Czytaj książkę: «The Hostage Bride»
“Do you want me, gatita?”
Did she want him? Ridiculous question! Impossible, preposterous, unnecessary question. Of course she wanted him! She yearned for him, ached for him. But…
And then suddenly she knew what was wrong. “Do I want you?” Felicity managed, a thread of near laughter running through her words. “But who are you? I don’t even know your name. All I know is Rico—if in fact that is the truth.”
“The truth, gatita?” He laughed. “Sí. Oh, yes, I told you the truth. My name really is Rico—short for Ricardo. Ricardo Juan Carlos Valeron at your service, señorita.”
The words pounded into her senses like cruel blows, making her heart stop. Ricardo Valeron. The one man who had the power to make an appalling situation even worse.
The Hostage Bride
by
Kate Walker
There are times in a man’s life…
when only seduction will settle old scores!
Pick up our exciting series of revenge-filled
romances—they’re recommended and red-hot!
The Hostage Bride
Kate Walker
MILLS & BOON
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
RICO VALERON brought the long, powerful car to a smoothly purring halt outside the house and drew on the handbrake. Checking his watch briefly, he turned the key in the ignition, silencing the idling engine. He had plenty of time, he told himself, and settled back in his seat, waiting.
From her bedroom, Felicity heard the sound of the vehicle’s arrival just seconds before she heard her father hurry from the dining room into the hallway.
‘Your car’s here!’ he called up the staircase, the sound of his voice echoing slightly. ‘Are you ready?’
Am I ready? she asked herself, looking into the grey eyes of her own reflection in the dressing-table mirror, then immediately away again. She didn’t like what she saw in those eyes. They gave too much away.
‘Fliss!’ Joe Hamilton was getting impatient now. ‘Did you hear me? The car’s here—we should be going.’
‘Just a moment!’
Felicity had trouble forcing her voice to work, making it strong enough to carry from her bedroom to the ground floor. In spite of all her efforts it didn’t sound right. It had no strength, no conviction. It didn’t sound at all believable.
Not at all the way a bride should sound in the moments just before she set out on her way to her wedding.
But then this wasn’t the sort of wedding she had ever planned. Not the one she had dreamed of as a young girl. The wedding she had created in her fantasies, lying awake in her bed in the throes of her first adolescent crush. Then, she had imagined herself as Cinderella or Queen Guinevere, with her groom as a mixture of Prince Charming and one of the knights of the round table coming towards her astride a white charger, ready to sweep her off her feet and carry her off into the perfect ‘happily ever after’.
Not like this.
Not like this travesty of a marriage that she had been forced into by fear and desperation and had tried every possible way she could imagine to get out of. But without success.
‘Felicity!’
Her father was getting impatient now. He only ever used the full version of her name when he was annoyed with her and she could sense the exasperation behind the word, could picture him pushing back his shirt cuff to glance at his watch in irritation.
‘I’m coming!’
What else could she say? She had no alternative. There was no knight on a white horse galloping to her rescue. She hadn’t even been able to confide in her own mother. That would have meant revealing just what an appalling mess her father had made of things, the hole he had dug himself into, so deep that there was no hope of ever finding his way out.
Unless she went through with this.
‘Just a minute!’
Drawing in a deep, sighing breath, she turned to the mirror once more, checking her appearance.
The white silk dress Edward had insisted on fitted her perfectly, its softly flowing lines enhancing her slender height, the sleeveless, off the shoulder style revealing slim arms and smooth skin touched by the golden tint of the sun. Her pale blonde hair was pulled away from her face, and coiled at the back of her head, under the fall of the veil that cascaded down from the delicate tracery of a small tiara. The severe style emphasised the fine bones of her face, the high, slanting cheekbones and the wide, soft grey eyes.
But there was no colour in her skin under the carefully applied cosmetics; no light in the shadowed depths of her eyes.
Instead she looked like someone about to set out on the walk to the scaffold.
‘No one’s going to believe this for a second,’ she told her reflection fiercely. ‘Can’t you at least manage a smile?’
