Dying For You
CHARLOTTE LAMB
Deja Vu?"I remember you, Annie. I remember everything." Annie Dumont led a busy life as an internationally loved pop star. She loved her work, but she had heard those awful stories about overzealous fans who had become obsessed with their idols. So she was naturally frightened when she began receiving strange phone calls.Little did she suspect who it was. Little did she realize that she was about to be dragged into a living nightmare, the likes of which could not have entered her wildest dreams!
Dying for You
Charlotte Lamb
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u5ea61dc7-b60b-59e3-bbf4-f5581a13f8fe)
CHAPTER TWO (#udaca1314-6d1d-5c59-96c4-ba9f80f6b63f)
CHAPTER THREE (#u9b398cc3-f209-594f-ac4b-9a6cb8cd740d)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
ANNIE got the first phone call at midnight on a cold spring night.
‘Remember me?’ a voice whispered, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
She had only just got back to her London flat, she was alone, and already on the verge of tears because her best friend, Diana, had just married the man Annie loved.
‘Who is this?’ she asked, then wondered if it was one of the band, who were all still drinking at the bar in the hotel where the wedding reception had been held. When they were drunk all five of them could do the silliest things.
But there was no reply. The phone went dead. She hung up, frowning, then switched on the answering machine. The last thing she needed tonight was crank phone calls.
She turned away with a swish of silk, comforted by the sensual feel of the sleek material against her skin. Annie loved good clothes. She had helped Diana choose her wedding-dress and had chosen the dress she herself wore as brides-maid—almond-green silk, a colour which exactly matched the colour of her eyes. She would be able to wear it for parties afterwards. There was a faintly Victorian look about the style of the dress, as there had been about Di’s wedding-dress; and Annie had put up her long black hair into a smooth chignon at the back of her head, carried a tiny Victorian-style bouquet of violets displayed on ferns.
She must take the best-looking flower and a spray of fern out of the bouquet, and put them between the pages of a book of poetry. She often pressed wild flowers in books; she liked finding them when she turned the pages years afterwards, being reminded of some special day, some important moment in her life. They always seemed to retain their scent, yet altered and nostalgic, a gentle, faded sweetness that gave her back instant memories.
However hurt she felt, she knew this had been a very important day in her life; she would want to remember it.
Yawning, she looked at her watch. Bed! she thought, seeing that it was way past midnight now. Annie kept strict hours when she wasn’t performing on stage. She would be in bed by ten most days, up very early, and tomorrow was no different. Tomorrow she had to be up at seven. She had a photo call at nine at the recording studio where she was just putting the final touches to her new disc.
She took off her green silk dress and hung it up carefully in her wall-to-wall wardrobe, put on a brief nightdress and matching négligé, then sat down at the dressing-table and started to take off her make-up, and smooth a toning lotion into her skin. However late, however tired she was, Annie always went through the same routine before going to bed.
‘When you’re in the public eye all the time people notice everything about you, so never forget to look your best. You are always going to be on stage!’ Philip had told her years ago.
She hadn’t been sure then that she liked the idea. In fact, it had been her first premonition that fame and success were not going to be without their drawbacks.
Philip had watched her shrewdly. ‘Not so sure you like that, kid? Well, now’s the time to make your mind up, before you really get started. If you want to be a star you have to take the rough with the smooth; there’s no two ways about it. If you want out now, you only have to say so. Nobody knows you yet; you can easily go back to your old life without anyone being any the wiser.’
She hadn’t wanted out. She had looked at him with wide, melancholy green eyes and sighed.
‘There’s nothing for me to go back to,’ she remembered saying. ‘I want to be a singer more than anything else in the world.’
It had been that simple then; it was that simple now, and yet it got harder every year, although that was something Philip hadn’t warned her about. The strain of being at the top and fighting to stay there was only a part of it; there was a more personal price to pay, because the public wouldn’t give you any space. They ate you up if you let them, and you never knew whether you could trust the people you met; you couldn’t be sure if they really liked you, or were starstruck, or wanted to use you in some way.
That was a hard lesson to learn. It hurt, and you were tempted to grow a second skin, toughen up; but Annie instinctively knew you couldn’t let yourself get too tough or the music would lose something vital. Getting hurt sometimes seemed essential to the music. Some of her best songs had been written about her secret feelings for Philip, feelings of which he seemed blithely unaware.
He had always treated her the same way from the beginning: as if to him she would always be the seventeen-year-old kid he had met all those years ago. In the beginning she had been relieved to find she could trust him to keep his hands to himself, not to proposition her or make off-colour jokes. Philip was a tough businessman, but he was kind and thoughtful to her; he treated her as if she were his daughter or his sister, and at first that had been fine. Until she had realised she was in love with him, but that Philip simply didn’t see her that way.
It was from that time that her songs had begun to have a deeper tone, she thought wryly, looking back. Until then she had just been pretending to write about love; like most people when they were young, she had loved sad songs, had acted out emotions she had never really felt. Falling in love with Philip had made her work far more personal, far more real, and in the past six months she had written some of the best work she had ever done, because her grief and loss when she heard that he was going to marry Diana had made the songs pour out of her, often two or three a week, a very high production rate, for her or any other songwriter.
It had helped to keep her busy. In preparation for her new disc and the forthcoming European tour she was to make, over the last six months she had been working so hard that she hadn’t had time to think too much.
For eight years she had had Philip and Diana to rely on, for help, advice, comfort and companionship. Philip was her agent and manager, and to look after her when she first came to London he had found Diana Abbot, who was then a twenty-two-year-old secretary in Philip’s office. Diana had gone on working for Philip, but she had also shared Annie’s flat, made sure she got to the studio on time, accompanied her on tours, and dealt with the Press and any other problems Annie ran into. A tough, capable, streetwise girl from the back streets of Liverpool, Di had a kind heart, warm brown eyes that smiled all the time and an infectious laugh.
Annie was as fond of Di as she was in love with Philip. He wasn’t handsome, but he had sex appeal. Tall and rangy, with steady, cynical blue eyes and hair the colour of toffee, he was always noticed by women. Annie had had to watch him dating other girls for years, a little comforted because none of his affairs lasted long. His life was too busy, too involved with work. The girls got bored with waiting for him to ring them, and moved on. Annie kept hoping Philip would finally realise that she was no longer a girl of seventeen, but a grown woman, but she had never once imagined that when Philip did fall in love it would be with Diana.
Three months ago a mix-up over luggage had meant that the two of them had missed a connecting flight during Annie’s coast-to-coast tour of America. A blizzard had raged for two days, making it impossible for them to fly on to catch up with Annie and the band. It had been the first time Philip and Diana had ever spent a long time alone together.
‘I really got to know him,’ Diana had said later, telling a pale, stunned Annie that she and Philip were getting married. ‘Funny, I’d known him for years without ever getting past the surface, but once we started talking it was like peeling an onion; there were layers I’d never suspected. We couldn’t go out of the airport hotel: the wind was like a knife, and the snow was six feet deep in places. There was a power cut, and we had no TV, no heat and no light, so we huddled under quilts, in our overcoats, and talked and talked.’
