by Lynne Graham
He dragged his lips from hers with a fevered imprecation and looked down at her, his breathing roughly audible. Hot golden eyes raked her flushed, vibrant face, and he set her free with an abruptness that felt like an amputation. Bella was less able to pull back from the extraordinary power he could exert over her. Every time it happened it was a revelation, and, instead of it strengthening her resistance, she found herself further weakened by the repetition.
Rico lounged back against the edge of the table, tension screaming from every poised angle of him. He appraised her with fiercely narrowed eyes, his sensual mouth compressed in a hard line. He looked like a pirate, his jaw-line obscured by a blue shadow of dark stubble. Her own skin was tingling from that abrasive contact. She raised a shaky hand to her reddened lips, feeling as though she had been branded, feeling as though she would never, ever be the same again.
‘I can keep my hands off you,’ he asserted with almost ferocious bite.
No, you can’t and the knowledge is killing you. Bella read in his clear eyes the frustration, the anger he couldn’t hide. This was a male accustomed to calling every shot, staying in control, never leaping before he looked. She remembered the tidiness of his desk and the incredulity with which he had emerged from the cluttered chaos of the interior of the Skoda that first night. Rico was one of those very organised and disciplined individuals who very rarely made an uncalculated move… and she threw him off balance and he didn’t like that one bit more than she did.
‘This will not happen again,’ he drawled flatly.
‘I know… you don’t want to seem like a snob but I’m really not your type,’ she remarked brittlely. ‘And you’re not my type either. Let’s leave it at that.’
His teeth clenched. ‘I am not a snob!’
‘You just like to think that everyone’s your equal from the safe cocoon of your bloody great limousine? Now you know that you don’t think that, Rico. You’re rich and you’re successful and you probably come from a rich, priveleged family. You have power and financial clout. You probably get a lot of respect and an equal amount of grovelling flattery and servility. You’re bound to have a good opinion of yourself. And you definitely don’t expect to be attracted to an Essex girl who writes illiterate prose!’
‘Basta…enough!’ he slashed back at her rawly. ‘How can you talk like this?’
‘And that bothers you even more, doesn’t it? People don’t say stuff like that right out where you come from.’ Bella treated him to a grim little smile, her beautiful face cynically set, masking the pain she was feeling. ‘But what the hell…? I’m not about to change myself for your benefit!’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He sent her a glittering glance that was alight with impatience and anger. ‘I drew back because I had no other choice. I cannot protect you. Even if you are on the Pill you have no supply with you. I could get you pregnant, and that is a risk that neither of us can want!’
The blood drained from her face, leaving her pale, and then abruptly her skin flamed again with a stupid embarrassment she couldn’t help. Hurriedly she turned away from him, shaken that he could reason so coolly about an unlikely possibility, the mere mention of which infuriated her. Did no woman ever say no to Rico da Silva? Did he think he was irresistible? Did he really imagine that she would have been foolish enough to let matters proceed to the point where the risk of pregnancy could have become a consideration?
‘It wasn’t going to go that far, believe me!’
‘I wish I had your confidence—’
‘All I did was let you kiss me, for heaven’s sake! That doesn’t mean I was about to jump into bed with you!’ she hissed, slamming into the fridge, unwilling to look at him because she was so outraged by his assumption that she was easily available should he choose to exert sufficient persuasion.
‘Keep quiet. Talking about it doesn’t help,’ he breathed in a sudden, savage undertone that brutally ruptured the heavy silence, sentencing her to nervous paralysis. ‘I ache to have you…Santa María, I am in torment. I want to rip your clothes off and fall on you like an animal, and in all my adult life I have never been so challenged to retain control and consider consequences!’
Bella straightened and slowly turned. Rico glowered back at her, the raw reality of what he was telling her etched in the ferocious set of his dark, startlingly handsome features.
‘And if you did not want me the problem would not be there. I would never touch a woman without her consent,’ he continued forcefully. ‘But every time you look at me I see the same hunger in you.’
