Escape From Desire

Escape from Desire
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

TAMARA sat up slowly, pushing a heavy swathe of wheat blonde hair back off her face. She didn’t normally wear it down, and already the hot Caribbean sun was beginning to bleach the loose wisps on her forehead silver. Cool grey eyes gazed thoughtfully out of a high-cheekboned, oval face of almost classical perfection, their expression faintly withdrawn, wary almost. It was Tamara’s habitual expression and one which had attracted the interest of more than one predatory male, until they realised that with Tamara the cool façade was more than merely skin-deep.

From the beach the sound of merrymaking and laughter was borne towards her on the light tropical breeze; from the swimming pool she could hear splashes and high-pitched childish voices, but here in the gardens of the luxurious holiday complex on St Stephen’s, there was no interruption and she had their beauty to herself.

She put down her paperback and glanced at her watch. Not long until lunch. The paperback was more of a safeguard against unwanted intruders than a compelling read; that was one of the problems about holidaying alone, but she had had little option—Malcolm hadn’t been able to come with her.

Malcolm! Sunlight glinted on the solitaire diamond on her left hand, the stone large enough to reveal its value, and yet not so large that it could ever be described as ostentatious. So typical of Malcolm. Eyebrows several shades darker than her hair drew together in a faint frown, What was the matter with her? Until now she had been perfectly content with Malcolm and their engagement. She sighed pensively. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of this tropical island paradise; or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the majority of the other guests were young couples, still at the honeymoon stage, or older couples free of growing families for the first time, bent on recapturing the magic of those earlier days. Certainly there were families among the hotel’s many guests, but somehow the atmosphere pervading the complex was essentially one of a sensuous lethargy, which was beginning to have its effect on Tamara’s thoughts, releasing doubts and breaking down barriers she hadn’t even been aware were there.

One of the main reasons she had agreed to marry Malcolm was because of his solid dependability, his lack of imagination and sexual magnetism. That wasn’t what she wanted in a husband. In the world of publishing in which she worked, as personal assistant to the fiction editor of a prestigious small publishing firm, she had seen all too often the results of hastily and ill-considered marriages, where two people declared that they had fallen madly in love only to change their minds within six or twelve months. That wasn’t for her. She wanted the sort of marriage her parents had had. Her parents. She sighed again, remembering the love and laughter which had pervaded the first fifteen years of her life, but all that love and laughter had gone the night they lost their lives in a motorway pile-up, leaving Tamara to be brought up by her father’s aunt, Lilian Forbes. Of course Aunt Lilian had been well-intentioned—it couldn’t have been an easy task to be faced with sole responsibility for a fifteen-year-old who was perhaps too emotional for her own good, but she was a distant, unbending woman, unused to children and found it difficult to show the spontaneous affection Tamara had been used to sharing with her parents, so gradually Tamara had learned to conceal behind a cool smile the turmoil of growing up feeling herself unloved and rejected. Eventually she herself, without realising it, had adopted her aunt’s mistrust of physically displayed affection, so that the boys she met found her cool and standoffish, turning to other girls less unapproachable and thus reinforcing Tamara’s conviction that she lacked the desirability of her peers.

To compensate for this she had pursued a career while other girls in the small village in which she lived got married and had babies, and at twenty-six she now considered herself immune from the emotions which seemed to possess other girls, and had been quite happy to accept Malcolm’s proposal.

Not that she had accepted him only for the sake of being married. London was no small village and there were plenty of men alive to the possibilities hidden deep within her cool exterior, but Tamara could never overcome the deep mistrust of what she termed ‘charmers’, which she had learned from her aunt.

She had even approved of the way in which Malcolm had taken her home to meet his parents, not once but twice, for what she knew to be a ‘vetting’. Colonel and Mrs Mellors had been polite but unforthcoming, and Tamara had sensed that they would have preferred to see their son married to one of their own set. Tamara could understand why. Although she had a well paid job and had done well for herself, she did not have the ‘county’ connections to appeal to the rather snobbish Mellors. Malcolm’s father owned and ran a small country estate which Malcolm had told her would come down to him in due course, but for now he was quite content with his accountancy partnership which enabled him to maintain an expensive London flat, and the BMW car he had bought just before their engagement.

