Her Man with Iceberg Eyes (26 page)

She wouldn’t shake his hand.

She wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole.

“Didn’t you know?” He telescoped down to a
squat—no point in making her even more nervous. She was younger
than he’d expected. Looked a lot younger than Horrie Winters had
said, and in total denial.

“Know what?” Her words came out in an
anguished croak. Her knuckles shone white with the death-grip she
had around the old spade handle.

Anton shrugged. “That I even existed, by the
look of things. That the house was left to the two of us,
fifty-fifty?”

“The house was left to me,” she snapped.
“Gran told me again and again it would be mine after she’d
gone.”

“Your Gran,” he said, choosing the words with
care, “was a long way from her original self. I gather she had
dementia and didn’t know what was going on half the time.”

A variety of expressions flitted over the
girl’s small dusty face. Disbelief. Outrage. Acceptance for her
grandmother’s condition, but not yet for the shared ownership of
the old timber bungalow.

“Gran worried about a lot of funny stuff,”
she agreed with apparent reluctance. “I didn’t think she was too
bad until a couple of months ago.”

“Your Grand-dad arranged for their solicitor,
Horrie Winters, to have Power of Attorney,” Anton said. “Way back
before he died, because he wanted her looked after. He didn’t want
to burden you.”

“Five years ago?” Her eyes accused Anton of
crimes he’d never committed. “So why didn’t this lawyer give Gran
more money? Her clothes were in rags. I was shocked when I went
through her wardrobe.”

Anton shrugged again, wanting to stand. “She
should have been fine. She had her pension for food and clothing.
Horrie had all the household bills direct-debited from a bank
account. I know that much.”

Her eyes narrowed in accusation. “How do you
know? She was my grandmother!”

He sighed. He was in no mood to be
cross-examined by a girl he’d never met about an old lady he knew
only the barest details of.

“Didn’t you keep in touch with Horrie?” He
hoped his exasperation wasn’t too obvious.

“I’ve never heard of him. I thought now Gran
was dead I’d get a letter from someone confirming the details of my
inheritance. My inheritance,” she insisted. “My house I’m going to
renovate and live in.”

“Our inheritance,” Anton corrected, trying
not to sound too sharp. “Old Lucy had the house for her lifetime.
Now it comes to us jointly.”

“Hah! According to you. Who are you,
anyway?”

He adjusted his balance; squatting on his
heels wasn’t easy. “Anton Piers Scott Haviland if you want the
whole mouthful. Some sort of relation? A distant cousin I suppose?
Sounds like you’ve never heard of me.”

Her pretty mouth fell open and her eyes
expanded to huge black pools of disbelief. Her spare hand grasped
at the air as though she was clutching for sanity. She lurched up
from the old chair and stared down at him in horror. “I don’t have
any cousins,” she insisted. “There was my mother Margaret, and that
was all. She had no brothers or sisters, so I’ve no cousins. Dad
had one brother, but he left New Zealand and he’s been in Canada a
long time now. Since...um ...”

She started to tremble again, and Anton rose
to his feet, too, seeing her tiny silver tassel earrings shaking
and catching the light. Was she going into shock? What the hell
should he do?

***

Taken by the
Sheikh

Abducted. Seduced. Purring.

Laurel de Courcey is captured by terrorists, chained
up in a disgusting bunker, and videoed for a ransom demand which is
shown worldwide.

Ooops—wrong hostage! Who’d expect a shy Kiwi nanny
to be worth anything?

Laurel’s soon tied up in Sheikh Rafiq’s bed instead,
because he rescues her and appoints himself her personal bodyguard.
Very personal. But she has good reason to distrust men.

Imprisoned in his old royal hunting lodge deep in
the desert ‘for her own protection’, Laurel rebels. Spectacular
fireworks, dangerous escape attempts, and an impossible love affair
follow.

Warning: contains one red-hot Sheikh with a wicked
tongue and unlimited stamina.

Excerpt

Laurel de Courcey stared at the cliff in
dismay. After her exhausting trek through the desert she had to
climb
that?

