‘I don’t understand why they’re still hanging around,’ Rachel said after they’d lost their pursuers in a sequence of dizzying turns down narrow back streets. She hadn’t dared speak before then in case she broke his concentration and they ended up hitting a wall. ‘What do they think we are going to do? Get married on the apartment steps or something?’
‘They don’t know enough about you.’ He sounded so grim that Rachel felt a cold little shiver chase down her spine.
‘I hate this,’ she whispered. ‘I hated it when I used to get caught up in it with Elise. I don’t know how you people live your lives like this.’
‘We live in a celebrity-driven world,’ he answered levelly. ‘The masses are greedy for the intimate details of the rich and famous—or, for that matter, anyone who lives a high profile life. You have now joined the celebrity ranks, so get used to it, because this is only the beginning of it.’
The beginning of it …
After that Rachel did not speak another word. They reached the motorway and suddenly the powerful car came into its own, eating up the miles with the luxurious smoothness that promised to cut the journey time by half.
He stopped once at a motorway service station, led her into the café and bought sandwiches and coffee.
‘Eat,’ he instructed, when she stared at the unappetizing-looking sandwich he’d placed in front of her. ‘You look like death and you have eaten nothing since you threw yourself at me last night.’
And I look like death because I hardly had any sleep last night, she threw back at him without saying the words out loud. Because out loud meant opening a Pandora’s box full of what they’d been doing instead of sleeping.
The indifferent-tasting sandwich was washed down by indifferent-tasting coffee. Rachel was surprised he ate his sandwich or drank the coffee. They just didn’t look like the kind of food this man would usually put anywhere near his mouth.
When they hit the road again he wanted to talk. ‘Tell me how your family works,’ he invited.
So she explained how her mother had lost her husband to a long-term illness while the twins had still been very young. ‘A few years later she married my father and then had me.’
‘So what is the age difference between you and the twins?’
‘Six years,’ she replied.
‘And who did the farm originally belong to?’
‘My father. But he—we—never differentiated between Mark and Elise and myself. And it isn’t really a farm,’ she then added because she thought she better had do before they arrived there and he saw it. ‘It’s what we call a smallholding, with three acres of land, a house, a couple of greenhouses and a couple of barns.’
‘Another lie, cara?’
Rachel shrugged. ‘It’s run like a farm.’
And the … neighbour that helps you out when you need it—what does he do?’
‘Jack owns the land adjoining our land—and his is a farm,’ she stressed. ‘He’s been good to us since our parents died.’
‘Call it as it is,’ Raffaelle said. ‘He has been good to you.’
Rachel turned to look at him. ‘Why that tone?’ she demanded.
His grimace stopped her from becoming hooked on watching his face. ‘I don’t think I want to elaborate,’ he confessed.
‘Suits me,’ she said and, turning the collar up on her coat, she leant further into the seat and closed her eyes.
His low laugh played along her nerve endings. ‘You are prickly, Miss Carmichael.’
‘And you are loathsome, Signor.’
‘Because I don’t mind saying that I dislike the way your siblings use you?’
‘No. You are loathsome simply because you are.’
‘In bed?’
Rachel didn’t answer.
‘You prefer, perhaps, this Jack in bed as your lover because he is so good to you.’
He was fishing. Rachel decided to let him. ‘Maybe.’ She smiled.
‘But can he make you fall apart with pleasure there as I can, or does he bring the smell of farmer to your bed, which you must overcome before he can overcome you?’
‘As I said. You’re loathsome.’
‘Si,’ he agreed. ‘However, when I said that I don’t sleep around I meant it, whereas you seemingly did not.’
Rachel turned her head and flicked her eyes open to look at him. Once a liar always a liar, she thought heavily when she saw the grimness lashed to his lean profile.
And a tease could only be a tease when the recipient knew he was being teased. Sitting further up the seat with a sigh, she pushed a hand through her curls and opened her mouth to tell him exactly who and what Jack was—when her attention was caught by a giant blue motorway sign.
‘Oh, heck,’ she gasped. ‘We need to take this next turn-off!’
With a startled flash of his eyes and a few muttered curses, he flipped the car across several motorway lanes with one eye on the rear-view mirror judging the pace of the traffic behind them and the other eye judging the spare stretch road in front of them. By the time they sailed safely down the slip road Jack’s name had been washed right out of Rachel’s head by an intoxicating mix of nerve-fraying terror for her life and the exhilarating thrill of the whole smooth, slick power-driven manoeuvre.
‘Which way?’ he demanded.
Rachel blinked and told him in a tense breath-stifled voice while her senses fizzed and popped in places they shouldn’t. What was it about men and danger that struck directly at the female sexual psyche?
He glanced at her and saw her expression and sent her a wide slashing masculine grin that lit her up inside like a flaming torch.
‘Scared, cara?’ he quizzed.
‘You—you—’
‘Had it all under control,’ he smoothly provided. ‘Which, in Italian terms, makes the difference between a mere good lover and a fabulous lover.’
Rachel knew exactly what he meant, which was the hardest thing to take. If he stopped the car now she would be crawling all over him in a hot and seething sexually needy flood.
It was everything—the powerful car and the reckless man and the adrenalin rush still singing through her blood. She tried to breathe slowly and lost it completely when he reached across to her and gently stroked her cheek. Static fire whipped across her skin cells, she whispered something and turned her head. Their eyes clashed. For a short, short split second in time it was like falling into a vat of writhing, hissing, snapping snakes.
He looked away. The smile had gone but the atmosphere inside the car had heightened beyond anything real. Rachel sat on her hands to stop them reaching for him and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening while he drove on with a sudden grim concentration that only made everything worse.
She gave directions in short, sharp, breathless little bursts of speech that only helped to increase the tension. He said nothing but just reacted with slick control of the car. They were both sitting forward in their seats. They were both staring fixedly directly ahead. She knew where this was going to end up just as he knew it. And the