‘I—’
‘Do not deny it,’ he cut in grimly. ‘And that we should be distracted by such primitive instincts when our very lives are at risk outrages my intelligence!’
‘It’s the fact that we’re trapped here,’ she muttered, shattered by his candour, devastated by the manner in which he was still looking at her, and shamefully lost in a colourful image of him ripping her clothes off and her liking it. Dear God, what was happening to her? What was happening to them both?
‘No digas disparates!’
‘In English?’
‘Don’t talk rubbish.’ He flashed her an exasperated glance, his beautifully shaped mouth twisting. ‘I felt exactly the same way in my office. Why do you think I was so determined to take you to the police?’
‘I had to be punished for attracting you? Are you a sadist or something?’
‘Since I met you I have been crazy!’ he raked back at her in a sudden explosion of raw, passionate resentment. ‘I don’t know myself any more!’
Swinging on his heel, he strode through the beaded curtain. A second later she heard the fiery assault of the poker on the container doors and couldn’t help smiling to herself. Rico was as disconcerted by the attraction between them as she was. That made her feel less threatened and more in control. Neither of them wanted anything to happen. Between them they ought to be capable of behaving like civilised adults and observing proper boundaries in spite of this horribly intimate and suffocating prison.
But, dear heaven, when he threw off the ice-cool front and let the tiger roar, she thought distractedly, Rico was quite shockingly volatile—yet another trait she ran a mile from in men. Only then did it cross her mind that she found the same trait astonishingly, paradoxically attractive when Rico revealed it. The sheer elemental physicality and passion which he suppressed and controlled with cold intellect fascinated her.
She made sandwiches for lunch—no sense in letting the bread go stale. Rico sank down on the other side of the table, his every graceful movement catching her attention. She averted her eyes to her glass of milk. ‘Do you have a family out there worrying about you?’ she asked abruptly.
‘My parents are dead. I have an older sister, who’s married with a family, but she lives in Spain.’
‘I imagine the police will have carried the news that far by now.’ Bella sighed.
Rico seemed to hesitate. ‘Sí…’
He reverted to his own language only when tense. No doubt he was disturbed by the idea of his sister’s current state of terror on his behalf.
‘Are you close?’
‘Yes.’
Bella was determined to keep on talking. Maybe conversation would keep other, far more dangerous undertones at bay. ‘You’re Spanish, aren’t you?’
‘My father was Portuguese but my mother was Spanish. I grew up in Andalusia.’
‘Rich?’
‘Rich,’ he conceded almost apologetically.
Involuntarily she glanced up and collided with a positively dazzling half-smile that gave her a seductive glimpse of another Rico entirely—a Rico with a sense of humour and considerable charm. That smile made her feel curiously light-headed. ‘What were your parents like? Distant?’
‘Not at all.’ He looked surprised by the suggestion. ‘We were a happy family but I was born late in their lives. My father died when I was a teenager, my mother a couple of years ago—’
�
�So what age are you?’
‘Thirty-two…far too old for you,’ he murmured in unwelcome addition.
‘Look, we’re not going to talk about things like that!’ Bella snapped, emerald-green eyes flashing reproach and reproof. ‘You’re an…Aquarius… right?’
Rico frowned. ‘Ah… astrology. Sí.’
‘We should avoid each other like the plague,’ she told him morosely. ‘It’s a combustible combination.’
‘I do not require a horoscope to know that, gatita,’ he returned with dark satire. ‘So tell me about your background.’
‘Forget it. It would give you indigestion.’
‘I would like to know. Who were your parents?’
Bella stiffened. Of course he didn’t mean ‘who’ in the worldly sense. He certainly wouldn’t be expecting to hear a name that he might recognise. She lifted her vibrant head, her sultry mouth compressing. ‘My father was Ivan Sinclair.’
