Rico would have been quite capable of making love to her and forgetting her existence one second after he’d achieved the satisfaction of physical release. Rico was ruthless, single-minded, a sexual predator in this particular tight corner. Rico wouldn’t have felt awkward over the breakfast-table. On his scale it would have been a minor event, unimportant when set against survival.
But Bella was not half as tough on the inside as she liked to pretend on the outside. Her outer shell of careless insouciance had been formed in the hard school of her childhood—with the slow, painful acceptance that her father didn’t give a damn about her, and that her mother dragged her about in her wake not out of choice but out of necessity, because there was nobody else to take responsibility. And when one day the possession of that child, now grown to an awkward thirteen-year-old threatened to come between Cleo and her latest man Cleo had dumped her on her grandfather, who hadn’t even known of her existence.
Bella had learnt not to let people get too close. She had learnt to protect her inner self from invasion. On the surface she was open, but inside herself she knew she told nobody anything which mattered. And now she could feel that reserve being threatened, her essential emotional distance coming under attack. Griff hadn’t hurt her, Griff had disappointed her, but she had the horrible suspicion that Rico da Silva had the power to tear her inside out…
‘Por Dios, what the hell are you doing?’
Bella jumped and unsealed her lips from the cold metal, her shoulders and arms aching from the awkward stance she had repeatedly taken up over the past few hours. She teetered on the chair, her legs stiff, and she would have fallen if a pair of strong arms hadn’t closed round her and lowered her down to the floor.
Rico was staring without comprehension at the line of tins, deprived of their labels, on the table. An incredulous frown was dug between his ebony brows as he abruptly noticed his open wallet, now emptied of the considerable amount of paper money that he had been carrying. One lean hand reached out and snatched at the single rolled banknote still lying there. He opened it up and read the message carefully printed on it.
“‘Help. Were in the container”,’ he said out loud.
‘I took the labels off the tins and tore them up and wrote on them first,’ she explained. ‘Then I pushed them through the biggest airhole. Then I had to blow to make them move. I’m hoping that some of them made it down onto the ground, or that there’s enough of a draught out there to take them off the roof. If anyone comes in they might notice them. That was when I thought of seeing what you had in your wallet—’
‘Had being the operative word.’ Rico studied her with intent, narrowed dark eyes.
‘Sorry…but a rolled-up twenty-pound note is far more likely to be noticed than a torn piece of label off a tin,’ she pointed out.
‘Sí…’ Still staring at her, he pushed long fingers somewhat unsteadily through his luxuriant hair and handed her the final note. Bella got back on the chair and posted it up into the world outside their prison. ‘I should have thought of this…’ he murmured tautly, gravely.
‘You think you have the monopoly on ideas around here?’ She laughed wryly. ‘It’s a far-out hope that someone will innocently walk in here, pick up one of those notes and release us—’
‘But not impossible. It’s a clever idea.’
‘Not if the ground out there is already littered or covered with debris, but who knows?’ Oddly embarrassed by his level of scrutiny, she turned away. ‘What do you want for breakfast?’
‘I think I owe you breakfast. You let me sleep for hours.’ He caught her wrist to examine her watch and groaned in disbelief. ‘It’s after twelve…almost lunchtime! Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘Relax. I did a lot of poker-bashing on and off.’ Bella flexed aching muscles, but she was horrendously conscious of those cool fingers still anchored to the tender inner skin of her wrist. ‘You slept through it. You needed the rest. I think whatever drug they used on us was still pretty much in both our systems until we could sleep it off. Where did you find that poker anyway?’
‘Stuffed behind the stove—an oversight on their part.’ His oddly abbreviated speech was matched by the blatant intensity of his continuing appraisal. His lashes dipped, showing only a glimmer of a pure, glinting gold, and he breathed in almost jerkily.
Her mouth ran dry, her heartbeat acce
lerating in a sudden, alarming surge. The atmosphere was thick with explosive tension. It had come out of nowhere and inexplicably, although her brain screamed at her to move away, her feet were welded to the floor in front of him. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. A pulse-beat of awareness vibrated between them. It was so powerful that it drained her of self-will.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said in a rather high-pitched voice, fighting for concentration, desperate to break the silence. ‘It’s more likely that we’re in a warehouse than a barn. This container wasn’t plumbed in with water just for us. Those fitments in there have been in situ for years. This place has been used maybe as an office… or some sort of permanent site hut, I reckon… What do you think?’ By the time she reached the end of that question she was spitting out words so fast that they ran into each other.
He wasn’t listening. He muttered something rough and yet soft in Spanish, and just as suddenly reached for her. As possessed by that terrifying strong need to physically connect as he was, Bella made no demur. Lost in the slumbrous demand of his golden gaze, she was mindless. He took her mouth with a hunger that burned like flames of fire over her unprotected skin.
And yet she craved that fire, needed that fire as she needed oxygen to live. Her hands gripped his broad shoulders, loving the heat of his flesh through the fine shirt. She pushed against him as he crushed her to him, her breasts flattened to the hard wall of his chest, already heavy with a sensitivity and an anticipation which he alone had taught her to feel. Her body remembered him with every newly awakened sense.
His mouth on hers was a source of unbearable pleasure. She was inflamed by it, driven with incredible speed to a pitch of desire strong enough to make her legs tremble and offer only the most fragile support. Every stab of his tongue intensified the drowning excitement that was fast claiming her. She kissed him back with an intensity of response that utterly controlled her, her hands sliding under his unbuttoned shirt, smoothing wonderingly over the flexing muscles of the satin-smooth skin of his back.
He dragged his lips from hers with a fevered imprecation and looked down at her, his breathing roughly audible. Hot golden eyes raked her flushed, vibrant face, and he set her free with an abruptness that felt like an amputation. Bella was less able to pull back from the extraordinary power he could exert over her. Every time it happened it was a revelation, and, instead of it strengthening her resistance, she found herself further weakened by the repetition.
Rico lounged back against the edge of the table, tension screaming from every poised angle of him. He appraised her with fiercely narrowed eyes, his sensual mouth compressed in a hard line. He looked like a pirate, his jaw-line obscured by a blue shadow of dark stubble. Her own skin was tingling from that abrasive contact. She raised a shaky hand to her reddened lips, feeling as though she had been branded, feeling as though she would never, ever be the same again.
‘I can keep my hands off you,’ he asserted with almost ferocious bite.
No, you can’t and the knowledge is killing you. Bella read in his clear eyes the frustration, the anger he couldn’t hide. This was a male accustomed to calling every shot, staying in control, never leaping before he looked. She remembered the tidiness of his desk and the incredulity with which he had emerged from the cluttered chaos of the interior of the Skoda that first night. Rico was one of those very organised and disciplined individuals who very rarely made an uncalculated move… and she threw him off balance and he didn’t like that one bit more than she did.
‘This will not happen again,’ he drawled flatly.
‘I know… you don’t want to seem like a snob but I’m really not your type,’ she remarked brittlely. ‘And you’re not my type either. Let’s leave it at that.’
His teeth clenched. ‘I am not a snob!’