The Price of Scandal

by Kim Lawrence

  Now the something in his voice made sense. ‘And you resented her?’

  The perceptive comment caused his expression to blank. There were some things he did not share with anyone; he was not about to start now.

  ‘Thank you for that psychological insight,’ he drawled, looking anything but grateful for her soft-voiced sympathy. ‘But my childhood is not the subject under discussion.’ It never had been, which made his introducing it all the more bizarre.

  Neve, oblivious to the warning in his voice, asked earnestly, ‘Has it occurred to you that your stepmother was trying to do her best?’

  ‘Oh, Livia was trying to do her best.’ And her best had been good enough to drive a wedge between father and son.

  ‘I know nothing about your particular circumstances, of course, but—’

  ‘No, you don’t, and that situation is not about to change any time soon.’ In contrast to his colourless tone and bored expression, the gleam reflected in his dark eyes was nothing short of combustible. ‘I suggest you put your own house in order before you share the benefit of your vast wisdom with the rest of us.’

  The chilling hauteur in his cutting put-down drove the colour from Neve’s face. ‘I don’t want to share anything with you.’

  It afforded her some comfort that her painfully childish response drew an equally immature retort from him.

  ‘Imagine my devastation.’ He swore under his breath and rubbed his temples with his thumbs to relieve the build-up of pressure there, before returning his attention to the redhead, who for some incomprehensible reason felt she had a licence to offer him advice.

  The silence stretched as she stood looking at him with blue eyes that gave him a shock every time he saw them, radiating a mixture of defiance, anger and hurt.

  ‘Where are my clothes?’

  Eyes like ice drilled into her as he snapped, ‘Do not be ridiculous. Sit back down. You are not going anywhere.’

  But he was, before he gave into the compulsion to drag her into his arms and either throttle her or drive his tongue between those soft, tempting lips. This woman had pushed him closer to losing control than he had ever been in his adult life.

  Neve watched, torn between alarm and apprehension as he strode from the room, grabbing his wet jacket from the coat rack as he passed.

  Anxiety made her voice shrill as she yelled after him, ‘What are you doing? Where are you…?’

  An icy gust of wind blew through the room as the outer door was wrenched open. Without a word he vanished out into the darkness.

  Neve reached the door as it slammed shut. The second person in one day to prefer a blizzard to her company…A message there, you think, Neve?

  She lifted a hand to her head, the faint ironic smile that curved her lips slipping away as she thought, And what am I meant to do now?

  Sit and wait, follow…?

  Well, at least she didn’t have to put up with his company, the man was a total pain, but as the minutes ticked by she began to worry. What if he was lost? What if he was injured? To go off like that, it was immature, it was reckless—he probably wanted to scare her. Well, she didn’t care if he killed himself!

  Neve’s thoughts continued to go around in dizzying circles, her mood swinging from one violent extreme to another until she couldn’t stand it for another second.

  She had to do something!

  She wrenched open the door, catching her breath and drawing the blanket tight across her shoulders as the cold hit her like a solid wall. She was still catching her breath when a voice snarled, ‘Madre di Dio! What are you doing, woman? Get back inside.’

  Neve gave a strangled sob of relief as a dark shadow materialised from the snowy blur and formed a broad-shouldered figure who stamped his way into the room, not the injured victim he had become in her feverish imagining but intact, unharmed and projecting more vitality than a man had any right to.

  Her initial relief rapidly morphed into anger so intense that for a moment Neve could not speak at all. She stood there feeling the rage pounding in her temples, watching as he shook his head to dislodge the powdery white residue that clung to the dark strands.

  As if he’d just taken a gentle stroll to the corner shop!

  The sound her bare foot made on the tiles as she stamped brought his head up.

  ‘How stupid are you?’

  Another time the look of astonishment that flashed across his face might have amused her, but Neve was beyond seeing the funny side of anything.

