‘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.

‘So what do you do on the nightshift?’ Rico da Silva probed in a purring undertone that set up a strange chain reaction down her spine.

Seriously shaken by the reaction of her own treacherous body, she remained mutinously silent.

‘And where does Hector fit in?’

‘Let go of me... I don’t feel well,’ Bella muttered tremulously, and it was true.

He searched her pallor, abruptly freeing hei. His ebony brows had drawn together in a sudden frown. She had the strangest feeling that he was as disconcerted by his own behaviour as she had been.

‘I’ll talk to your secretary tomorrow,’ she mumbled, her nerves strung so tightly that tension was a fevered pulse-beat through her entire body.

He pressed a button. The chauffeur climbed out and opened the door in the humming silence. Bella flew out like a cork ejected from a bottle and fled up the steps of the shabbiest house in the row. Inserting her key, she unlocked the front door, then rushed into the shelter of the dark house and rested back against the door like someone who had seen death at close quarters. Every sense on super-alert, she listened to the limo driving off before she breathed again.

Shock was still reverberating through her. She had felt so safe for so long. That had never happened to her before with a man. And then all of a sudden, when it was least expected, she had been gripped by the most dangerous drive in the entire human repertoire—sexual desire. But she was really proud of herself. Control and common sense had triumphed. She had run like a rabbit.

CHAPTER TWO

IN THE half-light. Bella picked her way past the piled-up books and newspapers that littered every stair and headed up to the second floor and the privacy of her spacious, cluttered studio. She was still shaking like a leaf. So that was what it felt like! She lit the candle beside her bed, and slowly drew in a deep, sustaining breath. Well, thankfully she was extremely unlikely ever to see him again. There was no need to worry about temptation in that quarter. Even so, she was still shaken.

‘I go with my feelings—that can never be wrong,’ Cleo had once said loftily, supremely blind to the wreckage of disastrous relationships in her past. Her mother had been like a kamikaze pilot with men. Every creep within a hundred-mile radius had zeroed in on her, stopped a while and then moved on. But Cleo had kept on trying, regardless of the consequences to herself and her daughter, always convinced that the next one would be different. And Liz could have no idea just how much it scared Bella to be told that she suffered from a similar lack of judgement with the men in her life.

When she came downstairs later that morning Hector was shuffling about in his carpet slippers in the ancient kitchen. The gas bill had arrived. He was taking it as hard as he always did when a bill came through the letter box. There were the usual charged enquiries about how often she had used the oven and boiled the kettle. Hector Barsay’s mission in life was to save money.

It was his one failing but, as Gramps had often said, everybody had their little idiosyncrasies, and those same little idiosyncrasies got a tighter hold the older you got. Beneath his crusty, dismal manner Hector was kind. He had a bunch of prosperous relatives just waiting for him to die so that they could sell his house and make their fortunes. None of them had visited since the time they had tried to persuade him into an old folks’ home and he had threatened to leave them out of his will.

‘I crashed the car last night,’ Bella told him tautly.

‘Again?’ Hector cringed into his shabby layers of woolly cardigans and she squirmed, guilt and shame engulfing her.

‘It’s not going to cost you anything!’ she swore.

‘I haven’t got anything!’ His faded blue eyes rolled in his head at the very suggestion that his pocket might be touched.

‘That’s what you have insurance for,’ she told him in consolation. ‘Before you know it the Skoda will be back in the garage as good as new.’

Back upstairs, she dug out her insurance details and wrinkled her nose. The renewal hadn’t yet been sent but then they always took their time about that and, to be fair, she had been a little late in sending on the money because Hector had made her ring round half of London trying to get a cheaper quote. When you had to do it from a phone box, that took time.

She headed out for a phone. Hector insisted that his phone was only to be used in an emergency. The girl at the insurance company was chatty until Bella explained about the accident. Then she went off the line for a while.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Jennings,’ she murmured on her return, ‘but at the time of the accident you were not insured with us—’

‘What are you talking about?’ Bella was aghast.

‘Your premium should have arrived by Tuesday. Unfortunately it was two days late—’

‘But surely-?’

‘You were given an adequate period in which to respond to the renewal notice.’

‘But I—’

‘We will be returning your premium in the post. The offer was not accepted within the stated period and we are entitled to withdraw it.’

Argument got Bella nowhere. Reeling with shock, she stood back to let the next person in the queue use the phone. From her pocket she removed the card that Rico da Silva had given her. How could she ring his secretary and tell her she had no insurance? Dear heaven, that was a criminal offence!

A Bugatti... In anguish she clutched at her hair, her stomach heaving. And what about the repair of Hector’s Skoda? She would be in debt for the rest of her life. Maybe she would go to prison! Rico da Silva had that piece of paper on which she admitted turning the wrong way into a one-way street without due care and attention!

An hour later Bella was hanging over a reception desk and smiling her most pleading smile. ‘Please... this is a matter of life and death!’

