The Devil and Miss Jones

‘Wait…’ she tried, low and uncertain, but the wind whipped away the sound of her voice, scattering it across the deserted hillside.

He had only got a few metres away from her and yet already she felt shockingly lost and alone. The leather of his jacket seemed to have lost some of its protection against the wind, and she was gripped by a terrible sense of fear at the thought of being alone again. It had been bad enough before but she suddenly knew that it would be terribly, frighteningly worse this time after the brief spell of human contact that this man had provided.

‘Wait!’ she tried again, louder this time.

She saw his determined footsteps slow, come to a gradual but definite halt. He didn’t turn, but he had stopped, and the way that her heart lurched told her how important that was. Safe or not, her mind was made up.

‘What time is it?’

It was perhaps the last question he had been anticipating, and as he turned the quick dark frown that drew his black brows together told her that. But he turned a quick glance at the workmanlike watch on a heavy leather strap around his strong-boned wrist and then brought his eyes back to her face.

‘Almost two o’clock—is that important?’ His gaze and his tone had sharpened on the last words.

Her reaction had given her away. The start she had been unable to suppress, the way that her breath had hissed in through her teeth at the thought of the way her day should have been going right now.

‘Might have been,’ was all she could manage.

It should have been the beginning of her new life. The start of what she had foolishly believed was the happiness she had been looking for for so long. She might have turned up at Gavin’s door to tell him that she thought she was making a mistake, but the things she had heard and seen had stopped her dead, unable to deliver her message. And Gavin had been so intent on his own sensual pleasure that he hadn’t even heard the door open. So he would have no idea the wedding was not going ahead and if it was nearly two o’clock then the ceremony she had run from was officially about to begin.

‘Will you help me? Can we get out of here?’ A rather wild gesture of her hand indicated the sleek, powerful black and silver motorbike that stood at the side of the road. ‘On that.’

She had to get as far away as possible from the Hall where no doubt there must now be a search in progress, everyone wondering what had happened to the bride who seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

‘I take it that you need to get to your wedding?’ he asked now.

‘Oh, no!’

She couldn’t hold back on the horror that flooded her mind at just the thought of it. She could still hear those words, muttered in the thick rough tones of sexual passion.

‘It’s worth putting up with her in my bed—taking her much prized and held-onto virginity to be legally and fully her husband. Just think, darling—half of seven million when we get a quickie divorce—that’s worth consummating the damn marriage with Miss Prim, even if I do have to lie back and think of the money. Maybe that will turn me on because she sure as hell doesn’t. She’s so big, it’ll be like sleeping with a horse…’

‘No way! That’s the last thing I want!’

She’d shocked him so that his dark head went back, his amazing eyes widening for a second before narrowing again in swift assessment. Her nerves twisted painfully as she saw his frown.

‘I—I want nothing to do with my wedding,’ she declared, the bitter truth ironing out the shake in her voice. ‘It would have been the worst possible mistake I could make so I—got out of there fast. Leaving it all behind me. And I want it to stay behind me—as far behind me as possible.’

‘Es que la verdad?’

The slow drawl had a faintly mocking edge to it, one that had her tensing every muscle as she nerved herself for his next comment. His next question—inevitably it would be something on the lines of exactly what she had left behind and why. And she wasn’t ready to answer that.

‘What language is that?’ she asked sharply. ‘Are you—Spanish?’

She’d asked something that had sparked a new mood in him, one that seemed to have a shade coming down over his eyes, hiding their expression from her. But now she was intrigued, wanting to know more.

‘Argentinian, actually.’

‘And what do you do there?’

Somehow she’d stepped over a line that he didn’t want crossing and his response was brusque, dismissive.

‘Horses and wine.’

So, a gambler? Or a breeder? A drinker or… She didn’t know how to phrase the question and his stony face did nothing to encourage her to go further.

‘You—you’re a long way from home.’

