by Various
Much to her relief, nobody appeared. The courtyard area was deserted and—it got better—the folding doors of the building were half open and the lights inside were on.
There was no sound of activity so she presumed that someone had left without locking up; it was about time something went her way tonight.
The only way to find out for sure if someone was inside was to go in. Sophie took a deep breath and headed straight for the first car she saw. It happened to be a four-wheel drive and as she climbed up to the passenger seat her skirt snagged on a tool box that lay on the floor. She heard the sound of ripping fabric as she frantically pulled it free but didn’t pause to look at the damage.
The key was in the ignition.
She raised her eyes and whispered a heart felt thank-you. It was as if it was meant to be.
It was destiny.
It is theft, retorted the voice in her head. The same voice asked how far she was going without money or a passport, but Sophie ignored that too. She turned the ignition. It wasn’t as if she intended to keep it, just to borrow it.
She was backing out of the driveway when in the periphery of her vision she saw a figure running down the drive towards her. Without turning her head, she knew exactly who it was. Sophie jammed her foot on the accelerator and the car shot forward in a shower of gravel.
Heart thudding, she drove at speed down the driveway, hit the bend fast, then exhaled when the lights of the palazzo vanished. She had escaped. She didn’t feel any better, though. In fact, she felt worse and her head hurt from trying not to hear every stupid instinct in her body screaming turn around and go back!
Her powers of self-preservation needed some serious work!
As she approached the tricky second bend she braked. She braked again and nothing happened.
Her last thought before she hit the bend and everything went slightly crazy was, I’m going to die and I didn’t tell Marco I love him.
Chapter Sixteen
MARCO reached the open garage door just as the four-wheel drive drew away, spraying gravel into the air.
He swore and stood there glaring at the receding lights, his chest heaving. He couldn’t believe that she had run away from him, or rather driven away like a grand-prix racing driver.
He had never chased after a woman in his life, but he was about to now and when he caught up with her he would—Before he had an opportunity to think of a punishment dire enough to fit the crime a worried-looking mechanic in overalls appeared from inside of the garage, wiping his oily hands on a cloth.
He saw Marco and looked relieved.
Marco, who barely registered his presence, didn’t slow as the agitated man began to speak. He listened to the outpouring with half an ear as, face set in rigid lines of fierce determination, he headed towards the open garage door. Tonight was not going as he had planned, but then since he had walked in and found Sophie Balfour asleep in his office nothing had gone as planned. His life was falling apart.
‘I wish I’d never met her!’ he growled.
Never seen that face. An image formed in his head of her face, the curve of her cheek, the soft pink generosity of her lips. She was a woman with no hard edges; she was soft and warm, except when she was berating him.
About to pull open the door of the first car he came to he stopped and turned back to the mechanic, who was speaking quickly, frantic to get his point across to his obviously disinterested boss.
‘What do you mean no brakes?’ Though the bad feeling in the pit of his stomach told him the mechanic had meant exactly what he’d said.
‘There are none, no brakes. I was working on them.’
‘You were working on your own car?’
‘No, it’s not mine,’ the man hastened to assure him. ‘One of the guests had trouble with it and I said I’d take a look…I only left for a moment to get a drink and…whoever has taken it is going to be in real trouble when they try and brake.’
A picture of the steep bend a few hundred yards down the drive flashed into Marco’s head at the same moment as there was a loud discordant noise in the distance.
Noise, then silence.
The silence was almost worse. Marco hit the ground running, his open jacket flapping as he ran. He struggled to banish the nightmare images of twisted metal, and a broken body flashed kaleidoscope-like through his mind…She was fine.
She had to be fine. He couldn’t think, he needed to focus; he needed to run, he needed to get to her.
The scene that met his eyes as he rounded the bend drew a groan from his dry throat. ‘This isn’t happening.’ He shook his head in denial of what he was seeing.
The off-roader was just that. It had overturned and taken out several saplings with it; the fallen greenery partially blocked it from view but by the light from the headlights he could see that it was upside down.
Icy tentacles of paralysing fear spread through his body, threatening briefly to overwhelm him, but Marco pushed past it.
His first instinct was to rush straight in, but he made himself pause and assess the situation.
The off-roader’s position, lying at a drunken forty-five degree angle up the steep embankment at the side of the drive, was precarious. He approached it cautiously; one false move and it would crash down the slope, causing God knows how much damage to Sophie, who had to be unconscious, or else she would surely have replied to his calls.
The smell hit Marco almost immediately; his nostrils flared. The air reeked of pungent petrol fumes. With a grimace he registered the pool of petrol forming on the road below and swore. One spark and the whole thing would go up.
‘Sophie!’ Marco was not a praying man but he prayed now as he worked his way around the vehicle. ‘Sophie!’
His frustration mounted as he saw that the driver’s side of the vehicle was jammed into the grassy embankment—the door was not accessible. Still calling her name and still getting no response he worked his way back around to the passenger side, his progress hampered by the loose ground beneath his feet that kept crumbling away.
After what felt to Marco like an age he reached the door. Dropping to his knees he called her name as he heaved his upper body through the open window.
