'You're coming on,' he told her, grinning, and she wasn't sure what he meant by that, but knew she didn't want to know.
Chris gave her a sharp look as he saw her in the black dress that evening. 'I thought you preferred not to wear it,' he said with unhidden suspicion.
Pierre came up and winked at him. 'I talked her into it. The fans were demanding another look at it.'
Chris relaxed. 'Went down well, didn't it? I know. I got told as much over and over again.'
When Liss walked out into the spotlight her eyes involuntarily slid to the table where Luc usually sat and widened in surprise as she saw he was not alone. One of the other guests sat with him, Lissa had seen her several times before; she was one of the wives whose husband rarely left the gaming rooms. Luc was smiling into the woman's eyes and listening to whatever she was saying to him. The woman lifted her glass and sipped, fluttering her lashes at him over the edge of the glass.
She was a very attractive woman, Lissa recognised, suntanned, slim, her low red dress provocative.
Lissa felt a strange stab of anger and began to sing. She did not look at Luc again, but she sang as she had never sung before, using the purring voice she had heard Pierre use as he tried to get her to sing as he wanted.
It was nothing but mimicry. She remembered the teasing looks Pierre had given her as he sang certain lines and looked round the audience in the same way, smiling. She heard the laughter start, as it had started the first time she sang the song. She paused where Pierre had paused, smiled where he had smiled, and her slender body moved in the sinuous gestures Pierre had used as he sang.
She felt Pierre 's excited look, saw his grin out of the side of her eye. As she ended, the audience erupted in whistles and shouts, as they had before. 'More, more!' they yelled. Pierre bent forward and whispered: 'Sing it again.'
Lissa looked at him in startled disbelief. She had never sung a song twice before. Pierre nodded at her vigorously and struck up the bars which opened the song.
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.'