Devil And The Deep Sea
Mills & Boon proudly presents THE SARA CRAVEN COLLECTION. Sara’s powerful and passionate romances have captivated and thrilled readers all over the world for five decades making her an international bestseller."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.
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Former journalist SARA CRAVEN published her first novel ‘Garden of Dreams’ for Mills & Boon in 1975. Apart from her writing (naturally!) her passions include reading, bridge, Italian cities, Greek islands, the French language and countryside, and her rescue Jack Russell/cross Button. She has appeared on several TV quiz shows and in 1997 became UK TV Mastermind champion. She lives near her family in Warwickshire – Shakespeare country.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
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. The island was just beginning to take off as a cruise ship stopping-point, and the future should have been rosy—except for Clyde’s predilection for gambling. While Samma’s mother had been alive, he’d kept his proclivities more or less under control, but since her death two years earlier things had gone from bad to worse. The restaurant had had to be sold to pay his debts, and the hotel hadn’t had the redecoration and refurbishment it needed, either.
Clyde seemed to win so seldom, Samma thought broodingly, and when Hugo Baxter was in the game his losses worsened to a frightening extent.
She motioned her next customer to the folding chair in front of her, and began to sketch in the preliminary shape of her head and shoulders with rapid, confident strokes.
Clyde’s only remaining asset was the hotel. And if we lose that, she thought despondently, I’m never going to get off this island.
Probably the woman she was sketching would have thrown up her hands in horror at the thought of anyone wanting to leave Cristoforo. ‘Isn’t this paradise?’ was the usual tourist cry.
Well, it was and it wasn’t, Samma thought cynically. During the years when she’d spent her school holidays here, she’d taken the romantic view, too. She’d been in the middle of her A-level course when her mother had collapsed and died from a heart attack. She’d flown to Cristoforo for the funeral, only to discover when it was over that the trust which was paying her school fees had ceased with her mother’s death, and that Clyde had no intention of paying out for her to complete her education.
‘It’s time you started working to keep yourself,’ he told her aggressively. ‘Besides, I need you here to take your mother’s place.’
Sick at heart, confused by her grief for her mother, Samma had agreed to stay. But it had been a serious mistake. When Clyde had spoken of her working for her keep, he meant just that, she’d found. She received no wage for her work at the hotel. The only money she earned was through her sketches, and although she saved as much as she could towards her airfare back to the United Kingdom, it was a wretchedly slow process.
