Vendetta Read Online Free PDF Page B

flopping uselessly to the floor. ‘You’ve gone all wavy and soft,’ she murmured dizzily.
    ‘Your glasses have fallen off.’ His voice came from such a long way away that she had to strain to hear it. Her thoughts seemed to flow stickily through her head, oozing aimlessly like melted honey and slurring off her tongue.
    ‘Why won’t my arms move? What’s happening to me?’
    ‘Perhaps you’re drunk.’
    She felt a warm weight slide under her knees and then the whole world went around and she gave a little cry as she seemed to float up towards the heavy-beamed ceiling.
    ‘I don’t think so. I never get drunk.’ The rocking feeling didn’t make her feel sick as the boat had. She was being carried, she realised muzzily, struggling against the dragging desire to melt into the arms that held her against a hard chest.
    ‘What’s happening, where am I going?’ she slurred weakly.
    ‘Wherever I care to take you,’ came the terse reply. ‘Don’t you know what you’ve done, Vivian?’
    She had used to know, but somehow the knowledge was now wispily elusive. ‘No, what have I done?’ she mumbled.
    ‘You’ve pricked yourself on a thorn, a very dangerous kind of thorn…’
    ‘Poison.’ The word floated up through her subconscious without fear. ‘Was it poisonous? Am I dying now…?’ It was much nicer than she expected, she decided woozily, aware of a strange, shining whiteness all around.
    ‘No, damn it, you’re just going to sleep. You’re only drugged, not poisoned.’
    ‘Must’ve been a rose-thorn, then,’ she said, having trouble getting her silly tongue around the words. There was a flat, echoing, metallic rhythm coming from somewhere close by, keeping time with the rhythmic rocking that was making her float higher and higher away from reality. Confusing images clouded in her wandering brain. ‘Was a rose, wasn’t it…tha’ caused all th’ tr’ble? In B-Beauty an’ the Beast…’
    ‘You’re getting your fairytales mixed up. Sleeping Beauty.’ The bitter steel of his voice cut into her fading consciousness. ‘I may be a beast but my name’s not Rose—it’s Thorne, Nicholas Thorne.’ His grip tightened and he shook her until her bewildered green eyes opened, staring fiercely down at her.
    ‘You do remember my name, don’t you, Vivian?’ he burst out harshly. ‘Even if you never saw my face. Nicholas Thorne. The man you almost destroyed ten years ago. The Olympic athlete whose future you smashed to bits with your car?’
    She stirred weakly in his arms. ‘No…!’
    ‘The man whose wife and son died while you walked away with hardly a scratch,’ he went on relentlessly. ‘Do you believe in the Bible, Vivian? That justice is an eye for an eye…?’
    She rejected the horror of what he was implying, the black eye-patch suddenly dominating her hazy vision. Perhaps he intended that it was the last thing she would ever see! Frantically she tried to bring her hands up to hide her face, to protect her eyes from his avowed revenge, but they, like the rest of her body, refused to respond to orders.
    ‘ No! ’ She was falling now, with nothing to save her. He had thrown her from the high place into a pit of horror. She was falling down, down, down and he was falling with her, his breath hot on her face, his unmasked hatred and the formidable weight of his hard body pressing her deep into the soft white oblivion that was waiting to receive them.
    ‘Ssh, I’ve got you.’
    Her body twitched feebly. ‘ No …’
    ‘Fight it all you like, Vivian, it’s too late,’ he murmured in her ear, with the cruel tenderness of a murderer for his victim. ‘All you’re doing is hastening the drug’s absorption into your system.’ His hand was heavy across her throat, his thumb pressing against the sluggish pulse under her jaw as his voice deepened and roughened ‘You may as well accept that for the next few hours I can do whatever the hell I like with this voluptuous young body and you