Czytaj książkę: «Prisoner Of Passion»

CHAPTER ONE

HEADS turned when Bella walked down the street. Her rippling mane of Titian curls, her incredibly long legs and her outrageous hotchpotch of colourful clothes caught the eye. But it was her prowling, graceful stride and the light of vibrant energy in her face which made the attention linger. Bella always looked as if she knew exactly where she was going.

She lifted the public phone off the hook and punched in the number. ‘Griff?’

‘Bella, I’m so sorry... something’s come up,’ he groaned. ‘I have to go back into the office.’

‘But—’ Her clear eyes froze as she heard a woman giggling somewhere in the background. Griff went on talking, although there was a similar catch of amusement in his voice. Apologising, he assured her that he would be in touch.

Five minutes later Bella was back in the wine bar with her friends.

‘Where have you been?’ Liz hissed, under cover of the animated conversation.

‘Calling Griff...’

‘You mean he’s not on his way yet?’

Bella gave a careless shrug.

‘He’s let you down, hasn’t he?’ her friend said bluntly.

Bella didn’t trust herself to speak. And the very last thing she needed right now was a lecture on the subject of Griff Atherton, who was everything Gramps had ever told her to look out for in a man but who was inexplicably as unreliable as they came, in spite of his good education, steady job and stable family background.

‘You really know how to pick them,’ Liz lamented. ‘Why do you always latch on to the creeps?’

‘He’s not a creep.’

‘It’s your birthday. Where is he?’

Bella shed her battered cerise suede fringed jacket and crossed her legs below the feathered hem of her minuscule new chiffon skirt, covertly attempting to stretch it to a more reasonable length. Liz had bought the skirt for her birthday. It was far too short but she had to be seen to wear it at least this once.

‘So what was Griff the Glib’s excuse this time?’

‘Wow, look at those wheels!’ Bella exclaimed hurriedly, keen for a change of subject. She craned her neck to gaze out at the gleaming silver sports car drawing up outside the five-star hotel on the other side of the street. ‘That’s a Bugatti Supersport.’

‘A what?’ Obediently distracted, Liz peered without a lot of interest and then gasped. ‘Look who’s getting out of it! Now that is what I call—’

‘Fabulous engineering.’ Bella was eyeing the sleek lines of the powerful car, not the driver with his smouldering, dark good looks. Bella preferred blonds.

‘I haven’t heard Rico da Silva described in quite those terms before.’

‘Who?’

‘If you ever put your nose inside a serious newspaper, you’d recognise him too. He’s absolutely gorgeous, isn’t he?’ Liz looked rapt. ‘He’s also single and loaded!’

‘He has a beautiful set of wheels. Is he into motors?’

‘He’s an international financier. The local paper did a profile on him,’ Liz told her. ‘He owns a fabulous country estate just outside town. He spent millions renovating it.’

Bella grimaced. Finance...money...banks. She never went into a bank if she could help it, didn’t even own a cheque book. People who wheeled and dealed in money and profit made her skin crawl. A faceless smoothie from a bank had pushed Gramps’ business to the wall and put him into a premature grave.

‘That’s his current lady,’ Liz murmured as a beautiful blonde woman swathed in fur emerged from the hotel.

Tall, dark and handsome with the little woman. Bella wasn’t in the mood to be generous. They looked like some impossibly perfect couple from a glossy magazine. His and hers matching glamour. They had that aura of untouchability which only the seriously rich exuded. It was there like a glass wall between them and the rest of the human race. A clump of pedestrians stopped to let them pass in a direct path to the Bugatti. They took it as their due.

‘How the other half lives,’ Liz sighed with unhidden envy.

‘Time we got this party off the ground!’ Bella stood up, spread a brilliantly bright smile round her assembled friends, and switched into extrovert mode.

Dammit, where was the turn-off? Bella called herself a fool for not staying the night with Liz as she had originally planned, but Liz had been in the mood to preach and Bella hadn’t been in the mood to listen. Now it was three in the morning. The roads were deserted. And somehow she had got lost. There it was! Jumping on the brakes, Bella swung into a frantic last-minute turn. As she made it a gigantic yawn engulfed her taut facial muscles. As she emerged from it, rubbing at her sleepy eyes, another car appeared directly in the path of her headlights.

