India Grey - Spanish Aristocrat, Forced Bride

‘Why not?’ he said brutally as images of the place he had been earlier flashed into his head with jagged, strobe-lit insistence. This was just a bird, for God’s sake. An injured bird; a pity, not a tragedy. ‘Why not end its suffering?’

‘Because you don’t have the right to play God like that,’ she said quietly. ‘None of us do.’

Standing in the last light of the fading day, she looked remote and almost mystically beautiful. Not of this world. What did she know about suffering? He could feel the pulse beating loudly in his ears, but her words cut through it, exploding inside his head. No? he wanted to say. Then who will? It’s not power that makes men behave like God, but desperation .

He turned away abruptly, walking back towards the door to the stairs. ‘It’s not about having the right,’ he said bleakly. ‘It’s about having the guts.’

‘Wait!’

He heard her come down after him, and the blue twilight darkened as she shut the door at the top of the stairs again. Tristan stopped on the landing, his shoulders against the closed door, and watched her come down the stairs, melting out of the shadows like something from a dream.

Slowly she came down the last couple of steps and stood in front of him, shaking her head. ‘I don’t,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I don’t have the guts to kill it. What shall I do?’

He shrugged. ‘Sometimes you just have to accept that there’s nothing you can do.’

‘But that’s—’

‘Life,’ he said flatly. ‘That’s—’

But he didn’t finish, because at that moment the dusk was shattered by two loud explosions that detonated a chain of night-marish images and sent an instant tide of adrenaline crashing through him. He saw her start violently, her head snapping round to the window, her eyes wide with shock. Pure instinct took over. Without thinking he reached for her, pulling her into his body, against his crashing heart as he shouldered open the door behind him and dragged her into the room beyond.

The next moment the sky beyond the two tall, arched Gothic windows was lit up with showers of glittering stars.

Fireworks. It was fireworks. Not bombs and mortars. Relief hit him, followed a heartbeat later by another sensation; less welcome, but every bit as powerful as he became aware of the feel of her breasts beneath the silk of her dress, crushed against his chest. As another volley of blasts split the sky she pulled away from him, laughing shakily.

And then she looked around her at the hexagonal room, with its pale grey walls and its arched windows and the bed with the carved wooden posts at its centre, and suddenly she wasn’t laughing any more.

‘Yours?’ she whispered.

He nodded briefly. Over the years he’d lent Tom more money than either of them bothered to keep track of. The tower was a token return for his investment. ‘It’s where I come when I want to be alone.’

Their gazes locked. Time hitched, hanging suspended. Her full lips were parted, her breathing was rapid and her grey eyes shone with shimmering colour from the fireworks that exploded above them. Then she blinked and looked away.

‘Oh. I see, I’m sorry—I’ll go.’

She moved towards the door, but he got there first, slamming it shut and standing with his shoulders against it.

‘Tonight I don’t want to be alone.’

ADRENALINE was pulsing through Tristan, making the beat of his heart hard and painful. It vibrated through his whole body as the explosions continued outside—audacious reminders of the things he had travelled around half the world to forget.

In the grainy, blurred light Lily’s luminous beauty had an ethereal quality. Her eyes were still fixed on his, and as he gazed into them he felt the panic recede a little, washed away by the warm, anaesthetising tide of desire. Rationality slipped away, like sand through his fingers. For a moment he battled to hold onto it, to anchor himself back in the world of reason, but then she moved forward so she was standing right in front of him and he could see the spiked shadows cast by her lashes on the high arc of her cheekbone and feel the whispering sigh of her breath on his skin as she exhaled shakily.

‘I don’t want to be alone, either,’ she said in a low voice. ‘But I don’t want to go back to the party.’

Slowly, almost reluctantly, he reached out and touched the gleaming curve of her bare shoulder with his fingertip. He felt her jerk slightly beneath his touch, as if it had burned her, and an answering jolt of sharp, clenching desire shot through him.

With deliberate slowness he bent his head, inhaling her scent as he brought his lips down to her shoulder. ‘You don’t like parties?’

‘I don’t like crowds. I prefer…’ she breathed, then gave a soft, shivering gasp as his mouth brushed her skin ‘…privacy. I don’t like being looked at.’

‘You’re in the wrong job,’ Tristan said dryly.

‘Tell me about it.’

There was a wistful ache in her voice that made him lift his head and look into her face. For a fleeting moment he glimpsed the bleakness there, but then she was tilting her head up to his, her lips parting as they rose to meet his, and the questions that were forming in his head dissolved like snow in summer.

He didn’t want to know anyway. He didn’t want to talk to her, for pity’s sake. This was purely physical.

Not emotional.

Never emotional.

Her hands came up to cup his head, her fingers sliding into his hair, pulling him down, harder, deeper. He sensed a hunger in her that matched his own. The silk dress hung loosely from her shoulders and he knew that simply slipping the narrow, gathered straps downwards would make it fall to the floor, but he forced himself to wait, to take it slowly, to suppress the naked savagery of his need.

Above all, this was why he had come. Tom and the press were just convenient excuses.

This was his salvation, his purifying baptismal fire. This was where he lost himself, purged himself of all the images from the last week that haunted him whenever he closed his eyes. It didn’t matter whose body he lost himself in, whose lips he was kissing. It meant nothing. It was simply a means to an end.

A way of remembering the joy of being alive, the pleasures of the flesh.

A way of forgetting.

Lily pulled away, taking a deep, gasping breath of air, trying to steady herself against the swelling tide of pure desire that threatened to sweep her away. The light was fading quickly now; the sky beyond the arched windows was the soft, lush purple of clematis petals and the walls of the tower room had melted into it, making it feel as if they’d been cut adrift from reality and were floating far out at sea. Tristan’s hands rested on her shoulders, his thumbs beneath her jaw, stopping her from dropping her head, ducking away from meeting his gaze. In a world of smudged inky shades of blue and mauve his eyes were as deep and dark as a tropical ocean.

‘I have to warn you,’ he said roughly, ‘this is just tonight. One night. No strings, no commitment, no happy ever after. Is that what you want?’

His honesty made her breath catch. No promises, no lies. Somewhere, distantly, she was aware of pain, of disappointment, but it was numbed by the dizzying lust that circulated through her body like a drug. In the morning she was leaving for Africa—a different world, a new direction in her life. Tonight stood alone; a bridge between the old and the new. There were no rules, only the imperatives of the moment. Of forgetting about tomorrow, and giving herself something to remember when it came.

‘Yes,’ she whispered, lifting her hands to the neck of his shirt, sliding them beneath the open collar. ‘Just tonight.’