Sweet Torment Page 10

  Yet still she struggled to be free until, his mouth continuing to dominate hers, he took hold of her, hips to pull her against him, moulding her body to his as if determined to imprint his desire upon her until it seemed that every part of her was burning with a longing to be-even closer to him.

  Of their own accord her hands went up to fondle his throat and ears, pull at his hair and then finger-walk down his back, probing the sensitive hollows. A sound, half groan and half sigh, exploded from him. His fingers, suddenly rough with urgency, pushed inside the opening of her blouse and curved about the soft swell of flesh they found hidden there so that the last of her con-

  trol slipped away completely, melting into a dangerous sensuousness.

  Then suddenly he raised his head, and missing the warm feel of his lips against hers, Sorrel opened her eyes and saw his face dark and lean, its expression enigmatic.

  `And what was that you were saying about not wanting me, hmm?' he taunted. 'I think I've just proved otherwise. So much for your pretence of being indifferent! 'You want me as much as I want you, and this morning is as good a time as any ,,to do something about it.'

  'No! ' Shame and anger scorched through her because she had been betrayed by her foolish, susceptible body. She twisted out of his arms. Her hand swung up and caught him across the face in a slap which seemed to echo through the room. He stepped back, one hand going to his cheek, and taking advantage of his surprise she sped to the bathroom to gather up her toilet bag, reached the room where she had slept, slammed the door shut and turned the key in the lock.

  No time to stop and plan what to do next; she had to go while the going was good before Juan had time to catch her and use his superior strength to force her to submit to him. Even if she only got as far as the courtyard at least she would be outside and would be heard if she shouted for help.

  Gathering up the contents of her handbag which she had tipped out to find a lipstick, she pushed them into the bag and thrust that into her overnight bag, then hurried from the room. To her relief Juan wasn't in the passage, so with long casual-seeming strides she went along to the hallway. Pulling open the front door, she stepped out into damp warm air and the first thing she saw was the red and white truck. The cover of the

  bonnet was up and Pancho was bending over the engine fixing something.

  'Buenos dias, Pancho,' she said, going over to stand beside him. 'Are you going to Ibara this morning?'

  He straightened up to give her a cheerful smile while he wiped oily hands on a rag he took from the pocket of his faded blue jeans.

  'Buenos dias, senorita,' he said, and slammed the bonnet closed. 'This morning I go further than Ibara. I go to Copaya, to the festival there.'

  'Where is Copaya?'

  'Not far, about thirty kilometres. It is a small city set beside a beautiful river. The climate is warmer than here and the old houses are charming. As for the women,' here Pancho rolled his eyes and kissed the fingers of one hand, 'mmm, they are the most beautiful and the most affectionate in all of Colombia. Every year at this time there is a festival, the first of the big winter festivals when there are all kinds of religious parades, dancing in the streets—and of course the corrida.'

  Copaya. Sorrel had heard the Angels talk of it, comparing it to some of the towns in Andalusia in Spain. Since it was a well-known tourist attraction there would be an airport there with regular flights to Medellin and Bogota.

  'How soon are you leaving?' she asked.

  'As soon as possible. The big truck with the bulls has gone already.'

  'Then I'm coming with you,' she said.

  'Bueno.' His smile widened. 'I am glad. Please get in —there is plenty of room.'

  Amazed by and grateful for this piece of luck, Sorrel climbed into the cab of the truck, sat down and closed the door. Pancho seemed in no hurry to join her and

  she could hear him whistling a tune as he tinkered with something at the rear of the vehicle.

  Then the whistling stopped and she heard him speaking. Tension crawled along her nerves. The door at her side was swung open, and she slanted a wary glance sideways. Juan was standing there, fully dressed now in a flamboyant shirt of crimson silk under an unbuttoned waistcoat of black suede. From under the brim of his tilted broad-brimmed, shallow-crowned hat his eyes glared at her, a wicked livid light flickering in them.

  Yet when he spoke his voice was quiet, soft as velvet.