‘A very long way,’ he agreed, his tone sombre in a way that made her feel he was talking of so much more than a physical distance.

‘So are you on holiday—or—?’

The rough shake of his head, sending that wild wet hair flying, had her cutting off the question sharply.

‘It seems that really we’re two of a kind,’ he said slowly.

There was a touch of dark amusement in his words, but there was also something more than that. Something that swirled, harsh and disturbing, at the bottom of his voice.

‘How so?’ Her voice caught sharply on the words.

That deep green gaze swept over her in cool assessment then swung back to his motorbike, eyes narrowed against the rain.

‘We both just took off—turned our backs, left everything behind. Two of a kind.’

CHAPTER TWO

TWO of a kind?

Just the thought of it took her breath away. It was true that was exactly what she’d done. She had felt that there was no other possible opening before her. But him?

Look at him! Did he look like someone in despair at anything? A man who had felt the need to walk, leave everything behind? A man who had lost…?

No, lost was the last thing he looked. Even with the drizzling rain misting his hair so that it hung damp around his face, the black strands whirled into crazy disarray by the wind, and the white cotton of his tee shirt plastered against the honed lines of his torso, the powerful ribcage, taut muscles, disturbed, or even dishevelled were the last words that came to mind to describe him. Strong, powerful, determined, totally in control fitted him better.

‘You can’t have!’ Disbelief rang in her voice.

‘And why not?’

It was flung at her and the flash of danger in his eyes held a warning that made her take a couple of hasty steps back and away. She had needed this sharp reminder that he was a total stranger and one she didn’t know whether she dared to trust or not.

‘But—don’t you have a job—a home—family who care for you?’

‘I have no home in Argentina now.’

It was a flat, hard statement, and it was only when it died from his eyes, leaving them bleak and opaque, that she realised there had actually been a light in the green depths, one that had made them warmer than ever before. And now she had driven it away with her foolish words.

‘No family either.’

‘I’m sorry… I didn’t mean…’ she began again, but he lifted his shoulders in a shrug that dismissed her concern. He deliberately switched on a smile but it was such a brief, on-off flash of a thing that it had no real warmth or even meaning. And that ‘now’ had had a special emphasis, one that made it plain the loss was of a recent date.

‘Perhaps we’re more alike than you’d think—both on the run, leaving our pasts behind.’

‘Is that really what you’re doing?’ She couldn’t see him running from anything.

But when she looked into those moss-coloured eyes she saw a shadow that swirled in their depths, giving them a look that she recognised. It was the expression that had been on her own face when she had looked in the mirror that morning and known that she was making a terrible mistake. That she couldn’t go through with the wedding to Gavin. It was the expression of someone who knew they had burned their boats and for whom life could never be the same again. And it was carefully masked so that only someone who had been through the same thing would see past the determined defences.

‘Everything?’

His laugh was harsh, dark, seeming to splinter in the damp-laden air like a glass that had been dropped on the stony, wet ground.

‘Take a look around you.’

The wide, vicious gesture embraced the empty, rain-swept road, the parked motorbike.

‘Right now what you see is what you get,’ he declared.

‘That’s all you have?’ she managed, on a very different note from the question she had asked before.

That dark head, the dishevelled overlong hair now soaked by the misty drizzle and clinging to the strong bones of his skull, nodded twice, hard, and undisputable.

‘That’s everything,’ he agreed. ‘A few changes of clothes, some bits and pieces in that bag, and what I stand up in. That’s it.’

‘But you… Why…?’ she began hesitantly but this time he shook his head with a touch of impatience.

‘I could ask the same of you,’ he said and she was relieved to see that at last a trace of lightness had crept into his voice, making it much less frightening, more reassuring. ‘But what would be the point? We’re just strangers, two ships passing in the night. So let’s leave the questions unasked. The whys unsaid.’

‘Not even names? If I’m supposed to head off out of here with you then you could at least give me a name to use.’

A shrug of those powerful shoulders conceded that point to her.