With a shriek of horror Bella barely had time to brace herself before impact. The jolt of the crash shuddered through her entire body, the sickening noise of buckling metal almost deafening her. Then there was a terrible silence. Fast to react, Bella’s first thought was for the other driver. Her windscreen was smashed. She couldn’t see a thing. She lurched out of the Skoda on legs that felt like jellied eels.

A hand clamped round her slim shoulder. ‘Are you hurt? Have you passengers?’

‘No!’ Taken aback by someone with even faster reactions than her own, Bella hovered in the biting wind tunnelling down the street as the powerful head and shoulders ducked into the cluttered interior of her car, which more closely resembled a travelling dustbin than a vehicle. Her teeth chattered with shock, her aghast attention logged onto the truly appalling amount of damage done to her car. The whole bonnet was wrecked.

‘You madman!’ she burst out helplessly. ‘What were you doing on the wrong side of the road?’

The large presence straightened. Bella was not small and she was wearing very high heels, but the male beside her still towered above her. In the streetlight his hard, dark features were as unyielding as hewn granite.

‘What was I doing?’ he repeated in a raw tone of disbelief, and this time she caught the foreign inflexion, the thickness of an accent that was certainly not British.

‘Did you forget we drive on the left here?’ Bella asked furiously.

‘You stupid bitch... you’re on a one-way street!’ With that he strode back to his own car.

A one-way street? About to open her mouth and loudly disclaim that ridiculous assertion at the same time as she asked him who the hell he thought he was calling a stupid bitch, Bella looked back to the corner and saw the sign. A one-way street. She had turned right into a one-way street and not unnaturally had had a head-on collision. Devastated by the realisation that the accident was entirely her fault, Bella leant against the wing of the Skoda because her knees were threatening to give way.

The other driver was lifting something out of his car. Oh, dear God, what had she hit? For the first time she looked at the other vehicle. It had a hideous déjà vu familiarity, only it had looked considerably more pristine earlier. A Bugatti. She had wrecked a Bugatti Supersport which retailed at somewhere around a quarter of a million pounds. She wanted to throw herself down on the road and scream like a banshee in torment. Her insurance premium would rocket into outer space after this... correction; she’d be lucky to get insurance. This wasn’t her first accident, although it was certainly by far the worst. Dammit, what was the guy’s name? Why, oh, why had she let her temper rip and called him a madman?

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded in a weak voice, moving forward.

He was lounging against his status-symbol car, which was not quite the status symbol it had been. And he had a mobile phone in his hand. Just her luck—a guy with a phone in his car!

‘I am calling the police,’ he imparted, with a decided edge of, And aren’t you going to enjoy that? in his growling delivery.

‘The p-police?’ Bella stammered shrilly, plunged into further depths of unhidden horror. She turned as white as a sheet.

‘Naturally. Why don’t you get back into your vehicle and await their arrival?’

‘Do we need the police?’ she asked in a shaky voice, her heart sinking to the soles of her feet at the prospect of being arrested on a charge of careless driving.

‘Of course we need the police.’

Bella took another desperate step forward. ‘Please don’t get the police!’ she muttered frantically.

‘I should imagine that you will be breathalysed.’

‘I haven’t been drinking. I just don’t see the necessity to get the police!’

‘I expect they already have more than a passing acquaintance with you.’ Rico da Silva sent a glittering look of derision over her.

‘Well, we wouldn’t be complete strangers, let’s put it that way,’ Bella conceded, thinking back miserably to her earliest memories of what her travelling mother had called police harassment. No matter how hard she tried Bella had never lost that childhood terror of the uniformed men who had moved them on from their illegal camping grounds.

‘I didn’t think so. It’s a hard life on the street,’ he murmured, shooting her scantily clad, shivering figure an intent but unreadable glance. ‘Heading home from the nightshift?’

What the hell was he talking about? Struggling to concentrate, she moved even closer. ‘We could sort this out...just you and me, off the record,’ she assured him in desperation, skimming an anxious glance across the street as another car passed by, slackened speed to have a good look at the wreckage, and then drove on. Any minute now a patrol car would be along.

‘Es verdad?’ Diamond-bright dark eyes scanned her beautiful, pleading face, his strong jaw line clenching hard as a long finger stabbed buttons on the mobile phone without her even being aware of it. ‘I don’t think so. In that one field alone I prefer amateurs.’

