles suggesting a great fitness and physical strength.

'Are you staying at the hotel?' Lissa asked, shifting her startled eyes from the compelling shaft of his stare with a sense of odd uneasiness.

'Yes. I arrived last night. Are you?'

'I live here.'

'On the island? Or do you mean at the hotel itself?'

'At the hotel.' Lissa felt a deepening disturbance at the way he was watching her. She stood up, holding Fortune's collar. 'Thank you so much for saving his life. I can't tell you how grateful I am.'

'Yes, you can,' he told her drily.

She looked at him in surprise, her eyes widening.

'You can have dinner with me.' He gave her a smile which lit up his whole face, the lines around eye and mouth cutting deeply into that golden skin, his blue eyes very bright. 'I'm sorry.' she stammered, her flush growing, 'but I work in the evenings.' 'Work at what?'

'Singing,' Lissa told him.

His dark brows flew upwards. He skimmed her again in obvious disbelief, the dark blue eyes narrowed. 'Singing?'

He sounded incredulous, and that wasn't surprising because at the moment, with her sand-stained dress clinging so closely to her wet body, her hair in saturated disarray, her small face innocent of make-up, she no doubt did not look like a professional singer. She probably looked more like a schoolgirl, she thought wryly.

She wasn't a professional singer, anyway. She only sang at the Palace because she was engaged to Chris. He liked her soft little voice and he had taken a chance on customers liking it, too. So far, luckily, they seemed to do so.

'I sing twice nightly in the cabaret,' she told the stranger.

'Really?' He was looking amused as he watched her. 'I must catch your act. Maybe we could have a drink together afterwards.'

Lissa looked away. Fortune had wandered up the beach on his way back to the hotel. 'Maybe,' she said vaguely. 'Thank you. I must go now.'

He was obviously on the beach to swim. Looking across the sands she saw a rolled towel flung down, sunglasses and a book.

'Well, enjoy your morning,' she said, retreating.

He stood there, his powerful body gleaming in the sunlight, the brief black swimming trunks emphasising the muscled thighs and flat stomach, his hands on his hips as he watched Lissa walk hurriedly away.

She did not look round, but she could feel the blue eyes watching her all the way into the shade of the clustering palm trees.

She felt strangely relieved to be out of range of those hard, narrowed eyes. The stranger made her feel very nervous, very aware both of herself and him. It was a sensation new to her and one she did not particularly enjoy.

As she walked back up to the hotel she found him occupying her thoughts. Lissa rarely noticed their visitors; she was too accustomed to the comings and goings of tourists. The black-haired man did not fit into the usual categories and she found it impossible to dismiss him easily from her mind.

She left Fortune sitting in the sun, scratching himself vigorously, and went into the back entrance of the hotel. Joseph looked up from the meat he was placing in a marinade. 'What happen to you?' he asked in his rolling Carib accent. 'You look like you been swimming in your dress.'

She told him and he roared with laughter, his liquid dark eyes dancing. 'Crazy dog!'

'He nearly drowned,' she said.

'That dog too lucky to drown,' Joseph said seriously. He was deeply superstitious, imbued with the island traditions. Although the staff were not allowed to gamble in the casino they gambled in private, often losing a week's wages on one hand. Chris said they still held cockfights back in the forest, out of sight of the law, which forbade it, and large sums changed hands on the outcome of a fight. Lissa looked at Joseph's friendly, goodhumoured face and hoped he did not attend the cockfights. The thought of them made her feel sick.

She went to her own room in the staff quarters and showered before changing into a skimpy white top and brief shorts. When she looked at herself in the mirror before she left the room she found a faint flush still lingering in her tanned face. A slim girl of medium height, she had very long, blonde sun-bleached hair which she normally wore sleek and straight around her face. Her skin was a uniform gold and her green eyes slanted beneath the fine, thin brows she darkened artificially to give more depth to her eyes.

She was healthy, physically active and energetic, and it was revealed in her figure; the rounded curves slimmed with constant exercise and light meals.

As she thought, of the dark stranger her frown deepened. She had found his appraising gaze disturbing. Living at the hotel she was not unaccustomed to being admired by visitors, but she couldn't remember any of them very clearly once they had gone.

Her years in the convent school had left her largely very innocent and untouched. Her feeling for Chris had obscured every other man from her. She had barely noticed any of them, but something about the stranger forced him on her consciousness.

He was unlike anyone she had ever seen before. Most of their guests came partly for the sun and partly for the gambling. They spent their days on the beach and their evenings at the tables. Their attention was not easily distracted from the ebb and flow of luck around the gambling rooms. Lissa had learnt to recognise the various faces, the predictable expressions, of the hardened gambler. Their fixed excitement, their restless boredom away from the tables, betrayed them. She had felt none of that in the dark stranger.

He had had amused, self-aware eyes, a cynical sophistication in the lines of his face. Razor-edged profile, hard mouth, eyes which stripped and probed-Lissa was not impressed by him.

That he was handsome couldn't be denied. Men with shoulders as wide as that, bodies as superbly fit, were usually to be seen on the beach showing off their expertise in the water for the avid gaze of bored wives whose husbands spent all their time at the table. Looks like that, in Lissa's experience, often went with vanity and a slight stupidity. She had fended off grinning assaults from these beach lizards, before now, and been only too happy to leave them to the admiration of female guests looking for a holiday romance while their husbands gambled.

The stranger she had met that morning did not come into that category, though. She struggled to place him, unable to imagine him at a desk or doing some routine job. He had an air of such cool self-assurance, the look of a man who has no doubts about himself or life, yet who can laugh at both, take neither very seriously.

He was unusual. Lissa hated admitting it, but she couldn't get him out of her mind.

She went down to the offices which lay behind the hotel foyer. As she walked past Rebecca's office she heard the typewriter going. She opened Chris's door and the men inside the room stopped talking and looked round. Their faces had been, hard and intent.

She caught a flash of something in the atmosphere which she had sometimes felt she saw before, but as always, it vanished before she had time to pin it down.

Chris grinned at her casually, milling back his lair hair with- a lazy hand. 'Hi, sweetheart. Come in- we've just finished talking.'