is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and

bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant

success with readers worldwide. Since her first

book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a

chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare

treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may

have missed. In every case, seduction and passion

with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon® reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

Prisoner of Passion

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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About the Author Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN Copyright

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?

‘Not Hector—my boyfriend.’

‘Maybe you should think of another occupation-something that keeps you home at night... although perhaps not,’ he muttered half under his breath.

Had she told him that she was a waitress? She didn’t remember doing so but she must have done. Screening another sleepy yawn, Bella sighed. ‘I don’t mind most of the time, although it’s murder on my feet and it’s very boring. Still, it pays the rent—’

‘He charges you rent?’

‘Of course he does... although not very much.’ She yawned again, politely masking her mouth with a slender hand. ‘He tried to claim for me as a housekeeper but the Inland Revenue weren’t impressed. I’m not really very domestic but he wouldn’t like it if I was. It’s kind of hard to explain Hector to people...’

‘Are you in the habit of telling complete strangers the most intimate details of your life?’ Rico da Silva prompted in a tone of driven fascination.

Bella thought about it and then nodded, although she would have disputed his concept of ‘intimate details’. Friends said, ‘I told you so.’ Strangers just listened and volunteered their own experiences. Not that the male standing next to her would. He was the secretive type, she decided. Still waters ran deep—dark and deep as hell with this one, she thought helplessly.

‘You’re a financier,’ she remarked conversationally, thinking that what was good enough for the gander was good enough for the goose.

‘How the hell do you know that?’ he shot at her forbiddingly.

Bella gave him a startled look. ‘I saw you earlier this evening and a friend told me who you were.’

‘And then all of a sudden you crash into me. Two such coincidences in one night strain my credulity!’ Rico da Silva shot at her.

‘Pretty lousy luck, huh? If I’d done the cards this morning I probably wouldn’t have got out of bed—’

‘“The cards”?’ he echoed.

‘Tarot cards. Though mostly I steer clear of the temptation to tell my own fortune these days. Sometimes I think you’re better not knowing what’s ahead of you.’

‘I do not believe in such a coincidence,’ he stated afresh, staring down at her in a very intimidating fashion. ‘It was your intent to meet me, es verdad?’

‘You’re a very uptight personality.’ Bella shook her vibrant head. ‘And a bit weird, to be frank—’

‘Weird?’ Rico da Silva roared. ‘You think that I am weird?’

She raised her hands. ‘Now just count to ten and back off, buster.’

“‘Buster”?’ he repeated, snatching in a hissing breath.

‘Mr Silver... no, it wasn’t that, was it?’ She sighed.

‘Rico... da... Silva,’ he enunciated very slowly and carefully, as if he were talking to a complete idiot.

‘Yeah, I knew it was something strange. I hate to tell you this but it is a little weird to imagine that a total stranger would crash into you deliberately to meet you,’ Bella told him gently. ‘I mean, I might have been killed.’

From beneath black lashes so long that they cast crescent shadows on his savage cheekbones, he cast her a glimmering glance. ‘I have known women to take tremendous risks to make my acquaintance.’

‘I wonder why?’ she said, and then realised by the sudden, thundering silence that she had said it out loud instead of just thinking it. ‘What I mean is...well, there’s only one way of saying this, Mr da Silver—’

‘Silva!’ he slotted in rawly.

Uptight wasn’t the word for it. This guy lived on the outer edge. On the brink of gently assuring him that he had met some very peculiar women, Bella was silenced briefly by the sight of the tow-truck surging up the street towards them.

‘Talk about service!’ she gasped. ‘I thought we’d be here for hours!’

‘Another half-hour of your relentless, mindless chatter and I would be—’

‘More hyper than you already are? It’s OK. I’m not offended,’ she told him with a smile. ‘You either love me or you hate me. But, for your own sake, get your blood pressure checked and take up something relaxing like gardening. Guys like you drop dead from heart attacks at forty-five.’ Dragging her attention from the darkening colour of his cheekbones and the razor-slash effect of his incredulous gaze, Bella turned to gape at the arrival of a second tow-truck. ‘Gosh... one each!’

