Into Temptation Read online

  She was aware of a feeling of being propelled forcefully upwards, and then a sensation of the sky receding, the ground rushing up to meet her. She landed hard on her back, the force of the impact knocking the breath from her body, jarring the very blood in her veins. A sharp, stabbing pain exploded through her head. She lay, unable to draw breath, unable to do anything but stare up at the startlingly blue sky.

  Then, from somewhere behind her, she heard Jack’s muffled voice, felt the slight vibration of the ground as he ran over.

  ‘Amber!’ His voice, sounded odd, as if it came from a long way away. He must have been kneeling down in front of her, but she couldn’t see him. Suddenly all she wanted to do was sleep.

  She heard him calling her name again, shaking her, cupping her face, then sliding strong arms underneath her and lifting her. Then everything went black.

  Chapter Seven

  She gradually became aware of a sound, a rather odd, high-pitched warbling sound playing gently in her head. As her senses slowly returned, the sound became clearer, and she realised it was a bird. A thrush, she thought. She was so tired, so unbelievably tired. And her head throbbed. So much so that the bird’s song almost hurt.

  Then, slowly, it all started to slot back into place. Jack. The boat trip to Sark. The carriage ride – the accident. Where was she? Was she lying on the track still, or somewhere else? It didn’t feel like the track: it was too soft. And was she injured? Carefully, she moved her arms and legs. Everything seemed to work all right. She put a hand, gingerly, to the back of her head, which she discovered was covered in some kind of bandage or dressing.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,’ advised a pleasant-sounding male voice. She opened her eyes to find herself in bed. A friendly-looking man with red hair was rummaging around in what looked like a doctor’s bag.

  ‘Where am I?’ she asked, voice hoarse. ‘What’s going on?’

  He came nearer. ‘You’re at La Vermandée Hotel. I’m Dr Gavey, the Sark doctor. You were in an accident; do you remember?’

  ‘Yes… A horse and carriage.’

  ‘Precisely.’ He took out a small torch-like implement and shone it into her eyes. ‘Just look straight ahead. You were thrown clear. It must have been quite a fall, but luckily you don’t seem to have suffered any serious injuries. Just a…’

  ‘Jack!’ she mouthed, her stomach clenching in fear as her mind suddenly and painfully grasped the ramifications of what had happened. ‘Is… is he…’

  ‘Your companion is fine. Just a scratch or two. Your driver suffered a broken leg but it’s a simple break and should heal well. Even the horse wasn’t too badly injured.’ The doctor grinned. ‘I think it’s fair to say that all of you had a remarkably lucky escape.’

  He put a thermometer into her mouth and fastened a blood pressure cuff around her arm. ‘You cut the back of your head, which explains the dressing – and the painful headache you doubtless have. You were knocked out for a little while. I had to put in several stitches under sedation. The cut is low down, though, so it won’t show when it’s healed.’ He removed the blood pressure cuff. ‘Excellent. Everything is as it should be.’

  She made to sit up. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s just after five. But you need to stay where you are. You’ve got concussion. Tomorrow you can get up, but for now my advice is for you to go straight back to sleep.’ He placed a small bottle of pills on the bedside cabinet and closed his bag. ‘Sleeping pills, if you need them. Take two with a little water. I’ve left some painkillers too.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll send in Mr Ward now. He’s very eager to see you.’

  He left. She heard the brief hum of voices at the door, then the door opened again. Jack came in and approached the bed, eyes grave, face tense with concern. He perched on the edge of the mattress, and slowly, carefully, scanned her face, as if he felt compelled to check for himself that she really was all in one piece.

  ‘How do you feel?’ he asked, finally.

  She swallowed. Her throat felt extraordinarily dry. ‘I’ve felt better, but I’ll live,’ she said.

  ‘Your head,’ he asked in a low, measured voice, ‘is it very painful?’

  She put up a hand to touch the spot where the throbbing pain seemed to emanate from, and winced. ‘Mmm. It certainly seems that way.’

