by Lynne Graham
Again? Rico had already been married?
About the Author
Books by Lynne Graham
Title Page
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
Copyright
Again? Rico had already been married?
Even in the midst of her turmoil Bella was struck by that unexpected revelation.
“So, if you are cherishing some pitiful fantasy of Cinderella catching her prince, let me assure you that even a pregnancy wouldn’t persuade me to make that ultimate sacrifice!”
Bella studied her tightly clenched hands. “You’re not my prince, Rico. Relax. Learn to enjoy life as the toad who didn’t deserve to be kissed and transformed. This particular Cinderella doesn’t believe in fairy tales.”
LYNNE GRAHAM
was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen romance reader since her teens. She is very happily married with an understanding husband, who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her three children keep her on her toes. She has a very large Old English sheepdog, which knocks everything over, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.
Books by Lynne Graham
HARLEQUIN PRESENTS
1712—ANGEL OF DARKNESS
1740—INDECENT DECEPTION
1758—BOND OF HATRED
1779—THE UNFAITHFUL WIFE
1792—CRIME OF PASSION
1824—A SAVAGE BETRAYAL
1835—THE TROPHY HUSBAND
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LYNNE GRAHAM
Prisoner of Passion
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN
MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
CHAPTER ONE
HEADS turned when Bella walked down the street. Her rippling mane of Titian curls, her incredibly long legs and her outrageous hotchpotch of colourful clothes caught the eye. But it was her prowling, graceful stride and the light of vibrant energy in her face which made the attention linger. Bella always looked as if she knew exactly where she was going.
She lifted the public phone off the hook and punched in the number. ‘Griff?’
‘Bella, I’m so sorry… something’s come up,’ he groaned. ‘I have to go back into the office.’
‘But—’ Her clear eyes froze as she heard a woman giggling somewhere in the background. Griff went on talking, although there was a similar catch of amusement in his voice. Apologising, he assured her that he would be in touch.
Five minutes later Bella was back in the wine bar with her friends.
‘Where have you been?’ Liz hissed, under cover of the animated conversation.
‘Calling Griff…’
‘You mean he’s not on his way yet?’
Bella gave a careless shrug.
‘He’s let you down, hasn’t he?’ her friend said bluntly.
Bella didn’t trust herself to speak. And the very last thing she needed right now was a lecture on the subject of Griff Atherton, who was everything Gramps had ever told her to look out for in a man but who was inexplicably as unreliable as they came, in spite of his good education, steady job and stable family background.
‘You really know how to pick them,’ Liz lamented. ‘Why do you always latch on to the creeps?’
‘He’s not a creep.’
‘It’s your birthday. Where is he?’
Bella shed her battered cerise suede fringed jacket and crossed her legs below the feathered hem of her minuscule new chiffon skirt, covertly attempting to stretch it to a more reasonable length. Liz had bought the skirt for her birthday. It was far too short but she had to be seen to wear it at least this once.
‘So what was Griff the Glib’s excuse this time?’
‘Wow, look at those wheels!’ Bella exclaimed hurriedly, keen for a change of subject. She craned her neck to gaze out at the gleaming silver sports car drawing up outside the five-star hotel on the other side of the street. ‘That’s a Bugatti Supersport.’
‘A what?’ Obediently distracted, Liz peered without a lot of interest and then gasped. ‘Look who’s getting out of it! Now that is what I call—’
‘Fabulous engineering.’ Bella was eyeing the sleek lines of the powerful car, not the driver with his smouldering, dark good looks. Bella preferred blonds.
‘I haven’t heard Rico da Silva described in quite those terms before.’
‘Who?’
‘If you ever put your nose inside a serious newspaper, you’d recognise him too. He’s absolutely gorgeous, isn’t he?’ Liz looked rapt. ‘He’s also single and loaded!’
‘He has a beautiful set of wheels. Is he into motors?’
‘He’s an international financier. The local paper did a profile on him,’ Liz told her. ‘He owns a fabulous country estate just outside town. He spent millions renovating it.’
Bella grimaced. Finance…money…banks. She never went into a bank if she could help it, didn’t even own a cheque book. People who wheeled and dealed in money and profit made her skin crawl. A faceless smoothie from a bank had pushed Gramps’ business to the wall and put him into a premature grave.
‘That’s his current lady,’ Liz murmured as a beautiful blonde woman swathed in fur emerged from the hotel.
Tall, dark and handsome with the little woman. Bella wasn’t in the mood to be generous. They looked like some impossibly perfect couple from a glossy magazine. His and hers matching glamour. They had that aura of untouchability which only the seriously rich exuded. It was there like a glass wall between them and the rest of the human race. A clump of pedestrians stopped to let them pass in a direct path to the Bugatti. They took it as their due.
‘How the other half lives,’ Liz sighed with unhidden envy.
‘Time we got this party off the ground!’ Bella stood up, spread a brilliantly bright smile round her assembled friends, and switched into extrovert mode.
