by Lynne Graham
‘Now get me out of here!’ Rico urged from below, as if he was afraid that she might go off and paint her nails or something and forget about him.
Her heart thudding like a wild creature’s, perspiration beading her upper lip, she lowered herself down off the roof, hitting the rough ground below hard enough to jar her ankle-bones painfully. In a stumbling run she raced round to the doors. If they were locked—dear God, if they were locked…
For the next few frantic minutes it crossed her mind more than once that they might as well have been as she pushed and hauled and thrust with all her might, sweat rolling off her as she struggled to drive back the bolts, and all the time Rico was shouting at her from inside.
‘Shut up!’ she screamed, pausing to get her breath back.
It took her another ten minutes and he didn’t shut up. As the bolts finally gave that final, necessary inch Bella slumped back winded on the dirty ground, as wrung out as a limp dish rag. Rico strode out and the first thing he did, which she found quite inconceivable, was to close the doors again and force the bolts back with an ease that made her hate him.
With a powerful hand he hauled her upright and dragged her towards the rickety barn doors.
‘Suppose they are out there?’ she hissed.
Rico, his dark features alight with savage determination, shot her a silencing glance. He pushed the barn door back slowly and she tried to duck under his arm to see what was beyond. Rain was lashing down in sheets outside.
‘Come on… skulking here isn’t going to get us anywhere,’ he asserted.
She sidled out after him, paradoxically appalled by the emptiness she saw all around them. A derelict stone cottage lay off to one side, and in every other direction all she could see was the rough moorland edging the muddy track that ran down the hill. There was no sign of life anywhere.
‘Now what?’
The wind and the rain made a truly ghastly combination as they raced down the lane. Rico hauled her relentlessly in his wake and she forced herself onward, fearfully aware that they were not safe until they could transport themselves some distance from their prison. They reached a road, not a very wide one—the sort of road which might see a vehicle maybe once a day, she thought hysterically.
‘I’m so cold,’ she gasped, soaked to the skin and shivering.
‘Moving will keep you warm.’ Shimmering dark eyes appraised her. His mouth tightened. He wrenched off his jacket and held it out to her.
Bella gave him a startled glance before she dug her numbed arms into the sleeves. ‘Now you’ll freeze,’ she muttered guiltily.
‘The subtle difference between a creep and a gentleman—the creep stays warm,’ he drawled from between clenched teeth. ‘We have to find shelter. It’ll be dark soon.’
The road twisted and curved downhill for what felt like miles, and at the foot of that hill met yet another narrow road. Without any other options they kept on heading down. The rain slackened off but both of them were so wet that it made little difference. When they finally rounded a corner and saw a dim light at the top of a rough track Bella thought it was a mirage. Every muscle in her body ached by that stage and her steps were clumsy and wildly uncoordinated. Even speaking was too much of an effort. She stopped, staggering like a drunk.
Rico put a strong arm around her and propelled her towards the track. Later she couldn’t recall climbing that final hill. A dog circled them, barking fit to wake the dead. A light went on, blinding her, and she came to a halt and swayed.
‘Come on,’ Rico pressed, and he was already almost carrying her.
She tried—she really did try—but in all her life she had never been so tired. Her legs simply folded beneath her, her head swimming, and she sank down into the thick, welcoming darkness behind her eyelids without a murmur.
‘Wake up…’
Bella surfaced, cocooned in wonderful warmth, a fleecy blanket against her cheek. Her eyes opened and focused on the logs crackling in the grate several feet from her, and then landed on Rico, who had crouched down to block her view of the fire. She searched his starkly handsome features with softened green eyes. A helpless smile curved her lips.
‘You look wonderful.’ Her voice was slurred, sounding as though it was coming from miles away, and with immense effort she freed a hand from the blanket and reached out to him, curving her palm against his blue-shadowed jaw-line. ‘But you need a shave.’
