by Lynne Graham
Shaken by that hand on hers and that cold intonation, Bella saw the senior policeman’s gaze drop and linger on their linked hands, and abruptly a tide of burning colour flushed her cheeks. ‘I’m fine,’ she said tremulously, shielding her eyes with her lashes.
‘We do require some form of statement from Miss Jennings. Of course, I understand what a devastating experience this must have been.’ Even so, there was the merest edge of wry amusement in the older man’s voice and she knew then that he knew that, whatever their relationship might have been before they had ended up in that container, it was now one of intimacy, and that stifled her natural effervescence even more. She did not want anyone else to be aware of what she could barely deal with herself. She snaked her fingers free of Rico’s, denying herself that warmth although every treacherous sense longed to maintain it.
There was a town not many miles from the farmhouse, complete with police station. They were practically smuggled into the building through a rear entrance.
‘Can’t hold the Press off much longer, though,’ the chief superintendent sighed.
‘The Press?’ Bella gasped.
“They’ll be down on us like vultures the minute they know we’re free,’ Rico drawled flatly
‘They could blow the whole bloody show,’ the inspector chipped in bitterly as they were hustled into a small, bare interviewing room which made Bella feel more claustrophobic than she had ever felt in the container.
‘The Press know about us?’ she whispered dazedly.
‘We have their agreement to hold off on printing a word, but now…well, let’s say there’s a risk of a leak before we get a proper chance at catching those b-blighters.’ He selected the word grimly.
‘Miss Jennings will be staying at my estate,’ Rico volunteered without any expression at all. ‘My staff are trustworthy.’
‘Her story has got to be worth a quarter of a mill flat, even at a conservative estimate,’ the inspector muttered with cold cynicism. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’
She heard the senior policeman’s slight intake of breath, knew the inspector was all at sea as to what he had said wrong. And several lowering realisations hit Bella very hard all at once. The police already knew all about her—her background, the accident through which she had met Rico, her unarguable poverty. Even as a victim she had been investigated, possibly just to make sure that she was indeed a victim… Rico’s remark in the bath the previous night—about her being a suspect—returned to haunt her.
And clearly in the inspector’s biased view she was exactly the kind of woman who was likely to jump on some tabloid bandwagon and tell all for a price.
‘Bella’s not going to talk.’
Glancing up, she met Rico’s brilliant golden gaze, aimed at her like a stranglehold and a gag. That look spoke not of faith but of threat. If you talk I’ll personally throttle you, that look said. Her cup of humiliation ran right over there and then. She looked away, her facial muscles locking tight, an acrid sting burning her eyelids. ‘O ye of little faith’, she reflected, in more pain than she could have believed possible and sick to the heart from it.
Did he really think that he was in danger of waking up some morning soon to a kiss-and-tell revelation about their lovemaking in captivity? Her stomach churned. After all they had gone through together he still distrusted her. So maybe she wasn’t a whore, but she could still be a greedy little gold-digger, it seemed! And this was the male that every hateful instinct urged her to cling to and stay with?
That was when she knew it was over between them—absolutely, finally and conclusively over, regardless of what she did or did not feel for Rico da Silva.
‘of course she’s not about to talk.’ The older policemen patted her shoulder in reassurance as he tactfully angled her down into a chair, and she had the bitter pleasure of appreciating that a man who had met her only an hour ago already knew and understood more about her than Rico did.
She answered questions like an automaton. Inside herself she just wanted to die behind her forced smiles, but torture wouldn’t have wrung an ounce of her true feelings from her. Pride… Thank the Lord it was there for her when she most needed it. Rico watched her like a hawk throughout, as if he were programmed to probe that uncharacteristic complete emotional withdrawal of hers. But she really didn’t credit him with that much sensitivity.
The noisy clatter of rotor blades stole through her self-imposed inner wall, her darkened green eyes briefly revealing her turmoil as she frowned.
