Maybe she was right.
He placed his hand on her arm and this time she didn’t jerk away. Her skin was cold, rough with goose bumps.
Bella whispered. “They’ve had to put her in restraints.”
“Jesus.” He took her briefcase from her arms and placed it on the ground, then wrapped his arms around her. She was shaking too hard to protest and her breath came in hard gasps. His chest hurt with the strange mix of emotions she stirred in him.
Would he have told Tarrant about her deception if he’d known her mother was hospitalized?
No. He wouldn’t.
The situation gave her crazy plan an undercurrent of sheer desperation that churned his gut.
He rubbed her back, trying to warm and soothe her. Gradually she calmed a little, but he could tell her hands were still shaking.
“Let me drive you home. You tell me which way to go, okay?”
She nodded. He picked up her briefcase and handed it to her. The throbbing screech of tree frogs hurt his ears as they walked to her car.
He groped in the dark to move her seat far enough back so he could get in, then he started it up and she directed him down winding, wooded roads, then into a driveway flanked by stone pillars.
Tension hung in the air along with the muggy humidity left over from the summer day.
“I guess you’d better come in.” Her voice sounded flat.
He gave her keys back on the front doorstep and a rich, sweet aroma filled his nostrils. “What’s that smell?”
“Angel’s trumpet. There’s one on either side of the door. The flowers open at night.”
“I wouldn’t think those would be hardy up here.”
“They’re not. We take them inside in the winter.”
“Wow.” The blooms wrapped them in a blanket of seductive fragrance. He could make out the large white flowers in the moonlight. “The plants are huge. That’s a labor of love.”
“They’re worth it.” The conviction in her voice suggested she meant more than the plants.
She turned on the lights and led him down a hallway and into a kitchen. Despite the collection of copper pots hanging on the wall and the racks of spices, the place had an uninhabited, desolate feeling. Empty fruit bowls, the stove and countertops too uncluttered, the wooden table bare.
“Do you live here?”
“No, the commute is too long for the hours I work. I have a small apartment in the city. I come up here on weekends to keep the place going.”
He pulled open the fridge, out of hunger more than curiosity. He’d had nothing but a couple of hors d’oeuvres all night. The lit interior contained a box of baking soda, two garlic bulbs and some ketchup. His stomach growled.
Her eyebrow lifted when he looked up. He shrugged and closed the door.
“I’m afraid I wasn’t expecting company,” she said dryly.
“No sweat.”
She moved into another room and snapped on a light. A cozy living room with patterned rugs and sofas. Silver-framed photos lined the fireplace mantel. He peered into one and saw three smiling people in a summer garden: a tall, professorial-looking man in tweeds, a slender, pretty woman blowing bubbles, and a little girl with chubby cheeks and glasses.
He heard Bella’s breath catch as he stared into the lost world of what was obviously an idyllic childhood.
“I should take those pictures down. They make me crazy.”
“There’s nothing wrong with remembering the good times.”
“It hurts too much. We were so close. They were my best friends. Now my mom doesn’t even seem to want to come home.”
“Did she ever have problems before your dad died?”
“She struggled with depression now and then, but nothing she couldn’t work through. My dad’s death just pulled the rug out from under her. She can’t seem to imagine being happy again.” She tugged her gaze from the picture and glanced up at him. Her wide gray eyes glittered with tears. “Honestly, I feel the same way a lot of the time.”
“But you haven’t given up on life.”
“No. I guess I’m not the giving up type.”
The determination in the set of her jaw gave him a warm flush of relief. “I’m glad to hear it.”
Of course that only made her less likely to give up on her ill-fated quest to attack Tarrant Hardcastle.
Her penetrating stare made him lift his chin. “Nice house.”
“Yes. It’s filled with things my mom and dad collected over a lifetime. They brought these cat figurines back from Egypt. And my mom painted that watercolor on a trip to Tuscany. She used to paint all the time when I was little. That one over there is a picture of the house when it’s covered in snow.” Bella rubbed her arms. “This is her sanctuary. They bought this house when they were first married and she’s never lived anywhere else.”
He moved toward her, again bedeviled by a raw urge to take her in his arms. Their intimacy of earlier hummed in his blood.
But she stepped back, raising a wall between them.
He searched his mind for words to set her at ease. “It must be nice to stay in the same place a long time and put down roots. We moved all the time. I don’t think we stayed anywhere more than two years.”
When her eyelashes glittered with fresh tears he realized he’d said the exact wrong thing. Her roots were about to be ripped right out of the ground.
He shoved a hand through his hair. “Isn’t the mortgage paid off by now?”
“I think it was at one point, but when the real estate market went up they borrowed against it for living expenses. The market went down and right now we actually owe more than the house is worth.” She gulped a breath. “This is an expensive area, and we always lived just like everyone else; but now I can see they never had anything left over to put away. I guess they must have been in debt almost the whole time, just trying to keep up.”
Dominic stayed silent.
“I earn a good salary, but the mortgage, the taxes, the hospital bills, living expenses…I’ve been borrowing from Peter to pay Paul for a year now.”