‘And fell in love?’ Annie had said, pretending to laugh, and Diana had turned a face glowing with happiness to her, nodding.
‘And fell in love. Crazy, isn’t it, after knowing each other for years? It was as if there had been a wall between us, and suddenly it fell down.’
Annie had felt sick at first. She had been hurt and jealous, bitterly shaken by this blow, but because she loved them both she had managed to hide her real reaction.
Neither of them had an inkling what the news had done to her. That was one good thing. She had never confided her love for Philip to Diana, and she had never let Philip himself glimpse it, either. At least they didn’t know how she felt, so all she had to do was go on acting, pretending to be delighted for them.
And in a funny sort of way, she was—she did love them both, and she wanted them to be happy, even if it meant that she was going to be left alone, after years of being the most important thing in both their lives.
She had first met Philip at a friend’s party where she had sung a couple of songs. It had never occurred to her to think of a life as a professional singer. When Philip told her he could make her a star she hadn’t believed him. She had no self-confidence and very little vanity, yet some instinct had made her trust him, and that instinct had been a sound one.
Everything he had promised her had come true, slowly at first, but over the last few years with dizzying speed. First she had worked in clubs, at night, while in the daytime she had had vocal training, stage training, dance lessons, and then Phil had got her that first recording contract, which really started her career. Now she was becoming known in America, and in two weeks’ time she would open her tour of Europe with a big concert in Paris.
She was becoming a star in the UK too, which brought its own problems, including getting crank calls, but she didn’t often get them now because her phone was no longer listed anywhere; only a handful of people knew her number. She had gone ex-directory several years ago when she started getting problems with fans ringing her day and night. At the same time she had moved to this flat in a rather exclusive district close to one of London’s big parks. The street was lined with trees; there was no passing-through traffic, just the cars of wealthy residents, or visiting tradesmen. There were big houses set in large gardens, so that one got a sense of living almost in the country, there was so much greenery around and on warm days a delicious country smell of leaves and flowers.
Even more important than all this, the large block of luxury flats into which Annie moved had a very thorough security system. There was a uniformed guard, with a savage-looking dog, on patrol all night around the grounds, and the electronically controlled doors of the building only admitted you if you had a card which you fitted into the computer by the door. You had to tap in your personal security number. Only then did the door open for you.
This was one of those anonymous blocks of flats where everyone behaved in a civilised fashion, not playing TVs or radios at top blast, not having riotous parties, not having violent rows with each other. There had been two bedrooms, one for her, one for Diana, who had shared the flat with her.
Now Annie would be living there alone, and she was finding it hard to adjust to that. She had never lived alone before. Before she met Philip she had lived with her mother and stepfather and her two stepbrothers in London. The family had all been relieved when she moved out: the house had been overcrowded, and Annie had never got on with her stepfather. She had barely seen any of them since.
Living alone was faintly nerve-racking. She listened to the silence: the only sound was the low hum of the central heating system, of the fridge in the kitchen. There were people living all around her, yet they were so quiet that it was like living alone, on the moon.
Every flat was occupied, in fact. This was a very popular apartment block; there was a waiting list of tenants wanting flats. A number of celebrities could be seen coming in and going out; often they had other homes and only kept their flat in this block for trips to London. It was well managed, comfortable, with a swimming-pool, saunas and a very well equipped gymnasium.
Life was easy here: lifts whisked you up and down, there was always a porter on the door, your garbage was disposed of by simply pushing it into a chute next to the lift. There was even an underground car park so that if fans did ever find out where she lived and waited outside she would be able to drive out of the building without being stopped.
Annie had felt totally safe there. Until now.
But it was stupid to let the phone call prey on her mind. After all, it hadn’t been obscene, just some stupid joke by one of the band, probably.
Yet as she climbed into bed she was still thinking about the call. If it was just a joke, why did it bother her so much? It did; she couldn’t deny it. The words kept ringing in her head. Remember me. Remember me? Had it been a question, or a demand?
Whichever it had been the intonation had somehow been disturbing, no doubt because she was here alone, for the first time in her life, feeling abandoned, left behind.
Tonight she was an easy target for whoever had rung. But nobody could have known that. She had tried to fool everyone at the wedding, tried to be the life and soul of the party afterwards—at all costs, Philip and Diana mustn’t guess at her real mood. They had every right to take happiness when they found it; she didn’t want to ruin their big day.
She wasn’t a teenager any more; she was twenty-five, for heaven’s sake! She could look after herself; she had flown the Atlantic several times, could speak French and Italian quite well, was learning Spanish—these days, as Philip said, music was an international business and meant a lot of travelling. The more languages you knew, the better.
So stop feeling sorry for yourself! she thought crossly. You’ve got plenty of life skills; you can manage on your own.
She could drive a car, cook; she had even had self-defence training and could throw a man over her shoulder if the need arose. Surely to heaven she could learn to live alone, and she could cope with grief and loss. You could cope with anything if you had to.
She turned over and settled to sleep, and some time during the night she vaguely heard the phone begin to ring, then cut out as the machine took over, but she was beyond caring by then.
In the morning she was in a rush to get to work, so she didn’t even bother to listen to the answering machine; she simply left it switched on.
The photo session was boring. She always felt like a dummy being arranged in a shop window, and her face ached from smiling by the time it was over.
‘Try to look happy, love!’ urged the photographer gloomily.
‘Sorry, I hate having my photo taken!’ she said.
‘It shows,’ the photographer told her. ‘Relax. Look, just a few more and we’re finished.’
The band lined up behind him and made elephant’s ears with their hands, and she laughed naturally.
‘That’s better!’ the photographer said.
The drummer, a huge boy of twenty called Brick because he was built like a brick wall, grinned at her as they all walked away. ‘I read in a book once that primitive tribesmen think that when you take their picture you’re stealing their souls—is that what you think, Annie?’
He was the band’s leading joker; the others all chuckled.
‘I just hate pictures of myself!’ she muttered, wondering if it had been Brick who had rung her last night, and he looked down at her slanting vivid green eyes, her sleek black hair and the small, pale-skinned triangular face which some journalist had not long ago described as giving her the look of a kitten caught out in the rain. That had made the band laugh their heads off! But it had infuriated Annie.
‘You can’t be serious!’ Brick said, shaking his head at her. ‘You’re amazingly photogenic, love! And you should be used to cameras by now; your face is always in some magazine or other these days.’
She shrugged without answering. Her dislike of cameras was another of her instinctive reactions, a gut feeling based on nothing rational, purely primitive, no doubt. People never understood; she rarely tried to explain any more.
‘Did you ring me last night, Brick?’ she asked, and he looked blank.
‘Ring you? No. Did you ask me to? I don’t remember anything much about the wedding after the reception started.’