The unexpected barrier at the end of the
gully rose up steep and crumbling. The tiny stream she’d been
following seeped out from under the daunting rock face. What was on
the other side? Rafiq hadn’t warned her about this—simply ordered
her to walk, and said she’d find ‘a house’.

Well, there was no house in sight. And did
she trust him anyway? He might be all taut muscles and flashing
eyes, but she had to remember he was only the lesser of two evils.
The other men in his group? Her body convulsed in a sudden shudder
just thinking about them.

She tried to banish the hideous memory and
gulped the last of her water, refilled the bottle from the
life-saving trickle, clenched her teeth, and attempted the
hazardous scramble up out of her temporary hiding place. How she
wished she had his strength and endurance!

Long minutes later she hauled herself over
the top and lay panting. Black spots whirled across her vision. She
squeezed her eyes closed, and still the spots flickered and jumped.
Finally she raised her head.

Indeed there
was
a house—or some sort
of half concealed building anyway. A high plastered wall hid much
of it, but an arched gateway, softened by cascades of pink blossom
from a gnarled tree, looked inviting.

She rose wearily and staggered onward. Palm
fronds and other lush greenery came into focus as she limped
nearer, and she feared the unexpected oasis might be a mirage after
the endless inhospitable miles of sand and rock.

But no—the gate was real. She stood in the
dancing shade of the blossoms and tugged the bell-rope. Within
seconds a small wrinkled woman appeared, bustling toward her with
colorful long skirts fluttering around her legs.

Laurel pulled Rafiq’s note from her jeans
pocket and smoothed it out. Would this be the woman she was
supposed to give it to? She held it forward.

The impassive dark face lit up. The gate
swung open. The little woman whisked the note from her fingers and
became extremely animated, urging her in and rattling away with
great enthusiasm.

“Laurel,” Laurel said, tapping her chest with
a finger.

“Yasmina,” the woman replied, thumping her
own.

“Yasmina,” Laurel tried. This brought nods
and smiles.

“Rafiq?” she asked. More nods and smiles, but
also an unmistakable gesture of ‘not here now’.

Oh darn.

Yasmina re-read the note with close
attention, all the while chattering in her own language, and drew
Laurel along the path and in through the doorway of a turreted old
house with thick stone walls. The blinding light outside made the
interior seem dim and restful, and the relative coolness washed
over her skin like a blessing.

After progressing through a long hallway,
they arrived in a high-ceilinged bedroom. Yasmina threw open a
further door, and Laurel stood amazed as the servant started water
gushing into a marble bath from an ornate gold spout. She must look
desperately hot and dirty if this was how she was welcomed!

The little woman emerged—smiling and
gesturing that Laurel was to treat the room as her own. She trotted
off, and Laurel sank down on the bed before her legs gave way under
her. What on earth would happen next?

The bath looked blissful once she managed to
rise to her weary feet again. Yasmina had thrown a handful of fresh
rose petals into it. Laurel assumed she’d been tidying up full
blown blooms as they proceeded up the path together, but plainly
the flowers had been intended for this. Fragrant foam grew ever
deeper in the water as the bath filled. A selection of French soaps
spilled from a basket at one end of the huge tub. It all seemed way
over the top for a semi-deserted relic so far from
civilization.

She stripped and bathed, shampooing the
gritty sand from her long fair hair and letting the delicious warm
scented water soothe away her aches. When she returned to the
bedroom she found all her clothes had disappeared and a gauzy mauve
robe had been laid on the bed. She slipped it on, admired its bands
of amazing gold embroidery, stretched out on the bed to consider
the strange turn her life had taken, and plummeted into an
exhausted asleep.

At once the nightmare hit again. The wind
from the desert moaned eerily. Palmfronds clattered, but otherwise
very little moved as the small seaside resort of Kalal drowsed in
the afternoon heat.

A solitary vehicle coasted to a halt just
behind her.

Laurel turned when she heard the door creak
open, but she had only a split second to register the fast-moving
dark shape of a man before brutal hands dragged a bag down over her
face. As quickly as that, she’d been trapped.

