She let out a little scream before she realised that it wasn’t the wall that was moving at breakneck speed. It wasn’t even a wall…Where there should have been the familiar concrete canyons of the city there was nothing but a blur of trees!

‘What’s happened? Where are we?’ She winced at the painful crick in her neck as she turned a bewildered face to search out Blake MacLeod’s fierce profile.

‘Nearly there.’

His thick brows were lowered in their characteristic frown, but his hard mouth was chiselled into a self-satisfied smile which rang alarm bells.

‘Nearly where?’

Nora gave another smothered shriek as Blake hit the brakes and spun the car down a roughly sealed side road cut into the side of the hill—a road so steep that it was almost vertical, and so narrow there seemed barely room for the car.

‘Karekare Beach is just over to your right.’ He nodded towards the flash of glittering sea that revealed itself between the bisecting hills.

‘How can it be? You were supposed to be dropping me off at work!’ she squeaked, instinctively bracing her feet against the floor in the vain hope of stopping their plunging descent.

‘I changed my mind.’

‘You can’t do that!’ she spluttered, clutching the edge of her seat as he rounded another tight corner.

His eyebrow shot up in an ironic slant that said he already had.

Outside her window, the forest fell away into a steep-sided valley and Nora blanched, her heart leaping into her mouth at the sight of the flimsy wooden crash barrier that marked the edge of the drop.

‘Oh, God!’ she groaned weakly. The music which had earlier soothed her now seemed to mock her fear. ‘You lying rat!’

‘A pity you had to wake up during this bit,’ Blake murmured with abrasive sympathy. ‘But once we get down under the bush canopy again you won’t notice the elevation.’

‘Don’t bank on it!’ She sucked in a nervous breath that did nothing to reassure her. ‘Is it my imagination or is the air thinner up here?’

‘We’re not that high,’ he replied with an admirably straight face. ‘You needn’t worry about me passing out at the wheel from hypoxia.’

She shuddered. ‘What happens if we meet someone coming the other way?’ she fretted.

‘One of us has to back up until there’s room to pass,’ he said, with a calmness that told her he had done this many times before.

Suspicion congealed into full-blown certainty: this was no random drive to blow away the mental cobwebs. ‘Where exactly are we going, MacLeod?’

‘Somewhere nice and secluded—’

‘—where no one will hear me scream?’ she concluded with acid sarcasm.

‘Where you can take time out—relax and unwind in the peace and quiet of tranquil surroundings.’ His deep voice mingled with the sexy growl of the car. ‘No stress, no pressure, no prying friends…You can catch some sun and laze about in luxury while you consider all your options…’

It sounded achingly like heaven to Nora’s bruised soul.

‘One of them being to have you arrested for kidnapping!’

‘What kidnapping?’ he countered blandly. ‘I suggested we spend the long weekend at my beach house. I didn’t hear you object, so naturally I assumed that you were willing…’

‘How could I have objected? I was asleep!’ she blustered, her outrage at his blatant manipulation of the facts ambushed by a treacherous thrill of excitement.

His beach house? The long weekend? She had forgotten it was a public holiday on Monday. She was on the brink of being stranded for days in Blake MacLeod’s sole company!

She didn’t flatter herself that Blake was whisking her away to his private hideaway because he was crazed by love, but there was a certain provocative undercurrent to his threats that charged them with erotic meaning. Even knowing that he had some devious ulterior motive for wanting to keep her isolated for the next few days didn’t stop her from feeling a rush of feminine triumph. Boring women didn’t drive sexy bachelors to reckless acts of piracy…

‘You’re taking a serious risk, you know,’ she told him. ‘I could cause you a heap of trouble.’

‘More than you have already, you mean?’ he asked, unruffled by the threat. ‘Perhaps I believe that the potential rewards far outweigh the risk.’

She wondered what kind of rewards he was talking about. They hit a pothole and the car momentarily swerved, jolting her out of her abstraction. ‘Why doesn’t the council do something to fix this road?’ she gasped.

‘Because it dead-ends at a beach with no public facilities and there are only a few private homes along the way. The road doesn’t generate enough traffic to justify the expense of regular upgrades.’

‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ she gulped as an overhanging fern slapped the windscreen.

