The Passionate Sinner Read Free

believed her to be a mature person of middle years, and all she could hope was that being blind he wouldn’t realise that she was far younger than she had led him to believe. There would hardly be any physical contact between them, and she had a low, softly modulated voice that shouldn’t give her away.
    But the helicopter pilot was in a position to do so, and she just had to appeal to him.
    ‘You won’t say anything, will you, about the fact that I’m younger than he thought? I—I very much wanted the post, you see. I longed to travel, but there was no hope of coming this far afield unless I took work in this part of the world. You do understand, don’t you?’
    ‘Do I, nonya?’ His smile was subtle and wholly foreign. ‘To me there is mystery in a young woman travelling thousands of miles to a strange island to be among people who will find her strange in return. You are not the sort that a man sees in the Far Eastern capitals, a woman of wealth who travels to pass the time, a good-time girl who takes work as a nightclub hostess, or a member of a religious order in the nursing profession.’
    His dark, elongated eyes flicked her mouth and saw the tiny nerve that pulsed there, he took in her hands that were gripping the handle of her bag with an unnatural tension, and then he swung the throttle of the helicopter engine and they began to descend, nearer and nearer to a glistening strip of beach that had suddenly appeared on the edge of the ocean.
    ‘I never approach the tuan with tales,’ he said. ‘If you have a secret, then it is your concern, but beware of him. His senses are abnormally acute and he may well guess that you are a bit of girl instead of a stolid maiden lady. We have a saying, Folly always demands a penalty.’
    ‘You think I’ve been a fool in coming here?’ Her heartbeats quickened as the helicopter dropped smoothly towards the pale stretch of sand, curving away like the undulating tail of a snake, out from among the trees,through a towering archway of black rocks to where the sea pounded.
    The helicopter settled, a moment of shrill noise and then abrupt silence as the rotors came to a stop. The pilot turned to face her, peeling off his earphones as he did so. A jag of black hair was sharp against his smooth coffee skin. ‘A pebble and a diamond are alike to a blind man, as we say, but Tuan Paul has never been an ordinary man and it is well known in this part of the world that he worked upon the oil-burned face of a boy, the son of the man who owns this island, and made it good to look at again. If there should be harm to him in your arrival among us, then you would be wise to leave before I take you to him.’
    ‘How could I possibly want to harm such a man?’ Merlin gasped, feeling the deep twist of pain, the sudden grip of fear, the realisation that she would be in peril from these people if they ever discovered her secret.
    ‘Women are creatures of intrigue and no man really knows if his heart is safe in the hands of a woman. Your eyes, Miss Lakeside, are not easy to read. They are impenetrable like a forest flower, and they are shadowed when your lashes veil them. I can see you, but I don’t know you. The tuan will not see you, but to his fingers a pebble will not feel like a diamond.’
    ‘A-and what is that supposed to mean?’ Merlin asked, nervously.
    ‘Just this, nonya, don’t get too close to him.’ The pilot swung open the exits of the machine and Merlin alighted before he could come and assist her. He had unnerved her with his remarks and the way he seemed to guess that there was more to her being here than the mere wish to satisfy an urge to travel. She could feel a tremor in her legs as she stood there on the hot sand that was like crushed shell and replaced her sun-glasses in order to offset the dazzle and to hide her eyes from the young Indonesian. Fear couldn’t be altogether concealed and she could feel it in herself ... the mounting apprehension of what faced her