‘OK…’

He took a step towards her, pulling off one glove and holding out his hand to her.

‘My name is Carlos… Carlos Diablo.’

There was a strange break in the middle of the words, almost as if he had suddenly changed his mind and decided not to tell her. But he finished the sentence smoothly enough, looking her straight in the eyes as he spoke.

Diablo. The word spun round inside her thoughts. Diablo. The devil. Carlos the devil. That sounded so ominous. But it was just a name, Martha reassured herself. Nothing but a name.

‘And I’m M…’

Her tongue stumbled thickly on the realisation that she had been about to give away her real name. What if he knew who she was? About the money she had won—the millions that had been all that had attracted Gavin to her. She had no idea how long he had been in England; if he had read it in the newspapers. She didn’t want to take any chances.

‘I’m Miss Jones,’ she said, and winced at just how prim and restrained it sounded. But it would do for now. After all, she had no way of knowing if he had even given her his real name.

‘I am pleased to meet you—Miss Jones…’

He gave the carefully formal name an ironic intonation as if he was only too well aware of the way that she was concealing the truth from him, but quite clearly he didn’t care a bit.

The devil and Miss Jones. It sounded like a gothic romance. Or some blues song.

That hand was still between them, long and brown and strong and totally steady, totally dependable. Surprisingly it put Martha’s mind at ease and had her moving to put her fingers into his, feel them swallowed up in the heat and hardness, the strength and—yes and the comfort of it.

She was totally unprepared for the effect that just that simple gesture had on her. Her hand touched his, warm skin against warm skin, and suddenly it was as if she were in the middle of an electrical storm as sensation fizzed along every nerve. It was more than warmth, more than contact, and heaven knew she needed both of those. It was something deep and primitive, wild and dangerous and yet somehow essential to life. It swept away the chill that had pervaded her body as she’d stood, miserable and lost, at the side of the road and it threatened to splinter her mind into tiny pieces as she fought to get her much-needed control back again.

Suddenly Martha knew a crazy, irrational need to go somewhere—anywhere—with this man—this Diablo. And not just because she wanted to escape from all she had left behind her, but because she wanted to go forward into something new and different—and startlingly exciting.

When she looked up into his face she saw something change there too. A whole new expression suddenly came over his features, softening them, changing them in the most dramatic way. His eyes warmed so that their shadowed green now looked like the colour of the fields where the rainclouds had parted and let the rays of the sun shine through, illuminating them. And his mouth—dear heaven, how sensual was that mouth? It was firm and strong but the fullness of the lower lip gave it a sexy curve that made something tingle right through her body, particularly when he let a tiny hint of a smile curl at the corners just for a moment. His grip on her hand tightened, briefly, conveying a message of support and encouragement that she was anxious enough to welcome hungrily. She even let herself wonder just for one brief heady moment just what it might feel to have that mouth on hers, feel it caress her skin.

‘So now can we get on?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know about you but I’m getting tired of standing here in this wind, getting soaked.’

‘Of course!’ Guilt at the way she had kept him hanging around, the rain soaking into his hair and shirt, made her sound over-enthusiastic. ‘But how do I get on that—in this?’

Her gesture took in the long white silk skirt, sleek and clinging at the waist, hips, around her legs, with just the tiniest flare of material at her ankles. Her delicate veil, soft and flowing when she had put it on an hour or so before, now hung limp and weighted with rain around her face and head.

‘I’m not sure I can manage it.’

Why did women wear those skin-tight skirts? Carlos wondered. He was surprised that she could even walk in that dress, let alone do anything else. It was sexy as hell though, in the way that it shaped her breasts, exposing just a hint of creamy cleavage, the suggestion of seduction so much more enticing than a full-on plunging neckline. The silk then clung to the swell of her hips, taking the eye down the length of her body to the point where the flounces of material kicked out around the knees. Was there anything more calculated to emphasise the womanly shape, the curves that some—mostly other women, he suspected—might consider to be rather fuller and more lush than current fashion demanded?