Life with Malcolm would be as calm and orderly as drifting down a canal, and suddenly for the first time Tamara wondered if she really wanted such a narrow existence.

Suddenly feeling restless, she got up, and walked towards the beach; a tall slender girl with a cool ‘touch me not’ air which clung protectively to her.

Through the cluster of palms fringing the silver crescent of sand, Tamara could see one of the couples who had been on the same flight as herself. In their early twenties, and patently on honeymoon, their pleasure in one another was like a tiny piece of grit marring the placid surface of her life, and irritating her into the admission that Malcolm and the marriage they would have was not what her parents would have wanted for her.

The young couple were ducking one another playfully in the water; Malcolm hated any demonstrations of affection in public. What would their honeymoon be like? He had suggested they spent it in the Algarve; his parents had friends who owned a villa there and the golf courses were excellent.

Was that really what she wanted? she wondered; a husband who devoted himself to golf while she played bridge with his friends’ wives?

Telling herself that she was being stupidly emotional, Tamara gathered up her belongings prior to changing for lunch. Many people didn’t bother, simply eating at the poolside tables dressed completely informally, but Tamara felt after a morning in the intense heat of the tropical sun, her body covered in oil, that she wanted to shower and then eat somewhere where it was cool. She normally tanned well, despite her fair skin, but because she had never been so near the Equator before she was deliberately taking extra care to protect her skin from burning.

The hotel complex was attractive—bungalows for family occupation dotted the grounds, ablaze with jacaranda, bougainvillea, hibiscus, and passion flowers, but she had a room in the hotel itself—a double one, since she had originally been coming away on holiday with another girl from the publishing firm, but she had been transferred to their New York office at short notice and so Tamara had come away alone.

Malcolm had encouraged her. He was rather busy and felt that he himself would be unable to get away until their honeymoon, and as it was almost two years since she had had a proper holiday—her aunt had been very ill for a long time and Tamara had helped to nurse her through her terminal illness, using up all her holiday leave—Tamara had felt that she needed the break.

To get to her room she had to walk through the hotel foyer, a cool, shady room with a terrazzo-tiled floor, cane furniture and plenty of greenery. The receptionist smiled at her as she asked for her key. All the staff were exceptionally pleasant and ready to help. Tamara smiled back, and ran quickly up the flight of stairs leading to the bedrooms.

By law no building on the island could be higher than two storeys, and it was pleasant to be able to look out of her bedroom window, and to find that the only thing obstructing her view of the Caribbean was a clump of palm trees, waving slightly in the onshore breeze.

As she stripped off her swimsuit Tamara was pleased to see that already her skin was turning a warm honey shade—Malcolm did not approve of bikinis, nor had Aunt Lilian, and Tamara had never owned one. There was a boutique attached to the hotel, and she had noticed some particularly attractive swimwear in the window when she walked past it. Her swimsuit was completely plain—a dull navy, which when compared with the bright beach clothes worn by the other visitors seemed very schoolgirlish and almost frumpish.

The water pressure in the shower could sometimes be erratic, as Tamara had already learned, but today it worked reasonably efficiently, the cool spray delicious against her hot skin.

As she stepped out she caught sight of her naked body in the mirror, her breasts warmly full, but firm, the nipples a delicate pink against the pale flesh. She tried to visualise Malcolm as her husband, the two of them sharing the intimacies of the bedroom, but her imagination refused to conjure up the image. Cross with herself, she pulled a slender cotton dress from the wardrobe, brushing her hair vigorously, and constraining it into a neat knot at the back, before slipping on loose espadrilles.

The dining room was busier than she had anticipated. She had brought her book with her as protection and had hoped to secure one of the smaller tables furthest away from the huge windows overlooking the sea, so that she could eat there unnoticed by the other guests.

This hope was forestalled the moment she entered the restaurant because she was hailed by a plump, dark-haired woman with a friendly smile.

‘Tamara! Come and join us.’

She indicated one of the two spare chairs at the table she was sharing with her husband, and Tamara had no option but to slide into one of them, and accept the menu George Partington was handing her.