‘Mr da Silva’s helicopter landing in the car park,’ the chief super revealed. ‘I’ll take you wherever you want to go, Miss Jennings. I’m heading back to London.’
‘Bella’s coming with me,’ Rico murmured drily without a single shade of doubt.
Without looking at him, so grateful to the older man that she could have grabbed his hand and kissed it, Bella sprang upright. ‘Thanks, but I have friends I can go to… friends I want to be with,’ she muttered abruptly.
‘Perhaps you could leave us alone for a moment?’ Rico suggested smoothly to their companions.
‘I’ll be waiting outside,’ the chief super told her, with a wry smile. And then the door closed, sealing them into the privacy which she would have done any craven thing to avoid, but which her intelligence told her had to be faced.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ Rico enquired harshly. ‘Of course you’re coming with me!’
She had to force herself to look at him again. She had to know, before she walked away, that she was making the only possible decision… and yet she already knew that, and loathed herself for being weak enough to require further proof. ‘I’m not going to talk to the Press,’ she said stiffly.
The faintest hint of dark colour accentuated the angular slant of his hard cheekbones. His hooded dark eyes were nailed to her, however, without any peroeptible emotion at all. He made no comment on her reassurance. His sensual mouth twisted. ‘I want you to come with me.’
‘Why? The party’s over…don’t you think?’ Behind her mocking grin she felt like somebody handing a murderer a knife.
‘But I don’t mind if the band plays on… for a while,’ he murmured, coolly careful to conclude with that candour.
He had used the knife without compunction. It was sex, nothing else. That was all he wanted—a temporary affair in the privacy of his home, with the added security of knowing that she couldn’t talk to the Press while he was around. Neat, tidy, every necessity covered, sexual and otherwise… so much Rico’s stamp that she wanted to shout and scream and claw him.
But she didn’t. She used her talons to hang on like grim death to her pride instead. ‘I don’t think so.’ Taming, unable to meet his sharp appraisal any longer, she began moving towards the door.
‘You’re as hot for me as I am for you, gatita…and I won’t make you a better offer,’ be warned with sicken insolence.
Her spine stiffened. She spun back, unable to let that go unchallenged. ‘So what? You think that matters to me?’ she demanded shakily.
‘I want you in my bed.’ The admission might have been wrenched by force from him. His strong face was hard and taut, his eyes as dark as black ice, biting into her almost accusingly.
Bella gave vent to an edgy laugh. ‘I’m sure you’ve got no shortage of willing replacements!’
‘And what if you’re pregnant?’
Bella paled but her magnificent eyes flashed at him. ‘Highly unlikely… it was the wrong time,’ she told him brittlely as she made for the door again, really desperate this time to escape.
‘Then allow me.’ He reached the door ahead of her and swung it wide. ‘Look after yourself,’ he murmured drily as she preceded him into the corridor. And then he was gone, striding past her in the direction of the rear exit.
On cotton-wool legs she wandered down to the window and stood there, watching him walk out and spring into the waiting helicopter. Well, that was that, she told herself. The feeling that she had been cut in
half without an anaesthetic would wear off. She was not, could not be, in love with a creep like that. Fear had somehow made her emotions centre on him. She had become disgustingly dependent, weak and vulnerable, but now that the whole ghastly experience was over she would swiftly recover and return to normal.
‘A self-contained bastard, isn’t he?’
Her head flipped round, her every feeling exposed. And the chief super placed a supportive arm round her and wafted her out to his car. He asked her where she wanted to go and then handed her a box of tissues. Sorry, he had four adult daughters, he told her ruefully; couldn’t help reading her like a book. He had seen her paintings, he told her. Fabulous, out of this world, he added almost shyly. Was there the slightest chance that she would sell one?
And that cracked her shell as nothing else could have done. The tears flooded out, and she got dug into the tissues with the agonised acknowledgement that this stranger, this kind, clever man whom she barely knew, knew so much more about her than the arrogant, hateful swine she had stupidly, recklessly gone to bed with!
