She endured it for as long as she could, hating the soft sounds of his breathing and the oppressive heat of his body.

'I'm cold,' she protested when she couldn't stand it any longer. 'Let's go inside.'

'Come on, then.'

She shook her head in what she hoped was a coquettish and promising way.

'No, you go first. I'll wait until you've got the lights on. I'm scared.'

Later, she could only think that it was his monstrous vanity that had saved her; that and the fact that he simply couldn't imagine that she couldn't secretly want him, otherwise he would surely never have left her alone.

She waited until he had almost reached the house, straining her eyes to make out his black shadow in an equally deep pool of blackness, before starting the Land Rover engine.

Luckily it fired the first time, but she was not prepared for the speed with which he raced back towards her, or the force with which he wrenched open the driver's door, clawing at her as he tried to drag her out.

She screamed, and then, realising that it was a waste of energy, she concentrated instead on maintaining her hold on the steering wheel. Luckily, by some miracle he had left the Land Rover in gear and so, crunching the gear-box horribly, she was able to set the vehicle in motion. As she turned it into a circle, not caring what might be in her way in the form of fences or walls, David still hung on to her arm. The pain from the biting grasp of his fingers made her long to lift both hands from the wheel and push at him, but she forced herself not to give in to it. His other hand clawed at her blouse, tearing the soft fabric. He kicked hard at her right leg, trying to dislodge her from the controls, and then thankfully the engine started to pick up speed.

He hung on to her for far longer than she had imagined possible, and she had visions of dragging his inert body with her for the rest of her life, but suddenly he let go. She heard the dull thud as he fell to the ground, but dared not stop to check if he was all right.

By some miracle she found the main road, not caring where it took her as long as it was away from David, but eventually she discovered she was heading in the right direction for the village.

It took her another twenty minutes to reach Kyle's home.

The front of the house was in darkness. It was still only-half-past eleven, but Kyle must have gone to bed. Thank G.o.d for that. The last thing she wanted was for him to see her in this state.

As she stopped the Land Rover and tried to climb out, she discovered that her legs were almost too stiff to obey her, partly from shock and partly from the pain in the one David had kicked. Something warm and sticky ran down inside her ruined blouse, and she dragged herself towards the front door with the slow, halting steps of a very, very old woman.

Just as she reached the door, she felt a wave of faintness wash over her. She fought desperately to control it, one hand clutching at the door, the other searching despairingly in her bag for her key.

When the door unexpectedly opened inwards the shock on top of so many other shocks was too much for her. She gave a harsh, terrified scream and then collapsed inwards in a dead faint.

Kyle caught her, his body jarred by the unexpected weight of her. He had been working in his study earlier in the evening and had fallen asleep, the remains of his jet lag catching up with him. The sound of the Land Rover had woken him, and he had come to the door to investigate.

Now, as he studied Heather's white face and bruised body, a feeling of rage, so intense and all consuming that it threatened to overcome everything else, enveloped him.

The last time he had felt this anger had been when Heather had tried to kill herself. Then it had been directed inwards at himself. Now...

He carried her towards the sitting-room, and then changed his mind and headed for the stairs.

She came round just before he placed her on his bed, her eyes wild and frantic until they focused on his face, and terror faded. As they closed, he bit back the questions rioting inside him. Time enough for questions later, all but one.

'Where is he?'

The harsh demand penetrated Heather's fogged mind. She didn't open her eyes, but turned her head in Kyle's direction instead.

'He took me to a farm... it's... it's empty... I left him there.'

'Yes, I know it.' He looked down at her, torn between two equally fierce needs, and in the end the more gentle of them won. He knew the farmhouse Heather meant quite well. It was remote and without a telephone. Unless Hartley decided to walk, he would be stuck there until daylight.

At that moment Heather opened her eyes again, her lashes fluttering weakly as though too heavy for her frailty to support.

Her fingers touched his sleeve and trembled against it, and as though she had read his mind she whispered huskily, 'Kyle, don't leave me.'

Heather heard herself say the words and was shocked by them; nearly as shocked as she had been by the expression of fierce rage in Kyle's eyes.

From the past, her memory dredged up a taunt once thrown at her by a jealous school friend. 'He isn't really your brother, and you're in love with him, aren't you?'

How fiercely she had denied it, how hard she had worked to prove to the world and to herself how much she disliked him. So much wasted energy, she reflected tiredly, so much mental torment and self-inflicted pain, and all for what? All to bring her to this point in her life when she was confronted with a dead end, with the truth she had fought so long to deny.

She loved Kyle. No wonder she had responded so quickly and so intensely to him. No wonder her flesh had quickened to his touch. No wonder she had hidden the truth from herself for so long.

Weak tears rushed into her eyes. Like a small, betrayed creature she wanted to crawl under the protection of a large rock and hide there until the danger had gone. Only it would never go. If she had mistaken the true nature of her feelings for Kyle at seventeen, she couldn't mistake them now.

