The Marriage Demand. Penny Jordan

      Angrily Nash headed towards the house. Just for a heartbeat then, seeing Faith standing at the window, the sunlight dancing on her hair, lingering on its stunning and unique mixture of differing shades of blonde, from purest silver to warmest gold, he had been inexorably swept back in time.

      He had known right from the moment his godfather had announced that he intended to invite her to spend the summer at Hatton that she spelled trouble, but he hadn’t imagined then just how fatally accurate his prediction was going to be. The kind of trouble he had anticipated had had nothing to do with theft and…and murder.

      His mouth hardened, the expression in his eyes bleak. Like his godfather, he had been totally taken in by Faith, believing her to be a naïve young girl, never imagining…Bitterness joined the bleakness in his eyes. Hell, he had even wanted to protect her, believing then that her advances to him were totally innocent and that she’d had no idea of what she was really inviting when she’d looked at him, her face burning hot with the thoughts he could see so plainly in those limpid dark blue eyes.

      He had even derived a certain amount of painful amusement from the way she’d looked at his mouth, semi-boldly, semi-shyly, but wholly provocatively, wondering just what she would do if he actually responded to her invitation and gave in to the fierce heat of desire she was creating inside him.

      But she had been fifteen, a child, as he had sternly and furiously reminded himself more times than he cared to count during that brief summer, and no matter how much his body might have reacted, telling him in increasingly urgent and physical terms just how it viewed her, his mind had known that to give in to what he was feeling would have been dishonourable and wrong.

      She would not always be fifteen, he had told himself. One day she would be adult, and then…Then he would make her pay over and over again for every one of those naïvely tormenting looks she had given him, pay in kiss after kiss for all those kisses he had ached to steal from her but had known he must not.

      How many nights had he lain awake, tormented by the heat of his own need, virtually unable to stop himself from groaning out aloud at the thought of how she would feel lying against him? Her skin silken soft, her mouth as perfect and perfumed as Gertrude Jekyll’s warmly scented roses, her eyes as blue as the campanula that grew amongst them. God, but he had wanted her, ached for her, longed for her. Hell, he had even been stupid enough to make plans for his future that had included her…for their future…

      Initially not even to himself had he dared to acknowledge just how much he’d looked forward to seeing her waiting for him, standing at her turret window, a modern-day Rapunzel imprisoned away from him, not by her father but by her age and his own moral convictions.

      It had left a residue of bitterness to be forced to recognise that the innocence he had striven so hard to protect from his own desire had been little more than a fiction created to conceal the real Faith. But his personal bitterness was nothing to the anguish and the anger he felt on behalf of his godfather. The anguish, the anger and the guilt. If he had not been so bemused by Faith, nor so wrapped up in the excitement of beginning the property empire that had now made him such a wealthy man, he might have seen more clearly what was happening and what Faith really was.

      But there was no way he was going to fall into that same trap a second time.

      The shock of discovering that she was working for the very foundation he had chosen to benefit from his godfather’s bequest had caused him to take the first flight from New York to London, despite the fact that he had been in the middle of lengthy discussions involving the sale of leases on some of his most expensive properties. His initial intention had been to warn Robert Ferndown of just what Faith was, but then he had heard Robert eulogising about her abilities, and Faith herself, and he had been caught up in a flood of savage anger against her.

      It had been then that he had decided to punish her for the crime she had committed, to punish her not swiftly and immediately, with a clean, sharp cut, but to give her a taste of what his godfather had suffered…to keep her on a knife-edge of fear and dread, never knowing when the final blow was going to fall.

      He let himself into the house and paused as he walked past the open study door. He could still taste Faith’s kiss on his lips, still almost feel her against his body, feel his own unwanted reaction to her. Angrily he turned on his heel. What the hell was he trying to do to himself?