Prisoner Of Passion Page 13

  Whatever the circumstances, Rico had been betrayed and humiliated, and just thinking about that made Bella’s heart go out to him. She was a soft touch. She couldn’t help it. Her fury with him from the night before evaporated. For all she knew the suggestion that she live with him for a month—an invitation that he had denied ever offering to any other woman—had been a courageous stab at what had felt like a mega-commitment on his part.

  On the other hand, it could equally well have been a deeply basic indication of how highly he valued the sexual passion they had shared. Beneath those beautifully tailored suits lurked one very passionate male, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. And he did have a sense of humour. Anyone who could handle Hector without batting an eyelash deserved applause.

  He wasn’t remotely intimidated by her intelligence either and even in a rage he had been capable of eating his own words and admiring her paintings. He even fitted Gramps’ yardstick of eligibility—good education, stable family background, steady employment. And she loved him. It was a shame that he had gone ballistic when she’d mentioned the large fluffy dog, the cat and the pony. Rico did not want children. Still, you couldn’t have everything.

  And right at this moment you have nothing, she reminded herself in exasperation.

  Griff rang her mid-morning the next day. ‘Bella… it would have been kinder to hit the guy with the bottle in the restaurant!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your exclusive interview… priceless, absolutely priceless. Let’s do lunch tomorrow. You really should be wearing my ring. It was too late to stop the announcement and I know you didn’t mean what you said,’ he asserted.

  Bella dropped the phone as though she had been burnt. Half an hour later she was standing in a newsagent’s, learning that Hector had spoken truly when he’d said that you shouldn’t talk to journalists. Rico had been labelled as a boring stuffed shirt, a male so inflated with his own importance that he hadn’t even allowed her to call him by his Christian name, the implication being that he was a raging snob. There wasn’t even a mention of his taking his jacket off…probably because it might have made him sound human.

  Bella cringed, cursing her own stupidity. She checked her watch. She had agreed to work a rare lunchtime shift at the restaurant. In her break she would get on the phone and apologise to him. It had never crossed her mind that anyone could turn their ordeal into sheer comedy, or that so unjust a picture might be drawn. If she had been able to choose a fellow victim out of a million names, she would have chosen Rico every time… She could have wept.

  Gaston’s was choked to the gills with customers. Serious foodies ate there, studying the yard-long menu with blissful intensity. Bella was loaded with empty plates when she noticed a curious lull in the level of quiet conversation. She turned her head, saw Rico and simply froze.

  ‘What were you paid for that character assassination?’ he blazed at her down the length of the entire dining room.

  Her staggered gaze clung to him. The tiger had escaped again. Rico in a rage. He strode across the floor in two long, lithe strides, indifferent to the turning heads, the buzz of conjecture. ‘How much?’ he breathed in a tone that quivered with fierce emotion.

  There was a look of savage betrayal in his brilliant dark eyes. She couldn’t bear it. It cut her to pieces. She forgot she was holding the plates. They dropped with an almighty crash. She barely noticed. ‘Nothing…’

  ‘You hate me that much?’ he shot at her from between clenched teeth.

  ‘No… no,’ she whispered, on the brink of tears, appalled that he had taken it so badly, making the worst possible interpretation of that foolish interview.

  ‘I do not appreciate being lampooned in print. It was a pack of lies!’ he condemned with raw distaste.

  ‘All I was trying to do was get rid of the reporters… they were upsetting Hector,’ Bella muttered frantically.

  ‘And regrettably we’re everywhere you look,’ a wry voice added from a nearby table in what just might have been a friendly warning.

  Exhaling his breath in a sudden hiss, Rico surveyed her, his dark gaze chillingly cold. In the space of a moment he had switched from seething rage to black ice, his strong face clenched hard, his mouth twisting. ‘I had you taped from the beginning. No pay, no play…es verdad?’ he murmured in a derisive undertone.

  She had never played poker but she caught his drift. Her cheeks burned. Her lashes swept up on her anguished eyes. ‘It’s not like that…’

  ‘It’s over,’ Rico drawled with lethal finality, and swung away.