“And you can’t pay Peter or Paul back unless you win the patents back from Tarrant and exploit them yourself.”
She nodded.
Except that he’d already foiled her plan and it was time to move forward.
“You found the papers you were searching for.” It wasn’t a question. Why else would she rush to a hospital after visiting hours?
“I did.” Her face looked tight.
“What did they say?” He fought an impulse to step closer, so he could sniff for truth or lies in the scent of her skin.
“I haven’t read them.” He noticed she still clutched her leather briefcase in her arms. “I didn’t want to take them out on the train.”
There was something guarded about her expression, something prickly about her posture, that made him not believe her. Had she read them and not liked what they said?
“Let’s take a look at them.” He spoke softly.
Her eyes widened. “Why should I show them to you?”
“Because I want to help you, not hurt you.”
Now that I’ve betrayed you.
His muscles tightened as recrimination crept through his veins like acid. Bella was combing through his father’s files in a desperate attempt to get her mother out of a mental hospital.
Pity squeezed his heart.
In a situation like that, he could see how someone would be desperate enough to try anything.
But that didn’t mean it was the right thing to do.
Bella opened a sliding door, letting in the rhythmic hum of the summer night. “I’m going to get something to eat.”
“Outside?” Curiosity propelled him after her.
She flicked on an outdoor light. It illuminated a jungle of leaves and vines. He followed her down a brick path, and saw that the jungle was actually a large and very organized garden.
Tomatoes. The vines climbed sturdy lengths of wooden trellis. He could sme
ll the ripe fruits as she plucked them. He reached out and took a plump beefsteak tomato, its flesh cool and reassuring in his palm.
Without a word, she continued down the brick path, crouched and reached among the distinctive huge leaves of a zucchini plant. He heard her snap off the vegetables.
“Here, let me carry some stuff for you.” He squatted beside her and held out his hands to take some produce. They continued the routine as she gathered peppers, eggplant and spring onions until his arms were loaded with them. The single outdoor bulb gave barely enough illumination to find the path, but Bella seemed to know the location of each ripe fruit and vegetable.
“Do you maintain this garden all by yourself?” He couldn’t keep the wonder out of his voice.
“I have to. It’s my mom’s pride and joy.”
“I’ll bet she’s proud.” He sniffed a fresh, ripe pepper. “I guess she hasn’t been hospitalized long if she had time to plant all this in the spring.”
“Let’s go inside.” Bella moved past him with an armful of food. He ignored the stirring in his belly as her hips brushed his thigh.
“How long has she been there?”
She didn’t look back at him. “Fifteen months.”
“Holy…” He stifled the curse on his lips. “So you planted this whole garden yourself?”
“Come on in before the moths do.”
He stepped into the house after her and followed Bella into the kitchen, where he set the food down on the tiled counter.
“Black Krim.” He held up the distinctive brownish-skinned heirloom tomato. “And Brandywine.” The bulbous shape of his favorite bulged from the pile on the kitchen counter.
“She likes the old-fashioned varieties.”
“A woman after my own heart.”
Bella tucked a strand of hair behind her ears and put her hands on her hips. “I usually sauté a bunch of this stuff into a ratatouille.”
“Sounds sensational.”
Now he really couldn’t take his eyes off her. Bella Soros was something else. That damn dress still clung to her beautiful feminine curves as she heated olive oil in a pot and chopped garlic into it.
“You’d better be careful. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and you’re almost all the way there.”
She chuckled and he felt relief to see her relax and smile.
It almost made him forget what he’d done earlier.
Dominic blew out a breath. He shouldn’t be flirting with her, encouraging her to let down her guard. He wanted to take a look at those letters and see how to play this. There must be some way to work out a compromise that would suit everyone.
It almost killed him to have to stand around waiting.
But it was a sweet way to die.
He sat, open mouthed, as Bella lifted a cooked morsel of striped heirloom eggplant to her luscious lips. Her smile of satisfaction replicated itself on his face, then traveled all the way to his groin on a wave of warm arousal.
Bella could feel Dominic’s appreciative gaze on her as she stirred the sauce. The steam from the cooking pot mingled with the heady scent of the attraction that snapped back and forth between them.
She tried to focus on the food and act as though she was just cooking a regular Friday night meal for herself.
But it wasn’t a regular Friday night. Her skin was still hot and sticky from their afternoon lovemaking. Her insides still trembled with the aftershocks of her orgasm. As she cooked, Dominic’s dark eyes seemed to burn right through her clothes.
And the letters throbbed inside her briefcase, their wrinkled pages threatening to bring her carefully wrought plans crashing down around her.
She tried to keep a blank expression as she sprinkled salt and pepper onto the bubbling stew. She tested a strand of rotelle. “You like it al dente?”
“Of course.” Dominic’s face glowed with quiet pleasure that gave her a secret thrill. There was something strangely comforting about his large, solid presence in her mother’s neglected kitchen.
Which was ridiculous. If he saw what was in those letters…
She had to make sure he didn’t see them. At least until she’d figured out what to do.