  ‘Of all the brainless, crazy stunts! You could have been killed!’ she raged, stamping her foot again as her feelings threatened to overcome her. ‘I feel guilty enough about just about everything without having your stupid neck to add to the list.’

  ‘So this is all about you,’ he drawled. ‘Amazing—’ He stopped mid scathing rebuttal when without warning she began to cry.

  Tears he could have coped with, even remained angry through, but Severo found his defences inadequate against the tearless, great gulping sobs that shook her entire body. As he watched her he could almost feel the layers of protective cynicism meticulously built up over the years peeling away.

  His hands clenched at his sides, blood dripping unnoticed from the deep graze on his palm as he fought the compulsion to draw her into his arms.

  ‘Don’t cry. I’m sorry if I scared you.’

  Neve sniffed in response to the abrupt apology and lifted her head. ‘I wasn’t scared,’ she lied, deeply embarrassed by her uncontrolled emotional outburst. ‘I was mad, angry. Storming off like that—you could have said what you were doing instead of just running out and—’ She paused, a frown forming on her smooth brow. ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘When setting out on a search and rescue mission, it always helps when you know where you are. I took your advice and went to look for high ground.’

  The high ground he had found was a tin-roofed storage shed that had seen better days. His weight added to the several inches of snow it already supported, had caused the roof to cave in.

  A dramatic moment!

  A slow smile moved across Neve’s face as she raised the hem of the bunched blanket and ran to his side. ‘You’re going to help me find Hannah!’

  Looking down into the blue eyes glowing with gratitude raised to him, Severo felt a dangerous rise of emotion tighten in his chest.

  He shook his head. ‘We have instructions to stay put.’

  Her smile slipped. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I managed to get a signal. I informed the emergency services of the situation.’

  Relief rolled over Neve like a wave. ‘That’s fantastic. You told them about Hannah?’

  Severo nodded. ‘Their search parties will be looking for her, though as they said there is a possibility that she has already been found or reached safety on her own.’

  ‘They really think so?’

  ‘Their teams have been finding stranded motorists all day. They were not keen on the idea of me mounting my own rescue mission.’ And Severo could see the logic of their thinking.

  ‘But surely,’ Neve protested, ‘their resources are stretched. The more people out helping—’

  ‘Their attitude is people helping will end up being people who need rescuing, and as you rightly pointed out their resources are already stretched…?’

  Her face scrunched into an expression of seething frustration. ‘But we can’t just sit here and do nothing. Let me speak to them.’

  ‘Sorry, not possible, the signal’s gone.’ Short of rebuilding the destroyed shed, it would stay gone.

  Neve’s suspicious frown deepened as she watched him begin to unzip his jacket.

  ‘Well, I want to try.’

  Severo regarded her with thinly veiled exasperation. ‘There’s no point—I have told you.’

  ‘How do I even know you contacted them at all? For all I know you might be making it all up.’

  The zip parted and his dark head lifted; Severo levelled an incredulous glare at her. ‘Maki
ng it up? Would that,’ he asked grimly, ‘be make it up as in lying?’

  Neve pressed a hand to her throat, refusing to give an inch in the face of his icy-eyed anger. ‘It’s obvious you didn’t want to help me find Hannah,’ she claimed, in a breathy accusing rush.

  Severo made no attempt to defend himself from the angry charge as he continued to cautiously ease off the jacket that had been all that was protecting his naked torso from the elements and the jagged pieces of torn metal that had cushioned his fall.

  Neve, who interpreted his unfriendly silence as a tacit admission of guilt, regarded him with unconcealed contempt that morphed into horror when he finally managed to remove his jacket and revealed the damage it had hidden.

  ‘You’re hurt!’

  He glanced down in response to her exclamation, his manner dismissive as his eyes brushed across the grazed area on his muscle-ridged belly and the angry raised red welts that ran along the golden skin of his right shoulder. He flexed his shoulder and realised the damage extended to his back.

  He’d been, Severo decided, lucky.