  Every skin-cell in her body vibrating with raw tension, Bella watched him stride towards the exit. And she knew that if she let him go she would never see him again. Her nervous paralysis gave. Tearing the chintzy apron from round her waist, she flung her hovering boss a look of apology and took off after Rico.

  He was already climbing into the limousine waiting by the kerb. As she raced across the pavement he stilled and straightened, one lean hand planted on the door. Glittering dark eyes hit her in near physical assault. ‘What now?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’ll play…I mean—’ gritting her teeth, cursing her fair skin as it heated, she sealed her lips again and sucked in oxygen ‘—I’ll move in with you.’

  His gaze narrowed, sliced even deeper into hers, tension tautening his set features. ‘You surprise me—’

  ‘Well, you’d better not surprise me,’ she warned fiercely. ‘You’d better treat me right!’

  Sudden vibrant amusement banished his stasis. He reached for her in one supple movement and pulled her to him, his hands splaying across the swell of her hips as he looked down at her. ‘You won’t regret it, I promise you,’ he assured her huskily.

  ‘If you don’t shift this car you’re going to get a ticket,’ she muttered, her heartbeat thundering in her ears as her gaze collided dizzily with his smouldering golden eyes.

  But he lowered his head to hers, one hand skimming up her back to wind into her tumbling hair. Their lips met slowly, almost hesitantly, and she trembled, the amount of emotion she was holding back flooding through her in powerful waves. With a ragged groan he forced her closer and took her mouth with a sudden, explosive hunger that made the ground fall away beneath her feet. Her hands closed round him convulsively, holding him to her. And she knew then that when the time came to walk away it would rip her apart.

  The limo got a ticket before it rejoined the slow-moving traffic. Bella looked at Rico, every pulse still racing, her heart pounding. It was the first time in her life that she had made a decision that already felt like a foregone conclusion.

  A part of her feared the devastating strength of what he could make her feel. Reason hadn’t powered her change of heart. She had reacted on instinct and she was still in shock because of it. He had walked away from her. It had cut her in two, forced her into compromise. But she was painfully aware that she was entering the relationships with needs and expectations that Rico might not be able to meet.

  ‘I’m flying to Tokyo in the morning for a three-day conference. You can come with me,’ he murmured smoothly.

  And Rico might also have needs and expectations that she might not be able to meet, Bella registered abruptly. She wasn’t some little bimbo, ready to drop everything to become a twenty-four-hour handmaiden, programmed to serve with a smile and satisfy every masculine demand.

  ‘I’ll be working-’

  ‘Por Dios!’ he gritted in disbelief. ‘Waiting tables?’

  ‘After the number of plates I broke and my departure at the busiest hour of the day, you can forget that,’ she said ruefully. ‘No. I’ll concentrate on my painting for a while.’

  ‘Then you can come to Tokyo,’ he asserted forcefully.

  ‘And what am I going to do with myself all day while you do whatever you do at the conference?’

  ‘Shop,’ he retorted impatiently.

  ‘I am not that heavily into shopping, Rico.’

  ‘Naturally I
will be paying the bills.’

  ‘When I said that I would move in with you I somehow missed out on the fact that you planned to pay me for my services.’ Bella shot him a furious look. ‘I am not going to be a kept woman!’

  Rico treated her to a fulminating stare, visibly hanging onto his temper. ‘I was not aware that I used that designation.’

  ‘You didn’t need to,’ she said tightly.

  ‘Basta… so I go alone! Leave it there!’ he ground out with raw bite, patently dissatisfied and antagonised by her response.

  He just doesn’t know any better, she told herself painfully. He was accustomed to having his own way with her sex. Sophie hadn’t been offered a Porsche for acting as his hostess alone. He might not have slept with her but it had been a pay-off. She hadn’t earned it, the blonde had said bluntly. Bella’s nostrils flared with distaste. If Rico knew what was good for him, he would keep the financial aspect out of their relationship. Bella might not be rich but she considered herself his equal on every other level.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked abruptly.

