Вайолет Уинспир: Dragon Bay

‘You are Lucan Savidge?’ she exclaimed.

‘At your service.’ He gave her a mock bow, and despite the fact that he was wearing only black silk pyjamas there was about him the assured, plantocratic look of a man who was used to giving orders, who liked spirited horses to ride, and red wine in crystal. Kara scanned the strong, tanned bone structure of his features, and she could well believe that he made his own rules and lived by them.

‘I can see that you have heard of me, though you are a newcomer to the Isle de Luc’ As he spoke, he drew away from the door and shrugged into a dressing-gown and sought his slippers. He seemed to take it for granted that having ordered her to stay where she was, she would do so and not make a dart for the door. The urge to escape was strong in her, but instinct warned her that she dealt with a man as quick and tempered as a jungle cat. He would leap after her and take hold of her with his large brown hands … a thought that made her go small in the bed that was only a yard or so from his bed. He sat down on the side of it and appraised her.

‘I can’t quite place your nationality,’ he said, ‘but you put me in mind of a faun. Is it your ears, or your eyes?’

‘My name is Kara Stephanos,’ she said with dignity. ‘I am taking a holiday in the Caribbean, and my homeland is Greece.’

‘Ah,’ his eyebrows slanted together, darker than the foxfire of his hair, ‘so you are Grecian. Is there not a Greek word for the fateful chance that throws two people together?’

She gazed at him with wide and wondering eyes. ‘The word is moira,’ she said, and was both relieved and confused to hear a tap on the door, followed by a discreet cough and the entrance of the waiter. He carried a laden tray.

‘I took the liberty, m’sieur, of bringing breakfast — for two.’

There was a pot of coffee on the tray, hot croissants, butter and fruit. There were two cups, two plates, and an unconcealed smile in the waiter’s eyes as they flicked from Lucan Savidge to Kara. Her cheeks burned. Nap had said last night that the man with the savage name was a man people whispered about.

‘The sun is on the balcony, so we will eat our breakfast there.’ Lucan Savidge gestured at the bathrobe Kara had tossed off last night, so sleepy from the fun of the fair, and her bath, that she had wandered into a stranger’s bedroom and spent the night there.

Her breath caught in her throat, for as she followed the tall stranger on to his balcony the sun fired his hair and she remembered the sibyl’s warning. She had spoken of an encounter with a man with fire in his hair; she had advised Kara to leave Fort Fernand before morning.

Kara had not heeded her warning; now morning had come and she had encountered Lucan Savidge with a vengeance.

He pulled out a wicker chair from the matching table, and Kara slipped into it. The sun was in the crests of the patio palm trees, and little tongues of fire peeped from the hibiscus bells. The sky was a clear, reassuring blue, and Kara felt much safer out here under the sky with this intimidating man.

She poured their coffee and watched him break a croissant and spread it with butter. ‘It is curious that we should be sitting here like this.’ A smile turned to a glint in his eyes. ‘I would be very suspicious if you were not so — but then coquettes have been known to be innocent-looking.’

‘I shall have my cup of coffee and then go,’ she said coldly. ‘No doubt you are a good catch, Monsieur Savidge, but a coquette would have to be innocent if she thought you could be compromised.’

‘You don’t like me at all, do you?’ He smiled and added brown island sugar to his coffee. ‘You are thinking that if I were gallant I would not have allowed the waiter to assume the obvious. My dear girl, I could hardly smuggle you back to your room as though the fellow had not seen you at all — looking all big-eyed and fluffy in the bed next to mine.’

Kara took several quick sips of her coffee. ‘You could have explained that you slammed your door last night and made the number 9 fall down to form a 6, and that I mistook your room for mine.’

‘Why did you stay silent when you could have given the same explanation?’ he inquired.

‘I–I was lost for words,’ she said helplessly. ‘Try being a girl — though I can see that would be hard — who wakes up in a strange hotel to find she has slept all night beside a stranger.’

His answering laughter relished the situation.

‘I shall leave the Isle de Luc today,’ she said.

He stopped laughing and his fingers paused on the mandarin he was peeling. ‘Running away?’ he taunted.

She flicked crumbs off the table and did not answer.

‘Is that why you are here on the Isle de Luc?’ His glance seemed to touch her skin like the flick of a whip. ‘Are you already in the process of running away from someone?’

‘It’s none of your business, Mr. Savidge.’ She bore his scrutiny as long as she could, then flushed and looked away from him. The sun was firing the sea, but she felt too disturbed to appreciate the view from Lucan Savidge’s balcony. Her love for Nikos, his love for someone else, was something she could not talk about to this man who looked as though he had never loved anyone.

‘Don’t worry, little martyr eyes,’ he mocked, ‘your girlish romance is of no interest to me. But what of your family? Don’t they mind that you are alone in the Caribbean, where men of my stamp are likely to be met with?’

‘Sugar kings, m’sieur? I thought they were part of another century, another time. I had no idea they still ruled in Great Houses amidst their canefields and cocoa groves.’

His mouth pulled to one side in a smile that left his eyes a cool grey-green. ‘The Savidges of Dragon Bay are part of the history of this island,’ he said. ‘Our roots go deep into the soil with the cane and the cocoa. We came from Ireland as rebels, and we stayed to found a dynasty.’

‘On slave owning?’ she said scornfully.

‘The Caribs were our workers and we never made slaves of them.’ Now he was looking arrogant — cool, hard and arrogant, his wicker chair tipped back against the ironwork of the balcony. ‘I asked you a question about your family. Do they let a child like you roam where she pleases?’

‘In the first place I am not a child, Mr. Savidge. In the second place my parents are dead.’ She wiped the juice of a paw-paw from her lips. ‘Nap, the young boy who works here, told me about your brother—’

‘About him being crippled,’ the deep voice bit out the words, ‘and that I was blamed for his accident?’

‘You were blamed?’ Kara’s dark eyes seemed to devour the fine contours of her face.

‘Yes.’ Lucan Savidge surged to his feet and towered over the table, his hair a brand in the sunlight, his eyes fiercely alight, the hard bones jutting beneath the sun-browned skin of his face.

‘Yes,’ he said again, and he stared past Kara to where the sky met the sea far out. ‘We used to be inseparable, Pryde and I. We rode our horses like a pair of demons, we did everything together, trying I suppose to outdo one another in daring and skill. We thought of ourselves as out of the age of heroes and giants because We were the Savidge twins. We shared a common heritage, a worship of our history and our home.’

He began to pace back and forth, and Kara sat watching him from her seat at the table, her chin propped on her hand.

‘It wasn’t until I was seventeen,’ he said, ‘that I fully realized that Pryde was the heir to all I loved because he was the elder by an hour. Our Negro Da was annoyed with me for the usual reason that I was never as tidy as my brother. "Good t’ing you born last," she said. "Pryde is more fittin’ to be master at Dragon Bay".’