The others all roared with laughter. Annie smiled wryly. No, it hadn’t been Brick, or, from the expressions of the rest of the band, any of them, either. She knew them well enough to be sure she would have picked up a self-conscious expression if the phone call had been a joke by one of them.
She and the band rehearsed for hours, not breaking for lunch, just having a yoghurt and an apple some time during the day. Philip got angry if she put on weight. It ruined the image he had spent years building up.
He was always telling her, ‘Image is everything in this business! It isn’t what you are, it’s what they think you are that matters, and you have to be certain always to look the way they think you should.’
The public saw her the way Philip intended they should—a street singer, small, sad, lonely, defiant.
She wore her long black hair down, framing her pale face. Her make-up highlighted her big eyes, her wide mouth. Her stage costumes were simple and inexpensive; she wore mostly black, accenting her slenderness, her frailty. And although the songs changed with the years, the mood of her singing remained the same. Her fans liked her that way.
Sometimes, though, Annie felt trapped inside a persona Philip had created but which she wasn’t sure fitted her any longer, even if it had when she first began singing.
‘Missing Phil and Di?’ Brick asked her as they left the rehearsal rooms. ‘Come and have a curry with us; we’re going to that Indian place down the street.’
She shook her head. ‘Too fattening. I’ll eat at home; see you all.’
When she got home she automatically switched on the answering machine while she was slitting open her private mail, all of it from friends in the music business. There was a letter from Philip’s office about the forthcoming tour, signed in his absence by his secretary, a telephone bill and a postcard from Budapest from a previous member of the band who had left to join another group, who were touring Hungary.
Annie read that first, smiling over the few scribbled words, and then her head lifted in shock as she heard the whispering voice on the answering machine. She had been so busy all day that she had forgotten last night’s crank call, but she remembered now as he said softly, ‘Remembered me yet?’
The phone clicked off again, but that wasn’t the end of it. The recording whirred on again. He had rung a second time; this time he whispered, ‘I remember you, Annie. I remember everything.’
Annie felt ice trickle down her spine. She stared at the machine, waiting, but there was nothing else on it; it clicked off.
Who on earth was it? Not Brick. It wasn’t one of his silly jokes. These phone calls were no joke. They were too disturbing to be funny. Were they veiled threats? Some sort of come-on meant to intrigue her? She had no idea what was behind them, but one thing was certain. She had never heard that voice before.
She was sure she didn’t know this man, that they had never met, or if they had it had been so brief, so casual, that she had simply forgotten all about it.
Why hadn’t he? She shivered, frowning. It was scary to think that out there was a man who thought he knew her when he didn’t. Was it some crazy fan who had started to believe his own fantasy? She had heard about things like that; it hadn’t occurred to her that it might actually happen to her.
And that accent of his... It was odd in some indefinable way, perfectly good English, but there was a faint note occasionally that made her wonder if he was a foreigner.
She was very aware of being alone in the flat. It was night again, very quiet. Was she the only person awake in the whole block of flats?
Walking over to the window, she looked out into the London sky, glowing with sulphurous yellow light from the street-lamps below. Annie gazed at the tall houses opposite, some rooms lit, others dark. There were people in all those houses, people in the other flats above and below her. Yet she felt intensely alone, and she was frightened.
The phone rang and she jumped violently. Swinging round, she stared across the room. She had forgotten to put the answering machine on again.
Well, she wasn’t answering him. She would let it ring and ring; he would give up in the end, believing she was out.
She went to the bathroom and ran the shower full on to drown the sound of the phone, had a lengthy shower. As she switched off the jet of water and stepped out, wrapping herself in a towelling robe, the flat was silent again and she heaved a sigh of relief, but as she walked towards the kitchen in bare feet the phone began to ring again.
She angrily shut herself in the kitchen and made some supper: a small mixed salad sprinkled with chopped nuts and fruit. The phone still rang and rang.
He wasn’t reacting the way she had thought he would. Why wasn’t he giving up? Surely it must be obvious that she was out?
She wasn’t, of course. But he couldn’t know that. Could he? Her nerves jangled. Could he? But what if he was out there, somewhere, near by, watching her?
Her heart almost stopped. If he lived near here, or was down there in the street, he could see her lights on; he would know she was in the flat.
Suddenly a new idea occurred to her. What if it wasn’t the guy who had been ringing her? What if this was Philip or Diana, ringing her from their honeymoon hotel, to check that she was OK? They would be worried if she didn’t answer, at this hour of the night.
She ran out of the kitchen into the sitting-room, snatched up the ringing phone.
‘Hello?’ she breathlessly said.
‘I wondered how long it would be before you answered,’ the smoky voice said, and her heart skipped a beat.
‘Why are you doing this? Stop ringing me; leave me alone—who are you?’ she gabbled, hardly aware what she was saying.
‘Haven’t you remembered yet? Never mind, you will.’
‘Look, it’s very late, and I’m tired; will you get off this line? And don’t ring again!’ Annie shakily said.
‘Are you ready for bed?’ he whispered, and she began to tremble, almost believing he could see her. He knew she was only wearing a robe and was naked underneath it. ‘You must be tired; you’ve had a long day,’ he said, and her eyes stretched wide, in shock. ‘I won’t keep you up; I just wanted to say goodnight,’ he murmured softly. ‘I’ll be seeing you soon, Annie.’
The phone went dead again, and she slammed her own down, panic pouring through her. He was coming here. What else had that meant?
She ran to the front door of the flat to check it was locked, stood in the hallway listening to the usual silence, waiting for the sound of his footsteps, for a ring on the door.
It was minutes before she remembered the security system in the flats. He couldn’t get in; the night porter downstairs on the desk would ring her, wouldn’t admit anyone until she said it was OK.
Yet somehow she wasn’t entirely sure. She waited, her heart in her mouth. The minutes ticked by; nothing happened. No phone rang; nobody came to the door. She shakily retreated to the living-room, sat staring at the silent phone, waiting.
It was two hours before she realised he wasn’t coming; not tonight, at least. She wondered then if she should ring the police, move out, go to a hotel, but she wouldn’t let this crazy person drive her from her home. When Phil and Di got back they would be horrified if they heard about it; they’d feel guilty, think that she couldn’t cope alone.
No, this was some sort of war of nerves. For some reason this man was trying to frighten her, but she wasn’t going to let him. What could the police do if she told them about it? Monitor her phone calls? Maybe she should have her number changed again. But then how had he got this number in the first place, and would he get the new one too?
Who was he? How did he know so much about her?
She went to bed, and managed to sleep after a while. When she woke up next morning she had a confused memory of a dream; phones had been ringing, a voice had haunted her sleep, there had been strange, terrifying flashes of light, and for some reason she had kept hearing the sea.
It must have been the traffic of London in the distance, she decided as she got ready. It sometimes sounded like the sea when you heard it at night, and the flashes of light must have been headlights from passing cars.