  'Move over, por favor.'

  'P . . . pardon?' His request confused her. She had expected him to demand that she get out.

  'You heard me,' he retorted curtly. 'Move over, make room for me to sit beside you. I'm also going to Copaya to take part in the corrida. I'm surprised but pleased that you want to come too and watch me perform in the lidia.'

  Quickly Sorrel turned, intending to slide under the steering wheel and leap out the other side, but Pancho was there settling into the driver's seat. Like a cornered animal she turned again, only to find that Juan was already taking his seat beside her, shoving her along the seat with a rough thrust of his thigh against hers. The door slammed shut, the engine throbbed into life and with a jerk the truck started forward in the direction of the archway.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PANCHO drove down the lane and turned the truck on to the road with a wicked screech of tyres, driving at his usual breakneck speed and chattering excitedly to Juan about the corrida. Sitting bolt upright between the two men, Sorrel stared straight ahead of her as the truck hurtled along, her mind busy with a new problem—how to get out of the new trap Juan Renalda had sprung on her.

  Receiving only uncommunicative grunts in answer to his questions and exclamations, Pancho gave up and started to whistle again. Sorrel glanced sideways at Juan. He had slid down on the seat so that his head rested against the back of it, had tilted his broad-brimmed black hat over his eyes and appeared to be dozing.

  The truck seemed to leap in the air as it hit a bump on the road. Sorrel licked dry lips and felt nausea heave in her stomach and remembered that she had had nothing to eat or drink that morning. In the near distance she could see the twin towers of the church in Ibara, the gold crosses on their domes glinting in the bright sunshine, soaring above the faded red roofs of the houses. Beyond the town the land stretched endlessly, wave after wave of tawny grassland, ideal for cattle ranching, edged at the horizon by a ridge of violet-blue mountains whose pointed peaks shone silver against a wide blue sky.

  In the single main street of Ibara Indian women in long skirts, ruanas, with wide-brimmed tall-crowned

  hats tilted on their heads and baskets slung on their arms, were boarding the battered-looking bus on which Sorrel had travelled the previous day from Manizales.

  An idea sprang into Sorrel's mind. She leaned sideways towards Pancho and whispered,

  'Please will you stop here and let me out?'

  He gave her a suspicious sidelong glance, looked back at the road and swore fervently. He wrenched the steering wheel round so that the truck swerved violently to the right to avoid a child who had dashed out of a house into the road. Sorrel was flung against Juan, who stiffened, shoved back his hat and sat up, pushing her away.

  'What happened?' he demanded.

  Pancho answered him in a spate of colourful Spanish and laid all the blame for the incident on Sorrel. The truck picked up speed, rattling over loose stones and pot-holes, and Ibara was left behind.

  'Why did you want to get out?" Juan asked Sorrel, speaking English so that Pancho wouldn't be able to understand.

  'I'm hungry and thirsty and I feel a little sick,' she replied stiffly, sitting once more in a tense upright position and feeling miserable because her little plan to escape on the bus to Manizales had failed because Pancho, like Jovita, gave all his loyalty to Juan.

  'You can eat when we get to Copaya. There's a restaurant at the arena. I didn't get any breakfast either. We were both too busy doing something else to eat, if you remember." A certain ironic dryness in his voice made her look
at him. Above the black and, white neckerchief knotted round his throat under the collar of the red shirt his jaw was taut and the set of his mouth was grim. About the scar on his cheek there were faint red marks. Made by her fingers? Sorrel blinked and

  looked away out of the windscreen again. She hadn't realised she had hit him so hard. A feeling of remorse swept over her suddenly, adding to the weakness caused by hunger. How had she, who disliked violence in any form, come to behave so violently? And how could she watch a bullfight? Once more she felt nauseous as she imagined blood spilled on sand, the blood of the man who was sitting next to her.

  'I'm not going to the arena,' she said determinedly. 'I don't want to see a bullfight.'

  `Then why are you in this wreck?'

