Free Fortune in the Stars by Kate Proctor Page B

back to her earliest
years and to the inevitability of the solitude that came with being an
only child in a family constantly on the move because of her father's
career. It had been the instinctive recognition of their kindred inner
solitude that had drawn together herself, Lexy, Sarah and Erica,
bonding four widely differing personalities into an oddly undemanding,
yet unquestioningly supportive friendship that doggedly survived
despite years of neglect and separation. Now there was only Lexy and
Sarah left with the ability to pierce her solitude within the unspoken
bounds of their friendship.
    And now Dominic was barging uninvited through her shell,
disregarding all those unspoken rules constructed to preserve it
intact, and ultimately forcing her to rethink values which had been
formed over a lifetime.
    Throughout those hours she found her thoughts veering off
at the wildest of tangents till at one point she could take it no more
and had found herself, at two in the morning, packed and dressed and
ready to risk trying to drive to Palma, before reason had belatedly
returned to her.
    With limbs leaden with weariness and eyes hollowed and
dark-ringed, she had risen from her bed shortly after dawn had
staggered drunkenly across sullen skies. Cold and dejected and with a
disruptively new set of values struggling to form within her, she lay
soaking in a hot bath and agonised over her now-incredible past
smugness.
    How easily she had looked down on as weak those women who
had become trapped in the snare of the same violent physical attraction
in which she now found herself. And even when the man now ensnaring her
had been discussed those years ago, how easily she had pooh-poohed the
very idea of any man possessing an animal magnetism that could have
such an effect. And what about Rupert and Linda? Had it been a
manifestation of that same overwhelming force she was now experiencing
that had negated Rupert's claims of love and Linda's of friendship?
    It was only when she was dressed and sitting huddled on
her bed, wrestling with the problem of whether her loyalty to Lexy
should take precedence over her compassion for Dominic's obvious
anxiety, that it occurred to her that her feelings towards Rupert had
become reduced to no more than what constituted a vague twinge of
compassion.
    Hell, she hadn't even been in love with Rupert! she told
herself exasperatedly, leaping down from the bed. She could have saved
herself this whole damned trip, she remonstrated illogically with
herself as she dawdled listlessly towards the kitchen in search of the
strongest coffee she could possibly brew.
    The sight greeting her as she walked through the open door
was that of Dominic slumped on a chair at the scrubbed table, his head
cushioned against the arms sprawled out across its surface, and sound
asleep.
    On bare feet now unpleasantly aware of the coldness of the
marble beneath them, she crept towards him. The pressure of the arm
against which his cheek lay had softened the sharply defined fullness
of his mouth almost to a pout.
    Lexy's big, bad, beautiful brother, she chanted silently
to herself while the molten heat of a burgeoning longing rippled
through her veins. Big and beautiful he most certainly was, she
accepted, just as she accepted with an almost fatalistic resignation
the feelings now bombarding her…the most physically
beautiful man she had ever seen. But bad too, she forced herself to
accept as the heavy dark sweep of his lashes seemed to grow
irresistibly lusher and richer beneath her mesmerised gaze. And not
merely the badness to be chuckled over by an adoring sister, but a
calculating ruthlessness that made the animal magnetism of which he was
so utterly aware a dangerous weapon he would use, without so much as a
thought, as a means to his ends.
    She gave an involuntary shiver as she remembered the
latent violence beneath the cool deliberation with which he had
demonstrated his power over her and delivered his threat. Yet even