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      Transfixed, she waited while that splintering gaze traveled upward, touching off explosions of honeyed fire deep in the hidden places of her body.

      Sexuality, bold and predatory, smoldered in the clear pale depths of his eyes.

      Heat stole through Ianthe, coloring her skin. Her eyes widened, became heavy lidded, drowsy with desire and invitation. Alex was watching her with half-lowered eyelids, sending delicious shivers through her.

      “You look like a sea nymph,” he said, the words rough and blunt. “I promised myself I wouldn’t touch you, wouldn’t let you get to me, but it was too late the first time I saw you.”

      ROBYN DONALD has always lived in Northland in New Zealand, initially on her father’s stud dairy farm at Warkworth, then in the Bay of Islands, an area of great natural beauty, where she lives today with her husband and one corgi dog. She resigned her teaching position when she found she enjoyed writing romances more, and now spends any time not writing in reading, gardening, traveling and writing letters to keep up with her two adult children and her friends.

      Forbidden Pleasure

      Robyn Donald

      

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      AUTHOR’S NOTE

      The Kai Iwi lakes of Northland exist, and are more beautiful than I can describe, but I’m afraid you won’t find this house beside one. There are no beaches, either, and although there is a motor camp, it doesn’t have a shop. But it’s a wonderful place to camp, and the water is an incredible color.

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ONE

      THE view, Ianthe Brown decided as she glowered through the window, was picture pretty, everyone’s idea of the tropics—dazzling white sand, water so blue it throbbed against the hot air, gently waving trees. All that was missing was the sound of surf on the reef and the traditional happy-go-lucky attitude of the Polynesians who lived on those smiling, palm-tasselled islands. And the palms.

      Not surprising, since they were two thousand kilometres to the north of this northern part of New Zealand.

      Ianthe frowned at the fingermarks on her reddened wrist, then stooped to massage her aching leg. The man who’d jerked her out of that haven of tranquillity and escorted her into this house was as far removed from happy-go-lucky as anyone could be; his mission had been to get her inside so someone else could interview her, whether she wanted that or not. Normally she’d have torn verbal strips off him; a sleepless night and the drugged pleasure of having at last closed her eyes and drifted into unconsciousness had temporarily scrambled her brain.

      It was back in full working order now, and she was furious.

      Of course she could climb through the window and run away, but she had no taste for humiliation; in her present state she’d be ludicrously easy to catch.

      She surveyed the room with critical eyes. Luxuriously spare, it oozed the kind of casual perfection that proclaimed both megabucks and a very good interior decorator. What little she’d noticed of the rest of the house revealed the same sophisticated simplicity.

      A far cry, she thought ironically, from her spartan quarters of the past few years. The cabin on the schooner had been so small she’d been able to stand in the middle and touch all four sides without too much stretching.

      Absently she transferred her weight to her good leg. Five minutes ago she’d been sound asleep in the shade of the pines, only to be hauled off her rug by an idiot with a manner cribbed from the more mindless and violent films, who’d ignored her vigorous objections and frogmarched her the hundred metres to a house she hadn’t noticed.

      Had she, Ianthe wondered with a shiver of foreboding as she straightened, stumbled into one of those films?

      No, this was New Zealand. Mafia godfathers didn’t exist here.

      Awareness prickled across the back of her neck. Without moving—without breathing—she strained to see from the corner of her eyes. On the very edge of her vision waited the tall, lean shadow of a man, intimidating and silent. A mindless panic tightening her skin, she set her teeth and turned.

      She’d expected the frogmarcher, but the man who watched her with narrowed, icy eyes—eyes so pale in his tanned face that her stomach jumped—was an infinitely more threatening proposition. Such eyes, Ianthe thought on a swift, involuntary breath, could indicate an Anglo-Saxon heritage, except that the strong, dark features were cast in a far more exotic mould—Italian, perhaps.

      ‘Who,’ she asked steadily, ‘are you, and what right do you have to kidnap me?’

      Although something flickered in the brilliant gaze, his expression didn’t alter. Urbanely he asked, ‘Don’t you have laws against trespassing in New Zealand?’

      He spoke like an Oxford-educated Englishman, each clipped, curt word at subtle variance with the deep, rich voice, textured by the maverick hint of an accent she couldn’t place.

      About six feet tall, he was startlingly good-looking, the angular, autocratic face emphasised by a forceful jaw and a hard, deceptively beautiful mouth. Yet the ice-blue eyes—piercing as lasers, wholly without warmth—dominated his tanned features, and beneath that uncompromising exterior Ianthe sensed vitality, a fierce energy barely contained by his will-power.

      Into her mind sprang the sudden glittering image of a hawk high in a summer sky, poised against the shimmering incandescence for a moment out of time before it plummeted lethally to earth and its prey.

      Beautifully cut shirt and trousers fitted him with the casual elegance of excellent tailoring. Irritated, Ianthe realised that if he’d been clad in scruffy jeans and a shirt off the peg he’d be just as imperious and formidable and dangerously compelling.

      In old shorts and a loose T-shirt that had faded into shabbiness, she must look downmarket and conspicuous. Her chin lifted a fraction of an inch. ‘Trespassing laws in New Zealand are lenient. Anyway, these lakes are reserves.’

      ‘Not this one. The land around it is privately owned—as you are well aware. You had to climb over a locked gate to get here.’

      Ianthe had wondered, but her need for solitude had been greater than her curiosity. She drew in a deep breath. For the first time since she’d woken in hospital with over a hundred stitches in her leg she felt alive, every cell in her body alert and flooded with adrenalin.

      ‘Whatever,’ she countered, ‘it still doesn’t give your henchman the right to manhandle me. All he’s entitled to do is tell me to get off your property. If I’d refused to go after that you might have a case, although it’s probably only fair to warn you that you’d have to prove I’d done some damage before any court would take you seriously.’

      ‘It sounds as though you make a habit of trespassing.’

      Ianthe stared at him.

      ‘You know so much about your rights,’ he elaborated, a lurking note of sarcasm biting into her composure.

      Crisply she retorted, ‘I once worked for a summer with the

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