Escape From Desire

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!

CHAPTER TWO

IT was shortly before ten forty-five when Tamara walked into the hotel foyer to join the small group of people waiting there for the guide for the rain forest walk.

She saw Zachary Fletcher straightaway, but ignored him, deliberately going to join Dot and George Partington, who were chatting to the foursome they had mentioned the previous day.

‘Are you looking forward to it?’ Dot asked her, and when Tamara said that she was she added curiously, ‘By the way, what happened to you last night? I looked for you at dinner time, but I couldn’t see you.’

‘I ate in my room. I had a headache—probably too much sun,’ Tamara lied, knowing full well that the reason she hadn’t dined in the restaurant was that she wanted to avoid any further contact with Zachary Fletcher. It would have been just her luck to run into him in the dining-room and for him to accuse her of deliberately arranging it that way. Not even the brief evening telephone call she received from Malcolm had soothed her, and she was still burning with a resentment which refused to fade.

‘You’re looking very attractive, anyway,’ Dot told her, admiring the olive cotton jeans Tamara was wearing with a white tee-shirt with toning stripes in olive and rust. Over her shoulder Tamara had slung a large canvas beach bag with a slightly thicker long-sleeved sweat-shirt, sunscreen, and some other bits and pieces in it, the canvas almost exactly matching the dull olive of her jeans. The outfit had been bought especially for her holiday—Malcolm didn’t care for women in jeans, and Tamara had had to buy a pair of jodhpurs especially for her visit to his parents, who kept a couple of hunters for Malcolm’s and his father’s use.

Malcolm had insisted on Tamara learning to ride—it was expected that she should, he had told her when she protested that she was not likely to get much opportunity to use her newly gained skill in London.

She had drawn the line at hunting, though. Much as she enjoyed the stirring sight of the huntsman with his hounds and the riders in their pink coats she had no wish to emulate them.

Dot introduced her to the cheerful quartet she and George had been talking to. Alex, the fashion designer, was slim and fair-haired, his wife Sue dressed in a pair of high-fashion baggy trousers cleverly linked to the top and the man’s shirt she was wearing belted with gold suede.

Their friends, Heather and Rick Chalfont, were Alex’s business partners, although more on the financial side than the fashion, Rick explained.

‘Don’t you find it lonely being here on your own?’ Sue asked her.

‘Not really. I came away for a rest …’ Dot had turned away to talk to Zachary Fletcher and Tamara was unbearably aware of his lean, sardonic face, the mocking expression in his eyes as they rested momentarily on her flushed skin.

‘Yes, the build-up to a wedding can be wearing,’ Heather agreed sympathetically. ‘When is the big day, by the way?’

‘We haven’t decided finally yet. Malcolm—my fiancé—has to go to New York soon, and he isn’t quite sure how long he’ll need to be there. Once he gets back we’ll fix a firm date.’

‘Hardly an eager bridegroom, then?’ Zachary Fletcher drawled, joining in the conversation. ‘Haven’t you warned him what happens to laggards in love?’

Despite his reference to the old Border ballad Tamara knew that he was implying that she was the one urging Malcolm into a marriage he wasn’t too keen on, and she longed to be able to tell him that he was quite wrong and that Malcolm simply wasn’t the type of man to rush anything.

‘Oh, we all have trouble getting our men to the altar these days,’ Sue laughed. ‘That’s what comes of sexual equality. There isn’t the same need to rush that there used to be—It’s much better too, don’t you think?’ she appealed to Tamara. ‘Just imagine marrying a man and not knowing the slightest thing about him sexually. It’s almost as archaic as an arranged marriage to a stranger.’

‘Yes,’ Tamara agreed blankly, hoping that her expression wouldn’t betray her, but how could she admit in front of Zachary Fletcher that her sexual experience of any man, let alone Malcolm, was practically nil?

Oh, there had been a few tentative caresses when she was in her teens, but shyness and Aunt Lilian’s stern lectures had withered any natural desire to experiment, and as the years had gone by she had grown more and more ashamed of having to admit the truth. Not even Malcolm knew that she was a virgin. The subject had never come up, and for the first time she began to wonder how Malcolm would react. There had been a time in her late teens when she had begun to think that the truth must be written all over her face, and it had made her awkward and shy when she was approached by boys, but it was something she had eventually overcome.

It had been obvious that Zachary Fletcher hadn’t guessed the truth, and she had to fight down her rising anger as she remembered the previous afternoon.

When Sue claimed Dot’s attention to her horror Tamara found her běte noire at her elbow, looking hard and intensely masculine in the same black jeans, this time with a cotton shirt, which again had long sleeves and was unbuttoned only at the throat, where she could just see the first crisp tangle of body hair shadowing his chest.

‘I hope you aren’t going to accuse me of joining the walk simply to force an acquaintance with you,’ she managed to say in an undertone.

‘Hardly.’ The creases in his face deepened as he smiled. ‘I’d have to be paranoic to do so, wouldn’t I, seeing that I put my name down first. Do you enjoy walking?’

He didn’t really sound as though he cared whether she did or not, but Tamara forced herself to answer politely.

