Caribbean Desire Read online

  'Yes,' he said conversationally, restarting the engine and slowly pulling away from the grass verge. 'Would you like to hear what I found out?'

  Emma looked at the dark, ruthless set of his features and shrugged. 'Would I be able to stop you?'

  'You could always tell me that you're not interested. Wasn't that your stand a few minutes ago?'

  He laughed softly when she didn't say anything, and her teeth clamped together in anger. He was playing a cat-and-mouse game with her, and enjoying it.

  She added 'sadist' to her list of descriptions of him.

  'I wish you'd get to the point,' she said.

  'Well, the point is, Emma—do you mind if I call you Emma? The point is,' he carried on, without waiting for an answer from her, 'that I know quite a few people in your line of work, and my contacts have informed me that over the past eight months you passed up three offers of a job, all working with some very prominent people. I was told that you had something else in the pipeline. To be specific, this job. So what I want to know is, why? If you're as free of any underhand motives as you claim to be, why turn down Rome and Hong Kong in favour of an island?'

  Emma relaxed. He hadn't found out about her. She was stupid to have panicked at all.

  'There you go,' she crowed triumphantly. 'If I were a gold-digger, I would have snapped up one of those offers.'

  'Except that Alistair is the oldest, and by far the wealthiest.'

  His vivid blue eyes met hers, and she could almost feel him trying to unlock her mind and unravel her most personal secrets.

  No wonder, she thought, he was such a big deal in business. Even knowing that she was safe, she still felt a stab of wariness.

  'That never even occurred to me,' Emma replied truthfully. 'I can't imagine what types you mix with, but you have a very jaded idea of women if you think that we're all after as much as we can get.'

  'Are you normally so lippy?'

  Emma flushed, feeling unreasonably offended by what she saw as an implied criticism of her. True, she always made a point of standing up for herself, but she had never seen it as a flaw in her character. Conrad made it seem as though it was a trait that wasn't particularly

  desirable in a woman. Just as well, she thought, that she couldn't care less what he thought.

  'Is the interrogation finished?' she asked coldly.

  'Doesn't the isolation of this island bother you?' Conrad continued as though she had not spoken. 'Don't you think that you might miss the bright lights?'

  'I don't need the night life, if that's what you mean.' Unlike you, she added silently to herself. If the gossip columns were anything to go by, Conrad DeVere never slept.

  A little voice told her that gossip columns did not ; exactly adhere to the truth like glue to tissue paper, but she ignored it.

  'Funny,' he mused with a sarcastic cut to his voice. 'You strike me as the sort of girl who would find the night life very exciting. After all, you're young, attractive...' He allowed the sentence to drift, the shrewd blue eyes glancing across at her.

  Emma felt a twinge of alarm. She looked at him, suddenly oddly conscious of his masculinity. The heat, she thought, must be getting to her.

  'And tired,' she finished hurriedly for him. 'How much longer before we get there?' He seemed to be driving abnormally slowly, although to be fair the roads were rough.

  They had left the one and only stretch of highway behind, and were travelling across much smaller winding roads. On the one side, the dense mat of trees seemed intent on consuming the narrow strip of tarmac at the first opportunity; on the other the vista stretched across yet more thick forest until in the distance the water glim- ; mered like sapphire.

  'There's not much to do here,' Conrad persisted, treating her interruption with bland disregard. 'Won't you miss the theatres? And surely there's some young man waiting for you back in London?'

  'That's none of your business.'

  'As I told you, everything about you is my business.' His voice was soft and silky-smooth.

  Emma didn't answer. She gazed through the window at the lush green panorama and wished that the man sitting beside her would simply evaporate in a puff of smoke.

  While she had been arguing with Conrad she had had no time to feel apprehensive. Now that sick fluttering in her stomach was returning. They surely couldn't be very far away from Alistair Jackson's house now. Not that there was much evidence of civilisation around them.