She and the band rehearsed hard for eight hours that day. She had no time to think about anything else, but as she drove home that evening she began to wonder what messages she was going to find on the answerphone, and her nerves leapt as she switched on the machine.
There were none. Relief made her feel almost sick, but the next day she rushed to the answerphone as soon as she got back to her flat. This time there was a short message from Philip’s office. No messages from the whispering voice. Perhaps he had got tired of playing cat and mouse with her, had given up the game or turned his attention elsewhere.
She got a card from Philip and Diana a couple of days later: blue skies, palm trees, a ludicrously blue sea and on the other side a message that made her laugh, ending with a reminder that they would meet her and the band in Paris in a week. They would need time to rehearse at the venue itself, and do Press interviews before the tour began, and Annie hoped to get in some sightseeing.
Annie was beginning to get used to living alone by the time she drove to Heathrow to catch the flight to Paris. The equipment was going overland, and then by sea, in large vans, and the band had all elected to go with it. Brick, in particular, had a neurotic fear of something happening to his amazingly expensive drums if they got out of his sight. Annie preferred to fly, though; it was quicker and more comfortable.
There had been no more of the weird phone calls; she was sleeping normally again and looking forward to seeing Di and Phil very soon. She was going to have to get used to the fact that they belonged to each other now, more than they did to her, of course. It would be painful, difficult at times; but Annie was determined to get over this first awkward phase of the new relationship. The other two meant too much to her for her to want to lose them. She would simply have to live with her feelings, as she had for years now, and maybe one day she would meet someone else, and get over Phil at last.
She would be the first to arrive in Paris, since the band would take quite a while to drive across France with all their equipment. They planned to stop en route at a hotel for the night, and they would join Annie at the hotel the following day.
Philip’s secretary had arranged for Annie to be met at the airport by a chauffeur-driven car, and she had an escort on the plane, a couple of security men hired by Phil to make sure she had no problems on the flight. They all sat in first-class, the men on the aisle side, in case someone tried to talk to Annie, who sat by the window.
She was casually dressed in a black and scarlet skiing jacket under which she wore a white silk jersey shirt, and black ski-pants and boots. A few passengers walked past, staring, but she kept her face averted, staring out of the window, and when they landed she was whisked through the VIP channel at Charles de Gaulle and escorted almost immediately out of a side-door. A large black limousine was waiting. The two security men had words with the chauffeur in a dark suit, who got out as they approached. He held the door open for Annie, half bowing, murmured a greeting in French, and Annie climbed into the back and settled down in the luxurious, leather-upholstered interior, while her Gucci luggage was loaded on to the car.
The two security men weren’t coming with her in the car; they were returning to England. A French security team would take over whenever required. The driver closed the door and got behind the wheel, then the limousine purred softly away and from behind smoked glass windows she watched the airport terminal disappear as they followed the unwinding ribbon on the auto-route.
It was some minutes later that she turned her gaze to the front again, and noticed the driver. She hadn’t noticed his face when she got into the car, and now she couldn’t see it, but he had smooth black hair and wide shoulders. She caught a glimpse of his neck, tanned and powerful above a white collar. He hadn’t said a word to her since they set off, for which she was grateful, because now that she was in France she was nervous about practising her French. She had been learning it for years, and could talk quite easily to her teacher, but that was a very different matter from talking to French people in their own country.
She stared curiously out of the window at the boring, ugly environs of Paris, so similar to the outskirts of London and any other major city in the world, the typical urban sprawl of the late twentieth century. There was a lot of traffic, but the driver sped past it all, the effortless power of the car engine making her faintly nervous. She thought of leaning forward and asking him to slow down, but something about the powerful shoulders, the set of that dark head, made her decide against the idea.
She watched the city thicken around them on either side of the wide motorway: roofs, tower blocks, spires of churches. They passed familiar names on road signs: Neuilly, Clichy, St Denis, entry points for the inner city, but the car purred on past, and after a while it began to dawn on Annie that the driver seemed to be heading away from the city, out again into the suburbs on the other side of Paris.
Had he lost his way? Or been given the wrong destination? Or was he taking some route she didn’t know about?
She was about to lean forward to ask him when they approached a toll barrier which stretched right across the motorway. The limousine slowed and joined a queue, and Annie looked up at the huge signs giving directions for the road ahead. Lyon? That was a city right in the centre of France—why were they taking a road that led there?
They reached an automatic ticket machine and the driver leaned out and took a ticket; the barrier rose and the car shot forward with a deep-throated purr.
Annie leaned forward and banged on the glass partition. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked in English, then in French, ‘Monsieur—où allez-vous?’
He still didn’t turn round, but he did glance briefly into his mirror and she saw his eyes, dark, brilliant, with thick black lashes flicking down to hide them a second later.
‘You’re supposed to be taking me into Paris,’ she said in her badly accented, agitated French. ‘Don’t you know the way? You’ll have to turn back. Do you understand, monsieur?’
He nodded his head, without answering, but the car drove onwards along the Peage, so fast that Annie had to cling to the leather strap beside her, her body swaying with the speed at which they moved. He must be doing a hundred miles an hour, she thought dazedly, watching another road sign flash past. Versailles. Wasn’t that about fifteen miles outside Paris? Where were they going? Then the black limousine began to slow down again, took a right-hand turn off the motorway, and joined a queue passing through another toll barrier.
Annie breathed a little more easily. ‘Are you going back on the other side of the motorway?’ It hadn’t taken very long to drive this far past Paris; no doubt it wouldn’t take long for him to drive back into the city, and she didn’t like to tell him what she thought of a limousine driver who didn’t even know the way from the airport to Paris. Or was this roundabout route a trick he often played on unsuspecting foreigners? Was he paid by mileage? Well, when Phil paid the bills he could deal with this man; she would make sure Phil heard about what had happened.
They reached the head of the queue, he leaned out and threw coins into the automatic machine, and the barrier lifted. The black limousine shot forward with a purr of power, like a panther going for the kill.
Annie leaned back in the corner, rather nervously looking out of the window, waiting for him to take the motorway link road to return to Paris on the eastbound road.
He didn’t. Instead he turned on to a local road, narrow and winding, and began speeding along between green fields and woods.
Annie tried not to panic. She sat forward again and banged on the window, more forcefully. ‘Où allez-vous, monsieur? Arretez cette voiture.’ And then, getting angrier, and forgetting her French entirely, ‘What do you think you’re doing? Where are you going? Please stop the car; let me out!’
There was still no reply; he didn’t even look round, but as they approached a roundabout he had to slow, so Annie shot to the door and wrenched the handle.
That was when she discovered that the door was locked, and that she could find no way of unlocking it. The lock must be controlled from a panel in the front of the car. Before the driver could negotiate the roundabout she rushed to the other side of the car, but that door was locked, too.
She sat down suddenly on the edge of the seat. She was a prisoner. Her heart began to race; she was very pale and yet she was sweating. She looked into the driver’s overhead mirror, caught the dark glance reflected there.