‘Amateur what?’ Bella returned in despair, deciding that he had definitely been drinking.

And then she heard the police answering the call, registered that he had already dialled, and allowed sheer panic to take over. Snaking out a hand, she grabbed at the phone. Lean fingers as compelling as steel cuffs closed round her wrist and jerked it ruthlessly down. She burst into floods of tears, her overtaxed emotions shooting to a typically explosive Bella climax and spilling over instantaneously.

‘You bully!’ she sobbed accusingly.

With a raw gasp of male fury, the background of the police telephonist’s voice was abruptly silenced as if the man before her had cut the connection. ‘You attacked me!’ he grated.

‘I just didn’t want you to ring the police!’ she slung back, on the brink of another howl. ‘But go ahead! Have me arrested! I don’t care; I’m past caring!’

‘Stop making such a noise,’ he growled. ‘You’re making an exhibition of yourself!’

‘If I want to have hysterics, that’s my business!’ she asserted through her tears. ‘What do you think this is going to do to my insurance?’

There was a short silence.

‘You have insurance?’

‘Of course I have insurance,’ Bella mumbled, making an effort to collect herself and keeping a careful distance from him, since he had already proved that he was the aggressive type.

‘Give me the details and sign a statement admitting fault and you can be on your way,’ he drawled with unhidden relish.

Bella shot him an astonished glance. ‘You mean it?’

‘Sí... five more minutes in your company and I will understand why men murder. Not only that, I will be at the forefront of a campaign to bring in the death penalty for women drivers!’ Rico da Silva intoned between clenched teeth.

Sexist pig. Smearing her non-waterproof mascara over her cheeks as she wiped at her wet face, Bella bit back the temptation to answer in kind. After all, he was going to be civilised. If he had smashed up her Bugatti she probably would have wanted blood too. Prepared to be generous, she still, however, gave a deliberate little rub to her wrist just to let him know that he might not have drawn blood but he might have inflicted bruises.

He planted a sheet of paper on the bonnet and handed her a pen.

‘You write it; I’ll sign it,’ she proffered glumly.

‘I want it to be in your handwriting.’

But he still stood over her and dictated what he wanted her to write. She struggled with the big words he used, her rather basic spelling powers taxed beyond their limits.

‘This is illiterate,’ he remarked in a strained voice.

Bella’s cheeks flamed scarlet. Her itinerant childhood had meant that she had very rarely attended a school. Gramps had changed all that when she had gone to live with him but somehow her spelling had never quite come up to scratch. Laziness and lack of interest, she conceded inwardly, for she possessed a formidable intelligence which she focused solely on the field of art. Spelling came a very poor second.

‘But it’s fine,’ Rico da Silva added abruptly, suddenly folding it and stuffing it into the pocket of his dinner jacket.

Seeing him reach for his phone again, she gabbled the name of her insurance company in a rush.

‘I’m ringing for a tow-truck for the cars,’ he murmured, reading the reanimated fear on her expressive face.

‘Oh... Thanks,’ she muttered, turning her head and strolling away while he made the call, far more concerned with what it would cost to pay for the towing service. ‘I’m sorry about your car. It was beautiful,’ she sighed when he had stopped speaking.

‘I’ll call a cab for you.’

Bella bit out a rueful laugh. She lived in London, which was almost sixty miles away. The cab fare home would be a week’s wages—maybe more. ‘Forget it.’

‘I will pay for it.’

She dealt him a disbelieving look. ‘No way.’

‘I insist.’ He was digging a wallet out of his pocket with astonishing alacrity.

‘I said no,’ she reminded him flatly, embarrassed to death by the offer and hurriedly attempting to change the subject. ‘Cold for May, isn’t it?’

‘Take the money!’ he bit out with stinging impatience.

Bella frowned, hunching deeper into her battered jacket, one long, shapely thigh crossed over the other, her fantastic head of hair blowing back from her exotic features in the breeze. ‘What’s the matter with you? I have to wait for the tow-truck’

‘I’ll wait for it,’ he told her harshly.

‘Look, it isn’t my car...’

‘What?’ he raked at her.

‘It belongs to this old man I live with. I only have the use of it,’ Bella explained soothingly.

