by Lynne Graham
‘Not Hector—my boyfriend.’
‘Maybe you should think of another occupation-something that keeps you home at night… although perhaps not,’ he muttered half under his breath.
Had she told him that she was a waitress? She didn’t remember doing so but she must have done. Screening another sleepy yawn, Bella sighed. ‘I don’t mind most of the time, although it’s murder on my feet and it’s very boring. Still, it pays the rent—’
‘He charges you rent?’
‘Of course he does… although not very much.’ She yawned again, politely masking her mouth with a slender hand. ‘He tried to claim for me as a housekeeper but the Inland Revenue weren’t impressed. I’m not really very domestic but he wouldn’t like it if I was. It’s kind of hard to explain Hector to people…’
‘Are you in the habit of telling complete strangers the most intimate details of your life?’ Rico da Silva prompted in a tone of driven fascination.
Bella thought about it and then nodded, although she would have disputed his concept of ‘intimate details’. Friends said, ‘I told you so.’ Strangers just listened and volunteered their own experiences. Not that the male standing next to her would. He was the secretive type, she decided. Still waters ran deep—dark and deep as hell with this one, she thought helplessly.
‘You’re a financier,’ she remarked conversationally, thinking that what was good enough for the gander was good enough for the goose.
‘How the hell do you know that?’ he shot at her forbiddingly.
Bella gave him a startled look. ‘I saw you earlier this evening and a friend told me who you were.’
‘And then all of a sudden you crash into me. Two such coincidences in one night strain my credulity!’ Rico da Silva shot at her.
‘Pretty lousy luck, huh? If I’d done the cards this morning I probably wouldn’t have got out of bed—’
‘“The cards”?’ he echoed.
‘Tarot cards. Though mostly I steer clear of the temptation to tell my own fortune these days. Sometimes I think you’re better not knowing what’s ahead of you.’
‘I do not believe in such a coincidence,’ he stated afresh, staring down at her in a very intimidating fashion. ‘It was your intent to meet me, es verdad?’
‘You’re a very uptight personality.’ Bella shook her vibrant head. ‘And a bit weird, to be frank—’
‘Weird?’ Rico da Silva roared. ‘You think that I am weird?’
She raised her hands. ‘Now just count to ten and back off, buster.’
“‘Buster”?’ he repeated, snatching in a hissing breath.
‘Mr Silver… no, it wasn’t that, was it?’ She sighed.
‘Rico… da… Silva,’ he enunciated very slowly and carefully, as if he were talking to a complete idiot.
‘Yeah, I knew it was something strange. I hate to tell you this but it is a little weird to imagine that a total stranger would crash into you deliberately to meet you,’ Bella told him gently. ‘I mean, I might have been killed.’
From beneath black lashes so long that they cast crescent shadows on his savage cheekbones, he cast her a glimmering glance. ‘I have known women to take tremendous risks to make my acquaintance.’
‘I wonder why?’ she said, and then realised by the sudden, thundering silence that she had said it out loud instead of just thinking it. ‘What I mean is…well, there’s only one way of saying this, Mr da Silver—’
‘Silva!’ he slotted in rawly.
Uptight wasn’t the word for it. This guy lived on the outer edge. On the brink of gently assuring him that he had met some very peculiar women, Bella was silenced briefly by the sight of the tow-truck surging up the street towards them.
‘Talk about service!’ she gasped. ‘I thought we’d be here for hours!’
‘Another half-hour of your relentless, mindless chatter and I would be—’
‘More hyper than you already are? It’s OK. I’m not offended,’ she told him with a smile. ‘You either love me or you hate me. But, for your own sake, get your blood pressure checked and take up something relaxing like gardening. Guys like you drop dead from heart attacks at forty-five.’ Dragging her attention from the darkening colour of his cheekbones and the razor-slash effect of his incredulous gaze, Bella turned to gape at the arrival of a second tow-truck. ‘Gosh… one each!’