‘Sophie!’ Inside the fumes were thick enough to make him cough.
He scanned the interior, dread clutching like a vice in his chest, anticipating the worst. When he saw the cab was empty and she wasn’t there his initial relief was quickly followed by frustration.
Where the hell was she?
He saw the piece of torn red fabric first, fluttering in the breeze that blew in through the cracked windscreen. It was when he went to pick it up that he saw the second flash of red, a smear on the windscreen, and he froze. He reached out a hand. Unable to take his eyes off the stain on his fingers he closed his eyes.
Then he shook himself and thought, Get in gear, Marco. Sophie was injured but she was alive. He had to find her and, considering the blood and the amount of petrol sloshing around, sooner would be better than later…
As he pulled himself out of the car he heard a sound.
He stopped and, head tilted on one side, listened.
Frustrated he heard nothing but the distant call of a hunting owl. Then just as he began to slide down the slope he heard it again, but this time louder; it was a definite whimper.
Forgetting caution he slid backwards down the rest of slope and, landing gracefully on his feet, moved in the direction of the sound, still calling her name frantically.
He had gone a couple of yards when she appeared out of the shadows.
She blinked in a dazed manner when she saw him and said his name.
Light-headed with sheer relief he didn’t respond, he just stared. She was a pitiful sight: her beautiful dress in shreds, her face filthy, blood oozing from what looked—much to his relief—like a superficial wound on her forehead. There was also a bruise along her cheekbone but to him she had never looked more beautiful.
He wanted to throttle her and kiss
her and tell her that when she left a room it was empty and if she left him he’d be empty too…He loved her.
Saying it in his head made him feel lighter somehow. It was actually a release to finally admit it to himself.
He felt elation as emotions he had kept in cold storage broke free—elation and deep shame that he had been such a coward. Post-Allegra he had channelled his energies into work and sealed his heart off behind high walls, afraid to get hurt, afraid to make a fool of himself. Allegra had only ever been able to hurt his pride, not his heart, and maybe that was part of the reason she had been so spiteful…she knew it.
Sophie had dismantled the walls he had built brick by brick.
He had told himself that she wasn’t part of his plan so he had changed the plan to fit around her, because he had always known he couldn’t let her go.
‘You’re all right.’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’ As if to disprove this claim she swayed. She grabbed the steadying arm that went to her waist and held on to his forearm with both hands. ‘Just a bit…’
‘Alive. You’re alive.’ A hoarse sound left his throat as he tugged her to him, then cradling the back of her head in one hand he pressed her face into his chest. His arms closed around her and she sighed and stopped fighting her feelings. This was where she wanted to be and she felt safe, and for that moment it was enough.
‘I thought—’ He broke off, saying something uneven in Italian.
She had never heard that note in his voice before and he sounded so strange that she made herself pull a little back. As she tilted her head to look up she was shocked by the anguish and tension stamped on his lean face.
‘I thought you were—’ Unable to complete the sentence he shook his head.
‘Me too, for a minute,’ she admitted. ‘I think I was thrown clear.’ She frowned; the sequence of events was still hazy.
‘Are you hurt anywhere?’ She stood passively while his big hands moved over her body; his light touch was clinical but the feelings it evoked were not.
Finding no obvious signs of injury Marco relaxed fractionally. ‘Does it hurt anywhere?’
‘No,’ she lied, thinking, everywhere. ‘Not broken,’ she joked shakily, ‘just bruised.’
He didn’t smile back. Her hand pressed to her head, she launched into a shaky apology. ‘I’m sorry about your car.’
‘It’s not my car.’
‘Oh?’ Were Italian jails nice? ‘I hadn’t been drinking—I’d only had two mouthfuls of the champagne…honestly! I just pressed the brakes and nothing happened. It just kept getting faster and then it tipped over twice. I wasn’t going to keep the—’
‘If you mention the car again I will kill you myself and save you the bother. Come, we need to get away from here, there’s petrol.’
Registering the smell for the first time Sophie nodded. ‘Right, of course…’ she murmured.
Marco watched as she pushed her hair back from her face with her forearm. The weary gesture and her attempt at a smile made things twist inside him.
Without a word he scooped her up into his arms and strode away from the accident scene.
Even if she’d had the inclination, she didn’t have the strength to resist, so instead Sophie tucked her head under his chin and held on tight.
He carried her as though she weighed nothing and he wasn’t even breathing hard.
He had put a few hundred yards between them and the car wreck when she became aware of the distant sounds of sirens. Before she could comment on it there was a hiss and then a loud explosion.
With her in his arms Marco leapt forward, throwing her to the ground and covering her body with his own while the world exploded around them—at least, it felt like that to Sophie.
She had no idea of how long they lay there but when Marco finally levered himself off her the air was filled with acrid smoke fumes, and the billowing orange flames from the exploded car lit the night sky.
Sophie rolled over. ‘Your face is bleeding.’
He dismissed the cut on his cheek with a shrug. ‘So is yours,’ he reminded her as he tugged her to her feet.
Sophie couldn’t take her eyes off the blazing vehicle. ‘I could have been in there.’
