‘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