With that, she rushed over to the Skoda, belatedly realising that she would need to clear the car out. She was kneeling on the driver’s seat, poking around amongst the rubbish for stray items of clothing, letters, bills, her sketch-pad and pencils, when his voice assailed her again from behind.
‘I will expect you to pass on your insurance details to my secretary tomorrow. This is the number.’
Awkwardly she twisted round and reached out to grasp a gilded card and dig it into her pocket.
‘If you don’t call, I will inform the police—’
‘Look, what are you trying to do—give me nightmares?’ she exclaimed helplessly, clinging perilously to the steering wheel to lean out and look up at him. ‘I am a law-abiding person.’
‘To trust you goes against my every principle,’ he admitted unapologetically.
‘You wouldn’t want me to lose my licence, would you?’ Bella fixed enormous green eyes on him in reproach. ‘It took me a lot of years to get that licence. The examiners used to draw lots for me and the one that got the short straw was it! I mean, we all have weaknesses and mine is in the driving department, but this is truly the very worst accident I have ever had and I am going to be much more careful in the future… cross my heart and hope to die—’
‘Or shut up.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ She squinted up at him.
He extended his phone with an air of long-suffering hauteur. ‘Ring your boyfriend to come and pick you up.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding. He’d probably say his car had a flat tyre or something anyway,’ she mused, returning to her frantic clean-up.
‘There must be somebody you can contact!’
‘At four in the morning to take me back to London?’ And pigs might fly, her tone said.
‘I am not giving you a lift!’ he snapped in a whiplash response.
So he had been heading for London too. ‘I wasn’t aware I asked for one,’ she hissed. ‘Now why don’t you just go away and leave me alone?’
‘I am being foolish. No doubt you are accustomed to walking lonely streets at this hour of the night, es verdad? But it is hard for me to forget my natural instinct to behave as a gentleman—’
‘I would have said you forgot it the minute I hit your car… but it’s OK,’ Bella continued sweetly. ‘I didn’t notice. I haven’t got much experience of what you would probably call gentlemen. I cut my teeth on creeps.’
There was a fulminating silence.
‘Make sure you make that call tomorrow.’
Bella scrambled out backwards with her bulging carrier bag, wondering why he was still hovering. Approaching the driver of the tow-truck, she told him to be sure to dump the Skoda at the nearest garage possible. Hopefully that would cut the cost. ‘I can’t pay you now,’ she then said awkwardly. ‘I haven’t got enough money on me.’
‘I will take care of it,’ Rico da Silva announced glacially from behind her.
She grimaced and ignored him to ask the driver what it was going to cost. Her horror was unfeigned. ‘I’m not asking you to fix it!’ she protested in a shattered voice.
‘I said I will pay the bill!’ Rico da Silva blitzed. Her temples were pounding like crazy. She just couldn’t fight any more. Once again she nodded. Anything for a quiet life. She started to walk away. Her feet were killing her.
‘Where are you going?’
‘The bus station.’ She glanced back at him with a frown of incomprehension, well aware that he liked her just about as much as she liked him, wondering why on earth it should matter to him how she intended to get home.
‘Madre de Dios!’ he ground out, skimming a f
urious hand of frustration through the air. ‘There will be no buses until morning!’
‘Morning’s only a couple of hours away.’
‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he bit out between clenched teeth.
‘Forget it.’
‘I said I will give you a lift, but only on one condition—you do not open your mouth!’
‘I prefer the bus. It’s more egalitarian. I’m allowed to breathe, you know, that sort of life-enhancing stuff called oxygen? I use up a lot of it, but thanks all the same.’ And then she saw the limousine waiting by the kerb on the other side of the street and her sleepy green eyes widened to their fullest extent. She had assumed that he was catching a cab. But a lift in a real live Hmo… She just couldn’t resist the offer. ‘Mr da Silva?’ she called abruptly.
‘I thought you might change your mind,’ he breathed, without turning his glossy dark head. ‘I must be out of my mind to be doing this.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Give my chauffeur your address and then shut up,’ he grated.