Huskily she asked him, ‘What’s this all about? Where are you taking me?’
‘I told you I’d see you soon, Annie,’ he said in that soft, smoky voice, and her heart nearly stopped as she recognised it.
CHAPTER TWO
FOR a moment or two Annie was so shocked that she just sat there, pale and rigid, her mind struggling to cope with her situation, then she whispered, ‘Who are you?’
He didn’t reply, and when she looked into the driving mirror above his head she couldn’t see his eyes, only the olive-skinned curve of his profile turned away from her, the gleam of black hair above that. He had a strong, fleshless nose, powerful cheekbones. It was a tough face; Annie searched what she could see of it, trying to assess the sort of man this was, what he might plan to do to her.
‘Have we met before?’ she asked, but there was still no reply. She pretended to laugh, trying to hide her alarm. ‘I’m sorry not to recognise you, but I meet so many people, it’s hard to remember all their faces. Fans are always waiting after concerts, asking for autographs, talking to me—is that where we met? Are you a fan?’
He didn’t look like a fan, though. She didn’t really believe he was. Her fans were usually in their teens, or early twenties; they wore the same sort of clothes, same hairstyles, immediately recognisable as the latest street trend. Many of the girls dressed like her, actually, even to having black nails and lipstick, although that was something she had only done briefly, a year or so ago, and no longer did. She’d got bored with that.
This man was too old to be one of her fans. He had to be in his thirties and she thought his clothes were old-fashioned: that dark suit, the white shirt, the dark tie. Now that she focused on his clothes she began to realise what good quality they were: the suit looked as if it might have been tailor-made. It was certainly expensive; it hadn’t come off a peg in a shop. The shirt and tie, too, looked classy, from what she had seen of them.
The clothes puzzled her. Clothes usually told you something about the person wearing them, and the message she got from what he wore was that he was respectable, conventional, yet what he was doing was neither of those things.
So he wasn’t a typical kidnapper, either, although who knew what they would look like? This might, in fact, be a clever disguise meant to make him invisible, anonymous, someone police would discount as a possible suspect.
His silence was unnerving. Swallowing nervously, she tried, again, to get him to talk to her.
‘Why won’t you tell me who you are?’
‘Later,’ he said without looking in her direction, his eyes fixed steadily on the road ahead.
She broke out, ‘Well, where are you taking me?’
‘You’ll see, when we get there.’
‘Tell me now.’ She tried to sound cool, calm, unflustered, unafraid, but her throat was dry and her mouth moved stiffly.
He didn’t answer.
She shifted on the seat and could see his hands on the wheel: firm, capable hands, long-fingered, the skin tanned. They had a strength that worried her. Annie looked sideways out of the window at the green French countryside. Spring was only just beginning, a few new leaves appearing on the trees. The sky was blue but the sun wasn’t hot. Where had he been to get that tan?
And then another thought occurred to her. She had noted a faint foreign accent right from that first phone call—was he French? Or some other nationality? Had he just arrived from another country, somewhere hot? Sicily? she wondered. Hadn’t she heard that Sicilian shepherds often kidnapped people and held them to ransom? That it was a family trade? She looked at the driver’s black hair and olive skin. He could be Italian. But she was going to Italy later on the tour; why hadn’t he waited until she got there? Why snatch her in Paris?
‘Are you kidnapping me?’ she asked, and caught the dark flash of his eyes again as he looked at her in his driving mirror.
He still didn’t say anything, though, which in itself was disturbing, because not to answer was a sort of admission. It meant he wasn’t denying it, at the very least.
She burst out huskily, ‘People will soon be looking for me, you know.’
His face stayed averted; he didn’t respond.
‘There are a whole group of us coming to Paris—my agent, the band, the tour manger... If I don’t arrive at my hotel they’ll call the police.’
He shrugged indifferently, but she kept trying to make him see sense.
‘You can’t just snatch someone without anybody noticing! When they check up with the airport they’ll find out that a car collected me. Plenty of people saw me getting into your car, including the security men who flew from London with me. They saw you; they’ll have noticed the number of your car.’
Would they have done, though? They had talked to him, certainly, had looked at his car, but would they have thought of looking at the number of the black limousine? There hadn’t been many other people around, either; if anyone had been watching they would have been looking at her, because she had been escorted out to the car by security men and airport officials eager to avoid any problems with the media.
She wasn’t yet a big name in Europe, though. The Press wouldn’t have been over-excited by her arrival. She was just starting to sell records there, so she wasn’t likely to be big news, but with a concert tour starting a week later there might have been Press interest, so the airport hadn’t taken any chances.
That reminded her of something. ‘There was a limousine booked,’ she said slowly. ‘Was that you? Are you from the limousine firm? Because if you are, the police will track you down at once.’
He laughed.
Annie’s nerves grated. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked him angrily, then something occurred to her and in a sudden pang of hope she asked, ‘This isn’t some elaborate joke, is it? I haven’t been set up? Are you taking me to meet Phil and Di somewhere? Is this one of Phil’s practical jokes?’
Phil was famous for practical jokes; the idea should have occurred to her before if she hadn’t been so unbalanced by recognising the voice that had made all those phone calls.
‘No, it isn’t a joke, Annie,’ he said, and the way he said it made the panic start up again.
She couldn’t breathe; she lay back against the upholstery, fighting to keep calm, fighting to breathe naturally. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out everything else, to stabilise herself.
There was no point in losing control. There was nothing she could do at that moment; she was locked inside this car behind smoky glass windows which would hide her from anyone looking in from outside, so that she couldn’t even attract attention by waving or screaming. She would just have to sit here and wait until they arrived at wherever he was taking her.
Her heart missed a beat. What would happen then? If only she knew what he meant to do to her. He didn’t look like a dangerous lunatic, or a criminal; in fact she had to admit he was strikingly attractive, if you liked Mediterranean colouring: the olive skin and black hair and dark, gleaming eyes. She always had, but then she had French blood, through her father, who had been born in France, of French descent, although he had spent most of his life in England.
Annie had only visited France a couple of times herself. It had been the one country she wanted to visit as soon as she started travelling with the band. She had never been there while her father was alive, and she had promised herself she would one day go in search of the place where he had been born, in the Jura mountains, but there had never been time so far for such a long trip. When you were giving concerts you did the gig and moved on, unfortunately.
Her father had been dark and olive-skinned with dark eyes, like this man. He hadn’t been tall, though; and he had been slightly built, not powerful. Annie’s long black hair had been inherited from him, but she had been born with her mother’s skin colour and green eyes. As a child she had often wished she had inherited her mother’s blonde hair, too, but now she was glad she was a mix of both parents. She wished now that she were even more like her father.
She had adored her father, and his death when she was eleven had darkened her childhood, especially when her mother married again within a year. Annie had never liked her stepfather, and made no effort to hide her hostility; and Bernard Tyler had soon come to dislike her too. So had her mother.