‘As long as you’re with me, Nora, you’re as safe as you want to be…’

That was what she was afraid of! ‘And if I said I wanted to go back?’ She knew it was what she should say.

‘To what? You didn’t really want to go anywhere near work today. You were just saying that out of misplaced bravado.’

She gritted her teeth at the accuracy of the thrust. ‘I was actually trying to get rid of you.’

‘Didn’t work, though, did it? Face it, I’m doing you a favour. Remember, revenge is a dish best served cold.’

‘I don’t want revenge.’ She had wasted more than enough time and energy on Ryan already.

‘Then you must be unique amongst human beings,’ he replied drily. ‘If someone I loved betrayed me, I’d take great pleasure in stripping them of everything they valued in life, piece by painful piece.’

Nora shivered at the icy implacability of his words and the implicit passion behind them. The kind of passionate intensity that had clearly been lacking in her relationship with Ryan.

‘Maybe I wasn’t really in love with him,’ she muttered. ‘He seemed like an unattainable god at university—he had a rugby blue and was hugely popular with everyone, whereas I was a geeky teenager who’d never even had a real boyfriend. Most of the other girls threw themselves at him, but I was too shy, so I—I—’

‘Contented yourself with worshipping from afar until he deigned to notice you?’ He sliced cleanly through her self-pitying gloom. ‘Sounds like a normal teenage crush to me. I had one on my biology teacher when I was thirteen. It’s one of those things you outgrow and laugh about afterwards.’

She tried, and failed, to imagine an adolescent Blake MacLeod in the throes of unrequited love. ‘Yes, well…I was obviously a late bloomer. When he moved up to Auckland to work for Maitlands and suggested there was a job for me there I thought it was because he missed having me around. I guess I didn’t really have a chance to grow out of my infatuation—’

‘Perhaps because Superjock didn’t want you to. I bet he fed off your innocent admiration. How many people who challenged his superior self-image remained his friends?’

‘At least I can blame my idiocy on youth and inexperience—what’s your excuse?’ she jabbed back. ‘Why are you really doing this? I doubt if you normally encourage people to run away from their problems!’

He turned his head to study her, his gaze taunting. ‘Do you really want to get into it with me right now?’

‘Keep your eyes on the road, for God’s sake!’ she yelled, clutching the seatbelt across her chest.

He obeyed her ear-splitting command, scouring around the next corner. ‘Sorry, but I like to look people in the eye when I’m having a serious discussion,’ he said with pious calm.

‘Then you can save the discussion until we get wherever it is we’re going!’ she gritted, knowing full well she was being manipulated. And to think she had been on the verge of forgiving him for preying on her vulnerability!

She simmered and suffered in burning silence until Blake pulled off the steep road on to a long, even steeper, concrete driveway which drilled down through the thick screen of bush covering the coastal side of the hill.

‘I thought you said your house was at the beach,’ she said nervously as the green canopy meshed overhead, further hemming them into the leafy shadows.

‘It is. The beach is directly below us.’

As soon as the words were out of his mouth Nora’s heart began to sink and her palms dampen. ‘But, but—beach houses are usually at sea level…’

His mouth twitched at her choked protest. ‘I prefer not to run with the usual crowd.’

‘I knew there had to be a catch,’ Nora muttered as the driveway burst out into blazing sunlight and she found herself looking down at the red-tiled roof of a semi-circular house which jutted out from the side of the hill. Way out…over a very high, very sheer drop.

‘Oh, God…!’

‘The structural engineering was done by a highly reputable firm,’ murmured Blake reassuringly as they swooped down to the broad paved turning circle in front of three double-width garage doors. A short bridge fed across the falling ground to one side to a wide door protected by a wroughtiron grille. ‘If anything, it’s been over-engineered—the cantilevered beams are strong enough to support several times the actual weight of the house.’

He touched a slim remote and one of the wood-panelled garage doors silently lifted to allow the car to slot in beside a boat-trailer loaded with an inflatable rubber surf dinghy. Further along in the huge internal garage Nora could see a shadowy black four-wheel drive, a motorcycle, a beachbuggy, a stack of surfboards and a surf-ski next to rack of assorted wetsuits.