But no—that was much, much worse. The smile she switched on was so blatantly false it was almost a grimace and hastily she let it slide again, lifting her long skirts and heading for the door.
‘At last!’ Joe exclaimed as he saw her descending the stairs towards him. ‘We’re going to be late!’
‘Isn’t that a bride’s prerogative?’ Felicity returned, hiding her apprehension under a mask of insouciance. ‘And Edward will wait.’
Oh, yes, Edward would wait. He stood to gain so much from this travesty of a marriage. Much, much more than he had ever promised Felicity for her agreement.
Catching the blurred signs of movement through the frosted glass of the front door, Rico abandoned his apparently indolent pose and straightened up. Narrowed dark eyes took in his surroundings in a swift, appraising survey, and he nodded in grim satisfaction.
There was no one around. Everyone had been invited to the wedding of the year and even the staff had been given the day off to stand outside the cathedral and watch the guests arrive. If his luck held he should be able to manage this totally unobserved. As the door opened he slid out of the driver’s seat, one hand slipping unobtrusively into his pocket.
‘We’re just coming!’ Joe shouted to the waiting chauffeur as he waved his daughter out of the house. ‘Come on, come on, Fliss! You’ll have Sir Lionel thinking… Oh, what’s that now?’
Felicity turned her head in the direction of the phone which had started to ring back inside the house, suddenly a prey to a renewed rush of nerve-twisting uncertainty.
‘Leave it,’ she said. Now that they were on their way she wanted this over and done with.
But her father was incapable of ignoring the insistent summons.
‘You go on, darling,’ he said, already turning back. ‘I’ll just deal with this and then…’
Left alone, Felicity found herself unable to move. Her feet seemed frozen to the spot, her mind refusing to function. The intense wave of inexplicable fear was like a cold shadow chasing over her skin, making her shiver in spite of the heat of the July sun. She could see nothing, sense nothing that might have sparked it off, and yet…
‘Miss Hamilton?’
It was the chauffeur who had spoken, bringing her eyes to focus on him properly for the first time. Images bombarded her already sensitive nerves, giving her a confused impression of a very tall, impressive figure, not at all what she had expected of a professional driver.
He stood straight and proud by the gleaming silver-grey Rolls, an almost military discipline about his bearing. Straight shoulders under the black uniform jacket, a strong chest tapering to a narrow waist and long, long legs. Highly polished shoes, so elegant they looked almost hand-made, were set squarely on the ground, and one black leather-gloved hand held the rear door of the car open invitingly.
But his face was hidden underneath the peaked cap and, even squinting hard against the brightness of the sun, she couldn’t make out a single one of his features.
‘It is Miss Felicity Hamilton?’
He sounded almost surprised, as if she was not quite what he had expected, and the faint hint of an accent—Spanish, perhaps?—that she had caught as he first spoke was stronger now. Rich and husky, it turned the syllables of her name into a murmured enticement, one that curled seductively around her senses.
Fayleeseetay, he had said, and suddenly the shiver of apprehension she had felt earlier was transformed into a very different response. The tingle of pure excitement that zigzagged down her spine was totally inappropriate in a bride setting out to her wedding to another man. Or it would be, Felicity told herself, if she was marrying someone she truly cared about.
‘Felicity,’ she corrected crisply, hiding the pang of regret that twisted inside her behind the careful control of the English form of her name. ‘That’s right.’
She must look like a dithering fool, standing here in the middle of the drive, as if she couldn’t make up her mind where to go. And the way that the chauffeur was watching her only aggravated that feeling of discomfort, making her feel uncomfortably like something not too pleasant that he had dissected and examined under a microscope.
‘Felicity Jane Hamilton—soon to be Felicity Jane Venables.’
Gathering her distracted thoughts hastily, she caught up her skirts in a grip that was far too tight, crushing the beautiful silk impossibly, as she marched down the path towards him.
‘But you knew that, didn’t you? After all, that’s why you’re here.’
His silence was just a heartbeat too long, tugging at already tightly drawn nerves, stretching them out to the point of discomfort.
‘Yes, Miss Hamilton,’ he said softly. ‘That is exactly why I am here.’