With that, she rushed over to the Skoda, belatedly realising that she would need to clear the car out. She was kneeling on the driver’s seat, poking around amongst the rubbish for stray items of clothing, letters, bills, her sketch-pad and pencils, when his voice assailed her again from behind.

‘I will expect you to pass on your insurance details to my secretary tomorrow. This is the number.’

Awkwardly she twisted round and reached out to grasp a gilded card and dig it into her pocket.

‘If you don’t call, I will inform the police—’

‘Look, what are you trying to do—give me nightmares?’ she exclaimed helplessly, clinging perilously to the steering wheel to lean out and look up at him. ‘I am a law-abiding person.’

‘To trust you goes against my every principle,’ he admitted unapologetically.

‘You wouldn’t want me to lose my licence, would you?’ Bella fixed enormous green eyes on him in reproach. ‘It took me a lot of years to get that licence. The examiners used to draw lots for me and the one that got the short straw was it! I mean, we all have weaknesses and mine is in the driving department, but this is truly the very worst accident I have ever had and I am going to be much more careful in the future... cross my heart and hope to die—’

‘Or shut up.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ She squinted up at him.

He extended his phone with an air of long-suffering hauteur. ‘Ring your boyfriend to come and pick you up.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding. He’d probably say his car had a flat tyre or something anyway,’ she mused, returning to her frantic clean-up.

‘There must be somebody you can contact!’

‘At four in the morning to take me back to London?’ And pigs might fly, her tone said.

‘I am not giving you a lift!’ he snapped in a whiplash response.

So he had been heading for London too. ‘I wasn’t aware I asked for one,’ she hissed. ‘Now why don’t you just go away and leave me alone?’

‘I am being foolish. No doubt you are accustomed to walking lonely streets at this hour of the night, es verdad? But it is hard for me to forget my natural instinct to behave as a gentleman—’

‘I would have said you forgot it the minute I hit your car... but it’s OK,’ Bella continued sweetly. ‘I didn’t notice. I haven’t got much experience of what you would probably call gentlemen. I cut my teeth on creeps.’

There was a fulminating silence.

‘Make sure you make that call tomorrow.’

Bella scrambled out backwards with her bulging carrier bag, wondering why he was still hovering. Approaching the driver of the tow-truck, she told him to be sure to dump the Skoda at the nearest garage possible. Hopefully that would cut the cost. ‘I can’t pay you now,’ she then said awkwardly. ‘I haven’t got enough money on me.’

‘I will take care of it,’ Rico da Silva announced glacially from behind her.

She grimaced and ignored him to ask the driver what it was going to cost. Her horror was unfeigned. ‘I’m not asking you to fix it!’ she protested in a shattered voice.

‘I said I will pay the bill!’ Rico da Silva blitzed. Her temples were pounding like crazy. She just couldn’t fight any more. Once again she nodded. Anything for a quiet life. She started to walk away. Her feet were killing her.

‘Where are you going?’

‘The bus station.’ She glanced back at him with a frown of incomprehension, well aware that he liked her just about as much as she liked him, wondering why on earth it should matter to him how she intended to get home.

‘Madre de Dios!’ he ground out, skimming a furious hand of frustration through the air. ‘There will be no buses until morning!’

‘Morning’s only a couple of hours away.’

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he bit out between clenched teeth.

‘Forget it.’

‘I said I will give you a lift, but only on one condition—you do not open your mouth!’

‘I prefer the bus. It’s more egalitarian. I’m allowed to breathe, you know, that sort of life-enhancing stuff called oxygen? I use up a lot of it, but thanks all the same.’ And then she saw the limousine waiting by the kerb on the other side of the street and her sleepy green eyes widened to their fullest extent. She had assumed that he was catching a cab. But a lift in a real live Hmo... She just couldn’t resist the offer. ‘Mr da Silva?’ she called abruptly.

