Anne Mather - A Dangerous Taste Of Passion

Will she surrender to the stranger at Orchid Cay?

For Lily Fielding, the small, safe Caribbean island is all she’s ever known. But the appearance of an intriguing newcomer is about to change everything for this unworldly vicar’s daughter, for the sensual awakening he promises is both intoxicating and illicit…

Raphael Oliveira should resist the temptation that beautiful Lily presents; after all, he knows that wherever he goes, danger follows… Although, once she is under his spell, Rafe’s intense passion and dark past threaten to destroy them both!

ANNE MATHERalways wanted to write. For years she wrote only for her own pleasure, and it wasn’t until her husband suggested that she ought to send one of her stories to a publisher that they put several publishers’ names into a hat and pulled one out. The rest as they say is history. 150 books later, Anne is literally staggered by the result! Her email address is mystic-am@msn.comand she would be happy to hear from any of her readers.

Anne Mather

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-05196-5

A DANGEROUS TASTE OF PASSION

© 2016 Anne Mather

Published in Great Britain 2016

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:

Change of font size and line height

Change of background and font colours

Change of font

Change justification

Text to speech

To Kate, the best daughter ever.

With all my love.

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

EPILOGUE

About the Publisher

HE WAS STANDING on the cliff that rose steeply at the end of the cove.

Was he watching her? Lily didn’t know. But she didn’t need her intuition to realise who he was. Dee-Dee had told her; had warned her actually. And Dee-Dee seemed to know everything.

But then, Dee-Dee also claimed she had the sight, and no one on the small Caribbean island of Orchid Cay would argue with her. And it was true, the old woman had foretold Lily’s mother’s illness, and last season’s hurricane that had almost destroyed the marina in town.

Lily’s father didn’t agree that Dee-Dee knew everything. He regarded their housekeeper’s visions as just mumbo-jumbo. But Lily supposed that as an Anglican priest he couldn’t be seen to have anything to do with the ‘black magic’ he declared Dee-Dee’s claims to be.

Still, right now, Lily was less concerned with Dee-Dee’s abilities than with her desire for the man to go away. She didn’t like thinking he was watching her and she wondered again what he was doing on the island.

According to Dee-Dee, his name was Raphael Oliveira and he was from New York. The old housekeeper had speculated that he’d got in trouble in the city and had bought one of the most expensive properties on the island to escape from justice.

But even Dee-Dee’s speculations couldn’t always be relied upon and no one had even known that the house at Orchid Point was for sale.

Whatever, Lily wished he would just turn around and go away. This was the time she usually took her evening swim, but she had no intention of taking her clothes off in front of him—even if he was more than a hundred feet away.

Folding her towel over her arm, she started back towards the rectory. She only permitted herself a surreptitious glance in his direction when she was almost home.

And discovered, to her chagrin, that he was gone.

* * *

A week later, Lily was sitting at her desk, entering the details of the previous season’s charters into the computer, when someone came into the agency.

She’d worked for Cartagena Charters ever since she’d left the university she’d attended in Florida. It wasn’t a particularly demanding job, but Orchid Cay was a small town and there weren’t that many jobs that her father would approve of.

Her working area, such as it was, was behind a screen that separated the counter from the office. Usually her boss, Ray Myers, attended to all enquiries himself. But today Ray was away in Miami, taking delivery of a new two-masted schooner. He’d told Lily there probably wouldn’t be any new customers until the weekend, but she was nominally in charge.

Sighing, as much at being interrupted as at the prospect of having to deal with an enquiry herself, Lily slid out of her seat and rounded the Perspex screen into the business area.

A man was there, standing with his back to her, staring out of the plate glass windows at the masts of yachts bobbing in the marina beyond.

He was tall and very tanned, with overly long dark hair, broad shoulders encased in a leather jacket. His thumbs were pushed into the back pockets of tight-fitting jeans, accentuating the fact that they clung to narrow hips and long powerful legs.

Lily swallowed. She knew who he was instantly; had sensed it, she realised, before she’d actually walked round the screen and seen him. It was the same man who’d watched her from the cliff a week ago, the man Dee-Dee had warned her might be dangerous to know.