His eyes were dark, such a deep, ebony brown that they were almost black, and his skin had a smooth olive tone that made her fingers itch to reach out and touch it. A straight slash of a nose combined with a squared, determined jaw to speak of a strength that bordered on ruthlessness, but the mouth told a very different story. Beautifully shaped and surprisingly soft, it made her long to see him smile, to feel the caress of those lips on her skin, to…
‘Won’t you get into the car, Miss Hamilton?’
‘I—oh—yes…’
Distracted from the wantonly sensual path her thoughts had been drifting along, Felicity could only blink in confusion and embarrassment, a wave of hot colour flooding her cheeks. That intent, probing gaze was so powerful, so unwavering, she almost felt that he could see into her mind, read the fantasies she wanted to keep hidden from him.
The fantasies she shouldn’t have been allowing herself to have! She might not love Edward, but she had promised to behave as his wife, and there was to be no hint that the marriage was anything other than a real one. That promise was going to be impossible to keep if she was already fantasising about other men and she hadn’t even got the ring on her finger!
‘Get into the car…’
Something had changed. Suddenly, subtly his tone had altered. A new note in it scraped uncomfortably over Felicity’s unsettled nerves.
‘I’m waiting for my father…’
‘You can wait for him in the car.’
The note that had disturbed her was stronger now, worryingly so. In an attempt to disguise the way it had made her feel, to ignore the slow creeping of cold pins and needles over her skin, she lifted her chin and met that ebony gaze head on.
‘I prefer to stay out here. I don’t want to crush my dress.’
The flashing glance of those dark eyes downwards over the dress in question was a look of pure scorn, and the shrug that lifted those broad shoulders dismissed her comment as purely feminine trivia.
‘We’re running late. Please get into the car, Miss Hamilton.’
It was that ‘please’ that did it. Something in the way it was enunciated, a dark edge that crept into his voice, moved it light years away from the common courtesy and turned it into a sound that sent something cold and unpleasant slithering down her spine.
But from inside the hall she could hear her father struggling to end the call.
‘I really have to go—can we talk about this later…?’
He would be with her any moment and that knowledge restored something of the confidence that the chauffeur’s disturbing attitude had chipped away at. She would get into the car, but because she wanted to, not because of his insistence.
She hadn’t realised just how difficult it would be. Hadn’t anticipated the problems of getting onto the high, soft leather seat while managing her long skirts, the enveloping veil, the silk train. She had one foot in the car when the struggle to avoid crumpling the dress resulted in an awkward loss of balance that drove a cry of shock from her lips.
‘Oh!’
He was there at her side in a second. One gloved hand came out, caught the fingers that waved in panic, searching for assistance. Caught and held them, the powerful muscles in his hand and arm tensing iron-hard to support her full weight.
Within a moment she was upright again, sliding safely into the car, her dress unharmed, her position secure, and nothing but another wave of colour to give any indication of the near disaster that had just been avoided.
‘Th-thank you,’ she managed, shockingly aware of the fact that it was his closeness, the feel of that strength under her clutching fingertips that had put the breathless, uneven note into her voice and not any thought of the fall she had almost had.
‘De nada.’
Strong hands arranged the folds of her skirt so that they were well away from the door, smoothed down her veil, his touch cool and totally impersonal. With the harsh force of those searching eyes turned away from her, his gaze fixed on what he was doing, Felicity found that some of the disturbing tension was seeping from her body.
She had to have been overreacting, she told herself. Had to be jumping to conclusions that were totally unjustified. She had been letting her imagination run away with her and had ended up creating a situation where none had existed.
‘Thank you,’ she said again, more confidently this time and when the chauffeur lifted his head again she managed to switch on a smile, directing it straight into the deep pools of his eyes.
There was no response. Nothing but the blankest, coldest stare she had ever encountered, one that turned her blood to ice in her veins and had her sinking back against the seat in sheer horror.
Her thoughts were still reeling as if that glare had been an actual physical blow so that she barely noticed the way he moved sharply, closing the door on her with a firm, decisive thud. It was only when he moved smoothly and unhurriedly round to the front of the car that she registered that all was not as she had anticipated.
