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quietly. ‘I know just what to give you to relax.’
    He ushered her before him and she moved awkwardly, shaken by the most profoundly erotic experience of her life. And yet he had scarcely touched her! She felt confused, fearful and yet achingly alive, aware as never before of the feminine sway of her full hips and the brush of her thighs beneath her skirt. Her spine tingled in delicious terror. Was he stroking her again with that spiky look of hunger? Imagining how she would look moving in front of him without her clothes? She blushed in the dimness of the hall and chastised herself for her dangerous fantasies. Either it was all in her own mind, or Nicholas Rose had decided to set her up for a very personal form of humiliation. He couldn’t possibly be genuinely attracted to her, not a man who, despite his physical flaws, possessed a raw magnetism that probably gave him his pick of beautiful women, not a man who showed every sign of being bent on vengeance.
    The kitchen was small and compact and clearly the preserve of someone who enjoyed cooking. The bench-top was wooden, slicked with the patina of age, in contrast to the microwave and modern appliances, and in the smalldining-alcove was a well-scrubbed kauri table and three chairs. Evidently Nowhere Island was not normally used for business entertaining.
    The table was set with rush place-mats and solid silver cutlery, and the steaming bowl of thick, creamy, fragrant soup that was set before her made Vivian’s tense stomach-muscles uncoil. There were bread rolls, too, which Nicholas got from the microwave, cursing as he burnt his fingers on the hot crusts.
    The relaxant turned out to be a glass of champagne. And not just any old bubbly, but Dom Perignon. Vivian watched as he deftly opened the wickedly expensive bottle over her murmured protests that wine in the middle of the day made her sleepy, and turned his back to pour it into two narrow, cut-crystal flutes he had set on the bench.
    Vivian drank some more soup, and when she was handed the chilled flute with a charming flourish accepted it fatalistically.
    ‘Have you ever tasted Dom Perignon before?’ he asked, seating himself again, and this time applying himself to his soup with an appetite that definitely wasn’t feigned.
    ‘Why, yes, I have it every morning for breakfast, poured on my cornflakes,’ she said drily.
    ‘You must be a lively breakfast companion…albeit a more expensive one than most men could hope to afford,’ he said, with a provocative smile that was calculated to distract.
    But not you. It was on the tip of her tongue to say it, but she manfully refrained. ‘I pay my own way.’
    His eyes dropped to her hand, nervously tracing the grain of the table, and the smile was congealed.
    ‘Yes, that’s right, you do, don’t you. Even to the extent of bank-rolling your fiancé’s grand property schemes. I suppose you could say he gained a sleeping partner in more than one sense of the word…’
    As she gasped in outrage, he lunged forward and trapped her left hand flat on the table-top, his palm pressing the winking diamond ring painfully into her finger.
    ‘You’ve been working for him since you left school, haven’t you? What took him so long to realise you were the woman of his dreams? It was around about the time you got that little windfall, wasn’t it? Did he make it a condition of his proposal that you invest your inheritance in his business, or did you do it all for love?’
    ‘How dare you imply it had anything to do with money?’ she said fiercely, fighting the sudden urge to burst into pathetic tears and throw herself on his mercy. ‘Peter asked me to marry him before he ever knew about the trust!’ The release, on her twenty-third birthday, of funds from a trust set up by her natural parents had been a surprise to everyone, including her adoptive parents, who had refused to accept a cent of it. It was for Vivian to use how she wished, they had said—so she had.
    ‘The