‘Muchas gracias, querida mia.’ She connected with his brilliant golden eyes and her heart turned right over. He caught her hand in his and pressed his mouth almost reverentially to the centre of her palm. ‘You scared me,’ he muttered roughly.
He sprang upright again and moved out of her view. It was still too much of an effort to turn her head. She heard another voice, female, elderly, somewhere behind her. Rico said something about a phone, and the lady was talking nineteen to the dozen about food and hot baths and him needing to change out of his clothes right this minute, stressing the fact with the kind of gentle but steely authority which reminded Bella very much of one of her former schoolteachers.
She drifted off again then, curiously uninterested in her unfamiliar surroundings, content merely with the warmth and the feeling of security. Time had no meaning until Rico reappeared. He bent down and swept her up off the sofa. ‘You can have a bath now that you have warmed up sufficiently,’ he informed her.
That struck Bella as hilariously funny. She giggled.
‘By the sound of it you’re feeling better.’ An elderly woman with a stern but smiling face looked down at her where she lay nestled in perfect relaxation against Rico’s broad chest. ‘Some day you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren that you almost died of exposure on your honeymoon. That should provoke a few interesting questions.’
‘Honeymoon?’ Bella whispered blankly as Rico carried her up a flight of stairs.
He set her down on a chair in a large, old-fashioned bathroom and peeled her out of the blanket. She was dismayed to discover that she was wearing not a stitch of clothing, but before she could react to the startling discovery he had lifted her up and settled her down into a massive Victorian bath filled with deliciously hot water.
‘Honeymoon?’ she said again.
‘I thought it best not to tell the truth. I said that we had got lost and our car had broken down. Mrs Warwick is a widow living alone. This is a remote place. I wished to minimise any fears she might have about opening her doors so generously and trustingly to complete strangers who look far from respectable.’ As he. talked he was stripping off his clothes.
Bella’s cheeks warmed to a temperature that had little to do with the bath water. Smooth brown shoulders gave way to a muscular torso sprinkled with curling black hair that arrowed down into an intriguingly silky furrow over his flat stomach and then… Embarrassed, she glanced away, but still she saw him before her—the lean, angular hips, the long, powerful thighs, the sleeping promise of his manhood in a nest of ebony curls.
‘You were wearing a ring on your right hand. When I was undressing you downstairs I slid it onto your wedding finger.’
Belatedly she noticed the ring. ‘It was my grandmother’s.’
‘Move over…’
‘Rico!’ Bella twisted her head round and skidded forward towards the taps in a rush, water sloshing noisily everywhere as he simply stepped into the bath behind her. ‘Lord, you’re cold!’ she gasped, all of a quiver as a pair of long, icy thighs closed round her hips from behind. ‘Sorry, I should’ve thought. I’ll get out!’
As she began to get up he reached for her and pulled her back, bringing her down on top of him, anchoring both arms round her. Above her head he laughed sonorously as she went from rigid to trembling and back again. ‘You have so much to learn, gatita mia. I shall enjoy teaching you.’
Bella squinted frantically down at the hands firmly cupping the pouting thrust of her breasts and blushed. Beneath his palms she could feel her nipples swelling and tightening in shameless, instantaneous res
ponse. ‘Rico…?’
‘I have informed my chief executive, Kenway, of our whereabouts. I also spoke to the police. Thanks to Mrs Warwick, I was able to give the exact location of the barn,’ he imparted with sudden harshness. ‘They will stake it out and wait until those bastards come back to check on us again. They will walk into a trap just as we did in that car park. The police will be waiting for them.’
The icy chill in his voice made her shiver. All Bella had thought about was freedom—the luxury of the fire and the bath, the wonderful release from fear to safety. Her world had not yet expanded beyond those things. The intensity of her relief and her continuing exhaustion had combined to blunt and blur her reasoning powers. Rico, she noted, was not similarly affected. He was already grimly anticipating their kidnappers’ capture and punishment.
‘Had they asked for a ransom?’