Her father was still in the house, and…
‘Just a minute…’
He ignored her, swinging long legs into the car and turning the key in the ignition in almost the same moment that he slammed the door to. With the Rolls in gear, he set it in motion, steering one-handed as he pulled something from his pocket and held it up. Her stomach clenching on sudden panic, Felicity realised that what he held was a mobile phone.
‘Okay,’ he snapped into it, his eyes on the drive ahead of him. ‘Mission accomplished. You can stop now.’
‘I said, just a minute!’
She was twisting in her seat, looking back to the house, watching it recede as the car picked up speed.
‘Did you hear me? We can’t leave yet—my father…’
The words died on her lips as the full realisation of what he had said hit home like a blow to her heart.
Mission accomplished. You can stop now.
Leaning forward, she banged hard on the glass panel that separated her from the driver.
‘What are you doing? Where are we going? You can’t…’
He ignored her. Thumbing off the mobile, he dropped it back into his pocket and put his hand on the steering wheel instead. With a faint roar of the engine he changed up a gear, pressed his foot on the accelerator.
‘You have to stop! My father…’
Some tiny movement of his eyes, a swift glance in the rear-view mirror, alerted her. Twisting once more in her seat, she could only watch in despair as behind her she saw her father, alerted by the sound of the engine, running to the door of the house. Coming to an abrupt halt he could only stand and stare after them, shock, disbelief and total bemusement in every line of his body.
But already they were too far away for her to read his face. She saw him raise an arm, gesticulating wildly, knew that he had opened his mouth to shout but his cries were inaudible.
And then she knew. Realised just what had happened. The phone call that had distracted her father as they had left the house had been deliberately planned. It had been organised by this man to coincide exactly with their appearance, to keep her father occupied just long enough to get her into the car…
Dad!
The word formed in her brain but she was too shocked, too stunned to be able to voice it. Instead she could only watch in despair as the car accelerated again, the distance between them increasing even more. Then with one last twist of the wheel they rounded a bend in the drive and the house and her father disappeared from sight.
She was on her own, she realised fearfully. Completely on her own with this unnerving, frightening stranger.
And it was when they turned left at the bottom of the drive, in the opposite direction to the way they should have headed for the church and her wedding that she really began to worry.
CHAPTER TWO
‘JUST what do you think you’re doing?’
Giving into panic was quite the wrong approach, Felicity told herself. Okay, so she had been badly thrown for a minute there, but really there was no need for that. This wasn’t the nightmare it seemed. No, there was simply some mistake, that was all.
‘I said… Oh, can’t you just slow down a bit?’
Had he even heard her? The solid, square set of his back seemed impervious as a brick wall and, with his face turned firmly in the direction they were travelling, his eyes on the road ahead, there was no way she could even read his expression or judge if she was getting through to him.
‘You’re going the wrong way!’
No response. Not even a flicker of a glance in her direction, not a turn of his head. If anything, his grip seemed to tighten on the steering wheel and the car engine roared again as the speedometer needle crept up.
Scrabbling frantically, Felicity managed to inch the glass panel open just a little bit and lean forward with her face close against it, her mouth in the open space.
‘I said, you’re going the wrong way.’
She tried to make the words sound as clear and definite as possible. After all, she was forgetting that he wasn’t English—what was he? Spanish? Perhaps he just didn’t understand what she was saying. Perhaps the few sentences he had spoken had been the full extent of his English, for all that they had been spoken with such apparent ease.
‘Listen to me! You’re…’
Frantically she scrabbled about in her memory for the scattered remnants of the minimal Spanish she had picked up during a holiday there a couple of years ago.
‘V-vaya—el camino malo,’ she managed, knowing it was far from grammatically correct but at least it expressed what she meant.
Unbelievably, that beautifully shaped mouth twitched, twisting into a faint smile of mockery at her stumbling attempt at translation.
‘Voy el camino correcto,’ he shot back at her. Then, confounding her foolish belief that he hadn’t understood a word she had been saying, he added sardonically, ‘I am on precisely the right road. It’s just not the direction you expected to be travelling in today.’