Tonight, trapped in the Land Rover with David, forced to confront her total revulsion towards him, she had had an illuminating mental image of Kyle, and she had seen him then not as her enemy, not as her unwanted adopted brother, but as a man. And not just any man; the man to whom everything within her that made her feminine instinctively turned, physically, mentally and emotionally.

She shivered beneath the knowledge, too weak to evade it as she had done so many times in the past. Where another teenager, given the same feelings, might have betrayed them, and thus worked through them, she had refused to admit them and had hidden them away so that they had grown and were now threatening to take over her whole life.

She groaned, and Kyle, hearing and mistaking the sound, swore. Listening to him, Heather flinched at the violence she could feel him containing. She moved and the light fell on her bruised leg.

Kyle touched it. His hand trembled slightly and she tensed. Was he, then, so furious with her that he was practically shaking with rage? He had warned her and she had ignored him. She was lucky to have got off with little more than bruises and a bad fright.

'I'm sorry.' The humble apology that once would have made her cringe with self-contempt was a plea for understanding as well as forgiveness.

'You're sorry! I shouldn't have let you go with him. I should have...' He broke off and said quietly, 'Listen to me, Heather, because I think I can only say this once. G.o.d knows, neither of us is able to be detached about this. If Hartley... if he raped you, it's a matter for the police. You must tell me-'

She shook her head vehemently.

'No... no, he didn't, although I've no doubt that was what he intended once he realised that I wasn't...' She broke off and shuddered, her body going hot and then cold with the reality of how easily she could have been saying exactly the opposite.

'I... I managed to fool him into getting out of the Land Rover... I started to drive off.' She shuddered again, more tensely this time, the mental image of how he had clung and torn at her flesh still too real.

'He tried to drag me out of the Land Rover... I... I thought he was going to... and then he let go. I heard him fall.' She struggled to sit up, burying her head against Kyle's shoulder, her voice shaking with remembered fear. 'Kyle, I don't know what happened to him. I don't think I ran over him or...'

'He'll be all right,' Kyle told her curtly. 'His kind always are.' His hand slipped round her throat, tilting her chin so that he could look at her face, and then, as his thumb brushed against the spot where she was bleeding, he frowned.

'It's nothing... just a scratch.'

'I ought to take you to hospital.'

'No! No, please.' She shrank from the suggestion like a night creature from the light. She couldn't bear to be questioned and pulled this way and that. 'I'll be all right once I've had a bath.'

She tried to get off the bed, but Kyle restrained her.

'Heather,' he said soberly. 'If Hartley did... if he did rape you, you have nothing to feel ashamed about, you know that, don't you? You...'

'Kyle, I've already told you I'm still the same boring twenty-three-year-old virgin I was before...' She broke off, her face going white as she recognised the shock in his eyes. Her skin burned, her body frozen into tension. What had she said? Oh, that stupid, idiotic tongue of hers! What on earth had possessed her to make that flip, acid response without thinking about what she was saying?

She waited for what seemed to be a lifetime, already antic.i.p.ating Kyle's sarcastic remark, her tension increasing when he said nothing. Either he didn't believe her and didn't want to say so, or he did believe her and pitied her so much that he was pa.s.sing up on the opportunity to mock her. Neither alternative pleased her.

'Kyle...'

'We'd better get those cuts and bruises seen to,' he interrupted brusquely. 'Can you make it to the bathroom, or would you like a hand?'

How frightening that she should feel so bereft, so forlorn. What had she expected, that he would pick her up tenderly and carry her there?

'I can manage on my own.'

She hated the way he stepped back from her, almost as though he disliked the thought of being in physical contact with her. In another man she might have suspected his withdrawal sprang from a distaste of touching her because of David Hartley, but Kyle wasn't like that. Already he had exhibited his compa.s.sion and understanding. Too weary to a.n.a.lyse his reaction, Heather stumbled towards the bathroom door.

'Heather, let me...'

She rounded on him fiercely. 'I'm all right. I can manage.'

She slammed the door behind her, leaving him on the other side. Her head was swimming and her body felt so weak; an after-effect of the shock and fear she had experienced, she suspected.

She showered quickly, grimacing over the scratches and bruises marring her skin. She was unfortunate in that she bruised easily. Too easily, she thought, dismayed by the purpling patches of swollen skin. No wonder Kyle had doubted her a.s.sertion that David had barely touched her.

He was waiting for her when she opened the door, a grim expression on his face and a tray with a gla.s.s of water and two tablets on it in his hand.

'These are very mild sleeping tablets. My doctor prescribed them for me last year.'

'For you? But...'

'Too many flights across the Atlantic,' he told her brusquely. 'I got too wound up and couldn't wind down.'

There was no point in telling her the rest of it, in describing that sickening sensation of desolation that had undermined his physical strength and had left him feeling as though life was little more than a dreary round of duty and obligation. There had even been a time... He grimaced faintly. There was little point in dwelling on life's ironic and often unkind twists.