Narrowed dark eyes rested on her, his beautifully shaped mouth hardening, and she found herself staring at him, noticing the shape of his lips. It was the artist in her, she supposed abstractedly. He would be an interesting study to paint.

‘How old is old?’ Rico da Silva enquired, surprising her.

‘As old as you feel.’ Bella laughed in more like her usual manner. ‘Hector says he feels fifty on a good day, seventy on a bad. I reckon he’s about the lattes.’

‘And what are you?’

‘Twenty-one...’ she checked her watch ‘....and four and a half hours.’

‘Yesterday was your birthday?’

‘Lousy birthday,’ she muttered, more to herself than him. ‘I had to work.’

‘It happens,’ he said in a strained voice.

‘And my boyfriend is two-timing me.’ It just came out. She hadn’t meant to say it. Maybe it was the effect of bravely smiling all evening and keeping her mouth shut with her friends.

‘The pensioner?’ He sounded even more strained.

It was the language barrier, she decided. How on earth could he imagine that she was dating a man old enough to be her grandfather?

‘Not Hector—my boyfriend.’

‘Maybe you should think of another occupation-something that keeps you home at night... although perhaps not,’ he muttered half under his breath.

Had she told him that she was a waitress? She didn’t remember doing so but she must have done. Screening another sleepy yawn, Bella sighed. ‘I don’t mind most of the time, although it’s murder on my feet and it’s very boring. Still, it pays the rent—’

‘He charges you rent?’

‘Of course he does... although not very much.’ She yawned again, politely masking her mouth with a slender hand. ‘He tried to claim for me as a housekeeper but the Inland Revenue weren’t impressed. I’m not really very domestic but he wouldn’t like it if I was. It’s kind of hard to explain Hector to people...’

‘Are you in the habit of telling complete strangers the most intimate details of your life?’ Rico da Silva prompted in a tone of driven fascination.

Bella thought about it and then nodded, although she would have disputed his concept of ‘intimate details’. Friends said, ‘I told you so.’ Strangers just listened and volunteered their own experiences. Not that the male standing next to her would. He was the secretive type, she decided. Still waters ran deep—dark and deep as hell with this one, she thought helplessly.

‘You’re a financier,’ she remarked conversationally, thinking that what was good enough for the gander was good enough for the goose.

‘How the hell do you know that?’ he shot at her forbiddingly.

Bella gave him a startled look. ‘I saw you earlier this evening and a friend told me who you were.’

‘And then all of a sudden you crash into me. Two such coincidences in one night strain my credulity!’ Rico da Silva shot at her.

‘Pretty lousy luck, huh? If I’d done the cards this morning I probably wouldn’t have got out of bed—’

‘“The cards”?’ he echoed.

‘Tarot cards. Though mostly I steer clear of the temptation to tell my own fortune these days. Sometimes I think you’re better not knowing what’s ahead of you.’

‘I do not believe in such a coincidence,’ he stated afresh, staring down at her in a very intimidating fashion. ‘It was your intent to meet me, es verdad?’

‘You’re a very uptight personality.’ Bella shook her vibrant head. ‘And a bit weird, to be frank—’

‘Weird?’ Rico da Silva roared. ‘You think that I am weird?’

She raised her hands. ‘Now just count to ten and back off, buster.’

“‘Buster”?’ he repeated, snatching in a hissing breath.

‘Mr Silver... no, it wasn’t that, was it?’ She sighed.

‘Rico... da... Silva,’ he enunciated very slowly and carefully, as if he were talking to a complete idiot.

‘Yeah, I knew it was something strange. I hate to tell you this but it is a little weird to imagine that a total stranger would crash into you deliberately to meet you,’ Bella told him gently. ‘I mean, I might have been killed.’

From beneath black lashes so long that they cast crescent shadows on his savage cheekbones, he cast her a glimmering glance. ‘I have known women to take tremendous risks to make my acquaintance.’

‘I wonder why?’ she said, and then realised by the sudden, thundering silence that she had said it out loud instead of just thinking it. ‘What I mean is...well, there’s only one way of saying this, Mr da Silver—’

‘Silva!’ he slotted in rawly.

Uptight wasn’t the word for it. This guy lived on the outer edge. On the brink of gently assuring him that he had met some very peculiar women, Bella was silenced briefly by the sight of the tow-truck surging up the street towards them.