Joyce Tyler knew her daughter condemned her for marrying again so soon after her first husband’s death, and resented Annie’s open contempt. She had twin sons a couple of years later, and became totally engrossed in them. She had always been a man’s woman, never unkind, but largely indifferent to her daughter; now she was only interested in her sons.
When Bernard Tyler began slapping Annie around, Joyce Tyler did nothing to stop him. In fact she bluntly told Annie it served her right. ‘If you were nice to him, he’d be nice to you. You only have yourself to blame.’
By then fourteen, Annie began staying out of the house as much as possible, because she was afraid of Bernard Tyler as well as disliking him. She started living for the day when she would be old enough to leave home for good. When she met Philip and he offered her a career in music she packed a case with everything she valued and left, knowing that her mother wouldn’t even think about her again, and that Bernard and his two sons would be glad to see her go.
When she began to be well-known they had got in touch with her to ask her to lend them some money, offering a long, rambling story about financial hardship as an excuse, but Philip had dealt with that, as he did with all her financial affairs. They had been given tickets for a concert soon afterwards, and Annie had seen them briefly that night, but then they had vanished again, no doubt because Philip made it clear that he wasn’t paying them any more large sums of money; and she had been relieved, yet that reminder of past misery had made her unhappy for days.
Her life would have been so different if her father hadn’t died so young, her mother hadn’t then married Bernard Tyler. Annie’s happy childhood had ended at the age of eleven; until she was seventeen she had been lonely and un-happy. Even to remember those years now was to feel greyness steal over her. She frowned, pushing the memories away.
‘You’re very quiet,’ the driver said, and she started, looking at him again, but all she could see was his profile and the dark sweep of his lashes.
‘I was thinking. My friends are going to be very upset and worried when I don’t arrive. They’ll wonder what on earth has happened to me.’
‘They’ll soon find out.’ His voice was cool, dismissive, and she flinched.
‘What does that mean? Will you ring them?’ Saying what, though? Telling them that she had been kidnapped and they would have to pay a large ransom to get her back?
She wished she could see his face properly instead of merely getting glimpses now and then. People’s eyes usually told you a lot about them, but that wasn’t true about this man. His eyes were like bottomless wells: deep, lustrous, impossible to plumb. And yet she was beginning to feel an odd teasing familiarity...
Had they ever met before? she wondered. Or had he cleverly managed to plant the idea that she knew him in her head subliminally, with his phone calls, and ever since he picked her up at the airport?
The limousine slowed, turned at right angles, and left the road on which they had been travelling. Annie looked out and upwards, seeing that they were driving between deep, sunk green banks from which trees and bushes sprang, over a winding, unmade road.
No! she realised; this wasn’t a road—it was a driveway leading up to a house. A moment later the house itself came into view: not a large house, but detached, with trees and a garden around it, two-storeyed, with mossy pink tiles on the roof, the walls painted white and the closed shutters over every window painted black.
As the car halted outside the front door Annie tried to make out whether there were any other houses in view, and felt her heart sink as she saw that the white house stood on the edge of some sort of wood, which lay behind it, and that there were only fields in front of it. It could hardly have been more isolated. She couldn’t see another house anywhere.
Nerves jumped under her skin. She bit her lip, feeling real fear growing inside her.
The driver got out and came round to open her door. Annie stayed obstinately on the seat, her chin up, defying him.
‘I’m not getting out; I’m staying here until you drive me back to Paris. Take me back to Paris and I’ll forget this ever happened, but if you don’t...’
He reached one long arm into the car, took her by the hand, and jerked her forwards. He took her by surprise, and he was even more powerful than he looked. She couldn’t resist the tug he gave her. She almost fell off the seat, and the next minute had been scooped up by his other arm going round her waist, lifting her off her feet and out of the car, kicking and struggling helplessly.
He carried her up the steps to the front door, holding her under his arm as if she were a child, ignoring her increasingly wild attempts to escape. While he was unlocking the door Annie wrenched her head round and bit his hand; he gave a stifled grunt of pain, but didn’t let go of her until they were inside the house and he had kicked the front door shut behind them.
Slowly he lowered her feet to the floor, his arm still round her waist, holding her tightly against him so that she helplessly slithered down his body, aware of every slow, deliberate contact, her breasts brushing his chest, their thighs touching, the warmth of his skin reaching her through their clothes. The effect was electrifying. She didn’t want to feel it, but she did: a deep physical wrench that made her almost giddy. Breathless and shuddering, she tried to push away once she was standing up, on her feet, but his arm was immovable; she couldn’t break the lock he had on her. Her long black hair dishevelled, a mass of it falling over her face, she watched him through it, her almond-green eyes like the eyes of a scared child in the dark.
He lifted the hand she had bitten, looked at it. So did Annie. ‘I’m bleeding,’ he said, sounding surprised. ‘You have sharp little teeth.’
And then he absently put out his pink tongue-tip and licked the blood away. Annie watched him, her nerves prickling. The little gesture had an intimacy that shocked her, yet sent another of those quivers of response through her body.
It was at that moment that she really began to be afraid, to believe that this was actually happening, that she had been kidnapped for motives she didn’t yet understand by a man who frightened her and attracted her at one and the same time.
Her insides collapsed, but she fought not to show how scared she was, throwing back her head and looking straight at him, hoping she looked calm and confident.
‘Why don’t you take me back to Paris now, before this gets really serious? Kidnapping is a very serious offence, you know.’
‘Very,’ he agreed, straight-faced.
Flushing at what she suspected to be mockery, she snapped, ‘You could end up going to prison for the rest of your life!’
‘They have to catch me first,’ he pointed out coolly, brushing the tangled black hair back from her face with those powerful tanned fingers. The light touch of his hand sent a trickle of icy awareness down her spine, and yet there was something like tenderness in the gentle movement of his fingers. Even that made Annie afraid—afraid of what might be coming, what he meant to do with her.
‘Why don’t I show you the room I’ve got ready for you?’
Her stomach turned over. She wondered if he could hear the acceleration of her heartbeat, see the spring of perspiration on her face.
If he picked up her nervous reaction he didn’t show it. ‘Then we’ll have lunch,’ he added, and she bristled.
‘I’m not hungry! I couldn’t eat; I feel sick!’
‘You’ll feel better with some food inside you,’ he said, as if she were a child. ‘It won’t be anything elaborate—I’m no cook—but I’ve got plenty of salad and cheese and fruit. It was freshly bought this morning in the market; you’ll find it’s delicious. And I’ve got a bottle of very good wine.’
‘I don’t drink wine!’
He raised straight black brows at her, looking genuinely incredulous. ‘You don’t drink wine? You’re missing out on one of life’s great pleasures. I shall have to teach you to enjoy it while you’re here. It will calm your nerves down, relax you.’
That was what she was afraid of, what she must not allow to happen. She had to stay on the alert, on her guard against him, and watchful for an opportunity to escape. If she could only get out of the house she might be able to hide among the trees until it was dark and then walk until she reached a village; there must be one somewhere near here!