She debated refusing to budge, but Blake had already sprung open both doors and slid out of the car, and she suspected that sulking in her seat like a defiant child would get her nowhere.

Only when she had scrambled out and walked haughtily around the car did she remember that Blake hadn’t needed a key to start the car—he had just pushed a black button on the swooping dashboard. Her heart stuttered and she tucked her handbag under her arm as she sneaked a look at Blake’s bent head, half concealed by the raised boot. How careless of him! He really was taking it for granted that she would fall meekly in with his plans. She wondered if he would feel quite so smug watching her drive off in his precious car! The thought of handling all that power on that skimpy road made her feel even queasier, but a foolish rush of adrenaline sent her diving to pull open the driver’s door. Her seeking fingers collided with a smooth unbroken surface as she suddenly realised what was missing.

‘Mind you don’t damage the paintwork.’

Nora jerked around to stare up into Blake’s sardonic face. ‘This car has no door handles!’ she spluttered.

Blake smiled. ‘A very useful deterrent to thieves.’

‘Then how do you open it?’ she asked, endeavouring to project an air of innocent interest.

‘You could try saying Open Sesame,’ he said smoothly, and she blushed at the reminder of their last ride together, in a lift.

‘I think it’s more to do with modern engineering than magic incantations,’ she said.

His deep-set eyes gleamed. In the periphery of her vision she was aware of him sliding a hand up over the gleaming wine-red curves as tenderly if he was caressing a woman, his fingers briefly cupping the jutting wing mirror. There was a quiet click and Nora’s bottom received a gentle nudge from the warm metal. Before she could react she had been swung decisively out of the way and Blake had re-shut the door and locked it with his remote.

As the garage door thunked definitively shut behind them, Nora zeroed in on the mirror he had so lovingly stroked and located the discreetly placed button beneath.

‘Very cunning,’ she said, torn between admiration and frustration. Just once she would like to get the better of him!

‘I thought so,’ said Blake, sliding his electronic control into his trouser pocket and picking up the bag, draped in his jacket and tie, which he had dropped at his feet. He strode over to punch a series of numbers into the electronic keypad on the wall, his lean back shifting to block her view when she craned for a look.

‘Is that an alarm?’

‘And remote deadlocking—it’s on password access now,’ he told her smoothly. ‘Would you like to come in?’ He opened the internal door to the house and stood back politely.

She lifted her chin. ‘You mean you’re actually giving me a choice?’

‘We all have choices—they’re just not always the ones we’d like them to be.’

‘You have a very glib tongue, don’t you?’

It was his turn to try and look innocent. ‘That’s not what my teachers used to say. They said I was so quiet in class they hardly knew I was there.’

‘I bet half the time you weren’t,’ she sniped.

His wicked grin was supremely confident. ‘How did you guess?’

‘You’re the type to have problems with authority.’

‘And what type is that?’

She wrinkled her freckled nose, the only part of her that didn’t actively ache. ‘Arrogant.’

To her chagrin he seemed flattered rather than annoyed by her insult. ‘Is it arrogance to have faith in one’s abilities?’

‘If it gives you an exaggerated opinion of your own importance, then, yes. Conceit like that could be your downfall.’

‘Now you sound like my father. He didn’t have any faith in my personal vision of the future either. He hated it when Prescott offered me a job.’

‘Did he think you should have stayed in school?’

He gave up waiting for her to move and brushed past her through the doorway. ‘No, he just didn’t like the idea of his son betraying his origins by becoming an errand boy to The Bosses.’

Lured by the skilfully dangled bait, Nora automatically followed, hovering by a potted palm in the tiled entrance way as he re-engaged the deadlock, brooding over his words.

‘Didn’t he want you working for Sir Prescott?’ she asked, recalling the woman at the party who had mentioned the rumour about Blake’s paternity.

‘Let’s just say that Dad disapproved of my capitalistic yearnings,’ he said, with an irony that suggested a radical understatement. ‘He thought that multi-national corporate executives were the corrupt robber-barons of the modern age. He would have preferred to see me pursue a career in honest crime than assist in the legalised oppression of the working masses.’ He put his free hand under her elbow and guided her up a wide flight of stairs, their feet sinking soundlessly into thick wool carpet the colour of bleached sand. ‘We fought like hell about it every time we saw each other.’