  He got up and walked over to the window, arms braced against the sill, face working with some dark emotion as he stared out at the row of trees at the bottom of the hotel’s gardens; as if, she thought suddenly, the trees offended him, and he were contemplating marching outside and physically uprooting them all, one by one…

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ he said, after a while. ‘I should never have allowed you to get into the carriage with that boy. I checked with the carriage company beforehand and they assured me all their drivers were very experienced. But I should have realised it wasn’t safe.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘It’s no one’s fault. It was just an unfortunate chain of events. One of those things.’

  He shook his head, lips compressed into a hard line. ‘No.’

  ‘There’s no way you could have predicted what happened.’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ he intoned bitterly, turning his intense eyes on her, surprising her with his vehemence.

  ‘What don’t I understand?’

  He strode over to where she lay, then knelt down at the edge of the bed, pressed her pale hand between his two brown ones. The anger seemed to have drained from his eyes – to be replaced by something else, something she couldn’t quite put a name to…

  ‘My God Amber, if anything had happened to you I would never have forgiven myself, never, I…’ He looked at her, and time seemed to stand still. Then all at once his mouth was on hers. The pain in her head a distant memory she responded instantly, like a blade of dry grass shown to a flame, winding her fingers into his hair, opening her mouth to receive his hard, searching tongue, faint with the overpowering pleasure of it. Oh how she had yearned for this, despite everything, despite all that she knew him to be. His hand brushed briefly against her breast as he slid his arms around her back, pressing her hard against him, and her whole body thrilled.

  Then just as suddenly, as if he had surfaced from some sense-numbing sleep, he caught hold of her wrists, yanked her hands from his hair, got up and moved away.

  ‘Dear God,’ he spat disgustedly, ‘I deserve to be shot! Taking advantage of you when you’re lying injured in bed, after an accident that I caused!’

  ‘You… you didn’t cause the accident,’ she said, still breathless from his kiss, her body suddenly and achingly bereft at his sudden withdrawal; as if he had snatched away some vital organ as he had moved away from her. ‘It had nothing to do with you. I’m fine – apart from a bit of a headache. The doctor says I can get up tomorrow!’

  He turned back to the window and shook his head slowly, his lean face once again dark and troubled.

  ‘What is it Jack?’ she probed gently. ‘What’s going on here? What don’t I understand?’

  It was a while before he spoke. ‘My mother died in a riding accident, that’s all,’ he said, in a curiously hard, emotionless voice. ‘I was with her when it happened.’

  Amber lay back, her mouth still burning from his kiss. So that was it. How appalling. How absolutely appalling.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘That must have been just awful.’

  He nodded briefly, the odd, clipped gesture betraying that he was a man little used to opening up to other people about his feelings. ‘It was the worst day of my life.’ He turned, and she saw with a twinge of disappointment that it was as if a shutter had come down over his handsome features, curtaining away all emotion. He looked at her dispassionately. ‘I’ll have some dinner sent up for you,’ he said. ‘Then after that you must rest.’ Then he went to the door and went out.

  Half an hour later Jack sat at the hotel bar, a large whisky in front of him, oblivious to everyone else there.

/>   The day his mother died would be imprinted on his soul forever. Usually the memory lay buried, subsumed in the dark, unvisited place in his mind to which he had long ago consigned it. But now it had worked its way free, the images and feelings of that fateful, defining day twenty years ago as sharp and distinct in his mind as if they had occurred just moments, not decades before.

  He was in Spain, on the vineyard that had been in his mother’s family for generations, and which was still his grandparents’ livelihood to this day. His parents had separated years before, and he spent all his school holidays there at the vineyard – would have spent his entire life there if he’d had anything to do with it: the sun-drenched estate was a million miles removed from the dull routine of his London day school. And the joy of being with his mother and grandparents in the country he loved was incomparable.

  It was very early on a September morning. His grandparents’ old stone villa on the Andalusian hillside shimmered in the hazy, newly-minted sun, its old stone walls still cool to the touch, not yet having begun to soak up the warmth of the day. From the window of the room where he slept the bright pink bougainvillea was heartbreakingly lovely against the perfect, peacock blue sky.

