Island of escape by Dorothy Cork Page B

for lying on.
    She had never in her life been in a place so solitary, so quiet, so—so benevolent. This was an enchanted island—an island that loved her.
    In minutes, she was asleep ...
    She woke with a little shiver, to realise she was cold.
     
    She was in shadow and for a dizzying moment she had no idea where she was. She had been dreaming vividly, but now the dream had fled and memory came back. She rolled over and sat up abruptly to reach for her clothes—and to discover with a chilling shock that the shadow that lay across her was a human one. She drew up her knees instantly, hugging them to her to hide herself, and looked up, her blue eyes widening.
    Steve Gascoyne stood looking down at her.
    Ellis felt both frightened and outraged. There was a look in his eyes—dark, brooding, primitive—that made her want to run, to escape. But naked, she could run nowhere—not into the sea, not across the clumps of yellow grass and into the tea-trees, not back to the car at the far end of the little beach. All she could do was to sit there, as still as the rock on which she had been lying.
    He didn't apologise and he didn't turn away; he stood where he was and looked at her, and then he said, `You look very beautiful there against the rock. As beautiful as a legend. I'm almost persuaded to believe in love again.'
    He dropped down on the sand and Ellis felt a shiver run through her, and hugged her knees to her more fiercely than ever. She could imagine too vividly the shock of being pulled helpless into his arms, he looked so dark and powerful. He must have been back to the house, for instead of the checked shirt and cord pants he had worn at breakfast time, he was now in a silky black shirt with a polo neck and black pants that accentuated his lean muscular maleness. The white streak in his hair looked so dramatic in this setting it was easy to believe he was some superhuman demon, and what he was saying was no help at all. Nor was the way he looked at her.
     
    She said quiveringly, Please—go away.'
    His heavy dark eyebrows rose and his long mouth curved in an ironic smile. 'Words straight out of a sile nt prayer,' he said mockingly. B ut I'm afraid I'm not going to disappear, Ellis. Why should I, when my —intentions are honourable, when I've asked you to be my wife and to sleep in my bed?'
    `Go away,' she breathed again. 'Leave me alone ! '
    `When I've found you naked? Which I didn't expect to do, by the way. No, it's too much to ask of any man, Ellis. Don't you know, my little moonbird, that if you take off all your clothes and fall asleep on the beach, then you must accept the consequences?'
    `There—there aren't going to be any consequences,' she got out, wishing desperately that at least he would stop looking at her. Certainly she was being as modest as she could, but when you were quite bare it was decidedly difficult, and she realised far too late what a fool she had been to imagine she was safe here. It was such a small island. And suppose someone else had come and found her here? Though to tell the truth she thought she'd have felt safer with any other man in the world than she did with Steve Gascoyne at this instant. He had been menace enough in civilised Hobart, but here on this island he seemed to have shed his thin veneer of polite conventionality, and she knew she could expect anything of him. Her desperate exclamation, 'There aren't going to be any consequences', was sheer bravado, and of course he knew it.
    Quite suddenly she wanted to weep, and she shook her dark gold hair forward and rested her head on her knees.
    `I'm going to take pity on you, moonbird,' he said after what seemed endless seconds. 'Get into your clothes. I'll go back to the car and wait for you.'
     
    Ellis raised her head to find he'd got to his feet and stood looking at her, a crooked smile on his mouth. `You're quite helpless, aren't you?' he said reflectively. `That's something a woman does well to remember—her physical