  ‘It is superficial.’ Though admittedly the deep cut on his palm might need a couple of stitches, or failing that a dressing to stem the blood that still seeped from the jagged edges.

  ‘Superficial!’ And he called her stoic! ‘Here, sit down. Let me—’

  He ignored the chair she had dragged out for him to sit in with an irritable, ‘I do not need a ministering angel.’

  Neve, jogging to keep pace with his long-legged stride, followed him into the living room, noticing as she did the trail of blood on the floor.

  ‘You’re bleeding!’ she cried in alarm. The violent strength of her emotions that rose up inside her as she saw the blood dripping from his arm froze Neve to the spot.

  He flung her an impatient scowl over his shoulder. ‘It’s only my hand.’

  Like that made it all right, she thought, watching as he grabbed a clean tea towel and wrapped the chequered fabric tightly around the injured area.

  Her own hand trembled as she pushed a skein of fiery hair back from her brow. ‘And let me guess—it doesn’t hurt at all?’ She narrowed her eyes and thought, God save me from stupid macho men!

  The macho man in question maintained a stubborn silence as he added another tea towel to the makeshift dressing. Blood was already oozing through the first one; Neve had to look away from the red stain.

  Looking at the raised welts that stood out livid on the smooth skin of his brown back made her feel just as bad. She pressed a hand to her stomach where her muscles quivered in sympathetic reaction to his pain.

  ‘What happened? How did you do this?’

  ‘I was on a roof when it collapsed.’

  The casual explanation sent a chill through Neve. ‘You could have been killed!’

  ‘As you see, I wasn’t.’ The fact that she was becoming visibly agitated over something that had not happened baffled him.

  His offhand manner made Neve, who was struggling to banish the image of his broken, lifeless body from her head, see red. ‘What on earth,’ she yelled, ‘were you doing on a roof?’

  Wasn’t a blizzard challenge enough for this man? Did he have to go out looking for alternative ways to kill himself?

  ‘There must be a first-aid kit here somewhere…’ she muttered, opening a cupboard door and scanning the neatly arranged contents.

  ‘I was finding the high ground and making the phone call that I invented.’

  The explanation stopped Neve in her tracks. ‘Oh!’ She swallowed and gave a shamefaced grimace as she closed the door and straightened up empty-handed.

  Feeling several kinds of a fool, she glanced warily up at his lean face. ‘I suppose I owe you an apology.’

  ‘I suppose so too.’

  If she had hoped to see some thawing in his manner, Neve was disappointed. ‘I’m sorry about what I said…I suppose I was a bit…’

  He angled a sardonic brow and watched the colour in her cheeks deepen.

  ‘Paranoid?’ she suggested.

  ‘Yes, you were.’ He left his task long enough to sling her a curious look from under the sweep of his ridiculously long lashes. ‘Are you always this freakishly obsessive when you get an idea in your head?’

  Under the circumstances she could hardly take offence at the question, and she had in her life been accused of tunnel vision. ‘Hannah’s my responsibility.’

  ‘You asked your stepdaughter to steal a car and run away?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  He arched an eloquent brow.

  ‘But I’m the adult.’

  ‘I doubt if that would make a difference.’ His assessing glance moved across her face. ‘I can see you at two, beating yourself up when your teddy bear lost an ear and feeling responsible when your best friend fell over and cut her knee.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She stopped, an arrested expression spreading slowly across her face as she realised there was more than a grain of truth in his comments.

  Hadn’t she always been the responsible one, first trying to keep Charlie out of trouble, and herself out of the care system? And now there was Hannah.

  ‘You have to take responsibility for your own actions,’ she asserted stubbornly.

  Neve had been doing that since she was fourteen.

  The year her parents had been killed in the train crash.

  Officially Charlie had been her guardian after their parents’ deaths, but Charlie’s ideas of guardianship had not been strictly conventional.

  Charlie would vanish for weeks at a time, often after saying he was just popping to the shop for a loaf of bread. It had made her self-reliant and also a pretty good liar!

