She slanted him an unfriendly look. ‘I don’t have a hospital phobia—I just don’t like hospitals. If you want to spend the journey delving into my psyche feel free, but I have to tell you you’re not very good at it.’
‘I’m more concerned about my daughter than your tortured psyche.’
Fleur grimaced, aware that she deserved the rebuke. ‘Of course you are. I’m sorry.’
The unstinting apology drew a quick sideways glance from him, but no comment. As his electric eyes brushed her own, Fleur’s outstretched hand stilled above his thigh.
‘I’m sure she’ll be all right.’ Crazy enough she felt the need to offer him comfort even though it was clearly not required, but squeezing Antonio’s thigh…?
‘I appreciate your attempt to be supportive,’ he observed with silky sarcasm, ‘but believe me when I say I’d find silence infinitely preferable.’
‘Fine, that suits me perfectly,’ she bit back. ‘I was only trying to be…’ She bit her lip. ‘I won’t say another word.’ Then when he said nothing she added, ‘Look, when I’m nervous I talk.’ She glared at his smug I-told-you-so profile and gritted, ‘You don’t have to listen. Tune me out.’
‘Believe me, if I could I would. Your voice is…’
‘My voice is what? It grates on you? Is it too shrill, too loud…?’ She pitched her voice an octave lower and introduced a low sexy rasp as she asked, ‘Would you prefer I giggled or—?’ She stopped dead and closed her eyes. ‘Will you listen to me? You’re right,’ she confessed, holding up her hands in mock surrender, and let him believe the least humiliating of her two present concerns. ‘I think I must have a hospital phobia.’ What she did have was just as irrational as any phobia.
‘And a very sexy voice.’
The dry aside made her stiffen and slant a suspicious look in his direction. ‘And awful hair,’ she reminded him.
‘I didn’t say it was awful,’ he said, looking at the road and thinking about pushing his fingers into that lush, shiny mass, letting the silky strands slide like water through his fingers.
‘Adam would,’ she mused, a distant expression on her face as she absently twirled a strand. ‘He’d hate it. He liked my hair short and neat.’ And I listened to him. I cut my hair; I lengthened my skirts; I allowed him to make me look stupid in front of his friends. What does that make me?
‘Who is Adam?’ He was conscious of her stiffening before she replied in a voice that was wiped clean of all emotion.
‘I was engaged to him.’ She supposed the thing about repressive relationships was that you didn’t even begin to suspect you had been in one until you had escaped.
Antonio’s eyes slid to her slim finger. ‘Past tense…?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, these days I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to cut my hair.’
‘You don’t look like a woman who asks permission for anything.’
Her shocked eyes brushed briefly with his before she lowered them and he turned his attention back to the road.
‘I’m not,’ she said after a moment. ‘I just forgot it for a while.’ She swallowed to relieve the emotional constriction in her throat.
‘It happens,’ he agreed. In his experience you scratched the surface of the average control freak and you revealed a pathetic loser riddled with insecurities. ‘You lived with this Adam?’
She wondered how far it was to the hospital and considered telling him to mind his own business, and then thought, What did it matter? It wasn’t as if it were a secret or anything.
‘Yes, for nearly three years. We split up about eighteen months ago.’
‘Madre di Dios! How old were you when you moved in?’
‘Is that relevant?’ she countered spikily. ‘I was twenty…so what? People can be just as stupid when they’re thirty as they are when they’re twenty.’
‘Twenty? His breath escaped in a hissing sigh of disbelief. Insane! My daughter will be twenty in seven years’ time.’ The realisation hit him like a ton of bricks falling on his chest.
‘She’s going to be a knockout when she’s older,’ Fleur predicted. ‘You’re going to have trouble long before she’s twenty.’
As images of men with evil intentions pursuing his little girl flashed through Antonio’s mind he felt the foundations of his once-stable world shift even farther.
‘I don’t think so.’ The present was so bad it had not occurred to him that there was every chance that the future could be worse.
‘Oh, you’re of the over-my-dead-body school of thought?’ Fleur mocked.
His jaw tightened. ‘I believe in discipline.’
‘You do know the surest way to send a female into the arms of an unsuitable man is to offer opposition?’
The little witch is patronising me! His eyes, fixed on the road ahead, narrowed. ‘Didn’t your parents have anything to say when you moved in with this man?’
‘I was a very mature twenty…’ And her parents had at that point just retired to Scotland.
‘And now you’re a very mature, damaged…what twenty-four?’
‘Twenty-five.’ Her eyes widened as she recalled it was her birthday. ‘Today, actually.’ Her head turned as a frown formed on her smooth brow. ‘And I am not damaged!’ she yelled, her voice very loud in the confines of the car. ‘Or do you think anyone who isn’t an innocent virgin damaged goods? What century are you living in?’
‘I was speaking about emotional damage.’
‘Well, don’t, because it’s not any of your business,’ she growled.
‘For the record, I have no especially strong feelings about virgins.’
‘How emotionally mature of you.’
‘Would this be the right moment to wish you a happy birthday? I don’t suppose that this was the way you planned to spend it.’
‘Nobody plans a day like today; they just have nightmares about it.’
‘Well, you’ll never forget it, at least.’
Or you. ‘Just like chicken pox.’ She lowered her eyes, which currently had a disturbing tendency to drift towards his profile.
‘Did you have something special arranged?’ Was some man waiting for her with flowers and champagne? ‘Now I understand your crankiness. I suppose I should apologise for spoiling your plans.’
‘I am not cranky! And…I was just having a quiet night in.’
‘Alone…?’
Fleur flushed, aware that she was in danger of appearing like a sad loser if she told him what her plans for her birthday had been. ‘What is this—twenty questions? You’re getting my life history and I don’t know anything about you.’
‘I thought reading those magazines had made you an expert.’
‘I suppose there might have been one or two things they missed out,’ she conceded lightly. ‘Unless you really do spend all your time making indecent amounts of money and attending film premières.’ Not alone, but she felt strangely reluctant to bring his glittering companions into the conversation.
‘I like to think my life is more balanced than that.’ His female family members