George and Dot had been on the same flight from Heathrow as Tamara and had introduced themselves to her at the airport. They were an outward-going couple, obviously quick to make friends, and Tamara suspected that, unlike her, they already knew most of their fellow guests.

The hotel was a relatively new one, and had not previously been used by package holiday firms, and consequently only half a dozen or so people on board their flight from Heathrow had had as their final destination, this particular hotel.

Among them had been the honeymooners Tamara had seen on the beach; a foursome, comprising two young couples who tended to stick together; George and Dot; two young girls, Tamara herself and a man who seemed to have come on his own and whom Tamara had glimpsed momentarily at the airport.

‘Try the shrimp and avocado salad,’ Dot encouraged her. ‘It’s delicious. Even now after several days I still can’t get used to the sight of avocados actually growing!’ Her eyes went to Tamara’s engagement ring. ‘You’re here on your own, aren’t you?’ she asked curiously.

‘Yes.’

Tamara felt reluctant to answer any questions about herself and was glad when Dot’s attention was transferred from her to the man just entering the restaurant.

Dressed in black jeans and a thin black cotton shirt, he looked sombrely out of place in a room where most of the men were wearing brightly patterned beach shirts and light-coloured trousers. He was different in other ways, too, she reflected, unable to pinpoint exactly why the man standing by the door should look so unlike any of the other holidaymakers. A shock of thick dark hair brushed the collar of his shirt, thick dark lashes concealing his eyes from her quick scrutiny.

‘There’s Zachary Fletcher,’ Dot murmured to George. ‘Ask him if he wants to join us. Isn’t he devastatingly sexy?’ she appealed to Tamara while George redoubled his efforts to catch the other man’s eye. ‘We were talking to him in the bar last night. Oh, he hasn’t seen us!’ she exclaimed in disappointment as the other man turned and walked towards one of the small tables almost hidden away in a corner of the room.

Even the way he walked was different from other people. Tamara reflected, aware of a tense watching quality in the way he moved, quickly and incredibly quietly for so tall and muscular a man. As he moved muscles rippled under the thin black shirt, the fabric of his jeans moving against the taut pressure of his thighs. Tamara found that she was holding her breath, studying the harshly chiselled features of a face that gave absolutely nothing away; a hard, too cynical face for a man who at most could only be in his mid-thirties.

‘Devastatingly sexy’, Dot had called him, and on a wave of revulsion Tamara acknowledged that the older woman was right. The man exuded a sensuality which was quite unmistakable. There wasn’t a woman in the room who had not watched him covertly as he walked across it, and Tamara felt almost sickened by their, and her own, avid interest in a man so patently uninterested in them.

He barely raised his eyes from the table except to order his meal, and Tamara noticed that his right arm hung a little awkwardly.

‘He’s here to recuperate from an accident,’ Dot told her excitedly, adding in a confiding tone, ‘He’s in the Army—oh, he didn’t tell us that, but I couldn’t help noticing it on his passport as we came through Customs.’

Tamara glanced at him again, convinced that Dot must have made a mistake. He didn’t strike her as the type of man who would accept the tight discipline of the Army—unlike Colonel Mellor, Malcolm’s father, whose considered opinion it was that Modern Youth badly needed a spell of ‘square bashing’—he looked like a loner, a man who deliberately withdrew himself from the pack. And that thick long hair didn’t suggest the Army either. He lifted his head, catching her off guard, cool green eyes surveying her with devastating intensity, before she was released, trembling inwardly, from the laser beam of his searching glance.

After they had finished their lunch Tamara accompanied the Partingtons back through the hotel foyer, lingering with Dot over the window display in the boutique.

‘Won’t you just look at that bikini!’ Dot sighed, pointing out the briefest scraps of cyclamen pink cotton Tamara had ever seen in her life. ‘If only I had a figure like yours! Why don’t you go in and try it on?’ she urged, her eyes twinkling as she added, ‘Treat yourself and your fiancé.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t!’

‘Of course you could. I’ll come with you, George can wait outside.’