‘That must have been tough on your mother,’ she murmured, her bleary eye caught by the paintings which enlivened the lime-washed plaster walls—an eclectic mix of signed prints and originals.

Irony turned into open amusement. ‘She wouldn’t thank you for saying so. Mum loves a good fight. She and Dad scrapped like cat and dog all their married life. Being a MacLeod meant you learnt from the cradle to stand your ground and fight tooth and nail to defend your beliefs. We were all extremely vocal.’

‘Except in the classroom,’ she said drily.

He shrugged. ‘I wasn’t interested enough to make myself heard there, and since I worked before and after school I had to catch up on my rest somehow. Thanks to large classes and inattentive teachers I perfected the art of dozing at my desk—and it didn’t cost me a cent in lost wages.’

‘It couldn’t have done much for your school grades.’

His mouth held shades of the cocky kid. ‘It wasn’t my academic record that caught Scotty’s attention; it was my willingness to hustle, to tackle anything that was thrown at me, to persist until a job was done…’

His fascinating frankness, Nora realised, had been a deliberate ploy to take her mind off their surroundings, but now that they had reached the top of the stairs she was hit by the full impact of his private eyrie.

The open-plan living area was centred around a square fire-box enclosed in glass, capped by a stainless steel flue and flanked on three sides by long couches in vibrant dark blue, deep-cushioned and luxurious. Bifolding glass doors and windows ran the length of the house, opening out to a wide sun-drenched terrace flanked by roughcast walls smothered in a dark creeper, the outer edge of which fell away with heart-stopping suddenness into a zigzag shaped swimming pool. An aptly named infinity pool, for beyond the shimmering sheet of captive water was…nothing…striations of blue sea and sky dissolving into an indistinguishable horizon.

Nora’s scalp tightened over her throbbing skull, her whole body going rigid with alarm. ‘There’s n-no guard rail out there—’ she stuttered.

‘Yes, there is. You just can’t see it from here. There’s a strip of garden a metre and a half below the far edge of the pool, closed in by a solid balcony wall…’ Which provided safety, but no security against Nora’s soaring imagination.

Her lips parted on a soundless mew of protest but Blake had already turned her smartly in the opposite direction.

‘Don’t worry, I’ve given you one of the guest rooms at the back of the house,’ he said, his hand flat between her shoulderblades as he propelled her through an archway on the other side of the stairs and down a wide windowless hallway into a high-ceilinged room with walls of palest coffee and Persian rugs splashed across the bleached carpet.

‘See—’ he said, crossing to the bay windows and whisking back the filmy curtains to reveal the dense native bush which formed a natural screen on the other side of the glass. ‘No view whatsoever. You’re tucked right up against the slope of the hill here. If you don’t want to use the air conditioning you can switch on the ceiling fans, and there’s a home entertainment centre in that lattice-wood cabinet. Your en suite bathroom—which is minus a bathtub, by the way—is through that archway. I’m sure you’ll find everything very suitable to your needs.’

Suitable wasn’t the word which sprang immediately to mind as Nora’s jittery gaze fell on the queen-sized platform bed draped in white mosquito netting which dominated the room. Flanked by huge glazed pots sprouting luxuriant palms, the bed seemed to float above the floor on its polished wood pedestal, and behind the folds of the gauzy hangings textured silk cushions in jewelled colours and dense patterns were piled on the white bedspread, adding to the aura of exotic luxury.

Talk about Arabian Nights! Nora visualised herself languishing in sensuous abandon amidst the mounding of pillows, the silk cool against her hot skin, a temptress worthy of a sultan’s favour…a tall dark grey-eyed sultan with a hawkish face and a black frown that made everyone tremble before him—everyone, that was, but the woman who could bring him to his knees…

‘Well, what do you think?’

She blushed, tearing her mind from her silken fantasies, seeking refuge in cool flippancy.

‘What—no bars on the window?’

He let the curtains drift back into place. ‘Why should there be? I thought we’d agreed that you’re a guest here, not a prisoner.’

His innocent expression fooled neither of them. ‘You and I obviously have different definitions of the word “guest”,’ she sniffed. ‘Which reminds me—you were going to tell me why you brought me here.’