Bella climbed in and surveyed the opulent interior with unhidden fascination. ‘Do you always travel… sorry, I forgot!’
The limo purred away from the kerb. Her companion stabbed a button, and under the onslaught of her incredulous scrutiny a revolving drinks cabinet smoothly appeared. ‘Wow,’ she said, deeply impressed.
‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked shortly.
‘No, thanks. My father was next door to being an alcoholic. Personally speaking, I wouldn’t touch the stuff with a barge-pole!’
He expelled his breath in a hiss. She watched his hand still and then hover momentarily before he finally grasped the whisky bottle.
‘I guess—’she began, and then sealed her mouth again as those black-as-night eyes hit on her with silencing effect.
‘You guess what?’ he finally gritted. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense!’
‘I was going to say that we don’t have a lot in common, do we? It’s a bit like meeting an alien,’ Bella mumbled, sleep catching up on her as she rested her heavy head back against the leather upholstery and closed her drooping eyelids. ‘Except even the alien might have had a sense of humour…’
Someone was shaking her shoulder hard. She surfaced groggily, registered that she was lying face down on some kind of seat, then remembered and hauled herself upright into a sitting position.
‘This cannot be where you live!’ Rico da Silva vented with raw exasperation. ‘Is this your idea of a joke?’
Bella focused on the familiar Georgian square of enormous, elegant terraced houses, which had been her home for the past year. ‘Why should it be my idea of a joke?’ She fumbled with the door-release mechanism but the door remained stubbornly closed.
‘I should imagine that not one in a thousand hookers lives in a house worth millions!’
‘Hookers’? He thought she was a hooker? He thought she sold her body for money? Aghast, Bella stared at him for several seemingly endless seconds, telling herself that she had somehow misunderstood him. ‘You think I’m a prostitute?’ she finally gasped, wide-eyed with rampant disbelief. ‘How dare you? Let me out of this car right now!’
A winged ebony brow quirked. ‘Are you saying now that you are not?’
‘Of course I’m not!’ Bella threw at him in violent outrage, belatedly understanding all of his peculiar utterances. ‘I’ve never been so insulted in my life! You have a mind like a sewer—’
‘You dress like one—’
‘Dress like one?’ Liz’s wretched too short skirt! She wanted to scream.
‘And you came on to me like a whore!’ he condemned, without batting an eyelash.
“‘Came on to” you?’ Fit to be tied, Bella looked at him with splintering green eyes. ‘Me… come on to you? Are you crazy?’
‘You offered yourself to me—’
‘I what? You’re a lunatic… Let me out of this car; I don’t feel safe!’ she shrieked. ‘I should never have got into it in the first place. I knew you were weird!’
‘Are you trying to tell me that I was mistaken?’ His strong, dark features were fiercely clenched.
‘How dare you think I would come on to you?’ Bella spat at him like a bristling cat. ‘I never go for dark men! Your car was at more risk than you were! And I may wear second-hand clothes, talk with an Essex accent and hardly be able to spell, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have principles! It might interest you to know that I’m a virgin—’
He burst into spontaneous laughter. In fact he threw his dark head back and very nearly choked on his disbelief. Bella launched herself across the car at him in a rage and two strong hands snaked out and closed round her narrow forearms to hold her imprisoned mere inches from him and in devastating contact with every line of his leashed, powerful body.
‘A virgin?’ he queried in a shaking voice. ‘Maybe not a whore… but definitely not a virgin.’
‘Let go of me!’
For a split-second he stared down into her brilliant green eyes and something happened inside her—something that had never happened to Bella before; a tight clenched sensation jerked low in her stomach. It made the hair prickle at the back of her neck, the breath catch in her throat, every muscle draw taut. She looked back at him with dawning comprehension and horror, feeling the swell of her own breasts, the sudden, painful tightening of her nipples.