Like it or not, Tamara was propelled inside the boutique, Dot telling the attractive dark-skinned girl who stepped forward to serve them that they wanted to see the bikini in the window.

‘It’s French,’ the girl explained in a soft voice. ‘And the colour will look stunning with your hair. I think you’ll find it’s your size. There’s a changing cubicle just behind the curtain.’ She indicated to the rear of the boutique and Tamara went reluctantly towards it, wishing she had had the strength of will to refuse to enter the shop in the first place, but there was no overruling Dot without actually being rude, and Tamara liked the older woman too much to want to do that.

While she stripped and changed into the brief triangles of cotton she could hear Dot explaining to the salesgirl that she and George were enjoying a silver wedding anniversary present to themselves.

‘With both our children married and their own lives to lead we decided it was now or never—before the grandchildren start to arrive,’ Tamara heard her say as she fastened the strings of the minute briefs and stared at herself in the mirror.

Her skin gleamed silkily in the half-light of the changing cubicle, almost translucent where the sun hadn’t touched it. The bikini top cupped the soft swell of her breasts, the clever stitching shaping them so that her body seemed to have a voluptuousness she didn’t recognise.

‘Are you ready in there?’

She stepped reluctantly out of the cubicle, feeling selfconscious and awkward, wishing for the first time since she had left her teens behind that she wasn’t quite so tall. She felt as though she were exposing an almost indecent length of leg, and longed for a wrap or something similar to provide her with a little more protection than that afforded by the minute scraps of cotton.

‘Oh, Tamara, you look fantastic!’ Dot exclaimed admiringly. ‘You must buy it. You’ll really stun them on the beach in that!’

‘Don’t you think it’s a little bit …’ Tamara searched for the words to describe her doubts, but Dot waved them aside.

‘It’s lovely,’ she declared stoutly. ‘You should be proud of your attractive body, my dear, not ashamed of it. Wait until that fiancé of yours sees you in it!’

‘I don’t think Malcolm would approve,’ Tamara told her faintly, surprised to see the frown suddenly creasing Dot’s forehead.

When the salesgirl moved away to answer the telephone Dot said firmly to Tamara, ‘You can tell me that it’s no business of mine if you like—after all, we have only just met, but I believe in always speaking my mind—it saves a deal of worry and trouble in the end. This engagement of yours—are your family happy about it?’

Tamara was taken aback. She wasn’t used to people questioning her so frankly, and was annoyed with herself for hesitating slightly before replying coolly,

‘I have no “family"—my parents are both dead, but I can assure you that there’s nothing to disapprove of in Malcolm. In fact,’ she added dryly, ‘there are those who consider him something of a catch.’

‘I wasn’t talking in the material sense,’ Dot explained, ignoring Tamara’s withdrawal. ‘I was talking about the fact that you’re going to marry a man who, it seems, sees your body as something to be ashamed of rather than delighted in. I thought that attitude to sex had disappeared long ago.’

‘Just because Malcolm isn’t a sex maniac, it doesn’t mean that we won’t be happy together,’ Tamara retorted stiffly.

Dot shook her head in bemusement, as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

‘Oh, my dear,’ she said sadly, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing. You’re throwing away one of life’s greatest pleasures, you know. Things were different when I met George, there wasn’t the freedom there is now, but from that very first moment I knew beyond any doubt that I wanted him physically very much indeed. I did have girl friends like you, though, many of whom found out too late that without sexual desire marriage can be a very arid state indeed. Forgive me for speaking so frankly—I can see I’ve offended you, but you remind me very much of my own daughter …’

‘It’s perfectly all right,’ Tamara told her, relenting in the face of the other woman’s patent distress. ‘I suppose I am being a bit touchy, but I know Malcolm and I will be happy. For one thing …’ She hesitated and then plunged on bravely, ‘Well, to be honest, Dot, I just don’t think I have a particularly high sex drive. In fact …’ She hesitated, wishing she hadn’t begun the conversation, realising that for the first time in her life she was revealing things about herself she had never ever revealed before—and to a stranger.

‘Don’t say any more,’ Dot insisted sympathetically. ‘I think I know what’s on your mind, Tamara, but believe me, I don’t think you’re right—you just haven’t met the right man. When you do you’ll discover a side of yourself you never dreamed existed, and he, if he’s got any sense, will delight in helping you to discover your real sensuality.’