He held out the gla.s.s to Heather. 'Here, drink this.'

One part of her wanted to object. The other knew she needed the healing benefit of a sound night's sleep.

She took the water, and one of the tablets, shaking her head in refusal of the second.

'They normally work within half an hour,' Kyle told her. 'Can you make it to your own room? Or...'

'I can make it.'

The compa.s.sion, and with it the bond she had sensed earlier, were gone now and he was once again the Kyle of her childhood, but now there was a subtle difference-not in him but in her. Now he was the man she loved as well.

Acknowledging that love had been a painful, slow progress, a story of denials and rejections that had brought her loneliness and misery. And now that she had faced up to the truth?

She could see no future in her feelings for Kyle; she admitted sleepily. He did not return her love and it was hardly likely that he ever could. Drowsily she turned her head, trying to find a more comfortable spot on the pillow.

She was sound asleep half an hour later, when Kyle walked quietly up to the bed. As he looked down at her, his expression was tortured and full of pain. He almost reached out to touch her, but just in time he controlled the impulse.

Ten minutes later he left the house, driving David's Land Rover, heading to the remote farmhouse.

He didn't stay there long; ten minutes was more than enough time for him to vent his wrath on a man who had committed what he considered to be the most despicable crime any man could commit, bar that of damaging a child. He didn't resort to physical violence; he didn't need to.

Curtly ordering David into the pa.s.senger seat of the Land Rover, he drove back in silence, stopping it at the end of his own drive and getting out.

'It was her own fault, Bennett,' David whined, moving cautiously into the driver's seat as Kyle stood and watched him. 'She as good as asked for it, telling everyone that she had lived with you. Implying that the two of you had been lovers. Everyone heard her.'

And as he drove away David couldn't understand the brief flash of surprised pleasure that had lightened the dark, bitterly angry features of the man standing watching him. What on earth had he said that had pleased him so much?

He hadn't expected Kyle to come seeking him out. He had judged the other man by his own code of behaviour. He would have to make sure that none of what had happened tonight got back to his cronies' ears. He would be a laughing stock if it did.

Kyle didn't wait to watch him drive away, but walked up the drive. It was cold, the sky clear and brilliant with stars. As he drew in a deep lungful of the crisp air he turned towards the house and wondered exactly why Heather had implied that the two of them had once been lovers. Physically she wanted him, he knew that. But that wasn't enough and it never would be enough. Stretching aching muscles, he walked more slowly toward the house.

CHAPTER NINE.

HEATHER woke up with a start. Her mouth was dry, her heart pounding rapidly with fear. She could feel it in the air around the bed, and the shreds of her nightmare still clung to her, bemusing her, even though she realised that there was nothing to fear.

Something moved in the shadows and she screamed involuntarily.

'Heather, what's wrong?'

How had Kyle managed to reach her room so quickly? He must have already been awake.

He looked tired, Heather thought as he snapped on the light, banishing the vague spectres of her fears.

'A bad dream. I'm sorry I woke you.'

She watched as he pushed unsteady fingers through his already tousled hair.

'You didn't,' he told her shortly. 'I was awake already.' He looked away from her and, for the first time since she had known him, Heather saw something approaching vulnerability and uncertainty shadow his face.

'Heather, what you said about still being a virgin...'

He hesitated slightly as though searching for the right words, and, already shrinking away from the pity she was sure she was going to see in his eyes, Heather fought to keep it at bay, snapping sharply.

'Are you accusing me of lying? What do you want me to do, Kyle? Prove it to you?'

An awful silence fell. Without any cloaking darkness to hide the brilliant colour scorching her skin, Heather knew that Kyle must be fully aware of her embarra.s.sment. Why had she said that? It didn't take the brain of Freud to deduct that there had been more than a touch of wishful thinking, more than just a mere desire to taunt him behind her challenge. She already knew full well that Kyle hadn't been accusing her of lying, or anything like that. He had simply been trying to express his concern for her. He had been trying to play the role of brother, but she had destroyed that carefully erected facade, and with those few impulsive words had laid bare for both of them the reality of the s.e.xual awareness between them.

For one long moment, they looked at one another. Kyle didn't attempt to hide from her how much he wanted her. She felt her heart thud heavily against her breastbone, and her breath quicken with excitement.

'Is that what you want me to do?' he asked her softly at last, and then, when she made no reply, he came closer to the bed, a dark, aroused flush of colour staining the bones of his face.

'Do you know the temptation offered to me, I wonder?' he groaned unsteadily. 'Do you know how often I've dreamed of having you in my arms, your body against mine? You can't even begin to imagine what it does to me to know that there's been no other man. Why, Heather?' he demanded, his voice suddenly velvet rough with male desire. 'Was it because you've been waiting for me? For this?'

She could have stopped him, she ought to have stopped him. She should have told him that he was wrong, that she didn't want him, and that her virginity was a result of chance and nothing else, but she was already in his arms and his mouth was moving on her skin with a hungry urgency that left her no room for thought.