Penny Jordan Tribute Collection. PENNY JORDAN
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of just what that meant, his attention was suddenly distracted by the happy gurgling coming from the cot.
Striding over to it, he stared down at Fleur. Her child. The child another man had given her! A surge of primitive aching pain filled him.
Fleur had kicked off her blankets and was playing with her bare toes, smiling coquettishly up at him.
Xavier sucked in his breath. She was so small, so delicate… so very much like her mother.
Instinctively he bent to pick her up.
Mariella didn’t know what woke her from her deep sleep, some ancient female instinct perhaps, she decided shakily as she stared across the room and saw Xavier bending over Fleur.
Gripping the bedclothes, she burst out frantically, ‘Don’t you dare hurt her.’
‘Hurt her?’ Tight-lipped, Xavier swung round. ‘You dare to say that when she has already been hurt immeasurably simply by being brought into being as the child of a woman who…’
Unable to fully express his feelings, he compressed his mouth.
‘I suppose she is used to being left to amuse herself whilst her mother sleeps off the effects of her night’s work!’
Mariella could scarcely contain her fury.
‘How dare you say such things, after the way you have behaved? You are the most loathsome, the most vile man I have ever met. You are totally lacking in any kind of compassion, or… or responsibility!’
Her eyes really were that colour, Xavier recognised in disbelief as he watched them darken from turquoise to inky blue-green.
Did they turn that colour when she was lost in passion? Was she as passionate in her sexual desire as she was in her anger? Of course she was… he knew that instinctively, just as he knew equally instinctively that if she were his…
‘It is nearly eleven o’ clock, the child must be hungry,’ he told her tersely, infuriated by his own weakness in allowing such thoughts to creep into his head.
Eleven o’clock—how could it be? Mariella wondered guiltily, but a quick glance at her watch showed her that it was.
She couldn’t wait to get back to the city and the sooner she and Fleur were on their way back there, the better, she decided as Xavier strode out of the room.
CHAPTER FOUR
MARIELLA frowned as she walked into the empty living area of the pavilion. Where was Xavier?
A laptop hummed quietly on a folding campaign table to one side of the pavilion. Xavier had obviously been working on it.
As she looked round the pavilion with its precious carpets and elegant few pieces of furniture, which she recognised as being expensively antique as well as functional, Mariella tried to imagine her dizzy half-sister in such a setting. Tanya was totally open about the fact that she was a girl who loved the bustle of cities, holidays in expensive, fashionable locations, modern apartments as opposed to traditional houses. Although she adored Fleur, self-indulgence was her byword, and Mariella was finding it increasingly hard to visualise her sister ever being compatible with a man like Xavier, who she could not imagine truly sharing Tanya’s tastes. He was too austere, surely. Too…
Tanya loved him, she reminded herself stubbornly, although she was finding that equally hard to imagine! He was just so totally not Tanya’s type! Tanya liked happy-go-lucky, boyish, fun-loving men!
Fleur was sound asleep, and Mariella decided she would go outside to check on what was happening. She could no longer hear the sound of the wind battering against the walls of the pavilion, which hopefully meant that she would be able to make her way back to the city.
As she stepped outside she saw to her relief that the wind had indeed dropped. The air was now totally still and the sky had a dull ochre tinge to it. She could see her four-wheel drive, its sides covered in sand.
On the far side of the oasis, the rock face of the gorge rose steeply, its almost vertical face scarred here and there by the odd ledge.
There was a raw, elemental beauty about this hidden place, Mariella acknowledged, seeing it now with an artist’s eye rather than the panicky apprehension of a lost traveller.
A scattering of palm trees fringed the water of the oasis, and beyond them lay a rough area of sparse, spiky grass. The rutted track she had driven down probably was a dried-out river bed, she could see now.
The quality of the stillness and the corresponding silence were almost hypnotic.
A movement on the other side of the oasis caught her eye, her body tensing as she recognised Xavier. He was dressed not in traditional robes, but in jeans and a tee shirt. He seemed to be checking the palm trees, she realised as he paused to inspect one before walking to another. He had obviously not seen her, but instinctively she drew farther back into the shadow cast by the pavilion.
He had turned away from the trees now and was staring across the oasis, shading his eyes as he looked up into the sky.
The storm hadn’t weakened the roots of any of the palm trees, Xavier acknowledged. There was no reason why he shouldn’t go back to the pavilion and continue with his work. And in fact pretty soon he would have to do so. Right now they were in the eye of the storm, but as soon as it moved on the wind would return with even greater force.
But he couldn’t go back inside. Not whilst he was still visualising her lying on the bed… his bed…
Angrily he stripped off his tee shirt, quickly followed by the rest of his clothes. And began to wade out into the water.
Mariella couldn’t move. Like someone deeply beneath the spell of an outside force she stood, muscles clenched, hardly daring to breathe as she fought to repel the sensation coiling through her, and shivering to each and every single sensitive nerve ending as her gaze absorbed the raw male beauty of Xavier’s nudity.
As an artist she was fully aware of the complexities and the beauty of the human form, she had visited Florence and wandered lost in rapt awe as she studied the work of the great masters, but now she recognised she was seeing the work of the greatest Master of all.
Xavier was wading out into the water, the dull glaring sunlight glinting on flesh so warmly and evenly hued that it was immediately obvious that such nudity was normal for him.
As he moved through the water she could see the powerful sinews in his thighs contracting against its pressure. Trying to distract herself she visualised what lay inside that heavy satin male flesh, the bones, the muscles, the tissues, but instead of calming her down, it made her awareness of him increase, her wanton thoughts fiercely pushing aside the pallid academic images she was trying to conjure, in favour of some of their own: like a close-up of that sun-warmed flesh, roped with muscle, hard, sleek, rough with the same fine dark hair she could see so clearly arrowing down the centre of his body.
Only his buttocks were a slightly paler shade than the rest of his skin, taut and man-shaped, packed with the muscles that would drive…
Mariella shuddered violently, feeling as though she herself were sinking into a pool of sensation so deep and dangerous that she had no means of freeing herself from it.
Helplessly she watched as Xavier moved farther into the oasis until all she could see above the water were his head and shoulders. He ducked his whole body beneath the water and she held her breath, expelling it when she saw him break the surface several yards away, cleaving through it with long, powerful over-arm strokes that propelled him at a fierce and silent speed away from her.
She felt sick, shocked, furiously angry, terrifyingly vulnerable, aching from head to toe and most of all, deep down inside the most female part of her body, tormented by a need, a knowledge that ripped apart all her previous beliefs about herself.
She could not possibly want Xavier! But that… that merciless message her body had just given her could not be denied.
It sickened