The horrible vision of her mom, restrained to her hospital bed with a tube in her arm, made her catch her breath. She knew her mom was living to get her father’s work back. To see Bella breathe fresh life into his legacy and bring him back to life, even in a limited way.
“You okay?”
Dominic’s soft voice warned her she must be showing emotion. Maybe in her breathing. “Sure, I’m fine.”
She drained the pasta, then spooned the ragout over it onto two pretty hand-painted plates. She carried them to the table where she’d laid cutlery and hand-blown blue glasses her family had brought back from a long-ago vacation in Mexico.
Dominic poured wine he’d retrieved from her father’s dusty wine cellar into the glasses. Their eyes met for a second as she sat and a fierce jolt of—something—made her catch her breath and look away. She picked up her fork.
Dominic raised his glass. “To everything working out for the best.”
“What does that mean?” Her hand, halfway to her glass, froze. Was the “best” her failing in her quest to get her dad’s work?
Dominic frowned slightly. “I mean I hope your mom gets better soon and comes home from the hospital.”
Oh. She lifted her glass, flushed with sudden guilt. Working for the enemy had made her so fearful and suspicious. It embarrassed her that she’d been so quick to assume the worst of a man who’d done nothing but try to help her.
And make breathless, passionate love to her.
No. It wasn’t love. It was sex. And she’d better not forget that.
She sipped her wine. “She’ll come home soon.” She tried to inject confidence into her voice, though, in truth, her confidence was slipping away every week. The bad news in her father’s letters was the latest blow.
“Good wine. Did your dad collect it? He has a lot of interesting bottles down there.”
“I guess he did. Funny, really, I never asked. I guess I’ll never know, now.” She sipped her wine and tried to brush away the pain of loss that always hung around, like the cobwebs in the corners of the room.
A frisson of fear snuck through her. Should she have let him go downstairs by himself? “Did you see anything else interesting down in the basement?”
His eyebrow lifted. “Should I have? I didn’t look around. I figured you wouldn’t want me to. But if there’s some junk that needs moving, or anything else you need help with, say the word.”
His pleasant expression and kind words made her stomach clench. Why was he being so nice? Because they’d had sex?
Or because he was up to something?
“There’s just a bunch of my dad’s stuff down there. Old equipment, computers. Probably none of it works, but I don’t know what to do with it. I’m sure it’s worthless, but I can’t bring myself to throw it away.”
“If it’s not hurting anyone, why not let it stay there?”
Because I don’t know how long we’ll own the house.
She didn’t want to say it out loud though. Her financial worries were not his business.
He lifted a fork full of food to his mouth and ate it. Nodded in appreciation as he chewed.
She inhaled and attempted to click back into hostess mode. “Edible? I’m rather intimidated by your food expertise.”
“Best kind of food there is. Straight from garden to table, and bursting with the flavor of sunlight.”
“Don’t you mean moonlight?”
He paused, fork in midair. “You’re right. Maybe that’s why this is the very best food I’ve ever eaten.”
His gruff voice and steady black gaze made her insides simmer.
“Stop teasing.” She speared rotelle with her fork. “I know I’m no chef, but I wasn’t expecting a guest.”
“And I’m glad of that. If you were I might have had to fight him.”
His dimples made an appearance. He forked some more food into his mouth.
She should laugh. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had a date. For one thing, she worked most of the hours she was awake—probably out of guilt over the reason she was really at Hardcastle. When she left, they’d be angry, but they’d miss her too.
She drew in a breath and tried to keep a straight face. “Lunch was delicious. Shame I got distracted and forgot to eat it.”
“I think we both got a little carried away.” His dimples disappeared. “As you know, I’m only in town temporarily.”
His serious gaze made her stomach wobble. A sharp laugh escaped her mouth. “Don’t panic. I wasn’t expecting a proposal just because we…well, you know.”
Dominic looked relieved.
Why did that hurt so much? She should be relieved too.
“Did you follow me home to let me down easy?” She took a bracing sip of wine.
He shook his head, eyes fixed on hers. “Nope, I just followed you. Couldn’t help myself. I was worried you might get into trouble in that dress.”
The fitted fabric of the dress chafed her tight nipples. “It got me into trouble already. I’ll have to burn it.”
“Now, that would be a crime. And you’ll be fine as long as I’m here to protect you.” His white teeth gleamed in a feral grin.
“Gee. I feel so…safe.”
This was not a situation any sensible woman would find herself in. Did he expect to sleep with her again tonight? Heat shimmered across her thighs and belly.
She really shouldn’t. Earlier, it had been unexpected. A surprise. An accident.
If she did it again it would be premeditated and she’d be walking into his dynamite-laced embrace with her eyes wide open.
Sleeping with the enemy.
Or was this all part of his “deal”? Secrecy in exchange for sex.
Tiny hairs stood up on her bare arms.
Dominic leaned back in his chair. Sipped his wine. His big body filled the chair, hiding it completely. “I didn’t come here to make love with you again, or even to sleep with you. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to do those things….” His low voice made her belly quiver. “But I can show some restraint.”
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