‘Yes, I do. I was brought up in the country …’

‘Well, today’s jaunt won’t be any country stroll. These mountains are pretty steep and I believe the jungle is extremely dense …’

‘Are you trying to put us off?’ George joked, suddenly joining in the conversation.

‘Not at all. I probably gave the wrong impression. To tell the truth, had I thought the walk would be too arduous I wouldn’t be attempting it myself.’ Zachary Fletcher touched his left leg as he spoke, and Tamara remembered George saying that he had seen him limping.

‘I was involved in an … accident,’ he added tersely, obviously reading the question in George’s eyes. ‘I’m here to recuperate, and take enough gentle exercise to get myself fit to resume normal work.’

‘You’re in the Army. I believe?’ George prodded.

‘Yes.’

The word was completely devoid of expression, but Tamara had been looking at his face as he spoke, and she caught her breath as she saw it change visibly, closing and hardening, a shutter coming down over his eyes. What on earth had there been in that innocent question to provoke a reaction like that? Unless of course he had been cashiered or some such thing. She had heard of such happenings from Malcolm’s father, and knew they were a terrible disgrace … What did it matter why he had reacted the way he did? she asked herself. She couldn’t care less about the man.

‘Looks as if our transport has just arrived,’ George commented. Outside the hotel were two Land Rovers, equipped with extra seats, and open to the fresh air.

‘Everyone ready?’

Everyone was. The quartet were first at the Land Rovers, followed by the young honeymoon couple. Tamara was about to sit beside them when the guide prevented her.

‘You sit in next one,’ he told her. ‘I sit here,’ and she had perforce to join Dot and George in the rear Land Rover, her heart thumping uncomfortably when Zachary Fletcher slid his long length in beside her.

There wasn’t a lot of room in the vehicle; Dot and George were both inclined to plumpness, and Tamara could feel the heat of Zachary Fletcher’s thigh burning through the thin fabric of her jeans. She tried to move away surreptitiously, but it was impossible to do so without squashing up to George.

The guide climbed into the foremost Land Rover and shouted something to the driver and they were off.

The road leading from the hotel complex was smooth and well tarmacked, but the moment they turned off it they were on a road which by the looks of it had been neglected for years. As the wheels of the Land Rover plunged into a huge pothole Tamara was flung bodily against Zachary Fletcher. It was like running full tilt into a stone wall, she thought breathlessly as his arm came out to save her and she was held against the hard, muscled wall of his chest and the taut flatness of his belly. It could only have been seconds before he released her, but they were the longest seconds of Tamara’s life. The heat of him seemed to burn right through her thin clothes, imprinting itself against her body. Scarlet colour ran up under her skin as she realised that just as she had been aware of the male contours of his body so he must have felt the soft fullness of her breasts.

‘Tamara, are you all right?’

Dot’s anxious query intruded on her thoughts. ‘I’m fine,’ she assured her, adding formally, ‘Thank you, Mr Fletcher. I was caught off guard.’

There was something distinctly enigmatical about the look he gave her. ‘It happens to us all,’ she was assured, ‘and please … call me Zach, Tamara.’

‘Oh, just look at that view!’ Dot exclaimed, drawing attention away from Tamara’s faintly flushed cheeks. ‘Have you ever been to the Caribbean before, Zach?’

‘No.’

All of them looked to their right, where the ground fell away to the sea, a vivid and impossible blue melting into lilac mists on the horizon.

‘It’s so beautiful!’ Dot sighed.

‘But very poor,’ George reminded her. ‘I can’t get over the poverty in which a lot of the islanders still live. When you’re here you begin to understand the pull Communism has for some of these people.’

‘You’re right,’ Zach agreed. ‘Already there are strong left-wing groups in all the Caribbean islands. They get their education and training in Cuba, and unless the West starts sitting up and taking notice we’re going to wake up one day and find we’ve lost the Caribbean to Castro.’

‘Oh, no politics, please!’ Dot protested. ‘Let’s not spoil our holiday! Tamara, just look at that building perched down there on the hillside. It looks as though it’s amost ready to fall into the sea!’

It was quite a long drive to the beginning of the rain forest, made worse by the appalling condition of the roads. Although St Stephen’s was one of the largest of the Caribbean islands, it had been very badly neglected; however, the hotel manager had told Tamara that they were hoping that the revenue from tourists would help to improve the facilities of the island.

The plain which stretched from the coast to the rain forest was dotted with banana plantations, the island’s main crop, and after a while the novelty of seeing the fruit protected from the insects by bright blue plastic bags began to wear off. The closer they got to their destination the more aware Tamara became of a certain tension in the man seated on her left. There was nothing in the relaxed manner in which he lounged in his seat to betray any emotion. His face was slightly averted as though he were studying the countryside, so that all Tamara could see was the taut line of his jaw and the dark hair growing low in his nape, but the aura of tension emanating from him was unmistakable; she could feel her own nerve endings shivering in primeval response, and she wondered what was wrong.

‘Oh, that must be the restaurant,’ Dot commented when a solitary building appeared on the edge of the plain just where the volcanic mountains rose steeply to the sky, their sides clothed in thick tropical vegetation.