  ‘My estate…I’m taking you home with me.’ Rico’s mouth compressed. ‘Don’t tell me…you have an objection to that as well?’

  ‘If you want to rescue a stray, try Battersea Dog’s Home!’

  ‘What the hell is the matter with you?’ he suddenly exploded.

  ‘I just don’t like being taken over as if I’m some sort of cypher!’ She swallowed hard, feeling the dismaying sting of tears in her eyes. ‘Look… this—’

  ‘Maybe now that you appreciate that the dog, the cat and the pony will be neither required nor appropriate you’re having second thoughts!’ he grated in a tense undertone.

  ‘I seriously doubt that I’ll be with you long enough for it to become a pressing problem!’ Bella was angered and embarrassed at having her own words thrown back in her face.

  He went rigid, his jaw-line squaring. ‘Don’t miscalculate and make it one.’

  Bella paled. ‘I wouldn’t do something like that!’ She was shocked by the suggestion that he thought she might.

  Abruptly Rico muttered an imprecation and released his breath. ‘How can I even say that to you after the risks we ran a few weeks ago?’ he murmured drily. ‘Let us face facts; we are fortunate indeed that you are not now pregnant.’

  Bella bent her head, suppressing an urge to tell him that she was only now expecting the confirmation that their passion was to have no further consequences. Why worry him unnecessarily? It wasn’t as if she was worried that that confirmation would not arrive. It was extremely unlikely that conception could have taken place at that time of her cycle, she reminded herself, and it was precisely because of that unlikelihood that she had not allowed herself to spend the past three weeks anxiously fretting.

  ‘Becoming a father is not one of your ambitions, I take it.’

  ‘No, definitely not on my agenda. A complication I will happily do without.’ His bronzed face was shuttered, taut. ‘How did we get onto this subject?’

  ‘You started it.’

  ‘Come here…’ With a slightly twisted smile, he stretched out both hands and drew her closer. ‘If this feels like a big step to you, gatita, it feels just as big to me,’ he confided almost harshly, studying her from beneath thick ebony lashes. ‘If I get it wrong sometimes, try to make allowances.’

  Her tension evaporated. He hadn’t found it easy to make that admission and she loved him all the more for making it. Asking her to live with him had been a very real commitment on his terms, she registered, a relieved feeling of contentment enclosing her, smoothing over the ragged edges of her nerves.

  ‘You’ve been trying to take me home with you ever since you met me,’ she whispered.

  ‘With a notable lack of success,’ Rico murmured thickly, tugging her relentlessly across the space that still separated them, dark eyes firing gold.

  ‘But you’re very persistent.’

  ‘And if I say please…?’

  ‘The world’s your oyster,’ Bella affirmed, barely able to think straight that close to him.

  He linked his arms around her but he tilted his head back, narrowly appraising her. ‘You have stars in your eyes, gatita. That worries me.’

  ‘You have a fear of being trapped. That worries me even more.’

  ‘Why did you talk to the Press?’ he enquired flatly, ignoring her sally.

  ‘I told you why. I just wanted to bring it all to an end. And I thought that if I made it clear that nothing happened between us they would leave me alone—’

  ‘So you lied.’

  ‘I could hardly tell the truth!’ But she flushed, her eyes troubled, her mouth faintly mutinous. ‘OK…I lied.’

  ‘Don’t ever do it again. Don’t lie to me and don’t lie about me,’ Rico told her with level emphasis. ‘In fact don’t talk about me at all. What is between us is private.’

  ‘I know that!’

  ‘This one time I give you the benefit of the doubt and I forgive you.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  He surveyed her with cynical dark eyes. ‘Bella… I’m not a fool. I can add two and two. Less than forty-eight hours ago you handed me a cheque for a considerable sum of money. Today the article appeared. Obviously you were paid for that interview.’

  She sprang back from him in consternation. ‘That money came from the sale of a painting!’