For some reason Tamara shivered, suddenly conscious that she was standing in the shop still wearing the brief bikini.

‘Buy it,’ Dot urged her. ‘Take the first step on the road to discovering yourself.’

She wanted to refuse and had fully intended to do so, but somehow she found herself leaving the boutique half an hour later clutching a glossy black carrier with the boutique’s name scrawled in gold across it, still wondering what on earth had possessed her.

George was waiting for them by the noticeboard on which the hotel pinned details of trips and activities they organised.

‘This sounds interesting,’ he told them, indicating a handwritten notice headed ‘Rain Forest Walk.’

Tamara read the details quickly and discovered that the hotel had organised a walk through the tropical rain forest which began on the slopes of the island’s volcanic mountains and which would take the better part of a full day.

‘We set off from here about eleven, drive to the rain forest, and then have lunch prior to starting the walk,’ George told them. ‘The manager here tells me that it’s well worth going. I hadn’t realised it, but apparently the rain forest covers a good two-thirds of the island; because the volcanic mountains are so steep they’ve never been cultivated, and the forest never cleared. It extends for several hundred square miles, and the paths are only known to a handful of local guides. I’m told that we stand a good chance of seeing some rare butterflies; and the parrots, of course.’

‘I don’t know if I fancy it,’ Dot told him frankly. ‘Won’t there be creepy-crawlies and snakes?’

‘Apparently not—there aren’t any snakes on the island.’

Tamara was tempted to put her name down for the walk. It sounded interesting, and after two days of simply lying soaking up the sun she was ready for something a little more physically demanding. As St Stephen’s was comparatively undeveloped there were very few organised tours apart from those involving cruising round the island and stopping off at various secluded bays for swimming and beach parties.

‘I think I’ll go,’ she announced impulsively. ‘I rather like the idea. When is it?’

‘Tomorrow,’ George told her. ‘How about it?’ he asked Dot. ‘Shall I put our names down?’

‘I suppose you might as well. It will be something to tell the kids about.’

‘Yes, I must remember to take my camera, they’ll enjoy seeing a shot of Mum “exploring the jungle”,’ George teased her.

In the end all three of them added their names to the short list.

‘The Somerfields—those are the young honeymooners, aren’t they?’ Dot asked her husband, scrutinising the list. ‘The Brownes and the Chalfonts—that’s the foursome who came together. They’re all in the fashion business,’ she explained to Tamara. ‘Alex Browne is a designer, apparently. Oh,’ she added, ‘Zachary Fletcher’s put his name down. In fact he was first on the list.’

‘If he’s been involved in an accident perhaps he needs the exercise,’ George suggested. ‘I noticed when we got off the plane with him that he was limping slightly.’

Zachary Fletcher! Tamara wished she had not decided to go. For some reason the dark-haired man disturbed her. Telling herself that it would look odd if she backed out now, she contented herself with the conviction that Zachary Fletcher was hardly likely to notice her; and then wondered why she should find the knowledge faintly depressing.

‘I think I’ll go up and change,’ she told the Partingtons. ‘I want to try and do a bit more sunbathing, especially if there won’t be time tomorrow.’

‘Wear your new bikini,’ Dot urged her. ‘We might see you later on the beach.’

When she went up to her room Tamara had no intention of changing into the cyclamen bikini, but she couldn’t resist taking it out of the bag, still amazed that she had actually bought it, knowing she would never wear it, and then, governed by some impulse she could not understand, she hurried into the bathroom and quickly changed into it, before she could change her mind, and not daring to visualise Malcolm’s reaction to her scantily clad body.

Picking up a white towelling robe and shrugging it on, she collected her book and the bag containing her suntan lotion and glasses before hurrying back outside.

The sun beat down with an intensity that burned right through her protective robe, and Tamara decided to forgo the beach in favour of the privacy of the gardens. She found a secluded spot protected by a low-growing hedge of tropical shrubs, their huge trumpet-shaped scarlet flowers almost too perfect to be real. The huge beach towel she had brought with her gave her something to lie on, and having smoothed as much of her body as she could reach with suntan cream she donned her glasses and picked up her book.

