Blaze sighed. ‘It’s probably a very stupid question, but how the hell did you land yourself in a mess like this?’
He had simply assumed that Rosie was her child. But then, everybody did. In the circumstances it was a natural assumption, and she could not possibly trust him with the truth. Rosie was her half-sister, the last pathetic footnote to her late mother’s ‘marriage’ to Dennis Carruthers.
‘I think you should leave,’ she said stiffly.
‘You’re right. I should walk back out of here and forget I ever left the car,’ Blaze murmured grimly. ‘But I have the hideous suspicion that all this would travel with me. Clearly you’re broke, and now you’re also unemployed’
‘And whose f-fault is that?’ she cut in shrilly.
‘I’m not in the habit of censoring speech in private conversation,’ he countered without an ounce of embarrassment. ‘But if I said one thing that was unfounded on fact, you’re welcome to call me to account over it.’
The invitation merely made her turn away in sharp distress. Dear God, how she loathed him! But he had uttered not a single untruth. The bald facts were exactly as he had stated them. Nouveau riche and painfully rough round the edges, the Hamiltons had certainly failed to merge tastefully with the surrounding countryside. Her father had loved putting on vulgar displays of his new-found wealth. He had thought that he needed to impress people to win respect. But all that he had won was derision.
‘I gather that you have to get out of here,’ Blaze prompted shortly. ‘Have you found somewhere else to go?’
‘No.’ The admission was dredged from her. Not that he needed it. He would know as well as she did that she had no hope of finding somewhere else without cold, hard cash to put down in advance.
London was a terrifyingly anonymous place to live in without friends. Those Chrissy had made at college had swiftly drifted away when she was forced to drop out of her teacher-training course and shoulder full-time care and responsibility for her little sister. In one gigantic bound, Chrissy had gone from teenage freedom to adult reality. She had grown up ten years in the first six months.
A succinct and unsuppressed swear word fell from his lips. ‘What are you planning to do this weekend?’ he demanded harshly. ‘Set up home on the street?’
‘We’ll manage,’ she muttered tightly.
‘Like you’re managing now?’ he derided cruelly. ‘Have you asked your father for help?’
‘I haven’t spoken to him in three years,’ she confided unsteadily. ‘He was f-furious when I moved in with Mum down here. He doesn’t know about Rosie and it wouldn’t make any difference if he did. As far as he’s concerned, I betrayed him when I went to Mum—’
‘Your brother? Your sister?’ Blaze cut in. ‘Surely one of them—?’
Chrissy vented a humourless laugh at the ridiculous idea of either Rory or Elaine taking up the cudgels on their behalf or even putting their hands into their pockets. Rory lived in California now with his wife and family and, just like Elaine, he had been appalled by what their mother had done. Neither had been willing to forgive Belle. Even when she was lying in Intensive Care, her life expectancy measured in hours, Elaine had refused Chrissy’s pleas for her to come down to London.
Chrissy had never got the chance to tell them about Rosie and, in any case, the revelation would only provoke horror and disgust. Rosie was Belle’s daughter by another man, the result of an illegal union that had made headlines for days in the tabloids when Dennis was arrested. After all, Belle hadn’t been the only woman he had deceived into a quick trip to the altar. There had been two others, neither of whom he had bothered to divorce.
‘I never got on that well with Dad anyway,’ Chrissy pointed out, eager to close the subject because she didn’t want to tell lies.
‘Who would?’ Blaze breathed with chilling hauteur. ‘He’d sell his granny to cannibals to make a fast buck.’
As he made the grim assurance, cold, clear anger lightened his eyes and tautened his sculpted cheekbones. Chrissy stared, puzzled by his vehemence. What had her father done to rouse his ire? But before she could voice her curiosity Blaze shrugged back a silk shirt-cuff and glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got a business meeting in an hour.’
‘I’ll post that money to you,’ she said again.
‘Forget it,’ he advised carelessly. ‘Consider it small compensation for the loss of your job.’
A painful flush stained her pallor. ‘I don’t want your ch-charity!’
‘Think of it as conscience money.’ Narrowed very blue eyes lingered on the betraying shimmer of tears below her lashes, the defeat slumping her shoulders. ‘I owe you and right now you need a helping hand,’ he intoned with a faintly scornful twist of his mouth as if he couldn’t quite credit how anyone of intelligence could end up in such a situation.
‘I don’t w-want your helping hand! I don’t want your lousy money!’ Chrissy spat.
‘I’m afraid you’re stuck with it,’ Blaze informed her flatly. ‘If it’s not too rude a question...where’s Rosie’s father?’
‘Behind bars!’ Chrissy told him fiercely.
‘In prison?’ She really had his attention now. For a split-second, he actually looked shocked. Blaze, the unshockable, shocked. Lush black lashes, inherited along with his golden skin tone from his Spanish father, briefly veiled his astonishingly noticeable eyes from her view. ‘When you screw up, you go the full yard, don’t you?’ he murmured.
She couldn’t quite believe her ears, and then she remembered that this was Blaze, who followed few of the rules that governed other people’s behaviour. He was prone to saying exactly what he thought with a brand of devastating honesty that frequently unnerved those around him. He had no time for civilised dissimulation. His raw energy always had an edge of impatience, as if restlessness ran in his bloodstream.
‘I want you to go,’ she said.
He studied her with grim detachment. She was at the end of her rope. He knew it, and she hated him for it. ‘Either you go home and crawl or you fling yourself on the tender mercies of the social services,’ he drawled. ‘You can’t make it without somebody’s help—’
‘Will you get out of here?’ Chrissy wrenched open the door with violence. She was shaking with the force of her emotions.
For a split-second, Blaze stilled. He stared down into her blazing green eyes, and for the first time that day they really connected. She fell into bottomless blue like a novice swimmer and forgot to breathe, her throat tightening, an electrifying tension shooting through her slim body.
He ran a blunt forefinger along the ripe fullness of her soft lower lip, and his touch was a flame dancing provocation on her too sensitive skin. ‘You are extraordinarily intense. You feel, you really do feel. That’s bound to get you into tight corners. Intensity is a passport to pain. Don’t you know that yet?’
Burnt by that near caress and his proximity, she leapt back, staggered and dazed by the sensations she had briefly experienced. If it was at all possible, her hatred intensified to the brink of explosion. His pity blistered into her skin like acid. ‘Go on, g-get out!’ she practically screamed at him.
When he had gone, the room was strangely shrunken in its emptiness. She blinked, shook her head uncertainly, and shivered. Once before he had made her feel like that. Trapped, hypnotised, lost. It was petrifying, overwhelming. Self could not seem to exist when he came too close. But this time, at least, he hadn’t lost his temper.
Few were aware of it, but a seething black temper lurked behind those stunningly blue eyes and that cool half-smile. Once, just once, she had fallen foul of that temper by