  Other cars were few and far between. There were no buildings or high-rise houses, only the occasional scattering of villages where groups of dark-skinned children played by the side of the twisting road, or else bathed under standpipes. They were obviously self-sufficient for food, because chickens clustered around the wooden huts, and glimpses of back yards showed that they cultivated all their own vegetables and fruit.

  'We're nearly there.' Conrad's voice broke into her silent appreciation of the scenery, bouncing her back to the present.

  'Good,' she lied. She wished now that she had never boarded that plane at Heathrow. What if she discovered that Alistair Jackson was a disagreeable, cantankerous old man? Wouldn't it have been better to have remained in England and continued to visualise him through conveniently distant rose-coloured spectacles? Reality was so often poles apart from what you thought it was going to be.

  'What did you mean when you said that Alistair Jackson had been taken in by a woman who was after his money?'

  Emma would have preferred not to talk to Conrad at all, but the only option open to her, of remaining silent, was too full of uncomfortable worries for her liking.

  'Nervous?' he asked with an aggravating guess at the truth.

  'No.' Emma glared at him. On top of everything else, the man was a mind-reader. 'I was simply trying to be polite. If it's too much for you, though...'

  Conrad smiled, his first genuine smile of amusement, and she glimpsed that notorious charm which the newspapers were always going on about. A ridiculous warmth swept over her.

  'Lisa St Clair. Ever heard of her?'

  Emma shook her head.

  'No. The newspapers never managed to get hold of the story. They would have had a field day if they had. Happened years ago. She came to Alistair highly recommended as a nurse, a very beautiful nurse, and with her mind on doing a bit more than mere nursing. I was only a teenager when it all happened, but my father told me that Alistair escaped by the skin of his teeth. Apparently this lady had an accomplice, a good-for- nothing wastrel whom she kept conveniently in the background. Someone saw them together in a hotel somewhere in Trinidad, and word somehow got back to Alistair. He wasn't pleased.'

  'I can imagine. From the newspaper clippings I've read of him,' she mused aloud, 'I wouldn't have thought him the sort to fall for someone like that. I guess all hard- nosed tycoons must have their soft spots.'

  'I guess we do.' Conrad looked at her with wry amusement and Emma blushed.

  It must have been exhaustion after the hours spent on the plane and at the various airports, because her rigid self-control seemed all haywire. She was responding to things Conrad said in a way that was so out of character for her that Emma could only blame it on nerves and exhaustion.

  'He'd been through a prolonged bad patch,' Conrad was saying. 'I was only a boy at the time, but apparently

  his daughter, his only daughter, left home against his wishes. Eloped with some fellow.'

  Conrad was concentrating on the road. He didn't see Emma's face whiten.

  'What do you know about it?' she asked casually, toying with the leather strap of her bag. 'I mean, it's useful finding out as much as I can about Alistair, and as from as many angles as possible, if my input is to be relevant.'

  It sounded good. Believable. Emma wondered whether to enlarge on the reasons for wanting to know why Caroline Jackson had left home, and decided against it. There was no point in arousing Conrad's curiosity unnecessarily.

  Conrad shrugged. 'Not much more to tell. She eloped and was never heard fr
om again. Sank like the proverbial stone into a pond of water, and didn't leave a ripple behind her.'

  Emma digested his summary of events in silence.

  'Why didn't Alistair try to locate her?'

  'How do you know that he didn't?' Conrad looked at her briefly through narrowed eyes.

  'Just assumed,' Emma said hastily. 'I mean, if he had located her, they would be in contact now, wouldn't they?'

  She made it sound like a statement of fact, rather than a question, and let the whole subject lapse into silence. Conrad was sharp enough to tune in to nuances of interest, and that was the last thing she needed.

  The car was slowing down, turning away from the main road up an ever narrower side route, where the undergrowth, untamed and prolific on the main road, had here been trimmed back and given some semblance of order.