His winged ebony brows drew together in unconcealed surprise. ‘The artist?’
‘My mother was one of his models. They had an affair. I was the result.’ She wondered why she had told him something that she usually kept very much to herself.
His dark visage was set in uninformative lines. ‘There was no marriage?’
‘Ivan didn’t believe in marriage. He visited Cleo on and off for a while after I was born but that eventually ground to a halt,’ she admitted. ‘I didn’t see him again until I was thirteen. And my mother initiated that meeting. She wanted him to take charge of me… It was a really stupid idea…’
The silence stretched and then Rico murmured, ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing much.’ With a jerky shrug she got up and began to clear the table. ‘He was furious at being put on the spot. He accused her of trying to blackmail him, even tried to say I wasn’t his… He was quite pathetic actually. He was no hero.’
‘He had a lot of talent.’
‘But, let’s face it, he was much better known as a drunk and a womaniser.’ Bella stated the obvious for him.
‘Scarcely a suitable guardian for a thirteen-year-old. Why did your mother even consider such an arrangement?’
She turned back to him, her beautiful face strong and her expression clear. ‘She had a lover who didn’t want a kid hanging around,’ she said bluntly. ‘But her visit to Ivan wasn’t a total disappointment. He coughed up some cash to get rid of us; she bought a new van and dumped me with my grandfather instead.’
An ebony brow quirked. ‘A new van?’
‘My mother was a traveller. She wasn’t born to the life, but then few are.’ Bella sighed. ‘She left home when she was eighteen. She was a hippie. Gramps said she was wild. He threw her out after an argument and then regretted it, but he didn’t see her again until she showed up with me twenty-odd years later. She was only involved with Ivan for a couple of years and then she met some guy with a lorry and took to the road—’
‘For how long… until you were thirteen?’
She nodded.
‘But you must have settled somewhere at some stage?’
‘Never for longer than a month.’
‘What about your education?’
She smiled. ‘I started that at thirteen.’
‘It must have been an appalling life.’ Rico frowned at her, his consternation palpable.
‘I didn’t know anything else. Sometimes it was fun.’ But her expressive eyes shadowed. She was thinking of the hunger and the cold and the wet, the lack of hygiene and privacy, the raw hostility of their reception everywhere they went. travellers were not welcome visitors in any locality.
‘Time I bashed the poker,’ she announced abruptly, suddenly bewildered and alarmed by the extent to which she had allowed him to draw her out. She never told people about that old life if she could help it, and could not understand why she had revealed so much to him. It was none of his business.
She strode down to the container doors and lifted the poker. She had only struck the metal a few times when another sound broke through in startling, shattering response—a series of sharp, zinging thuds. The poker fell from her nerveless fingers. She spun round, heard Rico behind her, then they were suddenly plunged into darkness and he was dragging her down on the bed. ‘Keep quiet,’ he urged in a raw breath of warning.
‘But—’ Had he gone crazy? Someone was out there—someone who could open those doors and set them free!
‘Those were bullets.’ Rico’s hands framed her cheekbones in the darkness and she fell back, sick and weak with terror.
CHAPTER FIVE
THERE was a loud thud up on the roof. Bella shivered violently as she heard the unmistakable sound of feet walking up and down above them. Nausea filled her stomach. Somebody laughed. There was a roaring in her eardrums. Her heart threatened to burst from her ribcage. For just a little while she had managed to close out the fear but now it was back with a vengeance.
Rico rolled over, pinning her body almost protectively beneath his. She could feel the splintering tension coursing through him and abruptly she closed her arms around him, needing that reassuring contact with every fibre of her being. She felt so small, so frighteningly powerless. They were caught like rats in a trap, wholly at the mercy of their captors.
Her breath rasped in her aching throat as there was another thud, then nothing. The silence dragged past on leaden feet until it seemed to thunder in her straining ears.
‘He’s gone,’ Rico grated.