  A perfect day for riding had been his immediate thought on waking up. A couple of weeks earlier he had persuaded his mother to buy him a new horse: Bárbaro, a spirited three-year-old black colt. As soon as he’d seen him at the horse dealership he’d known he had to have him. At thirteen, and full of restless, chafing energy, Jack considered himself more than ready to progress from the steady working horses his grandfather kept on the estate. Carlos had been against it, had maintained that Bárbaro was too much of a challenge for his grandson, but Jack – a confident and natural rider – had managed to work on his mother, assure her he could handle the beast. And Juana, so delighted to have her only child at her side for the few precious months of the year that they got to spend entirely together, had been unable to refuse him anything. Just as he had calculated.

  And so he had got up and gone to find his mother. It was still early, but she was sitting on the terrace having breakfast, looking out across the landscape of vineyards, olive groves and rolling hills. Naturally full of vitality, just like her son, she was up with the sun every day.

  She looked extraordinarily beautiful that morning, he remembered – still in her nightdress and wrap, her long black hair snaking in thick, glossy rivulets across her shoulders.

  ‘Can we go riding?’ he had asked. ‘Bárbaro will be itching to get out.’

  She nodded, putting down her coffee, black eyes sparkling. ‘A good idea. Let’s go straight away, while it’s still cool, and before anyone else is up. I’ll throw on some clothes and ask Ysabel to pack us a picnic.’

  Less than half an hour later they were at the stables, saddling up the horses, his mother’s chestnut gelding and Bárbaro both snorting with excitement.

  ‘Let’s canter to the olive groves by the river,’ he had suggested. And off they went, Bárbaro speeding off ahead, flying through the air as if he had wings.

  His thoughts that morning had been troubled, he remembered. His father had recently started seeing a new woman twenty years his junior – Penelope Bushell-Smith. Jack didn’t like her one bit. Her make-up was far too heavy, her artfully-dyed blonde hair too fussy and her heels much too high. He didn’t yet know a great deal about women, but he knew instinctively that Penelope Bushell-Smith was the sort of woman he forever planned to avoid: fawning, giggly, overly flirtatious, playing with relish the role of the cosseted, kept younger woman. And worst of all, although she was barely ten years older than him, she seemed to take pleasure in talking down to him, treating him like a little child, ruffling his hair now and then with a slim, carefully-manicured hand, and constantly referring to him as ‘the boy’.

  But as much as Jack detested her, his father seemed to be crazy about her. Which was odd, because Adam Ward wasn’t the sort of man to be crazy about any woman. He was the sort of person who always kept his feelings very much in check, an austere, dispassionate Englishman of the old school, who never openly displayed affection towards anyone – least of all his own son.

  And so it had come as a shock to witness the way his father had begun to shower adoring attention on his new girlfriend, whispering sweet nothings into her ear like a teenager in love, kissing her hand and buying her whatever she wanted: an expensive apartment in Kensington, top-of-the-range sports car, designer clothes – and whatever jewellery she liked the look of. Every time Jack saw her she seemed to be sporting some expensive new bauble.

  And as far as things between him and his father were concerned, things had subtly started to change: his father no longer seemed to have so much time for him. Their evenings together now always seemed to be postponed; and their weekly lunches were beginning to take place with much less frequency. His father didn’t even seem to have time to ask after his schoolwork any more, a topic that he had always made a point of discussing at length every time they talked – Jack’s position as heir to the family business was something his father had always taken extremely seriously. Now all he seemed able to discuss was his latest weekend away with Penelope, or whatever new hobby she was introducing him to.

  It was all so depressingly hackneyed, he had thought unhappily, though of course his father couldn’t see it: the lovesick middle-aged man and his young trophy girlfriend.