The plain itself seemed to be completely bereft of dwellings of any sort, although one or two dusty cart tracks looked as though they must lead to either villages or houses.

‘Most of the plantation owners built their homes on the Atlantic side of the island,’ Zach explained when Tamara commented on the uninhabited landscape. ‘It was considered to be healthier and less likely to be attacked by pirates.’

His face seemed to relax a little as he spoke to her, the bones softening a little from their previous fixed rigidity, and then the Land Rovers started to climb up towards the restaurant.

Made of wood, its original green paint had long ago faded to a dull olive, and inside, despite the overhead fans, the air was thick and clammy. Tamara had never felt less like food, and while the other members of the party settled themselves at the long trestle tables she went back outside, finding it both cooler and fresher.

‘Not hungry?’

She hadn’t realised that Zach Fletcher had followed her, but shook her head mutely, unwilling to admit to the momentary weakness which had overcome her inside the restaurant.

‘Me neither.’

The admission surprised her and her expression betrayed the fact. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked grimly. ‘Aren’t insensitive brutes like me allowed to have normal feelings?’

‘I never said …’ Tamara began defensively, but he cut her short, and mocked, ‘You never said, no. You didn’t need to, those eyes of yours say it all. Quite a contradiction, aren’t you? On the one hand we have the modern, liberated young woman, holidaying apart from her … fiancé, and yet those eyes could belong to a sheltered novice, with no more idea of modern mores than a babe in arms.’

‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ve decided that I’ll have something to eat after all,’ Tamara said pointedly, brushing past him, but once inside the restaurant she could do no more than drink a glass of lemonade and toy with the salad she had ordered.

It was after two o’clock when their guide preceded them along one of the paths leading from the restaurant up into the mountains.

Within half an hour Tamara was perspiring heavily, glad of her cotton tee-shirt, and she wasn’t the only one. Everyone seemed to be feeling the effects of the intense humidity, even, to her surprise, Zach Fletcher, whose shirt front was dark as his perspiration soaked into it, and yet unlike the other men he made no move to either roll up the long sleeves or discard the shirt altogether. Perhaps it was because he knew how darkly attractive he looked in the black shirt and pants, Tamara thought acidly, instantly dismissing the thought as stupid; he wasn’t the sort of man who needed to attract female attention by dressing dramatically; even in the same type of floral bermudas and shirts favoured by some of the more flamboyant guests, any woman worthy of the name would give him a second look.

The deeper they progressed into the forest, the more closely entwined were the trees; mahogany predominant among them; vines twining chokingly around them, dead and decaying vegetation lining the forest floor, the sweet rotting smell making Tamara long for a breath of clean, fresh air. Once or twice their guide stopped to point out to them an orchid, growing among the rampant greenery, and occasionally the laboured sound of their breathing was broken by the shrill screech of a parrot, although they never actually glimpsed the birds. On several occasions they could hear the sound of water, but they never came in sight of any of the streams which the guide told them ran through the forest, with apparently spectacular waterfalls in places.

Tamara regretted her decision to join the walk; there was something oppressive and unwholesome about the forest and its environs, something that made her flinch and long to be out in the open once more.

At her side Zach seemed to be having no problem in keeping up with the others, despite his claim that he was recuperating from an accident, but at one point when the guide called a halt and Sue shrieked out suddenly when she caught sight of a small lizard, Tamara, who had been looking in Zach’s direction, saw him pale suddenly beneath his tan, perspiration beading his skin, his fingers curling into his thigh.

‘Are you all right?’ Her low, impulsive question seemed to free him from whatever had held him in its grip, because his face suddenly seemed to relax.

‘Fine,’ he assured her hardily. ‘Come on, I think our guide’s ready.’

They tramped through the forest for over two hours, Tamara steadily growing more and more oppressed by the entwining branches blotting out so much of the sunlight, and the heavy, unreal atmosphere around them. It was almost as though she had stepped into one of the enchanted forests of her childhood, and now, as then, fear mingled with the feeling of unreality.

They had climbed quite steeply, the path sometimes so narrow that they had to walk in single file. At one point, as promised, the rain suddenly started to fall, in saturating sheets which penetrated even the thickness of the vegetation, and the guide, who had come prepared, handed out umbrellas, large enough for two people to shelter under together.

Tamara shared hers with Zach, marvelling at the abruptness with which the rain came and went.

‘It’s something you get used to,’ Zach told her laconically, causing her to comment in surprise, ‘You said you hadn’t been to the Caribbean before.’

‘I haven’t, but one jungle’s very much like another.’

He didn’t say anything more and Tamara had the conviction that subject was not one he wished to take any further. For some reason they seemed to have been teamed together for the walk possibly because everyone else was already with somebody, and she wished passionately that she had never decided to participate in the walk. She didn’t like the atmosphere pervading the forest and she didn’t like the prickles of awareness she experienced every time some inadvertent movement brought her into physical contact with Zach Fletcher.

He glanced at his watch and frowned.

‘We ought to be heading back. There’s no dusk as we know it at home here. Another couple of hours and it will be fully dark.’

He walked forward, catching hold of the guide’s arm, and spoke to him. The guide shook his head vehemently.