Marco saw the shudder run through her body. He cupped her chin in his hand and tilted her face up to his. A nerve clenched in his cheek and his eyes were dark and shadowed as he said, ‘The point is that you are not in there.’
She nodded. ‘I know, it’s just…it makes you realise how…temporary everything is…how fragile.’
His lips twisted into a smile she didn’t understand as he said, ‘Not everything is temporary. Some things last forever and nothing can extinguish them, not fire…’ His deep voice broke huskily, his eyes flickering towards the smouldering pile of metal as he added, ‘Not anything.’
Before Sophie could respond to this cryptic utterance the first fire engine drew up, followed by a second, then a police car and an ambulance.
Blinking at the sea of flashing lights Sophie shook her head. ‘Goodness, that’s what I call overkill.’ And an overdose of testosterone, she thought as the firefighters sprang into immediate action, applying a smothering layer of foam to the flames.
‘That’s what I call about time,’ Marco retorted as he walked forward to meet the approaching paramedics. Even with his face streaked with smoke and mud, his clothes torn and filthy, he still stood out as the man in charge among a dozen hero types.
Though she could not hear the conversation Sophie could tell by the gestures that Marco was refusing the other man’s suggestion he check out his head wound.
The conversation was brief; a moment later Marco was back at her side
‘You go to the hospital in the ambulance. I will follow in the car.’
‘I don’t need to go to the hospital.’
A spasm of irritation crossed his lean features. ‘You have a head wound, you could have concussion.’
‘You have a head wound, you could have concussion, but you’re driving.’ She furrowed her brow in an attitude of feigned bemusement. ‘Is it just me? Or—’
‘Enough!’ Marco’s deep voice cut her sarcastic protest short. ‘You will go in the ambulance—this is not open to discussion.’
‘But—’ Sophie’s eyes flew wide and she let out a yelp as he picked her up. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
He handed her to a hunky paramedic and said, ‘I will see you at the hospital.’
He didn’t, well, not immediately. Sophie had been poked and prodded, her wounds cleaned and her X-rays pronounced clear, by the time he appeared.
‘We can go home now.’
Sophie embarrassed herself terribly and probably him by wailing she had no home and bursting into loud noisy tears.
‘You’re carrying me again,’ she complained as he strode out of the swinging glass doors.
‘You know what they say, keep your enemies close and the woman you love closer.’
Sophie stopped crying and stared at him. ‘That’s not what they say.’ She sniffed. ‘And you don’t.’
He turned his head and the glow in his eyes made her heart flip. ‘I do love you.’
‘But…’
He slid her into the passenger seat.
‘No buts,’ he said, placing a finger on her lips and walking over to the driver’s side.
She waited until he got in and said one word.
‘Allegra.’
Marco stiffened at the name. ‘This has nothing to do with Allegra.’
‘It has everything to do with her. I knock myself out trying to please you and still fail!’
‘You have not failed.’
Sophie ignored the interruption. ‘She humiliated you and cheated on you and you still love her.’
‘Allegra…’ He stopped and shook his head, a look of blank incredulity spreading across his face. ‘You think I love Allegra?’
His eyes scanned her face; he opened his mouth and appeared to change his mind. Then quite s
uddenly he smiled. Sophie, who could find nothing to laugh at in this situation, told herself he was a callous rat and she’d had a lucky escape.
Marco felt a rush of heady relief. ‘And that bothers you.’ It was a statement.
‘I couldn’t give a damn!’ she flung back, then seamlessly contradicting herself yelled, ‘It bothers me that you’re stupid and sh-shallow enough to be in love with someone who isn’t good enough to…to…’
As her feelings threatened to overcome her, Sophie pressed a hand to her trembling lips and shook her head mutely before choking, ‘Just because she’s beautiful on the outside.’
And despite lip service what man born, she thought cynically, cared a jot if a girl had a sense of humour or a lovely personality, if she was plain or fat or had cellulite. Men went for the package and in Allegra’s case that package was stunning.
‘I don’t give a stuff about Allegra.’ Marco’s lips didn’t even twist into their usual grimace as he said the name. ‘She is the past.’ He made a slashing gesture of finality before extending his hand to Sophie.
She looked at his fingers and wanted to take them, wanted to place her hand within his and feel safe and cherished, but she knew that she would be fooling herself. The safety would be an illusion.
‘The past that you have been writing to.’ She saw his eyes widen and said, ‘Yes, I know.’
‘How?’
At least he hadn’t bothered denying it. ‘I saw the return address on the envelope. I waited for you to tell me…I gave you every opportunity.’
‘I have been corresponding with Allegra, but we have not been exchanging love letters. I would not touch Allegra with a barge pole—I would not risk even that. Allegra is poison.
‘My marriage to her was pure hell from almost day one. She never wanted me, just what I could give her. I have been corresponding not to her direct but to her lawyers. It is Allegra who insists on writing to me personally. When she left she took some items that did not belong to her,’ he explained. ‘It was a loss I did not discover until recently, and I needed those items back.’
‘She stole something from you.’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘What items?’
