TAMARA sat up slowly, pushing a heavy swathe of wheat blonde hair back off her face. She didn’t normally wear it down, and already the hot Caribbean sun was beginning to bleach the loose wisps on her forehead silver. Cool grey eyes gazed thoughtfully out of a high-cheekboned, oval face of almost classical perfection, their expression faintly withdrawn, wary almost. It was Tamara’s habitual expression and one which had attracted the interest of more than one predatory male, until they realised that with Tamara the cool façade was more than merely skin-deep.

From the beach the sound of merrymaking and laughter was borne towards her on the light tropical breeze; from the swimming pool she could hear splashes and high-pitched childish voices, but here in the gardens of the luxurious holiday complex on St Stephen’s, there was no interruption and she had their beauty to herself.

She put down her paperback and glanced at her watch. Not long until lunch. The paperback was more of a safeguard against unwanted intruders than a compelling read; that was one of the problems about holidaying alone, but she had had little option—Malcolm hadn’t been able to come with her.

Malcolm! Sunlight glinted on the solitaire diamond on her left hand, the stone large enough to reveal its value, and yet not so large that it could ever be described as ostentatious. So typical of Malcolm. Eyebrows several shades darker than her hair drew together in a faint frown, What was the matter with her? Until now she had been perfectly content with Malcolm and their engagement. She sighed pensively. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of this tropical island paradise; or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the majority of the other guests were young couples, still at the honeymoon stage, or older couples free of growing families for the first time, bent on recapturing the magic of those earlier days. Certainly there were families among the hotel’s many guests, but somehow the atmosphere pervading the complex was essentially one of a sensuous lethargy, which was beginning to have its effect on Tamara’s thoughts, releasing doubts and breaking down barriers she hadn’t even been aware were there.

One of the main reasons she had agreed to marry Malcolm was because of his solid dependability, his lack of imagination and sexual magnetism. That wasn’t what she wanted in a husband. In the world of publishing in which she worked, as personal assistant to the fiction editor of a prestigious small publishing firm, she had seen all too often the results of hastily and ill-considered marriages, where two people declared that they had fallen madly in love only to change their minds within six or twelve months. That wasn’t for her. She wanted the sort of marriage her parents had had. Her parents. She sighed again, remembering the love and laughter which had pervaded the first fifteen years of her life, but all that love and laughter had gone the night they lost their lives in a motorway pile-up, leaving Tamara to be brought up by her father’s aunt, Lilian Forbes. Of course Aunt Lilian had been well-intentioned—it couldn’t have been an easy task to be faced with sole responsibility for a fifteen-year-old who was perhaps too emotional for her own good, but she was a distant, unbending woman, unused to children and found it difficult to show the spontaneous affection Tamara had been used to sharing with her parents, so gradually Tamara had learned to conceal behind a cool smile the turmoil of growing up feeling herself unloved and rejected. Eventually she herself, without realising it, had adopted her aunt’s mistrust of physically displayed affection, so that the boys she met found her cool and standoffish, turning to other girls less unapproachable and thus reinforcing Tamara’s conviction that she lacked the desirability of her peers.

To compensate for this she had pursued a career while other girls in the small village in which she lived got married and had babies, and at twenty-six she now considered herself immune from the emotions which seemed to possess other girls, and had been quite happy to accept Malcolm’s proposal.

Not that she had accepted him only for the sake of being married. London was no small village and there were plenty of men alive to the possibilities hidden deep within her cool exterior, but Tamara could never overcome the deep mistrust of what she termed ‘charmers’, which she had learned from her aunt.

She had even approved of the way in which Malcolm had taken her home to meet his parents, not once but twice, for what she knew to be a ‘vetting’. Colonel and Mrs Mellors had been polite but unforthcoming, and Tamara had sensed that they would have preferred to see their son married to one of their own set. Tamara could understand why. Although she had a well paid job and had done well for herself, she did not have the ‘county’ connections to appeal to the rather snobbish Mellors. Malcolm’s father owned and ran a small country estate which Malcolm had told her would come down to him in due course, but for now he was quite content with his accountancy partnership which enabled him to maintain an expensive London flat, and the BMW car he had bought just before their engagement.

Life with Malcolm would be as calm and orderly as drifting down a canal, and suddenly for the first time Tamara wondered if she really wanted such a narrow existence.

Suddenly feeling restless, she got up, and walked towards the beach; a tall slender girl with a cool ‘touch me not’ air which clung protectively to her.

Through the cluster of palms fringing the silver crescent of sand, Tamara could see one of the couples who had been on the same flight as herself. In their early twenties, and patently on honeymoon, their pleasure in one another was like a tiny piece of grit marring the placid surface of her life, and irritating her into the admission that Malcolm and the marriage they would have was not what her parents would have wanted for her.

The young couple were ducking one another playfully in the water; Malcolm hated any demonstrations of affection in public. What would their honeymoon be like? He had suggested they spent it in the Algarve; his parents had friends who owned a villa there and the golf courses were excellent.

Was that really what she wanted? she wondered; a husband who devoted himself to golf while she played bridge with his friends’ wives?

Telling herself that she was being stupidly emotional, Tamara gathered up her belongings prior to changing for lunch. Many people didn’t bother, simply eating at the poolside tables dressed completely informally, but Tamara felt after a morning in the intense heat of the tropical sun, her body covered in oil, that she wanted to shower and then eat somewhere where it was cool. She normally tanned well, despite her fair skin, but because she had never been so near the Equator before she was deliberately taking extra care to protect her skin from burning.

The hotel complex was attractive—bungalows for family occupation dotted the grounds, ablaze with jacaranda, bougainvillea,

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Escape from Desire Penny Jordan

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

Escape from Desire

Penny Jordan