‘Talk about service!’ she gasped. ‘I thought we’d be here for hours!’

‘Another half-hour of your relentless, mindless chatter and I would be—’

‘More hyper than you already are? It’s OK. I’m not offended,’ she told him with a smile. ‘You either love me or you hate me. But, for your own sake, get your blood pressure checked and take up something relaxing like gardening. Guys like you drop dead from heart attacks at forty-five.’ Dragging her attention from the darkening colour of his cheekbones and the razor-slash effect of his incredulous gaze, Bella turned to gape at the arrival of a second tow-truck. ‘Gosh... one each!’

With that, she rushed over to the Skoda, belatedly realising that she would need to clear the car out. She was kneeling on the driver’s seat, poking around amongst the rubbish for stray items of clothing, letters, bills, her sketch-pad and pencils, when his voice assailed her again from behind.

‘I will expect you to pass on your insurance details to my secretary tomorrow. This is the number.’

Awkwardly she twisted round and reached out to grasp a gilded card and dig it into her pocket.

‘If you don’t call, I will inform the police—’

‘Look, what are you trying to do—give me nightmares?’ she exclaimed helplessly, clinging perilously to the steering wheel to lean out and look up at him. ‘I am a law-abiding person.’

‘To trust you goes against my every principle,’ he admitted unapologetically.

‘You wouldn’t want me to lose my licence, would you?’ Bella fixed enormous green eyes on him in reproach. ‘It took me a lot of years to get that licence. The examiners used to draw lots for me and the one that got the short straw was it! I mean, we all have weaknesses and mine is in the driving department, but this is truly the very worst accident I have ever had and I am going to be much more careful in the future... cross my heart and hope to die—’

‘Or shut up.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ She squinted up at him.

He extended his phone with an air of long-suffering hauteur. ‘Ring your boyfriend to come and pick you up.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding. He’d probably say his car had a flat tyre or something anyway,’ she mused, returning to her frantic clean-up.

‘There must be somebody you can contact!’

‘At four in the morning to take me back to London?’ And pigs might fly, her tone said.

‘I am not giving you a lift!’ he snapped in a whiplash response.

So he had been heading for London too. ‘I wasn’t aware I asked for one,’ she hissed. ‘Now why don’t you just go away and leave me alone?’

‘I am being foolish. No doubt you are accustomed to walking lonely streets at this hour of the night, es verdad? But it is hard for me to forget my natural instinct to behave as a gentleman—’

‘I would have said you forgot it the minute I hit your car... but it’s OK,’ Bella continued sweetly. ‘I didn’t notice. I haven’t got much experience of what you would probably call gentlemen. I cut my teeth on creeps.’

There was a fulminating silence.

‘Make sure you make that call tomorrow.’

Bella scrambled out backwards with her bulging carrier bag, wondering why he was still hovering. Approaching the driver of the tow-truck, she told him to be sure to dump the Skoda at the nearest garage possible. Hopefully that would cut the cost. ‘I can’t pay you now,’ she then said awkwardly. ‘I haven’t got enough money on me.’

‘I will take care of it,’ Rico da Silva announced glacially from behind her.

She grimaced and ignored him to ask the driver what it was going to cost. Her horror was unfeigned. ‘I’m not asking you to fix it!’ she protested in a shattered voice.

‘I said I will pay the bill!’ Rico da Silva blitzed. Her temples were pounding like crazy. She just couldn’t fight any more. Once again she nodded. Anything for a quiet life. She started to walk away. Her feet were killing her.

‘Where are you going?’

‘The bus station.’ She glanced back at him with a frown of incomprehension, well aware that he liked her just about as much as she liked him, wondering why on earth it should matter to him how she intended to get home.

‘Madre de Dios!’ he ground out, skimming a furious hand of frustration through the air. ‘There will be no buses until morning!’

‘Morning’s only a couple of hours away.’

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he bit out between clenched teeth.

‘Forget it.’

‘I said I will give you a lift, but only on one condition—you do not open your mouth!’