‘I thought you might change your mind,’ he breathed, without turning his glossy dark head. ‘I must be out of my mind to be doing this.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Give my chauffeur your address and then shut up,’ he grated.

Bella climbed in and surveyed the opulent interior with unhidden fascination. ‘Do you always travel... sorry, I forgot!’

The limo purred away from the kerb. Her companion stabbed a button, and under the onslaught of her incredulous scrutiny a revolving drinks cabinet smoothly appeared. ‘Wow,’ she said, deeply impressed.

‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked shortly.

‘No, thanks. My father was next door to being an alcoholic. Personally speaking, I wouldn’t touch the stuff with a barge-pole!’

He expelled his breath in a hiss. She watched his hand still and then hover momentarily before he finally grasped the whisky bottle.

‘I guess—’she began, and then sealed her mouth again as those black-as-night eyes hit on her with silencing effect.

‘You guess what?’ he finally gritted. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense!’

‘I was going to say that we don’t have a lot in common, do we? It’s a bit like meeting an alien,’ Bella mumbled, sleep catching up on her as she rested her heavy head back against the leather upholstery and closed her drooping eyelids. ‘Except even the alien might have had a sense of humour...’

Someone was shaking her shoulder hard. She surfaced groggily, registered that she was lying face down on some kind of seat, then remembered and hauled herself upright into a sitting position.

‘This cannot be where you live!’ Rico da Silva vented with raw exasperation. ‘Is this your idea of a joke?’

Bella focused on the familiar Georgian square of enormous, elegant terraced houses, which had been her home for the past year. ‘Why should it be my idea of a joke?’ She fumbled with the door-release mechanism but the door remained stubbornly closed.

‘I should imagine that not one in a thousand hookers lives in a house worth millions!’

‘Hookers’? He thought she was a hooker? He thought she sold her body for money? Aghast, Bella stared at him for several seemingly endless seconds, telling herself that she had somehow misunderstood him. ‘You think I’m a prostitute?’ she finally gasped, wide-eyed with rampant disbelief. ‘How dare you? Let me out of this car right now!’

A winged ebony brow quirked. ‘Are you saying now that you are not?’

‘Of course I’m not!’ Bella threw at him in violent outrage, belatedly understanding all of his peculiar utterances. ‘I’ve never been so insulted in my life! You have a mind like a sewer—’

‘You dress like one—’

‘Dress like one?’ Liz’s wretched too short skirt! She wanted to scream.

‘And you came on to me like a whore!’ he condemned, without batting an eyelash.

“‘Came on to” you?’ Fit to be tied, Bella looked at him with splintering green eyes. ‘Me... come on to you? Are you crazy?’

‘You offered yourself to me—’

‘I what? You’re a lunatic... Let me out of this car; I don’t feel safe!’ she shrieked. ‘I should never have got into it in the first place. I knew you were weird!’

‘Are you trying to tell me that I was mistaken?’ His strong, dark features were fiercely clenched.

‘How dare you think I would come on to you?’ Bella spat at him like a bristling cat. ‘I never go for dark men! Your car was at more risk than you were! And I may wear second-hand clothes, talk with an Essex accent and hardly be able to spell, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have principles! It might interest you to know that I’m a virgin—’

He burst into spontaneous laughter. In fact he threw his dark head back and very nearly choked on his disbelief. Bella launched herself across the car at him in a rage and two strong hands snaked out and closed round her narrow forearms to hold her imprisoned mere inches from him and in devastating contact with every line of his leashed, powerful body.

‘A virgin?’ he queried in a shaking voice. ‘Maybe not a whore... but definitely not a virgin.’

‘Let go of me!’

For a split-second he stared down into her brilliant green eyes and something happened inside her—something that had never happened to Bella before; a tight clenched sensation jerked low in her stomach. It made the hair prickle at the back of her neck, the breath catch in her throat, every muscle draw taut. She looked back at him with dawning comprehension and horror, feeling the swell of her own breasts, the sudden, painful tightening of her nipples.

