To Alice’s horror Louise was pulling open the obviously unlocked driver’s door and sliding into the driving seat. Totally appalled, Alice protested in disbelief, ‘Louise, no!’ unable to accept that Louise could behave so irresponsibly. ‘You mustn’t! You can’t…’
‘Who says I can’t?’ Louise was challenging her as she turned the key in the ignition and Alice heard the engine roar into life.
She could see a look in Louise’s eyes that was completely unmistakable and her heart missed a beat. Her sister had warned her that Louise could be headstrong, and that the trauma of the break-up of her parents’ marriage had affected her badly, as had the fact that her mother’s new husband had made no secret that he did not want an obstreperous teenage stepdaughter on the scene to cause him problems.
Even so!
‘Louise, no,’ Alice protested, pleadingly, instinctively hurrying round to the passenger door of the car and wrenching it open, not really knowing what she could do, just knowing that somehow she had to stop her charge from what she was doing. But before she could do anything Louise had put the car in gear and it was starting to move, the movement jolting Alice forward.
Somehow she found that she was in the passenger seat of the car, frantically wrestling to close the door as the car set off lurchingly toward the hotel’s exit.
Her heart in her mouth, Alice pleaded with Louise to stop the car, but everything she said only seemed to goad the younger girl on. Alice could hear the gears crashing as Louise manoeuvred the car clumsily onto the road. She had only just passed her driving test, and so far had only been allowed to drive her father’s sedate saloon car under his strict supervision. Alice, who could drive herself and who had driven considerable distances with her former young charges, knew that she would never have had the confidence or the skill to drive a vehicle such as this.
She gasped in shock as Louise started to accelerate, and only just missed hitting a pair of scooters bent on overtaking them.
The road stretched ahead of them, unusually straight for an Italian road, and heavy with traffic, a wall, beyond which lay the river, on one side of it and a row of four-or-so-storey buildings and a narrow pavement full of shoppers on the other.
Alice felt sick and desperately afraid, but somehow she managed to quell her instinctive urge to wrest the steering wheel from Louise’s obviously inexpert grip.
Up ahead of them she could see a car pull out to overtake; she cried out a warning to Louise but, instead of slowing down, the younger girl increased her speed.
Alice held her breath, tensing her body against the collision, which she knew to be inevitable.
CHAPTER TWO
IT WAS the unmistakable sound of Aldo’s Ferrari’s engine being inexpertly fired that first alerted Marco to what was going on.
Sprinting towards the main road, he reached it just in time to see the two blonde heads of the female thieves who had stolen the car, which was now being driven with teeth-clenching lack of expertise towards the Tuscan countryside.
However, it wasn’t the lack of driving expertise they were displaying that brought a grim look of tension to Marco’s mouth. No, what was concerning him was the fact that he feared an accident, and, having already lost a much-loved cousin as well as having had to identify both his and the destroyed body of what had originally been a very pretty young woman, he had no wish to see history repeating itself.
He was already reaching for his mobile to report the theft when he heard and saw the collision he had been dreading.
To his relief he realised immediately that the crash was not a serious one. The driver of the other car was already out of his vehicle and heading for the Ferrari, which Marco could see had barely been damaged by the impact at all.
Cancelling the call, he started to run towards the scene.
Above the sound of Louise’s frantic screams, Alice could hear the sound of approaching Italian voices. Her head ached where she had banged it on the windscreen, and as she tried to blink the pain away she realised that Louise was already standing on the pavement, beside the car, whilst somehow she herself was lying across both seats, with her head now against the driver’s headrest.
She knew she had to get out of the car. And she knew the easiest way to do that would be to slide her legs over to the driver’s side of the car, but her thoughts would only assemble in slow and painful motion as they fought their way through the dizzying sickness of her shock.
Someone, predictably a man, was comforting Louise, who was crying hysterically, but no one, Alice noticed, was bothering to help her. Somehow, though, she managed to get herself out of the car, just as the crowd that was surrounding it parted to allow through the tall, dark-haired and even darker-browed man who was now talking with the driver of the car they’d crashed into, handing him his card.
Then as he turned to look at her she recognised him. Alice thought she was going to faint. She would have recognised that eagle-eyed, imperious topaz stare anywhere, and she could tell from the way his glance moved from her face down to her breasts that he remembered exactly who she was as well.
It was the man she had seen earlier that morning, the man who…. Her head was throbbing and instinctively Alice pressed her hand to her temple. She felt so dizzy and sick, so unable somehow to draw her own gaze away from that angry, burning hostility of pure male fury. The shock of what had happened seemed to have robbed her of her normal self-control and maturity. Feeling as though she was going to cry, she longed desperately to have someone to turn to, some sturdy, reliable, pro-Alice male presence there to support and protect her. Such unfamiliar and undermining thoughts increased her sense of alienation from her normal ‘self’.
He of the angry eyes and hard, forbidding mouth was focusing on her so intently that she felt like a helpless specimen trapped beneath a microscope.
In the distance Alice could hear Louise sobbing frantically, ‘It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything. She was the one who was driving the car. Not me…’
But although she registered what Louise was saying it barely made any impact on her at all. And the reason for that was the man now standing in front of her, towering over her, all six-foot odd, furiously cold, dangerously angry and intensely male of him, addressing her in icily perfect and whiplash sharp English as he demanded, ‘If you are the perpetrator of this…this atrocity, then let me tell you now I fully intend to see that you pay for it. Have you any idea what you have done? The danger…the risk…someone could have been killed.’ His voice became acidly sharp and harsh. ‘Have you ever seen a victim of a serious road accident? Do you have any idea what it can do to the human body?’
Fresh nausea overwhelmed Alice. He wasn’t saying anything to her she hadn’t already thought for herself, but Louise, who could hear him, was now silent and ashen-faced, and instinctively Alice felt her first duty was to protect her. And now that she could see both cars, she could see too that surely he was overreacting. Anxiously she looked towards his car. The passenger door was crushed, there was broken glass all over the road. The car they had hit had lost its bumper and sustained a large dent, although fortunately its driver seemed to be unhurt, and indeed he was very evidently comforting Louise, who was shaking uncontrollably, telling everyone who would listen to her that it had been Alice who had been driving the car and not her.
Alice opened her mouth to correct her and defend herself and then closed it again.
How could she? Louise was seventeen; she had only just passed her driving test. Last night she had been drinking so heavily that she probably still had a dangerously high level of alcohol in her bloodstream, and she was in Alice’s charge…Alice had promised her sister that she would take care of her…
Unaware of what she was doing, she looked up at the man confronting her in helpless appeal.
Marco