Not him. He liked a woman to be a woman and that meant that she had to have a female shape. And this Miss Jones certainly was all woman.

‘We’re going to have to do something about that.’

She hadn’t expected to walk very far in the designer dress, he reminded himself. Only down the aisle… Just what the hell had happened to make her run out on her wedding? The need to know was like an itch in his mind though he didn’t feel that she would be prepared to answer if he questioned her about it. Not the woman who only gave her name as ‘Miss Jones’. So what was she so determined to hold back on? What did she have to hide?

And what sort of a groom would be fool enough to let a beautiful woman like this slip through his fingers when she had already agreed to marry him?

‘And what would that “something” we have to do be? How exactly do you expect to manage…?’

‘Easy,’ Carlos drawled. ‘Nothing to it.’

He had enough experience of getting women out of their clothes to have some understanding of how female garments worked. Admittedly, the women concerned had been only too eager to help him. He had never had to plan on dealing with a woman’s clothing so that he could help her run away from another man.

But from his memory of dealing with silk dresses in the past, they offered little resistance to strong hands. Just how hard could it be to get rid of some of that unwanted material?

‘Leave it to me.’

In a moment he was on his knees on the wet road at her feet, long brown hands reaching for her dress, tanned skin dark against the pale material. He gathered it into his fingers, twisting, bunching slightly so that it pulled against her legs, making her take an awkward step back and then forwards again, forced to stay where she was, held prisoner by his firm grip.

‘Just stay there,’ he muttered, a note of command in his tone, one that made her freeze where she stood.

But the small movement she’d made had been enough to make him freeze too—though in a very different sort of reaction. In the same moment that she’d stepped back and forward he had bunched the fine silk of her skirt in his hands, lifting it ready to get rid of the constricting skirt. And that had exposed the slender length of her legs.

Infierno! She was actually wearing stockings and suspenders, the nervous twitch of her body taking the skirt up higher so that the delicate pale blue lace of a garter too was exposed. Clinging round the top of her thigh. For a couple of heart-thudding seconds Carlos’s throat dried shockingly, his hands tightening in the slippery material.

‘Stand still!’

His voice was gruffer this time, and he didn’t care if she thought he was ordering her around. The struggle for control of his own senses, his own body, had put the rough note into his tone. This Miss Jones was one of those women who believed that the pulse point at the back of the knee was a good spot to spray some of her perfume. And she was damn right about that too if the heady, spicy scent that hit his nostrils was anything to go by. Not for Miss Jones the delicate floral perfume the lace and silk of her clothing and the fine blonde hair might suggest. Instead she wore something that spoke more of enticement, of sensuality. Obviously she had been planning on sharing that sexuality with the man she was supposed to have been marrying.

It was damned difficult to concentrate on what he was doing with his body hardening in instinctive response to the closeness of her delicate flesh, the scent of her skin combined with that sensuous perfume. A hot wave of jealousy of the unknown man she had planned to share this delectable body with tonight swept through him, making his fingers clench even more tightly on the white silk. He had to be a total fool to have let her get away—to have driven her away from him.

Well, maybe the fool’s loss was his gain. Miss Jones as a prospective bride he would have had to leave well alone. This woman as a bride who had clearly had more than second thoughts about marrying the man she was promised to and who obviously wanted to put as much distance between her and her groom as possible was a very different matter.

‘I said stand still!’ he repeated as another twitch of her body brought that sexy scent to torment his senses all over again.

‘I am standing still.’

Martha had to mutter the words between clenched teeth in order not to betray the way she was feeling. She just wished he would hurry up and get the job done as soon as possible. She didn’t feel that she could take the screaming tension of her nerves and every one of her senses for many moments longer.