‘Sí…and the agreed arrangements will continue so that they do not become suspicious. Kenway has been in constant touch with Hector Barsay on your behalf. He will inform him of your release—’
‘How did they know who I was?’ A yawn was creeping up on her. She was lying naked in a bath with a man and she was ready to fall asleep, so complete was her relaxation. She couldn’t believe it.
‘My chauffeur knew your address,’ he reminded her. ‘Had he not, the police might have suspected that you had something to do with the kidnapping.’
‘Me?’ It barely penetrated. Her eyelids felt as if someone had attached weights to them, but she wasn’t so far gone that she was not aware that Rico’s lean, hard length was reacting far more energetically to her proximity. But she didn’t tense, only smiled sleepily. There was something so wonderfully reassuring about being that close to Rico.
‘You’re falling asleep,’ he groaned with more than a hint of incredulity.
She wanted to remind him that she had been up since half past four in the morning, battering doors, posting ‘help’ notes through the container roof, while he had slept until noon, but she couldn’t find the energy. And he seemed to understand for he sat up and pulled her with him, and a minute later she was wrapped in a fleecy towel. Like a child she stood there, dead on her feet, while he patted her dry and pulled something over her head—something crisp and cotton and clean-smelling.
And then she was sinking into a warm bed without even caring how she had got there, sighing with pleasure as every limb relaxed. Voices spoke over her head. The smell of food briefly flared her nostrils but even that couldn’t push back the sleep enclosing her.
In the darkness, a long time later, Bella shifted against a warm, hard body and curved instinctively closer, her hand splaying over a hair-roughened chest, her cheek resting against a smooth shoulder. ‘Rico,’ she breathed sleepily in instant recognition combined with instant contentment, and she would have drifted away again had he not tangled a hand in the mane of her tumbled hair, tipped her mouth up and kissed her.
It was like coming alive when you thought you were dead. Every skin-cell suddenly flamed into red-hot life, a kind of frantic, feverish hunger possessing her. Her response was so intense that it swallowed her alive.
‘Rico…’ She gasped again as he pinned her to the mattress beneath him and kissed her breathless, his mouth, hard, hungry, hot, exciting her beyond bearing.
He freed her and wrenched the nightdress off. In the darkness there was no warning before his mouth closed round the engorged bud of one swelling breast. The sensation hit her with stunning effect. Her neck extended in an arch, a stifled moan torn from her when she felt the erotic brush of his teeth and his tongue as he pulled on her taut nipples. And there was no time for anything, not a single thought, nothing but the raw, driving intensity of need screaming through her veins.
His lips skimmed a tormenting path over the quivering muscles of her belly, his hands parting her thighs, and then he was doing something…something so intimate that she tensed in sudden alarm before the power of simple sensation tore her every inhibition away. And then she was lost again in a hot, swirling fire, conscious of nothing but the incredible, torturous excitement roaring mindlessly out of her control as he employed the same technique on the most sensitive flesh of all.
She was at screaming-point when he moved over her, every shred of physical awareness centred on the ache of emptiness between her thighs. And then he thrust into her and she moaned and arched in one taut movement, her body clenching on a pleasure so intense that she was utterly possessed by it. Her fingers raked down his back in reaction and her teeth nipped at the strong brown column of his throat in instinctive revenge for the ragged laugh he gave vent to.
After that there was nothing but the long, pulsing drive for satisfaction. It went on and on and on. She hit the heights fast, unable to rein back the flood of release, but he didn’t stop. She had barely hit ground level again before the frantic climb back up began, and in all her life she had never felt so controlled, never dreamt she could enjoy that reality so much. And when the second climax whooshed up inside her she was wiped out.
He shuddered above her, every muscle clinching taut, and she put her arms round him, happiness flooding through her like a rejuvenating drug. There was only one thought in her mind as she sank back into sleep. She would never let go of him again.
CHAPTER SIX
‘SOME more tea, Mrs da Silva?’