‘If you want to calm my nerves you might start by letting go of me!’ she told him, and without a word he let his arm fall.
She took several steps away, looked around the small, shadowy hall from which a staircase led upstairs.
‘Does this house belong to you?’
He didn’t answer, but she sensed from the expression in his eyes that it didn’t.’
‘Look, Mr...? You still haven’t told me your name. Or at least told me what to call you. I must call you something.’
He frowned oddly, hesitated, then said curtly, ‘Marc.’
From the way he watched her she couldn’t tell whether it was really his name but she didn’t query it. ‘Marc,’ she repeated. ‘You’re French, aren’t you?’
‘How did you guess?’
He was kidding. Solemnly she said, ‘A wild stab.’ She put her head on one side, listened to the silence surrounding them. No sound of traffic from outside, just the constant murmur of the trees in the wood behind the house, yet there was something familiar to her about the noise. She couldn’t track it down for a minute until she realised it reminded her of the sound she had heard in her dream the other night—a sound like the sea. This was it, not traffic, not the sea, but the rustle and whisper of hundreds of branches swaying and bending in the wind.
Why on earth had she heard that sound in her dream? There was something uncanny about it. It made her shiver. She had never been here before; why had this sound got into her dreams? Maybe he had rung her from here. Maybe the noise had been a background sound on the answering machine tape.
‘Did you ring me from here?’ she asked him, and he gave her a sharp look, shaking his head.
‘The phone has been cut off.’
She was sorry to hear that, but maybe it had been telepathy. He must have had this sound in his head when he talked to her on the phone and she had picked up on it. Nothing uncanny about telepathy—she had several times had ideas leap into her head from Di or Phil when they were working together. If you were on the same wavelength it could easily happen.
But she wasn’t on this man’s wavelength! she hurriedly thought. She couldn’t be.
‘Why has the phone been cut off?’ she asked, thinking that the house had the strange, echoing feel of a house which was always empty; it didn’t feel like anybody’s home.
‘I didn’t need it.’
‘Then where did you ring me from?’
He didn’t answer, eyeing her drily.
She noticed that from the hall several doors opened into rooms which were gloomy with shadow because of the closed shutters over the windows. She only got an impression of them, a fleeting glimpse of dark oak furniture and leather chairs, a wallpaper with trails of ivy and blue flowers.
‘Is there anyone else here?’ she asked huskily, listening.
He half smiled again. ‘No, we’re quite alone, Annie.’
She tensed, bit her lower lip, watching him and wishing she knew what went on inside his head. Or did she? Maybe she was better off not knowing! ‘At least tell me what this is all about! Why have you brought me here? Do you want money? Are you going to ask my record company for a lot of money before you let me go?’ Her mind worked feverishly. But even if Philip paid him whatever ransom he demanded, would he let her go? Alive?
She had seen his face now; he hadn’t tried to hide it. Didn’t kidnappers usually kill their victims so that they could never identify them? Fear made her stomach clench, sent waves of sickness through her.
‘This has nothing at all to do with money!’ he bit out, and she stared at him, afraid to feel relief. If he wasn’t holding her for ransom, what did he mean to do with her?
‘Then why have you brought me here?’ She searched his face for a clue. The hard, insistent lines of it did nothing to lessen her tension. ‘Are you sure you really know who I am? You aren’t mixing me up with someone else, are you? Because you keep asking if I remember you, but I don’t, and I’m sure we’ve never met before. I have a good memory; I’d remember if we had met.’
His dark eyes hypnotically stared down into hers. ‘You’ll remember Annie,’ he said softly. ‘I can wait; I’ve waited a long time already.’
A shiver ran down her back. If she wasn’t careful, he would start convincing her! He didn’t look it, but he must be crazy.
‘Stop arguing, Annie,’ he said. ‘Come upstairs and I’ll show you your room.’
She dug her heels in, resisting the hand that seized her elbow and tried to move her towards the stairs.
‘You can’t keep me here against my will and get away with it! I don’t know what the penalty is for kidnapping in France, but you don’t want to go to prison for years, do you? Look, if you just want to get to know me, I’ll have lunch with you now, and then you can drive me back to Paris, and I’ll see you again there. I’ll get you a ticket for my concert and—’
He laughed harshly. ‘You know you don’t mean it; if you made a date with me it would be the police who kept it, I imagine. I’m not stupid, Annie. You’re ready to promise me anything to get away. Do you think I don’t know that?’
‘What are you going to do to me?’ She tried to hide her fear, but he would have had to be blind to miss that look in her eyes.
His brows met. ‘I’m not going to hurt you, Annie; don’t look like that!’
He sounded so convincing. She let out a long sigh, put her hand out to him. ‘Then please let me go, Marc—please...’
Taking her hand, he looked down at the slight, pale fingers he held, slowly entwined his own tanned fingers with them. Annie felt her heart skip sideways in a little kick of awareness.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Just for the moment, you’re my guest. You’ll find the house very comfortable, and it’s tranquil here, much more peaceful than you would have been in Paris. No media clamouring for interviews, no telephones, no fans waiting outside to hassle you. Why don’t you stop worrying and enjoy it?’
Annie considered him soberly. If she kept her temper and was not unfriendly maybe she would be able to talk him round, get him to see sense and take her back to Paris.
She pulled her hand away; he let it go without comment. Annie began to walk upstairs, aware of him following close behind her.
‘In here,’ he said, throwing open a door on the landing above.
Halting on the threshold, she watched him walk across the darkened room to the windows. He opened them, flung back the shutters, and light flooded in, making her blink, dazzled, staring at him.
She felt a strange flash of surprise, a jerk of dislocation, like mental whiplash, and for that instant had the oddest feeling, and then it was gone, and she was watching him with wide, half-blind green eyes.
He stared back at her with a curious eagerness, as if he knew that something had happened to her just then, as if he could read her thoughts, or her feelings; and that bothered her. That could be very dangerous. From now on she must try to hide from him what she was thinking, or she would have no defences against him.
‘Annie?’ he whispered.
‘Where’s the bathroom?’ she asked, trying to keep all intonation out of her voice.
She thought she heard him sigh. Then he gestured. ‘Through that door. I’ll go downstairs and start preparing lunch, so don’t be long. I’ll bring your cases in from the car later and you can unpack after lunch.’
She waited until she heard him reach the bottom of the stairs, then she went over to the window. How far was it to the ground from up here? If there was a handy drainpipe it might be worth risking the climb down. She peered down at the garden below and grimaced. No, that was out.
There was no drainpipe close enough—the nearest was outside the bathroom, and the bathroom window looked far too small for her to climb through it. From here, too, the ground seemed a very long way off. She wouldn’t like to risk breaking a leg, or worse, by jumping out of the window. In films people knotted sheets together and climbed down them; maybe she could try that.
But not now. She could hear noises from the room below, a tap running, the sound of china clattering. That must be the kitchen. If she tried to climb out of here now he’d be sure to spot her.