It was a long drive down to Liz’s country cottage. With Liz she knew she was always welcome and she knew that Liz would keep her mouth shut. And she even knew where her friend kept her spare key—under the second tub of pansies to the left of the back door. The policeman was appalled, but to her he didn’t feel like a policeman any more. He had become Maurice during the drive.
‘I’ll stay until your friend gets home,’ he told her.
‘I want to be on my own.’
He studied her and then sighed. ‘If he asks where—?’
‘No!’ she interrupted, with helpless force.
‘I’ll keep you in touch with developments,’ he asserted, and took his leave with a touching reluctance to leave her alone.
Liz wouldn’t be back until far later than she had admitted to him. This was her night with the art club. She dined in town those nights and went straight to the college for her class. Liz was an accountant, several years Bella’s senior, who painted great, vibrant canvases of the flowers she loved and enjoyed a lucrative sideline from their sales. She joked that her clients would be unnerved by that flamboyant side to her nature and only ever signed her creations with her initials.
Gramps had enrolled Bella in the art club long before she’d attended art college at seventeen. She had been the youngest in the class and had had no training whatsoever, but from her first visit the instructor had been excited by what he’d called her ‘raw talent’. More worried than pleased by his enthusiasm, her grandfather had got in touch with Hector through the medium of one of Cleo’s fleeting visits. It had been Hector who had advised them on what art college and which course, Hector who had taken charge of her artistic development.
She made a dive for Liz’s phone, suddenly desperate to hear Hector’s querulous but familiar voice.
‘I was worried sick when those nosy policemen landed on the doorstep,’ he complained furiously, making her smile. ‘And I don’t want any blasted reporters following them!’
‘I’ll stay here until the fuss blows over. I’ll ring the restaurant and tell them I’m sick,’ she muttered, speaking her thoughts out loud on the subject of her job.
‘That Griff character has been calling too. Give him a ring,’ Hector advised irritably, and then added as an afterthought, ‘You didn’t damage your hands, did you?’
‘Just my heart.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Never mind. I’ll keep in touch.’
‘Phone calls cost a fortune,’ he reminded her in dismay. ‘The Royal Mail is expensive but considerably cheaper in comparison.’
She came off the phone and laughed until she cried. Through her tears she picked up Liz’s sketch-pad and began to draw, her agile fingers moving at speed over the paper. Only when she registered what she was drawing did she stop. With a choking sensation in her throat she looked down sickly at the slashing lines of Rico’s impassive face as she had last seen him.
She threw the pad aside, in more turmoil than ever. She would work through this, get her feet pinned back down hard to ground level and gather her common sense if it killed her! After all, a week ago she hadn’t even known Rico da Silva walked the same earth. But he didn’t, she reflected with sudden fierce anger; he didn’t walk the same earth at all.
‘I feel like an idiot… a total, absolute idiot!’ Griff complained for the third time. ‘Every one of my partners is sniggering behind his hands. So what did happen in that blasted container between the two of you? I have a right to know!’
‘The same way I have the right to know who was with you the night of my birthday?’ As soon as she said it she regretted it. Griff was very handsome but suddenly, betrayed by his fair skin, he looked like a guilty beetroot that had been stabbed unexpectedly in the back by a pickle fork.
‘Well, I… I don’t know what you’re talking about! I was working that night.’
He lied so badly that she was embarrassed for him. Why was he being so possessive all of a sudden? Why was it that even an unfaithful man suddenly hung on like grim death when he sensed that you were ready to break it off? It crossed her mind that Rico hadn’t hung on…Rico had been off like an Olympic sprinter… Only good manners had made him let her out of the door in front of him.
‘OK.’ Griff heaved a constricted sigh. ‘Guilty…but it was only a flirtation… I was tempted, that’s all. Unforgivable, I know, on your birthday—’
‘Don’t you think that date was subconsciously chosen to hurt most?’