‘So what do you do on the nightshift?’ Rico da Silva probed in a purring undertone that set up a strange chain reaction down her spine.

Seriously shaken by the reaction of her own treacherous body, she remained mutinously silent.

‘And where does Hector fit in?’

‘Let go of me... I don’t feel well,’ Bella muttered tremulously, and it was true.

He searched her pallor, abruptly freeing hei. His ebony brows had drawn together in a sudden frown. She had the strangest feeling that he was as disconcerted by his own behaviour as she had been.

‘I’ll talk to your secretary tomorrow,’ she mumbled, her nerves strung so tightly that tension was a fevered pulse-beat through her entire body.

He pressed a button. The chauffeur climbed out and opened the door in the humming silence. Bella flew out like a cork ejected from a bottle and fled up the steps of the shabbiest house in the row. Inserting her key, she unlocked the front door, then rushed into the shelter of the dark house and rested back against the door like someone who had seen death at close quarters. Every sense on super-alert, she listened to the limo driving off before she breathed again.

Shock was still reverberating through her. She had felt so safe for so long. That had never happened to her before with a man. And then all of a sudden, when it was least expected, she had been gripped by the most dangerous drive in the entire human repertoire—sexual desire. But she was really proud of herself. Control and common sense had triumphed. She had run like a rabbit.

CHAPTER TWO

IN THE half-light. Bella picked her way past the piled-up books and newspapers that littered every stair and headed up to the second floor and the privacy of her spacious, cluttered studio. She was still shaking like a leaf. So that was what it felt like! She lit the candle beside her bed, and slowly drew in a deep, sustaining breath. Well, thankfully she was extremely unlikely ever to see him again. There was no need to worry about temptation in that quarter. Even so, she was still shaken.

‘I go with my feelings—that can never be wrong,’ Cleo had once said loftily, supremely blind to the wreckage of disastrous relationships in her past. Her mother had been like a kamikaze pilot with men. Every creep within a hundred-mile radius had zeroed in on her, stopped a while and then moved on. But Cleo had kept on trying, regardless of the consequences to herself and her daughter, always convinced that the next one would be different. And Liz could have no idea just how much it scared Bella to be told that she suffered from a similar lack of judgement with the men in her life.

When she came downstairs later that morning Hector was shuffling about in his carpet slippers in the ancient kitchen. The gas bill had arrived. He was taking it as hard as he always did when a bill came through the letter box. There were the usual charged enquiries about how often she had used the oven and boiled the kettle. Hector Barsay’s mission in life was to save money.

It was his one failing but, as Gramps had often said, everybody had their little idiosyncrasies, and those same little idiosyncrasies got a tighter hold the older you got. Beneath his crusty, dismal manner Hector was kind. He had a bunch of prosperous relatives just waiting for him to die so that they could sell his house and make their fortunes. None of them had visited since the time they had tried to persuade him into an old folks’ home and he had threatened to leave them out of his will.

‘I crashed the car last night,’ Bella told him tautly.

‘Again?’ Hector cringed into his shabby layers of woolly cardigans and she squirmed, guilt and shame engulfing her.

‘It’s not going to cost you anything!’ she swore.

‘I haven’t got anything!’ His faded blue eyes rolled in his head at the very suggestion that his pocket might be touched.

‘That’s what you have insurance for,’ she told him in consolation. ‘Before you know it the Skoda will be back in the garage as good as new.’

Back upstairs, she dug out her insurance details and wrinkled her nose. The renewal hadn’t yet been sent but then they always took their time about that and, to be fair, she had been a little late in sending on the money because Hector had made her ring round half of London trying to get a cheaper quote. When you had to do it from a phone box, that took time.

She headed out for a phone. Hector insisted that his phone was only to be used in an emergency. The girl at the insurance company was chatty until Bella explained about the accident. Then she went off the line for a while.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Jennings,’ she murmured on her return, ‘but at the time of the accident you were not insured with us—’

‘What are you talking about?’ Bella was aghast.