  With a numb, prickly tension, Emma watched the large Jackson villa loom towards them.

  Ii sat with majestic grandeur at the end of a long drive and an open courtyard, and in the middle of what Emma considered the finest gardens that she had ever seen.

  The grass was trimmed to a crew-cut, and carefully landscaped with all manner of tropical foliage, from the bright colours of bougainvillaea to tall hibiscus bushes, sprouting red and yellow open-petalled flowers.

  It was so much more breathtaking than she had expected, and the photographs which she had seen of it were spectacular enough.

  So here I am at last, she thought wonderingly. The present meets the past.

  Her hand trembled as she slid open the car door, to find Conrad looking at her curiously.

  'He doesn't bite.'

  'What?' Emma blinked at him.

  'Alistair. He doesn't bite. Or do you normally get an attack of stage-fright every time you start a new assignment?'

  'Yes,' Emma said, agreeing with whatever he had said. Her mouth had dried up and all she seemed able to manage were monosyllables.

  Conrad was staring at her thoughtfully, but he didn't say anything.

  He collected her suitcases and hold-alls, and walked to the front door, chatting amiably to the plump dark woman who opened it.

  Emma followed and with every step she took her palms felt more clammy. She should never have come. She should never have come, because there were some things better left alone. She looked around at the Land Rover with a sense of yearning.

  Around her, she heard the rich sing-song tones of the house help, Conrad's laconic drawl, the ticking of a grandfather clock.

  It all washed over her. She started when Conrad asked her whether she wanted to see Alistair now or else later, after she had bathed.

  'Now,' she managed to say. When he began walking beside her, she turned to him politely. 'You can just tell me where to go,' she said. 'I'm sure I'll be able to find my way.'

  'I'm sure you would," he replied blandly.

  He continued walking with her, and Emma stopped in her tracks. 'Why are you coming with me?'

  'Because,' Conrad drawled with infuriating shrewdness, 'I want to be there when you meet Alistair. You may have half convinced me that you're not a gold- digger, but you're still hiding something from me, and I'd like to find out what it is. I'm not used to people having secrets, not from me, at any rate.'

  For a second Emma forgot her nervousness, and rounded furiously on Conrad.

  'If I wanted a chaperon, I would have asked for one!' she snapped. 'Shouldn't you be heading back somewhere, anyway, now that you're through cross-examining me? Don't you have work to do? Companies to run?'

  Conrad was clearly amused by her display of anger. He smiled, and Emma resisted the temptation to knock out his front teeth.

  'I'm touched by your concern for the welfare of my companies in my absence, but I think they can do without me for a few days.'

  'A few days?'

  Emma stared at him in dismay. The man unsettled her. She was in a delicate enough situation as it was; the last thing she either wanted or needed was to have him hovering around, making her feel things that she was not used to feeling and didn't much like.

  'The study's just here at the end of the corridor.' He walked off, and Emma hurried after him. Since she'd arrived, she seemed to have spent most of her time hur

  rying after the damned man. With her mouth drawn in a tight line, she waited while he knocked and then pushed the door open.

  'Alistair,' he said, 'I have your writer, Emma Belle.'

  Alistair Jackson sat in his wheelchair, surrounded by shelves of books. Emma followed Conrad into the large room, her eyes fixed on Alistair's face.

  He looked older than she had expected, somehow more frail. Had he really once been so tall and proud? The hair, full and dark in the faded photograph which she had inspected so many times, had given way in old age to a high balding dome. Under thick brows the eyes were still young, however, and were scrutinising her intently.

  She was aware of Conrad lounging by the window, but she could not prevent the curiosity from showing on her face.

  Ever since her mother had told her about Alistair, when she had been very young, Emma had been curious about him, but it was only in the last few months, when the possibility of actually meeting him was on the horizon, that she had begun to build her careful, detailed picture of him.