‘Mr da Silva’s secretary, Miss Ames, has no record of your name, Miss Jennings. You are wasting your time and mine,’ the elegant receptionist said frigidly.

‘But I’ve already explained that. He probably forgot about it, you know? He had a late night!’ Bella appealed in despair.

‘If you don’t remove yourself from this desk I will be forced to call security.’

‘At four this morning Rico told me to ring his secretary!’ Bella exclaimed, shooting her last bolt.

Sudden silence fell in the busy foyer. Heads turned. The receptionist’s eyes widened and were swiftly concealed by her lashes, faint colour burnishing her cheeks. ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ she said in a stilted voice.

Bella chewed anxiously at her lower lip and watched her retreat to the phone again; only, this time the conversation that took place was very low-key. She skimmed a hand down over her slim black Lycra skirt, adjusted her thin cotton fitted jacket and surveyed the scuffed toes of her fringed cowboy boots. A clump of suited men nearby were studying her as if she had just jumped naked out of a birthday cake.

But then it was that kind of building—a bank. Just being inside it gave her the heebie-jeebies. All marble pillars and polished floors and hushed voices. Sort of like a funeral parlour, she reflected miserably. And she didn’t belong here. She remembered that time she had gone to plead Gramps’ case and the executive had been so smooth and nice that she had thought she was actually getting somewhere. But double-talk had been created for places like this. The bank had still called in the debt and Gramps had lost everything.

‘Miss Ames will see you,’ the receptionist whispered out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Take that lift in the corner.’

‘How can I help you, Miss Jennings?’ She was greeted by the svelte older woman as the lift doors opened on the top floor.

‘I need to see Mr da Silva urgently.’

‘I’m afraid that Mr da Silva is in a very important meeting and cannot be disturbed. Perhaps you would like to leave a message?’

‘I’ll wait.’ Bella groaned. ‘Maybe you could send a message in to him?’

‘And what would you like this message to say?’

‘Can I come in... like, go and sit down?’

The older woman stepped reluctantly aside.

Loan-sharking certainly paid. Bella took in her palatial surroundings without surprise. ‘I’ll write the message.’

A notepad was extended to her. Bella dashed off four words, ripped off the sheet, folded it five times into a tiny scrap and handed it over.

‘Mr da Silva does not like to be disturbed.’

‘He’s going to like what I have to tell him even less,’ Bella muttered, sprawling down on a sofa.

Miss Ames disappeared. The brunette at the desk watched her covertly as though she was afraid that she was about to pocket the crystal ashtray on the coffee-table. Two minutes later Miss Ames returned, all flushed and taut.

‘Come this way, please...’

Bella strode up the corridor, hands stuck in her pockets, fingers curled round the pack of cigarettes that nerves had driven her to buy before she’d entered the bank.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Rico da Silva blazed across the width of the most enormous office she had ever seen. Her heels were sinking into the carpet.

She looked around her with unhidden curiosity and then back at him. He had to be about six feet four. Wide shoulders, narrow hips, long, lean legs. Michelangelo’s David trapped in the clothing chains of convention. Navy pinstriped suit, boring white shirt, predictable navy tie—he probably put on a red one for Christmas and thought he was being really daring. He was looking her over as if she were a computer virus threatening to foul up the entire office network. She tilted her chin, and her gaze collided with glittering golden eyes...

He had really gorgeous eyes. In the streetlight she hadn’t got the full effect. Eyes the colour of the setting sun, spectacularly noticeable in that hard-angled, bronzed face. Eyes that sizzled and burned. The key to the soul. There was a tiger in there fighting to get free—a sexual tiger, all teeth and claws and passion. On some primal level she could feel the unholy heat. Wow, this guy wants me, she registered in serious shock.

‘I asked you what the hell you’re doing here,’ Rico repeated with leashed menace.

Bella dragged her distracted gaze from his, astonished to discover how hard it was to break that connection. Reddening, she went tense all over, embarrassed by her last crazy thought. ‘I said it in my note.’

‘And what exactly is “We have a problem” intended to denote? By the way, problem is spelt with an e, not an a,’ he delivered, hitting her on her weakest flank.

‘I’ll try to remember that.’ She studied her feet and then abruptly, cravenly yielded to temptation and dug out the cigarettes and matches. Never had she been more in need of the crutch she had abandoned the day she’d moved into Hector’s house. She was just on the brink of lighting up when both the match and cigarette were snatched from her. Under her arrested gaze the cigarette was snapped in two and dropped in a waste-paper basket.

‘A member of the hang-’em-high anti-smoking Reich?’ Bella probed helplessly.

‘What do you think?’

She felt that she had never needed a cigarette more. ‘Just one...?’ she begged.

‘Don’t be pathetic. It won’t cut any ice with me,’ he drawled, with a sardonic twist to his mouth. ‘What is the problem?’