Half an hour slid by, before the book began to fail to hold her attention, which she found wandering to the antics of a tiny humming-bird darting in and out of the creeper adorning the walls of a nearby block of self-contained suites, and Tamara marvelled at the way the tiny creature delved so energetically in search of food.

She turned over, easing her stiff shoulders, tensing instinctively as she saw the black jean-clad legs in front of her, before her eyes moved slowly upwards over taut masculine thighs and a muscular chest before coming to rest on the saturnine face bent towards her.

Her skin went hot, burning with embarrassment as he glanced cynically over her body, so intimately revealed in her brief bikini.

‘Very provocative, but wasted here,’ he taunted softly. ‘Why aren’t you on the beach?’

Tamara suddenly found her voice, which to her chagrin was shaking with the pent-up force of her anger.

‘Why should I be?’ she demanded. ‘If you must know, I came here because I wanted …’

‘To be alone,’ he finished mockingly. ‘Snap! So what do we do now? Makes ourselves an interesting item of gossip or …’

Tamara scrambled to her feet, feeling at a distinct disadvantage lying at his feet like … like a sacrificial offering.

‘If you want to be alone, Mr Fletcher,’ she replied, stressing the formality of the ‘Mr’, ‘then I suggest you find somewhere else …’

‘I like it here,’ he told her calmly. ‘It’s quiet and it’s private.’ His teeth glinted in a white smile, the grooves either side of his mouth deepening, giving Tamara a glimpse of the man he might possibly be when he wasn’t either bored or indifferent. ‘Be a good girl,’ he suggested. ‘I’m sure you’ll find plenty of young men to admire you on the beach, and attractive though you are, I’m really well past the age where I’m incited to lust by the sight of a pretty girl with very little on.’

Throughout this speech Tamara’s eyes had gradually widened, as her body stiffened until she was staring at him in frozen outrage, scarcely able to speak for the anger building up inside her.

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to imply,’ she gritted out at last, hands clenched furiously at her sides, ‘but if you’re suggesting that I came here deliberately because you … because I knew you come here, you couldn’t be more wrong. You see,’ she told him sweetly, releasing the fingers of her left hand and raising it a little, ‘I don’t happen to need to run after other men—I’ve already managed to catch mine!’

She knew it was a vulgar little speech, but she really didn’t care; she didn’t care about anything but banishing from those green eyes the expression which said, quite plainly, that he thought she had deliberately come to this part of the gardens dressed as she was because she hoped to attract his attention.

‘I had no idea that you came here,’ she finished with a flourish. ‘If I had I would have made a point of avoiding it.’

‘Would you indeed?’ His eyes were on her left hand, narrowed and faintly assessing. ‘Are you sure about that? Girls have been known to do strange things when they’ve been … deprived of their fiancés’ presence.’

‘You’re an expert on brief affairs with other people’s girl-friends, are you, Mr Fletcher?’ she asked scornfully. ‘Well, you can relax—I’ll never be deprived, or depraved enough to trouble you.’

‘Oh, it wouldn’t be any trouble,’ she was assured with a smoothness which caught her off guard. ‘Not normally, that is.’

His glance seemed to stroke over her heated body, drawing from her a brilliant look of hatred, and her fingers curled in on themselves again.

‘It’s just that I prefer to do my own hunting,’ he added, further enraging her. ‘Now be a good little girl and run away and play with someone else, mm?’

When Tamara eventually reached her room she gave vent to her fury, removing the garments which she was sure had caused Zachary Fletcher’s preposterous insults and hurling them on to the floor. How dared he suggest … How dared he look at her like that … How dared he imply that …

Cheeks flushed, her eyes sparkling angrily under their fine brows, she turned on the shower, subjecting her body to a vigorous scrubbing as though by doing so she could punish it for encouraging Zachary Fletcher to believe she was the sort of girl who behaved in the way he had implied. And even if she was a man-chaser, she would never, ever in a million years, chase after someone like him, she decided through gritted teeth as she dried herself. Never!