  'I thought Pancho could give me a lift to Copaya where I can catch a plane to Medellin. I didn't know you would be going too. I thought you'd given up fighting professionally.'

  'I did for a while, but lately I've been irritated by the suggestions that I'd lost my nerve after that last fight, and when the promoter -of the local corrida asked me to perform on the first day of the festival at Copaya I agreed. It's an opportunity for me to prove once and for all that I'm not a coward.' Bitterness edged his voice and his laugh was short and cynical. 'Attendance at the Copaya corrida has been falling off over the past two years. There haven't been enough thrills and drama for the sensation-hungry fans. But today there will be a big crowd thirsting to see the return of El Valiente, half hoping to see him give a repeat performance of his last fight at Menizales nearly two years ago.'

  'Oh, no ! ' Her cry of protest came straight from the heart. Pancho stopped whistling to give her a startled sidelong glance and she heard him ask what was wrong. Juan answered him soothingly and the young man began to whistle again.

  'Must you fight?' Sorrel turned towards Juan im-

  pulsively, forgetting her own concerns for the moment, and he turned his head to raise an eyebrow at her. 'Surely you aren't concerned,' he taunted.

  'Yes, I am,' she replied.

  'For the bull, of course.' His mouth slanted derisively.

  'No,' she whispered. 'For you. You ... you might be

  gored again and be very ill like you were last time.'

  He shrugged and looked away from her out of the

  window at his side.

  `So what?' he murmured indifferently. 'It's all part of the game. Sometimes the bull wins.'

  'But ... but Jovita says you nearly died,' Sorrel blurted impulsively. 'Oh, Juan, please don't go into the arena today.'

  'I have to. It's all arranged.' His voice sounded hard and cold.

  'You might be killed,' she persisted, still protesting.

  'And you should care,' he jibed softly, turning his head to give her a narrow scornful glance. 'If I'm killed there will be one less bullfighter in the world to be degraded by a sport which you deplore.'

  'How can you do it? How can you let yourself be used in what's no more than a publicity stunt to get more people to buy tickets for the bullfight?' she whispered shakily. 'How can you go and deliberately tempt the bull to gore you? How can you do it to yourself, Juan?' She was on the verge of tears suddenly, incomprehensibly weeping because she couldn't bear the thought of him being hurt or killed.

  Through the blur of tears she saw him staring at her, his eyes wide, their expression one of puzzlement, and once again she realised how far apart they were in their attitudes. Then he raised a hand and with a gentle fingertip wiped away a tear which had slid on to her cheek.

  `Save your tears for the bull this afternoon,' he said softly. 'He's going to need them.' He lowered his hand and turned away abruptly to look out of the window again. 'Why do you want to go to Medellin?'

  'To tell Monica I failed,' she muttered dully, 'that I couldn't persuade you to go and tell Ramon you and she didn't have an affair. I promised her I'd see her today.'

  'And after that where will you go?' he asked coolly, still looking out of the window. 'Back to England?' 'Perhaps. I don't know.'

  She sat back and wiped the tears from her cheeks with her fingers, wondering vaguely why she had wept for him, why it was she felt so strongly about everything he did or had done, why he affected her emotions in a way no one else had ever done so that she did and said things which were quite alien to her nature.

  At least quite alien to the person she had always tried to be; the cool, competent emotionally-free woman she had always thought she was.

  Was she in love with him? She closed her eyes and sagged against the back of the seat. Oh no, she couldn't be. She mustn't be. She mustn't let this stranger whose way of life and background were so different from her own become all-important to her.

  She opened her eyes. The sunlight on the road glared, hurting her eyes. Looking around, she saw that the scenery was changing as they dropped down in a series of bends into the valley of a wide river valley. The countryside was more lush and thickly forested. Houses appeared, fronted by shady verandahs overhung by brilliantly blossoming vines. The rough road became a smoothly surfaced boulevard divided into two lanes by stately palm trees. A sign saying 'Detour' loomed up and Pancho turned the truck down a narrow side street to

  bump over cobbles between high white walls.