‘How do you know? He could be standing out th-there just waiting for us to make more noise… and then he might come in!’ she gasped strickenly.
‘I doubt it. I suspect he was only checking on us…but for the moment we keep quiet.’
‘Bastard,’ Bella mumbled, still shaking like a leaf in a high wind, her face buried in the hollow between his shoulder and his throat. Her nostrils flared on the warm, musky scent of him, already so reassuringly familiar. ‘You imagine you’re coping and then… then they take that away and remind you how it really is!’
‘The ransom will be paid, no questions asked—’
‘But maybe the police won’t allow that!’
‘The police are unlikely to be actively involved at this stage.’
‘What?’ In the darkness her dazed eyes flew wide. Rico shifted and switched on the light where it sat on the chair by the bed. ‘My bank will pay up. The police will stand back at this early stage. That is standard procedure. Publicity could be our death warrant. Scared kidnappers get more dangerous…’
Bella met his shimmering gold eyes, absorbed the wry, apologetic curve of his mouth as he released her from his weight and coiled back from her. He had allowed her to believe that the police were out there searching for them because that had appeared to keep up her spirits. ‘Oh, God…’ she whispered shakily as reality sank in.
‘Lo siento, gatita…I’m sorry.’
‘I guess if that’s the best approach…’
‘At the highest level the police will certainly have been informed of the kidnapping,’ Rico asserted. ‘But I would imagine that at this point they are merely waiting to see how the situation develops.’
‘And if what you euphemistically call “the situation” develops into tragedy, then they’ll be more actively involved!’ Bella could not resist saying.
His jaw-line clenched. ‘Don’t talk like that!’
‘You want me to maintain a positive outlook when we’re stuck here like sitting ducks inside a metal tomb with some maniac taking pot-shots at us for fun?’ A shrill, hysterical edge had entered her voice.
‘Every occurrence increases our knowledge of the environment outside,’ Rico intoned, staring her down with icy night-dark eyes.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said incredulously.
‘We’re wasting time and energy with that poker,’ he imparted with grim emphasis. ‘He would not have fired that gun at this hour of the day had there been the remotest chance of anyone hearing the gunshots.’
‘Oh…Rico�
�that is so comforting to know!’ she spat back in helpless disbelief.
‘I do not think that our lives are in any immediate danger,’ he grated.
‘You also thought that our kidnappers might be out of the country!’
‘Por Dios … pull yourself together! This far you have acted with commendable courage.’
Bella could feel her control unravelling as fast and as inescapably as a cotton reel of thread thrown down a steep hill. ‘Not quite what you expected from me, I gather. Well, I’d appreciate it more if you showed a little human sensitivity, instead of acting like Mr Macho all the time… even when we’re in the middle of a nightmare!’ Her voice rose steeply on the last words, fractured by the sob choking her throat.
‘I don’t think you’d appreciate it if I was sitting here paralysed with fear!’
The sobs she was frantically struggling to suppress overcame her. She bowed her head, ashamed of the weakness, and wrapped her arms round herself. Tears streamed down her cheeks. He touched her damp chin with a not quite steady forefinger and then, with a muttered, vicious imprecation, reached for her, unpeeling her arms and hauling her close.
She needed that contact. She needed that warmth… She needed him. Caught up in the charge of an explosive surge of feeling, she pressed her mouth feverishly to the angular curve of his stubbled jaw-line.
She felt him tense but there was an unstoppable flood of emotion suddenly churning about inside her. Her hands slid up, her fingers shyly splaying across his blunt cheekbones in a wondering caress. As she held him she looked at him with darkened green eyes full of new self-knowledge and a kind of helpless joy that was insanity, but which she couldn’t help. Her feelings were so intense that they consumed her.
‘I don’t trust myself this close,’ Rico breathed roughly.
‘Trust your instincts,’ she whispered, and she dropped her hands, then hesitated in a momentary agony of uncertainty before her fingers found the buttons on her jacket and began to release them.