Bella swallowed hard and then breathed in deeply.

‘You look guilty as sin,’ Rico informed her grimly.

‘And if my suspicions as to what has prompted this personal appearance prove correct I’m taking you straight to the police.’

The tip of her tongue slid out to moisten her dry lower lip. His lashes lowered. Hooded eyes, revealing a mere slit of gold, dropped to her mouth and lingered there. A buzzing tension entered the atmosphere. The silence vibrated.

As Bella laid her outdated insurance policy on the desk in front of him she felt as though she was moving in slow motion. ‘Can I sit down?’

‘May I sit down,’ he corrected automatically. ‘No.’

He scanned the document.

‘You see, it only ran out Monday,’ Bella pointed out, in a wobbly plea for understanding. ‘And I sent in the new premium and thought it was fine. But when I phoned the company this morning...’

The well-shaped, dark head lifted. Lancing golden eyes bit into her shrinking flesh. ‘You were driving without insurance when you hit me—’

‘Not intentionally!’ Bella gasped, raising both hands, palms outward, in a gesture of sincerity. ‘I had no idea. I thought I was covered. I’d sent off the money and I bet that if I hadn’t had an accident they would have just accepted it and renewed my insur—’

‘You’re whining,’ Rico cut in icily as he rose from behind his impressive desk.

‘I’m not whining. I’m only trying to explain!’ she protested.

‘Point one—if you were not covered by insurance at the time of the accident the oversight was your responsibility. Yours, nobody else’s,’ he stressed with a glacial lack of compassion. ‘Point two—in driving a car without insurance you were committing an offence—’

‘But-’

‘And point three—I most unwisely chose to let you go scot-free from the consequences of the offence you had already committed last night!’

‘What offence...? Oh, the one-way street bit,’ Bella muttered, hunching her narrow shoulders in self-defence. It was like being under physical attack. ‘But that was an accident... It’s not as though it was deliberate. Anyone can have an accident, can’t they? I’m really sorry. I mean, I would do just about anything for it not to have happened, because now everything’s in this horrible mess—’

‘For you, not for me.’ Rico sent her a hard, impassive look. ‘When I inform my insurance company of this they will insist that I bring in the police and they will pursue you for the outstanding monies in a civil case.’

Bella went white and twisted her hands, moving from one long, shapely leg on to the other with stork-like restiveness. ‘Please don’t get the police. Somehow I’ll pay you back... I promise!’ she swore unsteadily.

‘Is Hector going to pay?’

Bella flinched. ‘No,’ she mumbled.

‘I’ve already had a quote for the damage to my car.’ He gave it to her. Bella watched the carpet tilt and rise as she fought off a sick attack of dizziness brought on by shock. ‘Somehow I don’t think that you can come up with that kind of cash.’

‘Only in instalments.’ And if I starved, lived rough and went naked, she added mentally, beginning to tremble. He had spelt out the cold, hard facts and her vague idea that they might somehow be able to come to an arrangement had bitten the dust fast. She couldn’t expect him to pay for the repairs to the Bugatti and wait for twenty years for her to settle the debt. Intelligence told her that, but a numbing sense of terror was spreading through her by the second.

‘Not acceptable. So therefore it goes through on the record with the police,’ Rico da Silva informed her flatly.

Already she was backing away, knowing that she was about to break her most unbreakable rule and copy Cleo. She was going to run, pack a bag and leave London—go back to the old life where there were no names, no pack drill, little chance of being caught by the authorities. How had she ever got the idea that she could make it in this other world with all its rules and regulations?

‘You’re not leaving,’ he warned her grimly.

‘You can’t keep me h-here!’ Bella stammered fearfully. ‘You can put the police on to me but you can’t keep me here!’

‘I call Security or I call the police. I’m not a fool. If you walk out of here you’ll disappear. Maybe the police are already looking for you,’ Rico da Silva suggested, studying her slender, quivering, white-faced figure with cool assessment. ‘For some other offence?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘You’re terrified.’ His shrewd gaze rested intently on her. ‘A bit over the top for a charge of careless driving and doing so without insurance. If it’s a first offence you’ll be fined. However, if this is merely the latest in a line of other misdemeanours I can quite see why you wouldn’t want the police brought in.’

In his mind she had already gone from being a lousy driver to being a persistent offender. She had met prejudice like that before. Her first year with Gramps had been hell outside the sanctuary of his home. Neighbours, teachers and classmates had been all too ready to point the finger at Bella when there had been a spate of thieving in school. Bella had never stolen anything in her life, but had the true culprit not been caught in the act she was well aware that everyone would have continued to believe her guilty.

With the last ounce of her pride she thrust her head high. ‘I have a clean record!’

‘Excelente. Then you will not throw a fit of hysterics when I take you to the police station.’

‘You ... take me to the p-police station?’ The fire in her was doused, cold fear taking over.

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