‘What happened after I got the needle in my arm?’ she asked flatly as he reappeared with the second chair and she sat down.
An ebony brow quirked. ‘Why talk about it?’
‘Because I want to know!’
‘I was afraid you would be shot when you screamed. The smaller one was very nervous. He was taking aim when the other one brought you down.’
Bella bit at her lower lip. ‘I didn’t mean to scream.’
‘I suppose it was a natural response,’ Rico conceded shortly, his mouth clenching.
But not a miscalculation that he would have been guilty of making, she gathered. He had been on all systems alert but in icy control. And for some reason he wasn’t telling her the whole story. She sensed that. ‘What did you do?’
&nbs
p; ‘I deflected his aim,’ Rico admitted.
‘How?’
‘By wrenching his arm.’
Perspiration broke out on her brow at the image which his admission evoked. ‘You could have been killed!’
‘I could not stand by and do nothing.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘There was a struggle and the other one struck me from behind. I remember nothing more. And when I came to I was in here and my watch was smashed,’ he bit out.
‘At least you weren’t.’ She dug up the courage to look up from her plate, her face flushed and troubled. ‘Thanks for not standing by,’ she muttered tightly.
‘Don’t thank me. What I did was foolish. He would not have fired that gun. His companion was in the way, probably already in the act of injecting you with the drug that knocked you out. Sometimes instinct betrays one badly,’ he completed grimly.
He was denying the fact that he had saved her life. He didn’t want her gratitude. But Bella was deeply impressed by his heroic lack of concern for his own safety. ‘Instinct’, he’d called it, depriving the act of anything personal. However, that did not change the fact that many men would have put themselves first sooner than risk their own life at the expense of someone who was little more than a stranger.
A stranger. Rico da Silva ought still to feel like a stranger to her, only he didn’t any more. Shorn of the obvious trappings of his wealth, the male across the table was as human as she was. But she reminded herself how deceptive the situation in which they were now trapped was. They were stuck with each other. This uneasy intimacy between two people from radically different worlds had been enforced, not sought.
‘If I hadn’t been there, what would you have done?’ she found herself asking.
‘There is no profit in such conjecture.’
‘You’re a typical money man, aren’t you?’ Bella condemned helplessly. ‘No such thing as answering a straight question!’
His strong features darkened. ‘Estupendo… then I’ll give it to you straight. As you screamed I was about to activate the alarm on my watch. It would have alerted my bodyguards.’
‘The alarm—it would have been that loud?’
Impatience tightened his mouth, hardened his narrowed gaze. ‘It is a highly sophisticated device. The kidnappers would have heard nothing, but the signal emitted would have automatically activated an emergency alert on the radios my bodyguards carry.’
‘And brought them running,’ she filled in, dry mouthed. ‘Some watch.’
‘It would also have acted as a homing device once it was activated.’
‘The marvels of technology,’ Bella mumbled, regarding her lettuce with a fast disappearing appetite, unable to bring herself to meet his accusing gaze. It was her fault that his watch had been smashed, her fault that he hadn’t got to activate the damned thing. ‘You were wired like a bomb.’
“That went off like a damp squib.’
She fumbled to think of something to say in her own defence. ‘There might have been a shoot-out if your guards had come rushing back.’