  She’d had no choice. If the authorities had suspected she was living alone for weeks and sometimes months at a stretch they would have swooped, and being taken into care was one of Neve’s nightmares.

  It was her own teenage years that had made her empathise with Hannah’s situation—not, of course, that Hannah would ever find herself in a position where she had to live on sardines on toast for a week and say she didn’t want to go to the cinema with her friends because she didn’t have any money.

  ‘The responsibility is no longer yours, cara. The professionals are on the job. Take a back seat and let it go.’ It was easy to see that letting go was an alien concept to her.

  Neve bit her lip. ‘But—’

  He held up his uninjured hand. ‘You’re not in control. Why not enjoy the experience?’

  The astonishing suggestion drew her incredulous gaze to his face. ‘Enjoy!’ she echoed, repeating the concept to herself. Enjoy being stranded God knew where with a beautiful, devastatingly handsome stranger—actually when you put it like that she realised there were more than a few women who would pay for the experience!

  ‘A smile,’ he approved. ‘That’s an improvement. Think of it as an adventure. How many people get the opportunity to escape the real world even for a few hours? No stress, no responsibilities, no emails or phone.’ He had convinced himself but the redhead’s expression suggested she would be a harder nut to crack.

  Neve compressed her lips into a prim line. ‘I don’t like adventures.’

  ‘There are many kinds of adventures, cara.’

  The low, intimate drawl sent a shivery shudder through her body. She had no intention of even trying to translate the meaning lurking in that seemingly innocent observation. Instead she dragged her gaze free of his bold, uncomfortably perceptive stare and abruptly changed the subject, asking in a bright voice, ‘Can I do something to help? The wounds should be cleaned.’ Even before the words had left her lips she was panicking about the thought of touching him, and not just because the idea of hurting him made her stomach churn.

  ‘Thanks for the offer, but I think the easiest way to clean these—’ he flexed his shoulder experimentally and struggled to repress a wince ‘—is to take a shower.’

  ‘Good idea!’ she enthused, relieved that her offer
had been rejected.

  ‘I hope there’s hot water.’ Though possibly under the circumstances cold might be more appropriate. His icy adventure had not lessened the lust that had him firmly in its grip.

  The night ahead held a lot of interesting possibilities. He felt some of his tiredness fall away as he climbed the stairs and considered them.

  Chapter Six

  UNABLE to stop following him with her eyes, Neve watched until Severo vanished from view.

  She still hadn’t moved when a few moments later she heard the sound of water running, loudly, as though he hadn’t bothered to close the door behind him.

  Some people might take that as an invitation to join him.

  Neve gave a shocked groan and closed her eyes, her face scrunched into a grimace as she folded her arms onto the counter top. With a sigh she rested her head on them and struggled to eject the sybaritic image of the tall Italian standing under the spray, the warm jets of water cascading over his brown skin.

  What is wrong with me?

  Up until this point, focused on Hannah, she had been able to block out the effect that Severo Constanza had on her. Now she was forced to reluctantly confront the situation.

  She was attracted to him, and why not? He looked incredible—definitely the sexiest man she had ever encountered. She would have to be dead from the neck down not to be affected by his brand of raw sexuality!

  It wasn’t as though it was anything deep and meaningful, and it wasn’t as though she would ever do anything about it.

  She found him sexually attractive, but she found lightning storms attractive too—she didn’t have to go outside to feel the crackle of electricity in the air and risk getting struck to enjoy their raw primal beauty. She could do that from the safety of a warm room.

  Severo was good to look at, but touching was definitely off the agenda.

  Even if the opportunity arose?

  His comments about escaping the real world surfaced in her head. Following this logic, did that mean that the normal rules were suspended? Could a person think or even do things in this little bubble that they wouldn’t normally consider?

  Neve shut off this internal dialogue with a shocked gasp. What she needed was something to keep her busy, keep those dangerous thoughts at bay.