Devil And The Deep Sea – Sara Craven

And before dinner she’d found all her new clothes unpacked and neatly put away in the closets. Elvire might only be playing at being Roche’s housekeeper, as she herself was pretending to be his wife, but it was impossible to fault the way the other girl carried out her duties, Samma thought grudgingly. She took a leisurely shower, put on her nightdress, and sat down at the dressing-table to give her hair its nightly brushing, tensing as she wondered if she could hear the sound of movement from the adjoining room.

She picked up her brush, grimacing. She would have to get used to this unaccustomed proximity, or she would end up a nervous wreck. It was his room, after all, and he was entitled to use it—or find more congenial surroundings as the mood took him, she told herself, as she began to tug the brush through her hair. And stopped, her attention totally arrested by the noiseless opening of the communicating door. Roche walked into the room. His hair was damp, as if he too had been in the shower, and he was wearing a dark blue silk robe, and nothing else, as far as she could gather.

She dropped her brush with a clatter. ‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’ He said quite gently, ‘You are not a child or a fool, ma belle. I made my intentions clear downstairs.’ ‘But you promised you’d leave me alone—you said . . .’ ‘We seem to have said a great deal in our short acquaintance, and little of it makes any sense at all.’

He came to her side, and lifted her bodily off the stool and into his arms in one smooth, co-ordinated movement. His voice was almost rough. ‘I spent my first wedding night alone, Samantha. That is not going to happen a second time, whether you wish it or not.’

He carried her into his room without haste, and put her down beside the enormous bed. He looked at her for a long, measuring moment, then slid a finger under the narrow ribbon strap of her demure nightdress. ‘Did you buy this today?’ Mutely, she nodded. He said with a ghost of laughter in his voice, ‘Then it would be a pity to tear it. Take it off, cherie.’ ‘No.’ Her voice was scarcely more than a breath.

‘I—I couldn’t—please . .

“A year out of your life. What price would you ask?” Samma supposed that any other woman would surely slap the face of a man who would pose such a question. But Samma couldn’t afford that luxury with Roche Delacroix. With her stepfather ready to sell her “favors” to clear his gambling debts, Roche represented Samma’s only avenue of escape from an unthinkable future on Cristoforo Island.

Only a few hours earlier, the lips that opened the suggestive negotiation had made Samma so thoroughly aware of being female. Samma couldn’t help feeling that life was doubly unfair. OceanofPDF.com CHAPTER ONE The breeze from the sea whipped a strand of pale fair hair across Samma Briant’s cheek, and she flicked it back impatiently as she bent over her drawing-board. The waterfront at Cristoforo was crowded, as it always was when a cruise ship was in.

Tourists were eagerly exploring the bars and souvenir shops along the quayside, and stopping to look at the stalls which sold locally made jewellery, carvings and paintings of island scenes. And a lot of them lingered where Samma sat on an upturned crate, amused and fascinated by her talent for capturing an instant likeness on paper, and willing to pay the modest fee she charged for her portraits. She didn’t consider herself to be an artist. She possessed a knack, no more, for fixing on some facial characteristic of each subject, and subtly exploiting it.

But she enjoyed her work, and on days like this it was even reasonably lucrative. She had a small crowd around her already, and her day would have been just about perfect, except for one large, mauve, chrome-glittering cloud on her horizon— Sea Anemone, surely the most vulgar motor yacht in the Caribbean, currently moored a few hundred yards away in Porto Cristo’s marina. Because Sea Anemone’s presence at Cristoforo meant that her owner, the equally large and garish Mr Hugo Baxter, would be at the hotel tonight, playing poker with Samma’s stepfather, Clyde Lawson.

One glimpse of that monstrous mauve hulk lying at anchor had been enough to start Samma’s stomach churning uneasily. It was only six weeks since Hugo Baxter’s last visit. She’d thought they were safe for at least another month or two. Yet, here he was again closing in for the kill, she thought bitterly, as she signed the portrait she’d just finished with a small flourish, and handed it over to her delighted sitter with a brief, professional smile.

The fact was they couldn’t afford another visit from Hugo Baxter. Samma had no idea what her stepfather’s exact financial position was—he would never discuss it with her—but she suspected it might be desperately precarious. When Clyde had met and married her mother during a visit to Britain, he had been a moderately affluent businessman, owning a small but prosperous hotel, and a restaurant on the small Caribbean island of Cristoforo.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 1c3bf239177087cf
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 529,088 bytes (0.505 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 151
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 250.86 minutes
• Total Words: 50,172
• Total Characters: 282,860
• Average Words per Page: 332.26
• Average Characters per Page: 1873.25

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