The Passionate Sinner Read Free Page A

within the next few minutes ... her meeting with Paul van. Setan for the first time in months.
    King Tiger, whom she had been warned not to approach too closely.
    ‘Have we far to go to reach the house?’ she asked. ‘Is it a big house?’
    ‘It’s the island residence,’ he replied, a flicker of amusement in his eyes as he indicated a rock stairway that led up from the sands to a plateau above them.
    ‘Up there?’ she said, frowning. ‘Does that mean that Mynheer van Setan makes his way down that stairway? Isn’t that rather dangerous for him?’
    ‘He gives no thought to the danger, nonya.’
    ‘I see.’ She swallowed drily and wondered if Paul was careless of his life because he considered chat he had very little to live for since being cut off from his life’s work. Oh God, this was going to be harder than she had dreamed of, being here with him and having to endure the sight of him stumbling around, beholden to other people for the small things that sighted people took for granted, not caring very much if he plunged down those rocks and broke his neck.
    ‘He has a small island boy who leads him down,’ the pilot drawled, as if reading her mind. ‘You could not keep the tuan away from the sea, even though for him there is the danger of not seeing the silent approach of the tiger shark. We islanders go into the water with a knife strapped to the hip, but the strange part is that he has been swimming in our sea ever since he came here and the shark has not yet attacked him. Perhaps being blind he cannot exude the fear or panic that sighted people cannot suppress when danger comes close to them, and maybe the primitive shark senses that he shares the sea with someone who swims in total darkness.’
    She shuddered at the words and tried to picture that tall, assured man of medicine living a life so primitive, so far removed from the clinical environs of the hospital where he had been a kind of god to those he healed and those he worked with. Paul van Setan, the most brilliant young surgeon Sir Ivor Cliveland had ever trained and who would have carried on the tradition ... and who was now a kind of blind beachcomber who in need of something to occupy his keen mind had hit upon the idea of writing a casebook and outlining the methods he had used in his restoration of the human face and body.
    The tragedy of it struck through Merlin like a knife and as she stood looking about her, a hand was pressed tightly to her side.
    ‘You are all right?’ A hand touched her shoulder and she gave a start and found the Indonesian pilot close to her.
    ‘Yes.’ She tensed at his touch. ‘I—I’m taking in the strangeness of everything, and I do feel slightly nervous. Do you think he’ll mind terribly if he discovers that I’m a young woman?’
    ‘You had better let him first discover that you are a good worker.’ The white teeth gleamed against the coffee skin. ‘Then when the whispers reach him …’
    ‘The whispers?’ Her breath caught in her throat.
    ‘A nona, a young single girl in the house of a bachelor!’His black eyebrows quirked. ‘On an island everything is known, everything is discussed, and you are very attractive.’
    ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ she gasped, jerking away from him. ‘I’m not at all the type of girl that men look at.’
    ‘He will not be looking, will he, nonya?’ The foreign voice was insinuating. ‘He will be attuned to your voice, which is low and pleasing, and at some time his blind hand will brush against you.’
    ‘How dare you speak like this!’ Merlin felt that she had gone ashen, for his words struck at hidden and forbidden feelings deep inside her. It actually made her feel a little faint, the idea of one of Paul’s lean clever hands coming in contact with her body. She swayed and clenched her hand against the scaly trunk of a nearby tree. ‘I—I’m not used to this amount of heat,’ she said me infernal island of the devil’s.’
    ‘Perhaps you have,