‘So what do you do on the nightshift?’ Rico da Silva probed in a purring undertone that set up a strange chain reaction down her spine.
Seriously shaken by the reaction of her own treacherous body, she remained mutinously silent.
‘And where does Hector fit in?’
‘Let go of me… I don’t feel well,’ Bella muttered tremulously, and it was true.
He searched her pallor, abruptly freeing hei. His ebony brows had drawn together in a sudden frown. She had the strangest feeling that he was as disconcerted by his own behaviour as she had been.
‘I’ll talk to your secretary tomorrow,’ she mumbled, her nerves strung so tightly that tension was a fevered pulse-beat through her entire body.
He pressed a button. The chauffeur climbed out and opened the door in the humming silence. Bella flew out like a cork ejected from a bottle and fled up the steps of the shabbiest house in the row. Inserting her key, she unlocked the front door, then rushed into the shelter of the dark house and rested back against the door like someone who had seen death at close quarters. Every sense on super-alert, she listened to the limo driving off before she breathed again.
Shock was still reverberating through her. She had felt so safe for so long. That had never happened to her before with a man. And then all of a sudden, when it was least expected, she had been gripped by the most dangerous drive in the entire human repertoire—sexual desire. But she was really proud of herself. Control and common sense had triumphed. She had run like a rabbit.
CHAPTER TWO
IN THE half-light. Bella picked her way past the piled-up books and newspapers that littered every stair and headed up to the second floor and the privacy of her spacious, cluttered studio. She was still shaking like a leaf. So that was what it felt like! She lit the candle beside her bed, and slowly drew in a deep, sustaining breath. Well, thankfully she was extremely unlikely ever to see him again. There was no need to worry about temptation in that quarter. Even so, she was still shaken.
‘I go with my feelings—that can never be wrong,’ Cleo had once said loftily, supremely blind to the wreckage of disastrous relationships in her past. Her mother had been like a kamikaze pilot with men. Every creep within a hundred-mile radius had zeroed in on her, stopped a while and then moved on. But Cleo had kept on trying, regardless of the consequences to herself and her daughter, always convinced that the next one would be different. And Liz could have no idea just how much it scared Bella to be told that she suffered from a similar lack of judgement with the men in her life.
When she came downstairs later that morning Hector was shuffling abo
ut in his carpet slippers in the ancient kitchen. The gas bill had arrived. He was taking it as hard as he always did when a bill came through the letter box. There were the usual charged enquiries about how often she had used the oven and boiled the kettle. Hector Barsay’s mission in life was to save money.
It was his one failing but, as Gramps had often said, everybody had their little idiosyncrasies, and those same little idiosyncrasies got a tighter hold the older you got. Beneath his crusty, dismal manner Hector was kind. He had a bunch of prosperous relatives just waiting for him to die so that they could sell his house and make their fortunes. None of them had visited since the time they had tried to persuade him into an old folks’ home and he had threatened to leave them out of his will.
‘I crashed the car last night,’ Bella told him tautly.
‘Again?’ Hector cringed into his shabby layers of woolly cardigans and she squirmed, guilt and shame engulfing her.
‘It’s not going to cost you anything!’ she swore.
‘I haven’t got anything!’ His faded blue eyes rolled in his head at the very suggestion that his pocket might be touched.
‘That’s what you have insurance for,’ she told him in consolation. ‘Before you know it the Skoda will be back in the garage as good as new.’
Back upstairs, she dug out her insurance details and wrinkled her nose. The renewal hadn’t yet been sent but then they always took their time about that and, to be fair, she had been a little late in sending on the money because Hector had made her ring round half of London trying to get a cheaper quote. When you had to do it from a phone box, that took time.
She headed out for a phone. Hector insisted that his phone was only to be used in an emergency. The girl at the insurance company was chatty until Bella explained about the accident. Then she went off the line for a while.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Jennings,’ she murmured on her return, ‘but at the time of the accident you were not insured with us—’
‘What are you talking about?’ Bella was aghast.