‘I prefer the bus. It’s more egalitarian. I’m allowed to breathe, you know, that sort of life-enhancing stuff called oxygen? I use up a lot of it, but thanks all the same.’ And then she saw the limousine waiting by the kerb on the other side of the street and her sleepy green eyes widened to their fullest extent. She had assumed that he was catching a cab. But a lift in a real live Hmo... She just couldn’t resist the offer. ‘Mr da Silva?’ she called abruptly.

‘I thought you might change your mind,’ he breathed, without turning his glossy dark head. ‘I must be out of my mind to be doing this.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Give my chauffeur your address and then shut up,’ he grated.

Bella climbed in and surveyed the opulent interior with unhidden fascination. ‘Do you always travel... sorry, I forgot!’

The limo purred away from the kerb. Her companion stabbed a button, and under the onslaught of her incredulous scrutiny a revolving drinks cabinet smoothly appeared. ‘Wow,’ she said, deeply impressed.

‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked shortly.

‘No, thanks. My father was next door to being an alcoholic. Personally speaking, I wouldn’t touch the stuff with a barge-pole!’

He expelled his breath in a hiss. She watched his hand still and then hover momentarily before he finally grasped the whisky bottle.

‘I guess—’she began, and then sealed her mouth again as those black-as-night eyes hit on her with silencing effect.

‘You guess what?’ he finally gritted. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense!’

‘I was going to say that we don’t have a lot in common, do we? It’s a bit like meeting an alien,’ Bella mumbled, sleep catching up on her as she rested her heavy head back against the leather upholstery and closed her drooping eyelids. ‘Except even the alien might have had a sense of humour...’

Someone was shaking her shoulder hard. She surfaced groggily, registered that she was lying face down on some kind of seat, then remembered and hauled herself upright into a sitting position.

‘This cannot be where you live!’ Rico da Silva vented with raw exasperation. ‘Is this your idea of a joke?’

Bella focused on the familiar Georgian square of enormous, elegant terraced houses, which had been her home for the past year. ‘Why should it be my idea of a joke?’ She fumbled with the door-release mechanism but the door remained stubbornly closed.

‘I should imagine that not one in a thousand hookers lives in a house worth millions!’

‘Hookers’? He thought she was a hooker? He thought she sold her body for money? Aghast, Bella stared at him for several seemingly endless seconds, telling herself that she had somehow misunderstood him. ‘You think I’m a prostitute?’ she finally gasped, wide-eyed with rampant disbelief. ‘How dare you? Let me out of this car right now!’

A winged ebony brow quirked. ‘Are you saying now that you are not?’

‘Of course I’m not!’ Bella threw at him in violent outrage, belatedly understanding all of his peculiar utterances. ‘I’ve never been so insulted in my life! You have a mind like a sewer—’

‘You dress like one—’

‘Dress like one?’ Liz’s wretched too short skirt! She wanted to scream.

‘And you came on to me like a whore!’ he condemned, without batting an eyelash.

“‘Came on to” you?’ Fit to be tied, Bella looked at him with splintering green eyes. ‘Me... come on to you? Are you crazy?’

‘You offered yourself to me—’

‘I what? You’re a lunatic... Let me out of this car; I don’t feel safe!’ she shrieked. ‘I should never have got into it in the first place. I knew you were weird!’

‘Are you trying to tell me that I was mistaken?’ His strong, dark features were fiercely clenched.

‘How dare you think I would come on to you?’ Bella spat at him like a bristling cat. ‘I never go for dark men! Your car was at more risk than you were! And I may wear second-hand clothes, talk with an Essex accent and hardly be able to spell, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have principles! It might interest you to know that I’m a virgin—’

He burst into spontaneous laughter. In fact he threw his dark head back and very nearly choked on his disbelief. Bella launched herself across the car at him in a rage and two strong hands snaked out and closed round her narrow forearms to hold her imprisoned mere inches from him and in devastating contact with every line of his leashed, powerful body.

‘A virgin?’ he queried in a shaking voice. ‘Maybe not a whore... but definitely not a virgin.’

‘Let go of me!’

For a split-second he stared down into her brilliant green eyes and something happened inside her—something that had never happened to Bella before; a tight clenched sensation jerked low in her stomach. It made the hair prickle at the back of her neck, the breath catch in her throat, every muscle draw taut. She looked back at him with dawning comprehension and horror, feeling the swell of her own breasts, the sudden, painful tightening of her nipples.