Out of the corner of her eye Bella noticed Rico tense just as he had the last time their hostess had addressed her as his wife. ‘Please call me Bella,’ she said tightly, politely refusing the offer of a refill for her cup.
Rico had wakened her when he was already dressed. That had been her first shock. Shaven, his shirt immaculately clean—thanks, no doubt, to Mrs Warwick’s ministrations—his tie reinstated and his exquisitely expensive suit pressed and only a little limp from yesterday’s soaking, this was not Rico as she remembered him during their captivity—it was Rico the intimidating international financier she had faced at the bank.
‘A car will pick us up at eight. We will make our statements to the police as soon as possible,’ he had murmured smoothly before leaving her alone to rise and dress.
Her attention had fallen on the nightgown which had been discarded on the carpet the night before, and suddenly Bella had felt as though she was dying inside. How could she have made love with him again? The fevered, driving passion of the night haunted her now. He had a bruise from her teeth a half-inch above his collar and it seemed to scream at her like a badge of public shame every time she looked at him.
In the dark he was one hundred per cent sexual predator and she was one hundred per cent victim of her own wanton nature. Recalling that she had been all over him like a rash afterwards only intensified her sense of humiliation. There was a new distance between them and it wasn’t coming from her side of the fence. Rico had an aloof quality that he hadn’t had the night before. It had been there from the first moment she’d set eyes on him again.
And she understood, wished she didn’t, wished she were wrong, but knew she was right. The real world was about to reclaim them again. Their time together in that container had been time outside the real world. Now they were back to being the people they really were. He was Rico da Silva, rich, influential financier… and she was Bella Jennings, an illegitimate waitress who wanted to be an artist but who might never make the grade. The gulf was enormous and Rico had been the first to recall it.
Her inner turmoil was so intense that it threatened to swallow her alive. Suddenly she was wallowing in terrifying confusion, not knowing what she felt, not knowing what she thought. Involuntarily she collided with the dark density of Rico’s flashing gaze and her heart stopped beating altogether. Was it possible that he was enduring the same conflict?
But then she watched him smoothly turn his dark head and speak calmly to Mrs Warwick, and her heart beat again and sank simultaneously. Rico was in control. Rico knew exactly what he was thinking and feeling. Confusion and Rico da Silva were not a credible combination. Why had he made
love to her again last night? Why had he pounced and moved in when she had been half-asleep, her every defence mechanism at rest?
P for predator, P for passionate, P for prey. Her stomach heaved. He was a very virile male. When he wanted sex he was used to taking it. She had just been a willing female body in the bed and, as he had once reminded her, he was not a corpse, devoid of all sexual response. And if he was now wishing that he hadn’t bothered, she had no doubt that he had the cold will to ensure that she didn’t form any silly ideas about their possibly having embarked on a continuing relationship.
The four-wheel drive that picked them up arrived early, hastening their departure from the farmhouse. Two men were seated in front. They hadn’t even reached the end of the lane before she realised that they were policemen driving an unmarked car—a chief superintendent and an inspector, no less. The taut questions came flying within seconds.
Every time a question came in her direction Rico stepped in to answer it for her. In another mood, in another situation and with other companions, Bella would have roundly objected. But right now she felt detached from everything, everybody…Rico and the police included… and she didn’t care—she really didn’t care—if sitting there in silence, letting him do the talking for her, made her look like the dumbest cluck of all time.
Her mind had already leapt forward to the parting of the ways ahead. Her thoughts stayed there, frozen in intense shock at the image of forthcoming loss and departure that unexpectedly tore at her.
‘Miss Jennings?’ a voice said loudly.
Dredged from her inner conflict, Bella jerked and flinched, and found herself staring wordlessly at the older man in the passenger seat, who had turned round and was studying her intently. ‘Sorry, I—’
A hand suddenly closed tightly round hers where it lay clenched on the seat. ‘Bella’s still in shock,’ Rico delivered with chilling bite, and ‘leave her alone’ was writ large in his assertion.