The #1 Bestsellers Collection 2011(49)

It was paradise, but it was exhausting, so just as well it was only for a day. The night had been long and full, and the night to come promised to be all of that and more. And Sienna could hardly wait. Even now, just the heat from that looped arm was enough to set her skin to tingling, her pulse to racing. Just the faintest stroke of his fingers against her arm enough to make her nipples ache and firm.

As she’d lain in bed in the dark minutes before dawn, one hand down low on her belly while thinking about the babies growing deep inside and waiting for the first stirrings of the nausea she knew would come, she’d pondered her enthusiasm in his bed, a question that had been plaguing her all day. She’d refused to make love to him when she’d arrived, telling him there was no way she’d sleep with him, fighting off his advances like they were anathema to her. And yet, since the minute she’d invited herself back into his bed, she’d barely been out of it.

But why shouldn’t she enjoy making love to him? It merely meant that she enjoyed the sex, the same as he did. It was purely physical. Purely the means to an end.

Sienna looked up at him again, at the chiselled perfection of his jaw and dark beauty of his features, and for a moment was filled with a fear so huge it threatened to consume her. He was a prince, a man whose body and looks would give the gods a run for their money, a man who could move her world with just one heated look, one sensual caress. Why should he ever love her? What could she offer him but to be a willing partner in bed and a mother for his children?

She already represented those things.

Why was she was kidding herself that he would want more? She lowered her eyes, that now familiar gnawing eating away at her gut, leaving a vacuum that she didn’t understand and had no way to fill.

‘Are you enjoying yourself?’

She turned her face up to his and, even with the sun on her skin, felt the warmth of the smile that greeted her permeate all the way through to her bones. ‘Thank you,’ she nodded, knowing that whatever happened, she would treasure it forever. ‘It’s wonderful.’

The boat headed out towards the pinnacle of rock known as Iseo’s Pyramid, the mountainous sides reaching further and further into the sky as they approached, the seabirds forming a permanently changing cloud around the peak. Still some distance out, the skipper slowed the engines and cruised gently around the rock; yet even from this distance the rock rose sheer and majestic from the water, its black volcanic walls razor-sharp and magnificent. On one side a tiny beach clung at the base of a cleft in the rock, its white sand framed with wild olive trees and windswept bushes on one side, the jewel-blue sea on the other, and looking like the perfect picnic spot, exclusive, private and with a natural beauty that took her breath away. But there would be no picnic on the beach. ‘We can’t get any closer,’ Rafe explained as the boat bobbed off shore.

And when she looked closer, she could see why, the shadowed outline of rocks submerged just below the surface making any passage through a nightmare, and it was easy to see why the rock had claimed so many victims in its time. For even in the bright light of day, Iseo’s Pyramid loomed dark and menacing. To encounter it during a storm would be a living hell.

Sienna leaned against the side of the boat, her eyes scaling the mountain, trying to imagine what it was in the shape of the rock that Iseo had seen on that night, all those years ago.

‘Where does the Beast live when it’s not in residence, marauding for shipwreck survivors?’

‘The Beast of Iseo? It sleeps, far below the sea, busy digesting the contents of another wayward vessel.’

‘He must be hungry, then, this Beast of yours, given your embargo on sailings on nights with no moon.’

Rafe turned against the railing and looked down at her, his eyes obscured by dark glasses, yet the hint of a smile tugging at his lips. ‘I never thought of that. Do you think it would be wise to make a sacrifice every now and then, in the interests of increasing the opportunities for trade between Montvelatte and our neighbouring countries?’

‘Absolutely. Just make sure whoever you sacrifice is a virgin, so I have nothing to fear.’

He laughed, as he had on their cliff walk that evening, and the sound rippled through her on a wave of pleasure, and once again she asked herself why it couldn’t be like this always, when one day was so special. He did enjoy being with her. He must feel something for her, to have cancelled his appointments for a day and made the time to be with her. It wasn’t all about the sex, or they would never have left his suite this morning.

Shortly afterwards, the launch powered up and steered away from Iseo’s Pyramid, back across the passage to Montvelatte. Out on the water the wind was rising. She heard talk from the deck of a predicted summer storm but discounted it. The sky was so blue and cloudless that it reminded her of the years she’d spent with her mother in Australia, where the land had seemed to go for ever until it met the sky. She’d loved the sense of space she’d found there, the space she’d never found growing up on a tiny in-the-middle-of-an-ocean boat or in a crowded school clinging to the side of a mountain in Gibraltar. Australia had been made of space, it seemed, and Montvelatte, an island in the Mediterranean, seemed to share the best of both her worlds—space and endless skies, hers for the taking.