  Rico elevated an ebony brow, clearly unimpressed. ‘I don’t have you on a pedestal, gatita. So you don’t need to worry about falling off one. I don’t expect perfection but I do expect honesty. Who would pay that much for the work of an unknown artist?’

  ‘It wasn’t one of my paintings!’ she flared back at him, both angered and hurt by his lack of trust in her. She would not even have considered accepting money for talking about him to the Press. ‘It was one Ivan did of my mother—’

  ‘Qué dices?’ Rico interrupted, abruptly jerking up out of his lounging position, his attention fully arrested.

  ‘And, before you ask me why I didn’t think of selling it that day I came to the bank to tell you I had no insurance, I’ll tell you why,’ Bella said tightly. ‘I forgot about it. I’ve had it all my life. It didn’t occur to me until a few weeks ago that it was a valuable asset which could be sold.’

  His incandescent golden eyes bored into her. ‘You sold a painting of your mother by your father… to pay me back? Are you crazy?’ he launched at her.

  Bella blinked at him in bewilderment. ‘What else could I do?’

  ‘Where was it sold?’ he demanded.

  ‘What does that matter?’

  ‘Where?’

  She told him.

  ‘If it’s already been sold, you’ll only have yourself to thank!’ he shot at her furiously after he had instructed his chauffeur to head for the art gallery. ‘Por Dios…you don’t need to take lessons on how to make me feel bad!’

  ‘I owed you money. It had to be repaid somehow.’

  ‘We were lovers! What do you think I am?’ he blazed back at her. ‘A debt collector?’

  ‘You are in banking,’ she retorted helplessly, infuriated by the reaction she was receiving. Selling that painting had been a considerable sacrifice and she resented the assurance that it had been an unnecessary one. ‘And if you think that I was content to believe that just because we had briefly shared a bed I no longer needed to worry about the fact that I owed you thousands of pounds you don’t know me at all! I also had to cover the repairs to Hector’s Skoda—’

  Rico said something incredibly rude about the Skoda.

  ‘We don’t all slink about in status-symbol cars!’ Bella hissed. ‘Why did you tell your driver to go to the art gallery?’

  ‘If the painting’s still there, naturally I will buy it back for you.’

  ‘You buy that painting, it’s yours,’ Bella warned him fiercely.

  She sat in the car fuming while he was in the art gallery, having flatly refused to accompany him.
If he hadn’t been so damned suspicious and cynical, he would never have known where she’d got the money from! A debt was a debt. She didn’t want it written off. Maybe the money didn’t mean much to Rico but it was the principle that mattered.

  He swung back into the car and he wasn’t empty-handed. He settled the small canvas on her lap. ‘Here… take Mummy back,’ he said very drily.

  Bella squinted down at Cleo’s familiar features. Her throat ached but she was stubborn. ‘I told you I wouldn’t accept it.’

  ‘Madre de Dios…’ Rico bit out with raw impatience. ‘I could shake you until your teeth rattle!’

  ‘What did you pay for it?’

  Grudgingly he told her.

  ‘They saw you coming. You were ripped off. It isn’t one of Ivan’s best.’

  Rico stabbed a button and the window beside him purred down. ‘I’ll just chuck it out, then, shall I?’

  A lean hand closed with purpose round the frame. Involuntarily Bella’s gaze clashed with smouldering golden eyes and she gaped. ‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you?’ Her fingers curved protectively round the disputed article.

  ‘You drive me crazy sometimes.’ He slung her a fulminating glance and buzzed up the window again.

  And sometimes he shook her rigid. He would have thrown it out. He had called her bluff and Bella was not accustomed to having her bluff called. She had finally met her match in temper and tenacity. For the first time she was in a relationship where she was not the dominating partner.

  ‘Are you planning to pay me rent?’ Rico enquired smoothly.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘But I sense that money promises to be a bone of contention. If we were married would you feel like this?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, and then wished she hadn’t.

  ‘Illuminating… Clearly I have to suffer for not offering that band of gold,’ he murmured sardonically.

  She ignored the crack about the wedding ring, barely trusting herself to speak.