She went into the bathroom and found it very pretty: the fittings a primrose-yellow, a pine shelf along the wall filled with French toiletries—bath oil, soaps, gels, shampoo, talc.
Annie washed, then deliberately left her face bare of make-up, brushed her long black hair up into a neat bun at the back of her neck, made herself look as unattractive as possible.
Looking at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she saw the nervous awareness in her green eyes and turned away quickly. In this situation it was very dangerous to admit, even to herself, in the privacy of her own head, that she found him attractive. No, more than that, if she was honest. Ever since she first saw him she had been mesmerised; and that was scary.
He might keep telling her not to be scared, that he wouldn’t hurt her, but the fact remained—he had kidnapped her, brought her here by force. Why had he done that, if not for ransom? What on earth was going on here? She was afraid to think about it.
Was he out of his head? Look at his obsession that they had met before! Yes, one of them had to be crazy, and it wasn’t her. She was one hundred per cent certain she had never seen him in her life until today.
Then she remembered that fleeting dizziness when he opened the shutters, the feeling of déjà vu, and she frowned, bit her lip. What on earth had that been about? For a second she almost had thought she remembered...something...
Angrily she pushed the thought away. She was letting him get to her, that was all. She must not let him hypnotise her into joining him in his fantasy. That way lay madness.
Feeling calmer, she went downstairs, started looking into rooms, until she opened a door into a large, bright kitchen with golden pine fittings, white walls and red and white gingham curtains. There were bowls of hyacinths in bloom on the windowsill, and the whole room was full of their scent and the fragrance of fresh coffee.
While she hesitated at the door, Marc turned to look at her, his narrowed eyes skating over her face and hair, his brows rising sardonically.
‘You look about fifteen! Is that meant to make me keep my distance?’
‘I hope you will anyway,’ she said primly, not meeting his eyes.
There was a long silence, and at last she had to look up. He was watching her seriously, his dark eyes level and frowning.
‘I told you, you don’t need to be afraid. I’m not holding you for ransom, I won’t hurt you, and, I assure you, I won’t leap on you suddenly. I won’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do.’
Red burned in her cheeks. ‘You forced me to come here, and you’re forcing me to stay here against my will.’
‘It was the only way I could get you to myself for long enough,’ he coolly told her.
‘Long enough for what?’
‘To get to know me,’ he said. ‘Now come and sit down at the table and we’ll have lunch.’
Still absorbed in thinking over what he had just said, she didn’t argue. She sat down automatically and looked at the food he had put out on the square pine kitchen table—a large bowl of crisp green salad tossed in dressing, black olives in a dish, some hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, a gingham-covered wicker basket of sliced French bread, a platter of various French cheeses and a bowl of fruit.
Annie hadn’t felt hungry until then, but the food looked so good that she felt a surprising pang of hunger.
‘Help yourself,’ he said as he sat down opposite her.
She took salad—a mixture of avocado, lettuces, cucumber, green peppers—a hard-boiled egg, a tomato, some black olives, a slice of Brie, some of the golden bread.
‘I’m sorry there’s nothing more exciting,’ he said, and she looked up, her green eyes startled, then smiled.
‘It’s great food—I’ve always loved a picnic; that’s what this is—a picnic indoors.’
‘But picnic food tastes better in the open air,’ he said, reaching over to pour white wine into her glass, and that was when Annie had another of those strange déjà vu flashes, a baffling sense of having seen him do that before.
As she drew a sharp, startled breath he looked up at her, his body stiffening, his face watchful.
‘Annie?’ he said again, as he had before, and she slowly lifted her own eyes to stare back at him, dazed.
He held her eyes. ‘Tell me what you felt,’ he softly said.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘It was...nothing...’
‘It was something,’ he said, and his black eyes glittered. ‘You’re beginning to remember.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘WHY don’t you tell me when we’re supposed to have met, and stop playing games?’ Annie burst out.
Shaking his head, he gestured. ‘Taste the wine.’
‘Was it in England? In London?’
‘There’s no point in trying to guess. When you remember, you’ll know.’
But she was beginning to read his expressions, the fleeting thoughts passing through those brilliant liquid black eyes, the way his mouth changed, softening, tightening, twisting. He might not have denied that they’d met in England, but something about his face just then told her that that wasn’t where they had met. Where else could it have been? She was determined to make him tell her.
‘America?’
He laughed, shook his head.
That didn’t leave many other countries. Annie hadn’t travelled very widely yet. So she came to the most likely answer.
‘Was it here, in France?’
He didn’t answer, but his eyes were as bright as black stars.
‘It was, wasn’t it?’ she said slowly.
‘So now you believe we have met,’ he said, his voice deep, vibrating with a new note, passionate, excited. She felt her pulses leap, and this time it was she who didn’t answer. She didn’t have to; her sudden flush, the way she looked down, her dark lashes cloaking her eyes, spoke for her.
Huskily she finally said, ‘I believe you think we did. But I really don’t remember—I’m sorry. I’ve only been to France a couple of times—it must have been on one of those trips, I suppose. The last time I came here I spent two weeks in Normandy with my best friend and her sister. We stayed in a wonderful old hotel in Caborg, right on the sea. It was very hot that summer; we spent a lot of time on the beach—was that where we met?’
He shook his head, sipping wine and leaning back in his chair, his lids half down over his dark eyes, his legs stretched full-length sideways. Annie didn’t mean to stare, but she couldn’t help noticing that under his shirt she could almost see the ripple of lean muscled flesh every time he breathed. He had a very slim waist and hips, or was that a visual illusion because of the length of his legs? She couldn’t deny that he was her type. His long, supple body was intensely sexy.
Her eyes drifted back upwards, and with a start of shock met his gaze. Annie looked away, her colour high.
‘Well, where did we meet?’ Her voice was husky, defying him to make anything of the way she had been looking him over. ‘If I knew where we met I might remember it. Why don’t you tell me?’
‘Because you have to remember without any help from me,’ he said coolly.
‘Why?’ she persisted.
He ignored the question, gesturing. ‘Come on, eat some of your salad—you look as if your blood sugar is a little low. Maybe that’s why you’re so bad-tempered.’
‘I’m bad-tempered because you’ve kidnapped me!’ she retorted, but picked up her glass and drained the pale golden wine while he watched, his brows shooting up.
‘Careful! If you aren’t used to drinking wine it could go to your head if you drink it too fast.’
She reached for the bottle, which stood in a vacuum jug in the middle of the table, but Marc lifted it out before she seized it, poured her another half-glass, refilled his own, advising her,
‘Eat your food before you drink any more; it’s never wise to drink on an empty stomach.’
‘Will you stop giving me orders?’ But she began to eat all the same, and the food was delicious—the cheese, the bread, the salad with its tangy dressing tasting of lemon, vinegar and herbs and glistening with oil. All this tension seemed to have given her an appetite, or maybe it had been the wine, after all.
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