A scalding cascade of horrendous
possibilities flooded her brain. Terrified, she screamed at top
volume, dropped her sketching pad, and kicked backward with every
ounce of her considerable determination. The heel of her shoe
connected with what she hoped was her captor’s shin.

It caused a guttural male voice to let loose
a vicious curse in the local language, and she enjoyed a fleeting
flash of triumph. But then an iron-hard hand closed over her face,
pressing her lips painfully back against her teeth. And a steely
arm wrapped around her waist and heaved her forward and face
down.

Her scrabbling fingers told her she’d landed
on a slab of foam rubber on a hard floor.

Doors banged, a motor revved, and she jerked
backward as the vehicle took off at high speed.

Shudders of panic took over then. Huge
fluttery tremors ran up and down her spine.

She was blind. Cruel hands had yanked a
drawstring tightly around her neck so the bag was closed, and cut
off any vestige of light...any hope of seeing where she was being
taken.

She struggled and kicked in the swaying
vehicle, and suffered the further insult of a warm weight moving to
pin her down to the no doubt filthy mattress.

“Be still!” a man’s deep voice growled close
against her ear.

She was so astounded to hear accented but
obvious English she momentarily froze before resuming her frenzied
bucking and struggling. But she had no hope of escaping from under
his strong body.

Hard hands grabbed her wrists, and she heard
the snick of handcuffs and felt the smooth hard metal against her
skin. Her whirling brain registered she was now one step more
helpless.

Fingers trailed from her wrists to her elbows
and back to her useless hands. It was almost a caress. Her heart
thudded even more rapidly as the implication sank in.

“Be still,” he muttered again. “We do not
mean to hurt you as long as you cooperate.”

With her shoulders flattened down under his
chest, Laurel’s breasts were squashed against the floor. The man’s
hips were exactly above hers. His bony pelvis ground against her
bottom as the vehicle swayed and braked. A long hard thigh clamped
either side of her own, pinning her down, holding her captive.

And between those impressive thighs the firm
masculine bulge felt all too obvious. Desolation engulfed her
then.

“Lie still and it will go easier for you,” he
growled, lifting his upper torso off her which at least gave her
poor breasts some relief.

But the shift in weight drove his hips even
more firmly into hers, and there was no escaping the intimate press
of his body. She willed her legs to weld together as shattering
images exploded across her brain.

What did they want from her? One minute she’d
been wandering happily in the sun, thinking of the children she was
caring for, and inventing a family of her own. In an instant,
future imaginings had been ripped away and replaced with the
desperate danger of the present moment, and this cruel man, and not
nearly enough air.

Blind and half deaf, she used the senses she
had left to get some sort of fix on her situation. There was
him—who was strong and muscular because he now had her firmly
confined. There was the driver. And there seemed to be another
hoarse voice in the front seat, too. Presumably that was the man
who’d grabbed her in the street and pushed her in to be held down
by this one?

So three of them at least. Awful odds. She
didn’t stand a chance.

***

Seduction on the
Cards

When journalist Kerri is assigned to interview a
seriously rich anti-gambling crusader, she imagines a grandfatherly
tycoon with a comb-over. But hunky Alex Beaufort has plenty of
hair—and enough of everything else to make her mouth water.

Irrepressible Kerri decides to find out exactly how
much, and a sizzling game of strip-poker soon has them both peeling
off their layers of self-protection.

Seduction is definitely on the cards—but who’s
seducing who? And what are the odds? Good enough to take a chance
on?

Warning: Contains sexy Frenchman, tropical heat, and
enthusiastic outdoor fun and games.

Excerpt

Kerrigan Lush felt the ripple of unease start
on her scalp, tingle down her neck, trickle along her spine...and
then slide down each leg until her toes curled in her scarlet
stilettos.

Get a grip, Kerri,
she snapped at
herself.
It’s only a building. You’re here to interview the man
who donated it to Gamblers Anonymous—not because you’ve a little
gambling problem yourself.

She patted her pocket. Yes, the mini-recorder
was safely there. She checked her watch. Jiggled her keys. And
still those scarlet shoes weren’t willing to cross the street.