And while she was still gaping in stunned disbelief he added curtly, ‘But wherever we’re going, if you’re sensible you’ll sit back and fasten your safety belt. Right now the way that you’re behaving is not only dangerous, it’s against the law and—’
‘Against the law?’
Felicity couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
‘Against the law? You—you’re—abducting me—and you’re worried about breaking the law on seat belts? Why, you…!’
With a desperate effort she managed to push the dividing window open just a little bit more and get her hand through, banging her fingers down hard on his shoulder.
‘Stop this car at once! Stop it, I say!’
When he made no response but simply focused his dark-eyed gaze on the road ahead, she resorted to the only thing she could think of to get his attention. Driven past caring for her own safety, she reached up and caught hold of a strand of jet black hair that she could see underneath the uniform cap and pulled hard.
‘Madre de Dios!’
For one frantic, terrifying moment the car swerved violently but a second later he had both himself and the powerful vehicle back under control.
‘Stop that!’ he snarled through gritted teeth. ‘Don’t be so damn stupid, woman! Do you want to kill us both?’
‘Where you’re concerned, don’t tempt me,’ Felicity muttered but already she was having second—and third—thoughts about the wisdom of her actions. The wild movement of the car had thrown her to one side, bruising her arm, and the few seconds of sheer panic she had felt at just the thought of what might have happened if there had been any other traffic on the road was enough to have her hastily rethinking.
She sank back onto her seat, struggling to appear outwardly calm while inside her thoughts were whirling frantically, trying to come up with some possible explanation for what was happening.
Had the chauffeur gone completely mad? What could he possibly hope for as a result of his actions?
‘Look—you…’ she tried again, struggling to force her voice to sound firm and full of a confidence she was far from feeling.
Those dark eyes flicked up swiftly, meeting hers in the rear-view mirror and holding her gaze for the space of a heartbeat before returning to their concentration on the road.
‘My name is Rico,’ he said unexpectedly.
Rico? She’d be a fool to believe that—because he’d be all sorts of an idiot to give her his real name. And one thing she didn’t believe that this Rico was, was a fool. There was too much intelligence in that face, too much natural cunning in the black coffee-coloured gaze he turned on her to merit any such description.
But Rico suited him. It was a rogue’s name, an outlaw’s name. She could just imagine him playing the role of a brigand or a bandit in some wild adventure film.
But this was no film; nor was it, in her opinion at least, any sort of an adventure.
‘Then—Rico—I think you’ve got this all wrong. You’ve made a terrible mistake.’
‘No mistake.’
The flat comment was accompanied by a brusque shake of his head.
‘I know exactly what I’m doing.’
‘But—I think you must have the wrong person.’ It was the only explanation she could come up with.
‘You’re not Felicity Hamilton?’
His sarcasm scraped brutally on already raw nerves.
‘Well, yes, I said I was—but you’ve still got it wrong. I—I’m not rich, you know, and nor is my father.’ She wouldn’t have been forced into marrying Edward if that had been the case.
‘I’m not interested in money.’
‘But then—why…?’
Her voice failed completely, drying to a painful croak as she thought of the only other possible reason there might be for this man to abduct her in this way. Nightmare thoughts filled her head so that she could almost feel the colour leaching from her cheeks, her heart clenching in panic.
‘Stop this car! Stop it at once!’
She had no hope that he would obey her but still it twisted every nerve to see how determinedly he ignored her, the total lack of response he made.
‘I said, stop!’
But even as she spoke a sudden hope flared. They were approaching a particularly tricky bend. The car would have to slow down to manoeuvre round it. If she could just get the door open… Carefully she edged forward, inching her fingers onto the handle.
‘It’s locked.’
The words scythed through her hopes in an instant, cutting them off completely. Once more her gaze went to the mirror, meeting that knowing look with a sense of appalled horror.
‘Central locking,’ he supplied helpfully.
With a gesture he indicated a button on the door at his side.
‘You can’t get out until I let you out.’