  Above the throb of the engine Sorrel could hear quite distinctly the sound of music, the rhythmic beating of drums and the wild fluting of Indian pipes. Glancing down another narrow side street as they crossed it, she had a glimpse of fantastically-dressed and masked people twirling and circling in a progressive dance down a wider street. The next side street gave her a quick view of a float carrying a statue of the Virgin surrounded by masses of red and white flowers.

  At the next junction of streets Pancho jerked the truck right down a lane of small terraced houses, passing a group of giggling dark-eyed children who were holding their own parade. A big adobe church loomed at the end of the lane and next to it were the high walls of a circular stadium, plastered with glossy, gaudy posters advertising the bullfights.

  Pancho drove through a wide gateway and parked the truck next to a big cattle lorry on which the words Rancho Renalda were painted. Juan opened the door and got out, to be surrounded almost at once by the men who had brought the bulls. Pancho also left the truck and ran round to join the excited, talkative group of men.

  She could go now, thought Sorrel, leave quietly while they were all busy. Bag in hand, she slid to the edge of the seat ready to jump down, but Juan was there hands on hips, blocking the way.

  `The restaurant is just over there,' he said. 'It's a little late for breakfast, but perhaps you won't mind having lunch instead. I wouldn't like you to faint through lack of food.'

  She stepped down and at once he slammed the door shut and shouted something to Pancho. Then with a hand under her elbow he urged her across the yard,

  bright with hot sunlight, and through the swinging plate-glass doors of a building.

  In the restaurant the tables were covered with red and white checked tablecloths and were set along the walls between padded bench-like seats with high wooden backs. There were already many people lunching there, laughing and talking, and some of the men greeted Juan loudly while they sent bold, curious glances in Sorrel's direction.

  They sat at a table in the corner, the high backs of the seats cutting them off from the curious stares. The waitress who came obviously knew Juan and chattered to him light heartedly while she took his order for barbecued steaks, sweet potatoes and vegetables. She brought them thick cups of coffee and then went off to the kitchen for the food.

  Feeling tension building up in her now that she was alone with him in the comparative privacy of the booth, Sorrel sipped the hot strong coffee.

  'Why did you hit me?' he asked, speaking to her suddenly in English and surprising her into answering.

  'I didn't like what you said about me wanting you,' she mumbled, refusing to look at him.

  `You were offended by the truth?' he exclaimed. `It wasn't true,
' she protested weakly.

  `Then it was a good piece of acting on your part,' he jeered. 'You really had me deceived into believing ...'

  'I wasn't acting,' she flared, and glared at him across the table, only to gasp and put her hand to her mouth as she realised she had just contradicted herself when she saw the lift of his mouth at one side. 'Oh, it was you, you made me,' she groaned.

  `So now I'm a black-hearted villain who forced you into my arms,' he mocked. 'But I couldn't have made you respond the way you did if there hadn't been a

  spark of desire alight inside you waiting to be fanned into a flame.' He took a sharp breath and thrust fingers through his hair. A muscle twitched in his cheek as if he were gritting his teeth to control some strong emotion which had flared up within him. 'By God, you're cruel, do you know that?' he said tautly. 'If you hadn't hit me, and run away we'd have become lovers back there in my room.'

  'No, no, we wouldn't,' she whispered, shaken to the core by his devastating honesty.,

  'Yes, yes.' The words were a savage hiss. 'Right from our first meeting we've been attracted to each other, but you won't admit it. You won't follow your natural instincts because when you stop to think you decide I'm not the sort of man you ought to care for. I don't do things the way you expect them to be done, so you call me immoral. I fight bulls for my living, so I'm degraded. I show you I'm attracted to you, so you hit me.' He gave her a raking, insolent glance which made her flinch. 'I shouldn't have given you a chance to think this morning. I should have kept my mouth shut and taken what was offered, even if it was without love.' He mimicked the way she spoke jeeringly.