  Penelope Bushell-Smith was a million miles removed from his mother, he remembered thinking that sunny morning, looking back over his shoulder at the woman he adored, her lovely, naturally beautiful face alight with happiness and exhilaration. If only his father had lavished just a little of the affection he showered on Penelope on his wife, then maybe she wouldn’t have left him…

  Banishing all thoughts of his father’s girlfriend from his mind he had cantered on and on, finally leading them to a small lemon grove on the hillside where there was a stream, a tributary of the main river, that the horses could drink from. Bárbaro, covered in sweat, pulled bad-temperedly on the reins, eager to slake his thirst.

  They let the animals drink, then tied them up. Tired after the long ride Jack and his mother slumped down on the ground and drank down long draughts of the freshly squeezed orange juice the housekeeper had packed. They remained there for ten minutes or so, watching as the sun rose, turning the serene green and brown landscape hazy. Then they got to their feet. Jack fed Bárbaro a piece of apple, then mounted him, tried to take up the reins. But the horse yanked them out of his hands, danced about, throwing back his head and snorting.

  ‘Dios! What’s wrong with you?’ he had shouted angrily, retrieving the reins and shortening them as far as he could.

  ‘Maybe there’s something in the bushes,’ his mother, still on the ground, offered. ‘A snake or even a lynx perhaps: Ignacio said he thought he saw one up here a couple of weeks ago.’ Ignacio was the estate manager. ‘Poor Bárbaro,’ she said in a gentle voice. ‘He’s still so young. Everything scares him.’ She took the horse by the bridle and tried to calm him.

  ‘Be careful mamá!’ Jack warned, concerned. But, as she gently stroked his nose, Bárbaro seemed to calm down.

  She mounted her horse and they cantered off again. But before they had gone even two hundred yards Bárbaro suddenly reared up, throwing off his startled young rider. Momentarily disoriented, Jack lay for a few moments on the ground. Then his senses returned. He sat up to see Bárbaro fifty metres or so in front of him, whinnying loudly, and stamping his hooves.

  He rubbed the dust from his eyes – and his heart suddenly pitched. There was a large cat on the ground. It bared its teeth at the horse, then, a fraction of a second later, made off into the bushes. His horse danced around and started to buck, kicking up a cloud of dust. Then, as he watched in horror, Bárbaro lifted his head – and started to gallop towards him, nostrils flared, eyes wide with terror.

  Jack seemed unable to move, almost hypnotised by fear, by the horse’s glistening, muscular, black body
…

  ‘Get up!’ he heard his mother shout, her voice thick with urgency ‘Get up and run to the trees!’

  But his limbs wouldn’t work, seemed suddenly to be made of clay. He couldn’t move… He locked eyes with the horse. Then suddenly, at the edge of his field of vision, he detected a fast, darting movement – then felt a pair of firm hands on his shoulders, propelling him out of the way.

  As he stumbled sideways, he turned and saw what would haunt his dreams forever: the sight of his mother being battered in the chest by Bárbaro’s hooves, flying backwards, her arms flailing like a rag doll’s.

  ‘Mamá!’ he had screamed, the cry as if ripped from somewhere deep inside him. ‘Mamá!’

  The horse galloped away. Somehow he got to his feet and half ran, half stumbled to where his mother lay.

  He had never seen a dead person before, but immediately – instinctively – he knew that she was dead. A pool of blood was forming on the dusty ground behind her head, slick and black. And her beautiful expressive face, so full of life, was draining of colour, transmuting into a grey mask, a parody of a human face. There was nothing behind the half-open black eyes any more, nothing of Juana, his mother.

  He held her against him for what seemed like hours, praying that he might die too.

  Then somehow he managed to mount his mother’s gelding and gallop back to the villa.

  Bárbaro was rounded up and shot that same evening by Carlos. Jack couldn’t watch, but, alone in his room, he heard the single, deliberate shot ring out from the direction of the stables. And it was as if it pierced his heart too, shattering it into a hundred guilty pieces.

  It was his fault. He had wanted Bárbaro; had wanted him even though the lively young colt was too much of a handful for a thirteen-year-old boy. He saw that now. His mother had known it, but had loved him so much she couldn’t refuse him anything. He was responsible for his mother’s death. And he would carry that with him forever.