Lindsay Armstrong - A Question Of Marriage

The crazy part about it was that he made her feel as sweet as a peach while he kissed her lingeringly, but not only that. He himself felt so amazingly good it was almost impossible to remain unaffected. How did he do it? she marvelled as he ran his hands down her back and laid a trail of feather-light kisses down her neck. With great restraint, she answered herself. This was no stolen, victory kiss—he was far too clever for that, damn him, she thought.

This was a skilled assault that made her skin feel like silk as those cool, dry lips wandered across it, and the way his hands found the curves of her body made her heartbeat triple. This was a man who made not one blunder while her senses rioted and she began to drink in the feel of him through her pores.

His height, those broad shoulders, the interesting hollows of his face, which she found herself wanting to touch, the crisp cotton of his shirt, the hard, taut length of him that she was now resting against as he stopped kissing her, with not an ounce of defiance left in her but one embarrassingly girlish word on her lips—Wow!

To her everlasting gratitude, she managed to stop herself from actually saying it as he put her away from him and steadied her before releasing her.

‘Well?’ There was sheer devilry in those dark eyes as he posed the question.

Aurora breathed deeply and had to suffer the indignity of him restoring some tendrils of hair behind her ears and straightening the collar of her blouse before she could think of a response. Then she could only fall back on the truth. ‘I’m speechless,’ she said huskily and licked her lips.

He raised an eyebrow at her with a mixture of amusement and mockery. ‘I’ll take it as read, then. And I’ll leave you to—compose yourself.’

‘I didn’t necessarily mean I was bowled over or anything…’ she began to protest not quite truthfully, but stopped with her eyes darkening. ‘You’re not still going to lock me in!’

‘Oh, yes, I am, sweetheart,’ he said coolly, then looked amused. ‘By the way, there’s an en-suite bathroom through there.’ He pointed. ‘Never let it be said I inconvenienced a guest even if they are burglars or groupies—and I’m now quite sure it was you that dark and stormy night.’ He turned on his heel and walked out and Aurora heard the key turn in the lock before she was able to think of a thing to do.

‘I don’t believe this!’ she said through gritted teeth, then sank back onto the bed to drop her face into her hands as she marvelled bitterly on her sheer bad luck and wondered what to do next. Of course, it was obvious, she thought. She had no choice but to come clean, yet it went supremely against the grain to be outwitted by this man and there was no guarantee he wouldn’t insist on reading at least some bits of her diaries…

Several minutes later she got up and went into the bathroom, where she washed her face and had a drink of water. Then she returned to the bedroom and went straight to the fireplace. The brick came out easily; her diaries were still in the cache. She removed them, put them into the plastic bag from her shoulder bag and tied the fishing line to the bag. She turned off the light and went to the window that was so impossible to climb out of because of the wrought-iron bars—apart from being one floor above the ground.

Five minutes of silent, intense scrutiny of the shrubbery and surrounds below yielded nothing, no movement at all. Her old bedroom was not directly above any window on the ground floor, so she felt quite safe as she manoeuvred the rubbish bag awkwardly through the bars, lowered it to the ground to be swallowed up amongst some flourishing hydrangea bushes, and threw the line down after it.

Then she switched on the light again and looked around. Despite the luxuriousness of the bedroom, a thick-pile silvery blue carpet, matching curtains and bed cover, there was only one chair, a wooden antique that matched the marvellous bureau but looked highly uncomfortable.

She shrugged, slipped her shoes off and retired to Luke Kirwan’s bed, where she propped the pillows up behind her and picked up the book on his bedside table—a murder mystery, as it happened. And she’d finished the first chapter when she heard the key in the lock. She made no move to get up and that was his first sight of her as he came into the room—propped against his pillows, looking gravely at him over the top of his book.

Inwardly, Luke Kirwan was amused. This girl had enormous nerve if nothing else. Not that she lacked other qualities, he conceded. A delicate figure, unusual beauty—her hair and eyes alone were stunning—a flair for clothes and the kind of joie de vivre that was infectious. The fact remained, he reminded himself, that discreet enquiries downstairs had shed no light on who she was, and the story of coming with someone who’d deserted her for an ex-girlfriend was most likely another invention.

‘I do hope you’re comfortable—or, after what passed in here before I locked you in, is that an invitation to join you?’ he said with an undercurrent of sarcasm.

‘Not at all.’ Aurora closed the book, got up and slipped on her shoes. She added, as she shook out her beautiful skirt and ran her hands through her hair, ‘It was your idea to lock me in, not mine, so I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t make myself comfortable. How do you do, by the way? I’m Aurora Templeton.’ She held out her hand.

He crossed the room to take it, and felt it tremble briefly in his. It was the only sign of inner nerves he could detect, however. Her back was as straight as ever, her chin elevated and those stunning green eyes proud.

‘Why do I get the feeling this is not to be a—penitent confession—brought on by sober reflection?’ he murmured a little wryly.

Aurora took her hand back. ‘Because you really have only yourself to blame, Mr Kirwan. You and your secretary, that is. This preoccupation with guarding you from “groupies” is what brought this all about. I find it a little hard to believe that any kind of a real man needs to go to those lengths anyway, but, be that as it may—if I could have got in touch with you by any other means, I would not have had to resort to this.’

‘Hang on—resort to robbing me, do you mean?’ he queried quizzically.

‘No. Reclaiming my property,’ she stated.

‘Really, you’re going to have explain better than that, Aurora Templeton.’ He paused and narrowed his eyes. ‘Why does that name ring a bell?’

‘From the number of messages I left on your answering machine that you ignored?’ she suggested with irony. ‘But you also bought this house from my father,’ she explained. ‘This was my bedroom.’

Luke Kirwan blinked.

‘And this,’ Aurora continued, turning towards the fireplace, ‘was my secret cache from the time I discovered it when I was about twelve.’

He followed her across the room and ducked his head to look into the fireplace. He observed the brick and the empty cavity in the wall, put his hand into it and whistled softly. ‘I see,’ he said as he straightened.

‘Good!’ Aurora said briskly. ‘Now, you may or may not have been aware that I was overseas at the time the house was sold—’

‘I had no idea Ambrose Templeton had a daughter,’ he said, and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his hands.

‘Well, he does,’ she said flatly, ‘and I can prove it. But I didn’t even know the house had been sold until I got home, just a few days before he took off on his round-the-world voyage. And it was only after he’d left that I remembered the cache and something that was very precious to me in it.’

‘Why the hell didn’t you just say so?’ Luke Kirwan demanded.

‘I would have, if I could have got here first—to make sure no one got to it before I did.’