Dammit, where was the turn-off? Bella called herself a fool for not staying the night with Liz as she had originally planned, but Liz had been in the mood to preach and Bella hadn’t been in the mood to listen. Now it was three in the morning. The roads were deserted. And somehow she had got lost. There it was! Jumping on the brakes, Bella swung into a frantic last-minute turn. As she made it a gigantic yawn engulfed her taut facial muscles. As she emerged from it, rubbing at her sleepy eyes, another car appeared directly in the path of her headlights.
With a shriek of horror Bella barely had time to brace herself before impact. The jolt of the crash shuddered through her entire body, the sickening noise of buckling metal almost deafening her. Then there was a terrible silence. Fast to react, Bella’s first thought was for the other driver. Her windscreen was smashed. She couldn’t see a thing. She lurched out of the Skoda on legs that felt like jellied eels.
A hand clamped round her slim shoulder. ‘Are you hurt? Have you passengers?’
‘No!’ Taken aback by someone with even faster reactions than her own, Bella hovered in the biting wind tunnelling down the street as the powerful head and shoulders ducked into the cluttered interior of her car, which more closely resembled a travelling dustbin than a vehicle. Her teeth chattered with shock, her
aghast attention logged onto the truly appalling amount of damage done to her car. The whole bonnet was wrecked.
‘You madman!’ she burst out helplessly. ‘What were you doing on the wrong side of the road?’
The large presence straightened. Bella was not small and she was wearing very high heels, but the male beside her still towered above her. In the streetlight his hard, dark features were as unyielding as hewn granite.
‘What was I doing?’ he repeated in a raw tone of disbelief, and this time she caught the foreign inflexion, the thickness of an accent that was certainly not British.
‘Did you forget we drive on the left here?’ Bella asked furiously.
‘You stupid bitch… you’re on a one-way street!’ With that he strode back to his own car.
A one-way street? About to open her mouth and loudly disclaim that ridiculous assertion at the same time as she asked him who the hell he thought he was calling a stupid bitch, Bella looked back to the corner and saw the sign. A one-way street. She had turned right into a one-way street and not unnaturally had had a head-on collision. Devastated by the realisation that the accident was entirely her fault, Bella leant against the wing of the Skoda because her knees were threatening to give way.
The other driver was lifting something out of his car. Oh, dear God, what had she hit? For the first time she looked at the other vehicle. It had a hideous déjà vu familiarity, only it had looked considerably more pristine earlier. A Bugatti. She had wrecked a Bugatti Supersport which retailed at somewhere around a quarter of a million pounds. She wanted to throw herself down on the road and scream like a banshee in torment. Her insurance premium would rocket into outer space after this… correction; she’d be lucky to get insurance. This wasn’t her first accident, although it was certainly by far the worst. Dammit, what was the guy’s name? Why, oh, why had she let her temper rip and called him a madman?
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded in a weak voice, moving forward.
He was lounging against his status-symbol car, which was not quite the status symbol it had been. And he had a mobile phone in his hand. Just her luck—a guy with a phone in his car!
‘I am calling the police,’ he imparted, with a decided edge of, And aren’t you going to enjoy that? in his growling delivery.
‘The p-police?’ Bella stammered shrilly, plunged into further depths of unhidden horror. She turned as white as a sheet.
‘Naturally. Why don’t you get back into your vehicle and await their arrival?’
‘Do we need the police?’ she asked in a shaky voice, her heart sinking to the soles of her feet at the prospect of being arrested on a charge of careless driving.
‘Of course we need the police.’
Bella took another desperate step forward. ‘Please don’t get the police!’ she muttered frantically.
‘I should imagine that you will be breathalysed.’
‘I haven’t been drinking. I just don’t see the necessity to get the police!’
‘I expect they already have more than a passing acquaintance with you.’ Rico da Silva sent a glittering look of derision over her.
‘Well, we wouldn’t be complete strangers, let’s put it that way,’ Bella conceded, thinking back miserably to her earliest memories of what her travelling mother had called police harassment. No matter how hard she tried Bella had never lost that childhood terror of the uniformed men who had moved them on from their illegal camping grounds.
‘I didn’t think so. It’s a hard life on the street,’ he murmured, shooting her scantily clad, shivering figure an intent but unreadable glance. ‘Heading home from the nightshift?’
What the hell was he talking about? Struggling to concentrate, she moved even closer. ‘We could sort this out…just you and me, off the record,’ she assured him in desperation, skimming an anxious glance across the street as another car passed by, slackened speed to have a good look at the wreckage, and then drove on. Any minute now a patrol car would be along.
‘Es verdad?’ Diamond-bright dark eyes scanned her beautiful, pleading face, his strong jaw line clenching hard as a long finger stabbed buttons on the mobile phone without her even being aware of it. ‘I don’t think so. In that one field alone I prefer amateurs.’
‘Amateur what?’ Bella returned in despair, deciding that he had definitely been drinking.