  She waited for him to speak, and when he did the depth of his voice surprised her. She listened to him as he shifted the conversation between Conrad and herself, chatting about generalities, and thought, He must have been quite something once. There was still an aura of command about him, even now.

  Part of her responded to what he was now saying, asked the right questions, made all the right noises. The rest of her was slowly trying to reconcile him with the man whom her mother had feared and respected for so many years.

  Slowly the tension began to ease out of her body. She could feel herself physically relax and begin to respond to his questions with less restraint.

  When he asked her if the following morning would be too soon to start work, she responded enthusiastically, 'We could stan this minute if you like!'

  Alistair's firm mouth relaxed into a smile and he raised one restraining hand. 'I wouldn't hear of it. You've only just arrived. Spend the rest of the day unwinding. Believe me, you'll need some rest before we begin on my autobiography. The things I could tell you!'

  His eyes clouded over and Emma remained silent. She wondered what was going through his mind. Was it her mother? The temptation to ask was almost irresistible, but she bit it back. Everything, she thought, would unfold in its own time and not a minute before.

  'I'm sure,' Conrad drawled, 'that you're not the only one with stories to tell.' He looked at Emma with one raised eyebrow, and she scowled. She had almost managed to forget his presence.

  'No,' she replied sweetly, 'I'm sure you have no end of stories that you could amuse us with.'

  'Well, anyway' Alistair looked at them narrowly, and then waved his hand '—no time for stories of any kind. An old man like me needs his beauty sleep.' He turned to Conrad with a grimace. 'You know how finicky that stupid doctor of mine is. He may even threaten to send that harridan of a nurse here again, and I don't think I could cope with the experience twice in a lifetime. It's bad enough that he sees fit to deprive me of my

  beloved whisky, and the occasional cigar, but' and

  he turned to face Emma '—if you saw that battleaxe of a matron, then you'd really understand the meaning of suffering.'

  He chuckled, but Emma suddenly noticed that he was looking tired. When he rang the bell for Esther to take him to his room, she stood up, realising with a start from a glance at her watch that they had been talking for far longer than she had thought.

  'Conrad can show you around the house and grounds,' Alistair said from the door.

  'I'd prefer to show myself around,' Emma began, but Alistair was already out of the room.

  She turned to collect her handbag from where it was slung over the arm rest.

  'No guided tour?' Conrad
asked in a mocking voice.

  'I'd rather go on a guided tour with a python.' To Emma's annoyance, he burst out laughing, and she reluctantly grinned. She looked at him and for a split second their eyes locked. Something in his expression made her turn away first, her heart pounding in her chest.

  'I have unpacking to do anyway,' she said breathlessly, moving towards the door and keeping as much distance between them as she possibly could.

  He moved towards her and Emma looked at him in dismay, her body responding with infuriating sensitivity to his nearness. She would have left the room, she had every intention of doing so, but her feet refused to obey the commands from her brain. They remained firmly planted on the ground until Conrad was so close to her that she could feel his warm breath on her face when he spoke.

  'And I was hoping to find out what you're trying so desperately to hide.'

  'Hide?' Emma laughed unconvincingly. 'I'm exhausted, that's all.'

  'Well,' he said smoothly, 'I'm here for a couple of days more. Time enough for you to overcome your.. .exhaustion.'

  This time Emma did flee, walking quickly towards the door and making sure that she shut it firmly behind her.

  Esther showed her to her bedroom, but it was only when she was inside that she felt her body sag as all the nervousness and anxiety drained out of her.

  Alistair, she thought, was at least not the cantankerous old man that she had dreaded. He was forceful but

  approachable, and with a biting but very witty sense of humour. In fact, Emma decided, he was endearing.

  She sat on the bed, and pulled a sealed letter out of her bag, staring thoughtfully at the black, rounded writing on the front.

  Eighteen months ago her mother had given her the letter, and told her to give it to Alistair, to hand-deliver it, to make peace for her as she couldn't do it herself.

  Two days later she had died.