It was foolish she knew but just for a second she ignored him. She had to. She couldn’t just give in without a fight.
But no matter how hard she tugged and twisted, the door handle remained stubbornly unmoveable and at last she had to abandon the futile struggle and sit back again.
‘You might as well give up and make it easy on yourself.’
Disturbingly, his voice sounded almost gentle, and he had actually managed to inject into it a faint note of concern—one that she had no doubt at all was in no way sincere.
‘We have a long journey ahead of us and you’ll only cause yourself more distress if you keep this up.’
‘A long journey? Where are we going?’
But her attempt to sound artless and innocent didn’t slip past his defences as she had hoped. Instead it earned her another of those slanting glances, half sardonically amused, half reproachful of the fact that she might think he would believe her.
‘You’ll find out when we get there,’ he tossed over his shoulder. ‘So why don’t you sit back and enjoy the ride?’
‘Enjoying myself is the furthest thing from my mind!’
‘Well, yes…’
He moved his broad shoulders in a shrug that revealed his total indifference to her retort.
‘But you’ll be a lot more comfortable—and safer—if you sit back, fasten your seatbelt and try to relax.’
He was negotiating a roundabout as he spoke and, reading the road signs, Felicity saw that they were heading for the motorway that led away from her hometown and directly to London.
‘You’re taking a risk, aren’t you?’ she said sharply. ‘I can read—and I can see where we’re heading.’
Another indifferent shrug was his only response. Was he really so confident that he didn’t care if she guessed at the route he was taking?
‘Doesn’t that worry you?’
‘Should it?’ he drawled and, as if to emphasise how little he cared, he finally pulled off the peaked chauffeur’s cap and tossed it onto the seat beside him, raking one tanned hand through the sleek darkness of the hair he had revealed. Then glancing up into the mirror again, he grinned widely and wickedly just once, straight into her watchful grey eyes.
Felicity’s heart kicked wildly, banging hard against her ribs and she bit down sharply on her lower lip, trying to hold back the cry of shock that almost escaped her.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair! A man like this Rico—a man who had abducted her for who knew what reasons, who had invaded her life and turned it upside down—should at least look on the outside in some way that revealed the darkness of his inner heart. But in his case it was quite the opposite.
She could only see just one small part of his face reflected in the mirror but even like that, foreshortened and distorted, he had the sort of potent good looks that hit home like a punch right in her stomach.
The smooth olive skin, dark eyes and shining jet black silk of his hair all combined with strongly carved cheekbones, impossibly lush curling eyelashes and that sweetly sensual mouth to create the most forceful blueprint of purely masculine beauty she had ever seen.
She couldn’t drag her eyes away but stared, transfixed, until Rico glanced in her direction once more and caught her stunned gaze. Ashamed at being caught watching him, she looked away sharply, staring down at her hands in pained embarrassment.
‘You really should fasten that seatbelt.’ This time his tone made it plain that she’d do better to obey. ‘We’ll be hitting the motorway traffic soon and, while you might be prepared to put your life on the line by flouting the law, I would prefer that you were sensible.’
I would prefer that you were sensible. Did that mean that whatever his plans for her were they didn’t include actually harming her? She couldn’t tell…but rather than risk any further argument she reached for the seatbelt as instructed and pushed it firmly into the holder, relieved to find that her hands were as steady as she could have wished, betraying nothing of her inner turmoil.
‘Rico what?’ she asked as he turned the car onto the feed road to the motorway, the powerful vehicle increasing speed effortlessly at the slightest touch on the accelerator. ‘I take it you do have a surname?’
‘Just Rico will do.’ His attention was on the road as he indicated, steered skilfully out into the traffic.
‘I can find out, you know. Edward will tell me.’
A sign on the side of the road flashed past as she spoke, barely giving her time to register what was written on it. But, as realisation dawned, sudden inspiration struck, giving her an idea.
‘In fact, I’m surprised you ever thought you’d get away with this,’ she went on, talking to fill the silence, to distract him while she thought back over the scheme that had just occurred to her, considering her options, trying to decide if it would work. ‘You must know I’d report you. That I’d tell Mr Venables.’