‘Your premium should have arrived by Tuesday. Unfortunately it was two days late—’

‘But surely-?’

‘You were given an adequate period in which to respond to the renewal notice.’

‘But I—’

‘We will be returning your premium in the post. The offer was not accepted within the stated period and we are entitled to withdraw it.’

Argument got Bella nowhere. Reeling with shock, she stood back to let the next person in the queue use the phone. From her pocket she removed the card that Rico da Silva had given her. How could she ring his secretary and tell her she had no insurance? Dear heaven, that was a criminal offence!

A Bugatti... In anguish she clutched at her hair, her stomach heaving. And what about the repair of Hector’s Skoda? She would be in debt for the rest of her life. Maybe she would go to prison! Rico da Silva had that piece of paper on which she admitted turning the wrong way into a one-way street without due care and attention!

An hour later Bella was hanging over a reception desk and smiling her most pleading smile. ‘Please... this is a matter of life and death!’

‘Mr da Silva’s secretary, Miss Ames, has no record of your name, Miss Jennings. You are wasting your time and mine,’ the elegant receptionist said frigidly.

‘But I’ve already explained that. He probably forgot about it, you know? He had a late night!’ Bella appealed in despair.

‘If you don’t remove yourself from this desk I will be forced to call security.’

‘At four this morning Rico told me to ring his secretary!’ Bella exclaimed, shooting her last bolt.

Sudden silence fell in the busy foyer. Heads turned. The receptionist’s eyes widened and were swiftly concealed by her lashes, faint colour burnishing her cheeks. ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ she said in a stilted voice.

Bella chewed anxiously at her lower lip and watched her retreat to the phone again; only, this time the conversation that took place was very low-key. She skimmed a hand down over her slim black Lycra skirt, adjusted her thin cotton fitted jacket and surveyed the scuffed toes of her fringed cowboy boots. A clump of suited men nearby were studying her as if she had just jumped naked out of a birthday cake.

But then it was that kind of building—a bank. Just being inside it gave her the heebie-jeebies. All marble pillars and polished floors and hushed voices. Sort of like a funeral parlour, she reflected miserably. And she didn’t belong here. She remembered that time she had gone to plead Gramps’ case and the executive had been so smooth and nice that she had thought she was actually getting somewhere. But double-talk had been created for places like this. The bank had still called in the debt and Gramps had lost everything.

‘Miss Ames will see you,’ the receptionist whispered out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Take that lift in the corner.’

‘How can I help you, Miss Jennings?’ She was greeted by the svelte older woman as the lift doors opened on the top floor.

‘I need to see Mr da Silva urgently.’

‘I’m afraid that Mr da Silva is in a very important meeting and cannot be disturbed. Perhaps you would like to leave a message?’

‘I’ll wait.’ Bella groaned. ‘Maybe you could send a message in to him?’

‘And what would you like this message to say?’

‘Can I come in... like, go and sit down?’

The older woman stepped reluctantly aside.

Loan-sharking certainly paid. Bella took in her palatial surroundings without surprise. ‘I’ll write the message.’

A notepad was extended to her. Bella dashed off four words, ripped off the sheet, folded it five times into a tiny scrap and handed it over.

‘Mr da Silva does not like to be disturbed.’

‘He’s going to like what I have to tell him even less,’ Bella muttered, sprawling down on a sofa.

Miss Ames disappeared. The brunette at the desk watched her covertly as though she was afraid that she was about to pocket the crystal ashtray on the coffee-table. Two minutes later Miss Ames returned, all flushed and taut.

‘Come this way, please...’

Bella strode up the corridor, hands stuck in her pockets, fingers curled round the pack of cigarettes that nerves had driven her to buy before she’d entered the bank.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Rico da Silva blazed across the width of the most enormous office she had ever seen. Her heels were sinking into the carpet.