He looked blankly back at her. She was too clever for him, could practically tell him what he was about to say before he parted his lips, and whatever had been between them had evaporated entirely on her side. She decided to let him off the hook.
‘Look, it doesn’t matter, does it? We’re finished. Good friends still, I hope,’ she stressed gently. ‘But that’s all, Griff.’
‘I didn’t sleep with her!’ He startled her by surging across Liz’s tiny lounge with an amount of emotion she would never have expected from a male usually so cool and controlled. ‘And I’m sorry; I’ll never do it again,’ he swore, grasping both her hands.
He had slept with that other woman. She could tell, but it was not her place, after what had happened with Rico, to stand in pious judgement.
‘Let’s go out to dinner somewhere very public,’ he urged tautly. ‘You have to come out of hiding some time. Da Silva’s “no comment” is beginning to fall pretty hard on my ears! You’re my girlfriend, for God’s sake, but all that trash in the tabloids and your disappearance is giving everyone the idea… well, that you’ve got something to be ashamed of!’
Liz walked into the tiny bedroom where she was changing. ‘You’re going out with him?’
‘It seems that I owe it to him to help him save face with his colleagues in the office.’
‘He never said that, surely?’
‘I don’t think he even realises that that is what he said. I’ll pack. It’s time I went home anyway.’ A rueful smile curved Bella’s lips. ‘Thanks for having me, but I’ve got to face the music sooner or later. Not that I’m expecting to be mobbed. I’m old news since our kidnappers were caught. There won’t be much interest now until the case reaches court,’ she pointed out.
‘Don’t you believe it… You’ve got a price on your head whether you like it or not! And the longer you keep quiet about your ordeal,’ Liz said grimly, ‘the more outrageous become the tabloid fantasies. You’d be better off issuing a statement.’
Bella sat silently in Griff’s BMW as it transported her back to London. The more questions he asked about Rico the tenser she became. Why the heck couldn’t he just take the hint and shut up?
It had been three weeks since she had been dropped by the chief superintendent at her friend’s cottage. Hector had packed a case for her and Liz had collected it covertly from his back door, because the Press had been encamped at the front continuously during those first days after her ca
ptors’ arrest. She had twice been collected and smuggled into a central London police station where the evidence against their kidnappers was being carefully stockpiled. But all that was over, bar the court case.
Only now did she wonder if it would ever be over. The Press had ferreted into her past and published everything —her colourful parentage, her cursory education, her artistic talent. It seemed to her that everyone she had ever known in life had talked about her to the tabloids—Gramps’ neighbours, fellow students at the college, her tutor, former boyfriends—bitter and otherwise. ‘Frigid’, had said one; ‘wild’, had said another. I’M STILL IN LOVE WITH HER, had screamed the headline given by an ex she barely recalled from six months ago.
She didn’t recognize the femme fatale the tabloids had depicted her as. Her every piece of privacy had been ripped from her resistant body. She had been invaded, raped in print and twisted into something she was not, and as far as she could see there was not a damn thing she could do about it!
‘Here?’ Bella gasped when she realised where Griff was planning that they should dine. ‘You’ll be broke for six months!’
‘Will you keep your voice down?’ he hissed at her, paling to the same shade as his brand-new dinner jacket. ‘I can well afford to splash out occasionally.’
Only he had never splashed out for her benefit before. Griff might have earned a very healthy crust as a partner in a busy legal firm but he was careful with his cash. Was he celebrating something—a more than usually lucrative divorce?
The head waiter looked at her with recognition. She threw her slim shoulders back and smoothed her elbow-high black gloves up her arms. Her figure-hugging black velvet dress could mercifully hold its own in any company. A seventies designer original, the colour spectacular against her wealth of vibrant Titian hair and creamy skin, its deceptively simple cut made the most of her lithe, female shape and fabulous legs.
Their table was right in the very centre of the crowded dining room. ‘Are we celebrating something?’ Bella whispered, maddeningly conscious of heads turning in their direction. Surely not all these beautiful people read the same rubbishy tabloids?