Read Online The Passionate Sinner by Violet Winspear - Free Book Online

have heard the name the islanders have given me, harimau which means tiger.’
    ‘Sang harimau,’ she corrected him. ‘King tiger.’
    His smile was brief, a trifle caustic. ‘It has something to do with a legend of theirs, that each one of us has been at some time a member of the animal kingdom and that when we take human shape certain of our former characteristics are retained. Soon after I came to Pulau-Indah I took to going into the forest at night, where I had an uncanny knack of finding my way, obviously due to increased facility to hear and sense the presence of other night creatures. Real tigers roam there, you know, and at night they’re prowling for food. The islanders first decided that I was crazy, and then very gradually they began to hint that I had an affinity with the big tawny cats and that was why I was unafraid to go where they were. The truth was I didn’t much care if one night they took me for their supper—you catch your breath with extreme sharpness, mevrouw, but a woman like you, you support the truth and dislike dishonesty, don’t you?’
    Merlin put a hand to her throat and felt for a moment slightly choked by her own dishonesty. Feeling the withdrawal of her touch from his arm, he glanced downwards and she saw his eyebrows pull together. ‘Have I struck a wrong chord?’ he asked. ‘Have you some small guilty secret, Miss Lakeside, locked up in your heart?’
    ‘Haven’t we all got a few bones in the cupboard of our conscience, mynheer! I’m an old maid, but not necessarily a devout nun.’
    ‘Intriguing,’ he murmured. ‘The secrets of Ruth are always more subtle than the secrets of Jezebel. It has to do with a man, of course?’
    ‘That—that is always the assumption.’ she said uneasily.
    ‘The most logical one, unless you once robbed a piggy bank.’ Then to Merlin’s disquiet, she saw him reaching out a hand in her direction, as if sudden curiosity made him want to actually touch the object of his aroused interest. She drew away, carefully, back against the veranda rail, all too conscious that she had on a thin shirt and that although her figure was slim she had a youthful firmness and suppleness that his sensitive fingers would be aware of at once. Lon had warned her of this. That blind men could tell so much from the voice, and then came the day when they wanted to extend their research. It was perfectly natural and under normal circumstances she would have offered her face for a braille reading, though it would have touched the near peaks of exquisite agony to have let him touch her body.
    ‘I can hear you moving away from me,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Are you scared of being touched? I mean it quite impersonally. You mustn’t imagine that I want to take a liberty.’
    ‘I don’t imagine that.’ Merlin shrank into stillness, like a prudish spinster grown so out of touch with physical contact that it now took on a sinister aspect. It was better to act like that than to face the real truth, that she dreaded to be found out and yet longed to be discovered as a girl of twenty-one who could give him the sweet consolation he must hunger for in the dark depth of his days and nights. She wanted that strong brown arm to curve around her and drag her hard and fast to that tanned and sinewy body, whose skin would warmly sear her own, whose muscles would make her feel deliriously weak, whose desires would come vibrantly alive to the young female feel of her. How she longed for that ... a rage of heaven even if afterwards she had to face the hell of his anger.
    He was blind, but his mind was keenly, alertly alive, and he’d guess who she was ... he’d find out, and the pleasure wouldn’t be worth the pain of his hatred.
    ‘You are scared out of your wits,’ he said softly. His nostrils tensed, as if he had actually caught the scent of her fear. ‘My dear woman, I haven’t been so long without a woman that I shall go berserk and ravish you the instant I get my hands on