And then she heard the police answering the call, registered that he had already dialled, and allowed sheer panic to take over. Snaking out a hand, she grabbed at the phone. Lean fingers as compelling as steel cuffs closed round her wrist and jerked it ruthlessly down. She burst into floods of tears, her overtaxed emotions shooting to a typically explosive Bella climax and spilling over instantaneously.
‘You bully!’ she sobbed accusingly.
With a raw gasp of male fury, the background of the police telephonist’s voice was abruptly silenced as if the man before her had cut the connection. ‘You attacked me!’ he grated.
‘I just didn’t want you to ring the police!’ she slung back, on the brink of another howl. ‘But go ahead! Have me arrested! I don’t care; I’m past caring!’
‘Stop making such a noise,’ he growled. ‘You’re making an exhibition of yourself!’
‘If I want to have hysterics, that’s my business!’ she asserted through her tears. ‘What do you think this is going to do to my insurance?’
There was a short silence.
‘You have insurance?’
‘Of course I have insurance,’ Bella mumbled, making an effort to collect herself and keeping a careful distance from him, since he had already proved that he was the aggressive type.
‘Give me the details and sign a statement admitting fault and you can be on your way,’ he drawled with unhidden relish.
Bella shot him an astonished glance. ‘You mean it?’
‘Sí… five more minutes in your company and I will understand why men murder. Not only that, I will be at the forefront of a campaign to bring in the death penalty for women drivers!’ Rico da Silva intoned between clenched teeth.
Sexist pig. Smearing her non-waterproof mascara over her cheeks as she wiped at her wet face, Bella bit back the temptation to answer in kind. After all, he was going to be civilised. If he had smashed up her Bugatti she probably would have wanted blood too. Prepared to be generous, she still, however, gave a deliberate little rub to her wrist just to let him know that he might not have drawn blood but he might have inflicted bruises.
He planted a sheet of paper on the bonnet and handed her a pen.
‘You write it; I’ll sign it,’ she proffered glumly.
‘I want it to be in your handwriting.’
But he still stood over her and dictated what he wanted her to write. She struggled with the big words he used, her rather basic spelling powers taxed beyond their limits.
‘This is illiterate,’ he remarked in a strained voice.
Bella’s cheeks flamed scarlet. Her itinerant childhood had meant that she had very rarely attended a school. Gramps had changed all that when she had gone to live with him but somehow her spelling had never quite come up to scratch. Laziness and lack of interest, she conceded inwardly, for she possessed a formidable intelligence which she focused solely on the field of art. Spelling came a very poor second.
‘But it’s fine,’ Rico da Silva added abruptly, suddenly folding it and stuffing it into the pocket of his dinner jacket.
Seeing him reach for his phone again, she gabbled the name of her insurance company in a rush.
‘I’m ringing for a tow-truck for the cars,’ he murmured, reading the reanimated fear on her expressive face.
‘Oh… Thanks,’ she muttered, turning her head and strolling away while he made the call, far more concerned with what it would cost to pay for the towing service. ‘I’m sorry about your car. It was beautiful,’ she sighed when he had stopped speaking.
‘I’ll call a cab for you.’
Bella bit out a rueful laugh. She lived in London, which
was almost sixty miles away. The cab fare home would be a week’s wages—maybe more. ‘Forget it.’
‘I will pay for it.’
She dealt him a disbelieving look. ‘No way.’
‘I insist.’ He was digging a wallet out of his pocket with astonishing alacrity.
‘I said no,’ she reminded him flatly, embarrassed to death by the offer and hurriedly attempting to change the subject. ‘Cold for May, isn’t it?’
‘Take the money!’ he bit out with stinging impatience.
Bella frowned, hunching deeper into her battered jacket, one long, shapely thigh crossed over the other, her fantastic head of hair blowing back from her exotic features in the breeze. ‘What’s the matter with you? I have to wait for the tow-truck’
‘I’ll wait for it,’ he told her harshly.
‘Look, it isn’t my car…’
‘What?’ he raked at her.
‘It belongs to this old man I live with. I only have the use of it,’ Bella explained soothingly.
Narrowed dark eyes rested on her, his beautifully shaped mouth hardening, and she found herself staring at him, noticing the shape of his lips. It was the artist in her, she supposed abstractedly. He would be an interesting study to paint.
‘How old is old?’ Rico da Silva enquired, surprising her.
‘As old as you feel.’ Bella laughed in more like her usual manner. ‘Hector says he feels fifty on a good day, seventy on a bad. I reckon he’s about the lattes.’
‘And what are you?’
‘Twenty-one…’ she checked her watch ‘….and four and a half hours.’
‘Yesterday was your birthday?’
‘Lousy birthday,’ she muttered, more to herself than him. ‘I had to work.’
‘It happens,’ he said in a strained voice.
‘And my boyfriend is two-timing me.’ It just came out. She hadn’t meant to say it. Maybe it was the effect of bravely smiling all evening and keeping her mouth shut with her friends.
‘The pensioner?’ He sounded even more strained.
It was the language barrier, she decided. How on earth could he imagine that she was dating a man old enough to be her grandfather?
