The audience clapped enthusiastically and Lissa, off balance, turned to launch into the song again. She felt a movement at the back of the room and saw Chris standing there. He had taken the red carnation from his buttonhole and held it in his fingers. He was shredding it absently, staring fixedly at her.
Something inside her hardened. She turned her eyes back to the grinning audience and began to sing.
The applause, the enthusiasm, had melted her inhibitions. She was relaxed, leaning on the piano, smiling. In the clinging black dress she suddenly had a new sophistication and was aware of it. Her old self was gone. She was no longer a little girl, Pierre had reminded her; she was a woman, and it was a woman singing, breathing out the witty lines, glancing past the smiling faces in the audience as though she invited an interest from them which in the past she would have run from like a terrified child.
She did not even look towards Luc's table. Walking off in a storm of applause, she found Chris waiting for her. His eyes had an odd harsh glitter in them.
Lissa looked at him defiantly, her mouth level.
Chris stared and didn't say anything, but his eyes were trying to read hers.
Lissa walked past him and went through the club to the foyer. She got Fortune from the desk clerk and took him out into the warm still night.
She could not sleep after that. She felt wrung and yet elated, her mind confused with the rush of too many impressions. She watched the dog's white coat ahead of her and heard the sigh of the sea far off on the beach. The stars pierced the deep blue mantle of the sky, brighter than steel, sharper than knives. She stared up at them as she walked and shivered.
She would not think about the odd painful emotion she had felt before she began to sing.
She wouldn't think at all. She walked because her mind was far too wide awake for sleep and her body was restless and taut.
When she found herself on the edge of the pale beach she stood there watching the waves sigh up on to the sands. The dog ran down towards them, kicking up sand with his paws, printing the immaculate silvery beach with his marks.
The sound of movement behind her did not surprise her. She had known he was coming for at least a minute. She had been standing there, listening to his footsteps and shuddering like someone with a chill.
He came up behind her and stood there, breathing. Lissa stared at the sky, the sea, the silvery sands.
His hands touched her arms, slid caressingly down them, the cool brush of his fingers making her skin leap with awareness.
He moved closer, turning her to face him. She stood with lifted head and hard, wide eyes watching him as he watched her.
'Well, well, well,' he murmured. 'You are the most surprising creature, aren't you? What got into you tonight?'
She did not bother to reply. The peculiar anger inside her wouldn't let her speak.
His fingers ran down her check. He softly touched her folded lips with one of them gently tracing the warm moulded shape of her mouth. 'Why so silent?'
The tickling sensation of his finger went back and forward. He stared at her, brows sharply lifted.
'What's wrong, Lissa?' His tone had changed. The amused warmth had gone out of it and he was no longer smiling. 'What happened when you got back this afternoon? What did Brandon say to you?'
'Do you care?' She shot the words out like a dagger and saw his features tighten, his eyes narrow.
'What happened?'
'He told me never to see you again,' Lissa said icily. 'So please go back to the hotel, Mr Ferrier.'
His frown deepened. He took her slender shoulders in his hands and bent towards her, speaking curtly. 'Tell me! He was angry? What did he do? Did he threaten you?'
'Threaten me? Chris?' Her astonishment was in her face, but even as she threw back the words incredulously her mind was recalling the brutal violence in Chris's handsome face and she was shaken by the memory.
'He's no angel,' Luc Ferrier said harshly. 'His reputation on the island is far from pretty.'
Her eyes flew wide, her heart hurt inside her breast. 'What?'
Luc Ferrier's skin was taut, the hard bone structure beneath it clenched. He looked as tough as Chris had claimed he was-he looked dangerous, ruthless, a man with eyes that bofed into her own and made her deeply nervous.
'He runs this place with a private army, doesn't he? Those men in the gaming rooms would carve you up sooner than look at you. He has the island nicely organised. Makes money hand over list, keeps a whole horde of women busy making the swag he sells in his shops, and pays them in peanuts to do it.' 'That's a lie,' Lissa said angrily, trembling. 'Is it? Do you know how much he pays them?' 'Do you?' she asked furiously, glaring up at him.
'Oh, yes,' he returned, taking her breath away. 'On average, I understand, he pays them one percent of what he makes from the finished product.'
'One per cent?' Lissa's lips stiffened, dried. 'Who told you that? It's a lie!' It must be, she thought. Chris wouldn't, surely? Make money like that out of the local people? Cheat and manipulate them? Chris wasn't that sort of man. He was warm and friendly and kind. He wouldn't.
'It's the truth,' Luc Ferrier bit out, staring at her. 'Ask around. You know them all, you've known them all your life. Surely you must have realised how he ran this place?'
She ran her tongue tip over her dry lips and he watched the movement with an impassive face. 'Chris has to be firm with difficult customers. That's why he has so many men around the gaming rooms. Trouble can flare up if someone loses. Gamblers have volatile tempers.'
'That's what he told you?' Luc Ferrier said drily.
'Well, of course, it's true-up to a point. One or two tough boys are always around a place like this-but he has squads of them on tap. He doesn't just run the hotel, he runs the whole town. He's into everything from the tourist shops to the restaurants. He takes a percentage of that place we were eating at today.'
Her eyes wide and shocked, Lissa shook her head. 'No,' she muttered. 'I don't believe you.'
'Why should I lie?'
She looked at him fixedly and tried to decipher the hard strong face. 'You're making Chris sound like a gangster,' she protested.
Luc grinned humourlessly. 'He may use different words. He probably calls himself a businessman, but that's what he is, Lissa-a thug.'
'Don't!' she shivered, her brows drawn. 'Not Chris!'
He looked probingly into her anxious green eyes. 'Do you love him?'
'Of course I do,' she came back in a husky tone, but her eyes slid away from him. A week ago she would have been astonished by the question, given a firm and unthinking 'yes'. Now although she still made that positive reply she felt a strange tremor running through her, an uneasy flicker of uncertainty. Her love for Chris had been part of the backcloth of her life. She did not know what had changed- Herself, perhaps. She wasn't the same girl she had been a week ago. Odd things had happened to her, and all of them connected with this man.
She was half afraid Luc would press her, make her look at him. She knew instinctively that he was aware of the way her eyes had moved away as she spoke, but he didn't say anything. He just watched the smooth flushed oval of her face with a hard, intent observation of which she was very conscious.
'You owe it to yourself to look at him very carefully before you think of marrying him,' he said flatly. 'You're the type to whom marriage means a lifetime. Before you sign up for life I'd take a good, hard look at what you're getting, if I were you.' He paused, then said slowly, 'Especially his women.'