‘Of course. But why don’t I let you get settled in first?’ His grey-eyed gaze slid over her crumpled figure. ‘You might feel more disposed to relax if you change into something more casual…’

He placed the small bag he had been carrying on top of the squat wooden chest at the end of the bed—and for the first time Nora noticed the distinctive home-made tags.

‘Hey, where did you get that? That looks like mine!’

He gave a wry shrug and suspicion turned to fresh outrage as she elbowed him out of the way to unzip the lid and throw it open. A very familiar pattern of cartoon rabbits stared back up at her.

She flushed to the roots of her hair. ‘You stole my laundry!’

He shrugged, unrepentant. ‘I was being a good host. I doubt you would have wanted to spend the entire weekend in the same set of underwear.’

She was ransacking the contents, recognising several things that hadn’t been in the plundered laundry basket. ‘You went through my chest of drawers, too!’ she accused.

‘I thought you’d want a reasonable selection of your own things to wear. I know how women are about their clothes—’

‘I bet you do,’ she muttered darkly.

‘Growing up with three sisters, I could hardly help but gain an insight into the female perspective,’ he reminded her.

Her flush deepened. She doubted that his insight was solely due to sisterly influence. ‘That’s not the point. I didn’t give you permission to go into my things—’

‘Are we going to have an argument now over who first invaded whose privacy?’ he drawled.

Her anger deflated like a pricked balloon. ‘I already admitted that was a mistake,’ she said.

‘Which you’re now going to rectify by behaving like the perfect guest,’ he said smoothly.

‘My laptop’s not here—’ she realised.

‘Sorry, I must have left it down in the car—I’ll bring it up later. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get changed myself. Meantime, feel free to explore. My room is at the opposite end of the hall.’

Was that a warning or a tacit invitation? Nora wondered with a shivery frisson that led her to close the door with a slight snap at his departing heels. Either way, her first inclination was to do the exact opposite of whatever it was he wanted.

However, she had no intention of cutting off her nose to spite her face, so she peeled off her hastily donned office battle armour and substituted an amber sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of loose white cotton shorts, both still fragrant with sunshine and washing powder, from her open bag. Then she ventured into the compact luxury of the en suite bathroom to splash water on to her face.

She nosed shamelessly into the drawers of the marble-topped vanity and found a mixture of used and new make-up and feminine toiletries of various brands. Evidence of sisters or his string of Insignificant Others? she wondered moodily.

Back in the bedroom, she couldn’t resist crawling under the voluminous mosquito netting to find out if the bed felt as gorgeous as it looked.

It did. Soft, yet resilient, the mattress sank under her testing weight. Sliding her bare toes over the nubby silk, Nora experimentally stretched out to her full length, draping limp arms over the mound of cushions and letting her tired bones melt into the welcoming depths of the downy softness. Her puffy eyelids felt as if they had little weights attached and it was an effort to keep them open. Motionless, Nora became aware of the heavy silence hanging over the house, absorbing the continuous muted roar of the ocean and transforming it into a lullaby of white noise. Perhaps if she didn’t move for a few minutes the warring factions within her body might make their fragile peace, she thought hopefully, and render her fighting fit for another round of verbal fisticuffs with Danger Man.

Her mouth curved into a bitter smile. Blake MacLeod might think that because she had let herself be temporarily swept away by his aggressive arrogance she would be putty in his hands, but she was no longer a naive soft-hearted idiot who trusted people to act with honour. No, she was a hardened cynic. From now on she would be a taker rather than a giver—smart and ruthless. And beautiful, of course…She snuggled deeper into the gratifying fantasy of herself as a voluptuous sexy femme fatale, a fascinating woman of passion and mystery, an irresistible and unconquerable challenge to men everywhere.

And to one infuriating man in particular…

Chapter Eight

NORA DIDN’T BELIEVE in ghosts, but the white shrouds swirling around her in the smothering darkness made her rear up with a cry of alarm.

As she lashed out at the floating phantoms, the ghosts abruptly transformed themselves into billowing folds of mosquito netting dancing to the slow beat of the ceiling fan chopping quietly overhead.

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