The Reluctant Fiancee. JACQUELINE BAIRD

her university course, her ambitions. It was only when they were out of sight of the house that Leon suddenly stopped a few feet away from a large willow tree.

      ‘The infamous tree where you were held captive,’ he declared, and grinned down at her.

      Bea tilted her head back. She laughed up at him. ‘Yes, and I haven’t forgotten I got no supper. Because of you, I was confined to my room.’

      His dark eyes narrowed for a moment on her young, girlish figure. She was wearing figure-hugging blue jeans and a blue sweatshirt. Her high, firm breasts, clearly defined against the soft fabric, made it obvious she wore no bra. Leon dropped her hand and curved an arm around her waist, pulling her against his lower torso. ‘I wish I could confine you to my room.’

      She looked at him, thrilled by his statement, but all her youthful uncertainty was reflected in her wide blue eyes. ‘Why?’ she asked.

      ‘For heaven’s sake! Don’t look at me like that. You make me feel like... Never mind...’ Leon hesitated, then walked on until they were at the tree. Leaning his back against the trunk, legs splayed, he turned her loosely in the circle of his arms, so she was standing between his hard-muscled thighs.

      The light touch of his hands on her waist and the subtle male scent of him both conspired to make her heart leap in her chest. She wanted to move forward, just a fraction, enough to make contact with his hard body, to have that proud head bend and his firm mouth on hers. She didn’t know herself. Bea had never felt like this with any man before. Only Leon had the power to turn her into a quivering heap of over-active nerves, passions, feelings...whatever! She only knew his virile masculine aura was such that it promised everything a female could desire, with the certainty that he could deliver...

      ‘Did you ever see either of those two little monsters again?’

      ‘What?’ She jumped as his question cut into her overheated thoughts. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did.’

      Leon sent her a mocking glance. ‘Not here, I hope. Surely you weren’t stupid enough to be caught twice?’

      If Leon had one fault, Bea thought mutinously, it was arrogance. He was so clever, of such towering intellect, he tended to think other people were dumb.

      ‘No, actually. Jack, the older of the two—not the one who was about to scalp me—’ she clarified, ‘is a good friend. He’s in his second year at Oxford, and doing well, already a rugby blue. We went to a couple of parties together when he was home for the Christmas break; we have the same friends. I got a card from him last week. He’s spending the Easter break in Switzerland. He’s also a keen skier—in fact an all-round sportsman.’ As she spoke what she had wished for earlier happened.

      Leon slipped one arm completely around her waist and hauled her hard against him. With his free hand he clasped her chin and tilted her face up to his.

      ‘Is he now?’ His lips were quirking as he cast her a curious glance. ‘Well, I hope he breaks a leg.’

      ‘Leon! That’s rotten.’

      ‘No, realistic,’ he returned with a laugh. ‘If anyone is going to tie you up ever again, it’s going to be me.’ And, swinging around, it was suddenly Bea who had her back against the tree.

      ‘You wouldn’t, and anyway you have no rope,’ she shot back.

      ‘Who needs one?’ Leon murmured, and, fastening her to the tree with the pressure of his large body, his dark head bent and his lips brushed softly over hers. ‘Will you let me tie you to me, Phoebe?’ he asked huskily, his teeth nibbling her bottom lip while his hand clasped the nape of her neck and held her head firm. He scattered kisses over her brow, her eyes, her cheekbones, and back down to her softly parted lips.

      She was helpless against his gentle persuasion as he trailed kisses down her throat, and then his hand cupped her breast through the thickness of her sweater, his thumb unerringly finding its rigid tip and squeezing ever so slowly. ‘Will you be tied to me, metaphorically speaking, my own sweet Phoebe? Will you be my wife?’

      Of course she said yes. She said yes to everything he suggested. Their engagement would be a secret until she had finished school, and on her eighteenth birthday, in August, he would take her to the family villa in Cyprus and declare it to the world. They would marry a few weeks later and, if she liked, she could still go to university.

      Bea sailed through her last term at school. Her grief at losing her father at the beginning of the year still lingered, but her love for Leon and knowing he loved her somehow made everything better. She even applied herself to her exams with a new-found vigour.

      Leon telephoned every other night, wherever in the world he happened to be, and with his support and encouragement she blossomed into a confident young woman. She did have one slight argument with him in June: school was to finish in July and she wanted to join him immediately afterwards, but Leon said no. But the ‘no’ was tempered the next day by the arrival of a huge bouquet of red roses, and the following day came a loving letter from America, explaining the difficulties of his schedule but promising to be in England the week before her birthday—mid-August.

      One morning in August Bea stood in the hall, an envelope addressed to herself in her own handwriting in her hand. ‘Lil, they’re here!’ she yelled. Her exam results.

      ‘Well, open it, dear,’ Lil commanded, joining her. ‘They won’t alter for the waiting, pet.’

      With trembling fingers she slit open the envelope, took one glance and then she was whirling Lil around the hall in a wild polka. ‘I’ve passed! I’ve passed! Four straight As.’

      To make her happiness complete, after spending two hours on the telephone calling all her friends, Leon arrived. She was still on the telephone when a deep voice murmured in her free ear, ‘Miss me, Phoebe?’

      Bea squeaked, ‘Got to go,’ and dropped the receiver on the hall table. A strong arm encircled her waist and turned her around. ‘Leon, you’re back,’ she murmured inanely, suddenly inexplicably nervous.

      Leon’s hand cupped her chin and tilted her head back as his dark eyes scrutinised her lovely face. ‘Is that the best you can do in the way of a welcome, Phoebe, darling?’ he drawled mockingly. ‘Months apart and you say “you’re back”?’

      ‘One hundred and thirty-two days, actually.’ Bea glanced at her watch, ‘And twenty-two hours.’ Wrapping her slender arms around his neck, with a wide, beautiful smile curving her full lips, she added, ‘I have missed you during every one of them.’

      A long, satisfying kiss later, Bea gazed dazedly into Leon’s dark eyes. ‘I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.’

      ‘Change of plan—I have to be in Athens tomorrow.’ Leon spent the next ten minutes explaining why, but Bea barely took it in. She was too entranced to have him beside her, to hear his voice, to be able to feast her eyes on his large, all-male body.

      Her happy, dazed state lasted until the aeroplane touched down at Athens airport, and beyond...

      

      Sighing, Bea let the paperback book, number one on the New York Times bestseller list, fall to the ground beside the sun lounger on which she was reclining. She didn’t seem able to get interested in anything today.

      Leon’s villa was set high on the hills above Paphos, in the Greek sector of the island of Cyprus. The view before her was magnificent: an enticingly cool-looking swimming pool and beyond it the garden, flowing down the hillside in a mass of flowers and shrubs, the whole enclosed by an undulating white wall. Beyond, in the far distance, the ancient port of Paphos and its magnificent fortress stood by the Mediterranean Sea.

      Her only garment was a minuscule bikini, and yet the heat was still stifling. Glancing at her half-naked body, she hauled herself into a sitting position and idly picked up a bottle of sun lotion and began massaging it into her arms and legs, across her flat stomach. The trouble was, she thought wryly, it wasn’t so much the heat outside that was making her so restless, but the heat