He wasn’t actually touching her, only the material of her skirt, and yet the surface of her skin seemed to tingle as if he was actually stroking it, as if his breath was warm against her exposed flesh. The cold, miserable dampness of the afternoon seemed to evaporate in a second, leaving her body heated from the inside so that she felt sure that she would actually see steam rising from her clothes where the warmth dried them. But she couldn’t drag her eyes away from the man at her feet. Looking down at his dark head as he bent over his task, her gaze was grabbed and held, drawn by a sensual magnetism, and her fingers actually twitched against her sides as she fought the impulse to reach out and touch, stroke the black, disordered strands back into smoothness against the strong bones of his skull.

She wanted to touch him. No, it was more than a want—it was something close to a need. She had to feel him, make some physical contact—something more than just the warm, strong comfort of his palm on hers, her hand held safely inside his. And yet she knew she had to hold back, because if she gave in to this wild, irrational need, broke through the natural, instinctive restraints that held them separate, then some intuitive feeling warned that it would never stay that way.

There would have to be more. She just knew it. No other man had ever made her feel this way. But what if he found her as unattractive as Gavin had done?

… even if I do have to lie back and think of the money. Maybe that will turn me on because she sure as hell doesn’t. She’s so big, it’ll be like sleeping with a horse…

She couldn’t bear it if another man found her so unappealing. It would be like presenting the other cheek after someone had slapped her viciously already.

As if sensing her thoughts Carlos suddenly paused, turned his head, and looked up, straight into her eyes. A burn like a bolt of lightning went straight through her as she saw the new darkness in that green gaze. A darkness that mirrored the way she was feeling, the stinging sensitivity that flooded every nerve.

And that was too much. Already way off balance with all that had happened that day, she could barely cope with her own response. The prospect of having to cope with the fact that he might be feeling something of the same was more than she could handle. For a moment the world seemed to swing round her, the ground rocking beneath her feet and making her feel desperately insecure. In a panic she actually stamped her foot hard on the wet surface of the road.

‘What exactly are you doing?’

‘This…’ His response was as curt and raw-toned as her own as he turned his attention back to the task in hand.

She felt a sharp tug, heard a faint sound of something ripping and suddenly there was a rush of cold air around her ankles, her calves. She wasn’t quite sure what he had done until she saw him toss the white frill of silk to one side, having ripped it right off the bottom of her dress. Now she could move more easily. She could walk, might even be able to clamber onto that powerful beast of a bike.

‘Thanks—’

Testing, tentative, she took a step towards it—another—then froze, another thought stilling her feet.

If she got onto that bike then she would have to sit behind him. Close behind him. She would have to wrap her arms around that lean, tight waist, rest her chest, her breasts, against the broad, strong back, feel the heat of his body reaching hers. She would have to open her legs wide, spread them to accommodate…

‘No!’

‘What the hell now?’

Carlos was getting to his feet, wiping his hands down the taut length of his denim-covered thighs. The strange connection there had been between the two of them seemed to have evaporated in a rush and his voice held a thread of irritation that grated uncomfortably on her nerves.

‘Lady, make your mind up. What is it?’ he demanded again.

‘I—I’m scared.’ She couldn’t bring herself to say of what because she couldn’t even start to explain it to herself.

‘I’m a perfectly safe driver.’

‘I’m sure you’re a fantastic driver!’

But that didn’t mean that she would feel safe with him anywhere. And… From nowhere came another thought. One that shook her right through to the very core of her being.

If she felt like this now, with this complete stranger, how could she ever have thought that Gavin was the man she wanted to marry? How could she have been so blind as to think she felt enough for him to say yes to his proposal?

But after three long lonely years of nursing her mother through her last illness, she had been looking for love—for a family—for a future. And she had fallen into his grasp like a ripe little plum. A ripe, stupid, easily deceived little plum. She had needed to be loved, had been in love with the idea of love. At least she had seen sense before it was too late.

‘Isn’t there a law about wearing a helmet on a motorbike?’ she hedged, expecting and seeing his impatience at her reaction.

‘I thought you wanted to get out of here.’