She looked around her with unhidden curiosity and then back at him. He had to be about six feet four. Wide shoulders, narrow hips, long, lean legs. Michelangelo’s David trapped in the clothing chains of convention. Navy pinstriped suit, boring white shirt, predictable navy tie—he probably put on a red one for Christmas and thought he was being really daring. He was looking her over as if she were a computer virus threatening to foul up the entire office network. She tilted her chin, and her gaze collided with glittering golden eyes...

He had really gorgeous eyes. In the streetlight she hadn’t got the full effect. Eyes the colour of the setting sun, spectacularly noticeable in that hard-angled, bronzed face. Eyes that sizzled and burned. The key to the soul. There was a tiger in there fighting to get free—a sexual tiger, all teeth and claws and passion. On some primal level she could feel the unholy heat. Wow, this guy wants me, she registered in serious shock.

‘I asked you what the hell you’re doing here,’ Rico repeated with leashed menace.

Bella dragged her distracted gaze from his, astonished to discover how hard it was to break that connection. Reddening, she went tense all over, embarrassed by her last crazy thought. ‘I said it in my note.’

‘And what exactly is “We have a problem” intended to denote? By the way, problem is spelt with an e, not an a,’ he delivered, hitting her on her weakest flank.

‘I’ll try to remember that.’ She studied her feet and then abruptly, cravenly yielded to temptation and dug out the cigarettes and matches. Never had she been more in need of the crutch she had abandoned the day she’d moved into Hector’s house. She was just on the brink of lighting up when both the match and cigarette were snatched from her. Under her arrested gaze the cigarette was snapped in two and dropped in a waste-paper basket.

‘A member of the hang-’em-high anti-smoking Reich?’ Bella probed helplessly.

‘What do you think?’

She felt that she had never needed a cigarette more. ‘Just one...?’ she begged.

‘Don’t be pathetic. It won’t cut any ice with me,’ he drawled, with a sardonic twist to his mouth. ‘What is the problem?’

Bella swallowed hard and then breathed in deeply.

‘You look guilty as sin,’ Rico informed her grimly.

‘And if my suspicions as to what has prompted this personal appearance prove correct I’m taking you straight to the police.’

The tip of her tongue slid out to moisten her dry lower lip. His lashes lowered. Hooded eyes, revealing a mere slit of gold, dropped to her mouth and lingered there. A buzzing tension entered the atmosphere. The silence vibrated.

As Bella laid her outdated insurance policy on the desk in front of him she felt as though she was moving in slow motion. ‘Can I sit down?’

‘May I sit down,’ he corrected automatically. ‘No.’

He scanned the document.

‘You see, it only ran out Monday,’ Bella pointed out, in a wobbly plea for understanding. ‘And I sent in the new premium and thought it was fine. But when I phoned the company this morning...’

The well-shaped, dark head lifted. Lancing golden eyes bit into her shrinking flesh. ‘You were driving without insurance when you hit me—’

‘Not intentionally!’ Bella gasped, raising both hands, palms outward, in a gesture of sincerity. ‘I had no idea. I thought I was covered. I’d sent off the money and I bet that if I hadn’t had an accident they would have just accepted it and renewed my insur—’

‘You’re whining,’ Rico cut in icily as he rose from behind his impressive desk.

‘I’m not whining. I’m only trying to explain!’ she protested.

‘Point one—if you were not covered by insurance at the time of the accident the oversight was your responsibility. Yours, nobody else’s,’ he stressed with a glacial lack of compassion. ‘Point two—in driving a car without insurance you were committing an offence—’

‘But-’

‘And point three—I most unwisely chose to let you go scot-free from the consequences of the offence you had already committed last night!’

‘What offence...? Oh, the one-way street bit,’ Bella muttered, hunching her narrow shoulders in self-defence. It was like being under physical attack. ‘But that was an accident... It’s not as though it was deliberate. Anyone can have an accident, can’t they? I’m really sorry. I mean, I would do just about anything for it not to have happened, because now everything’s in this horrible mess—’

‘For you, not for me.’ Rico sent her a hard, impassive look. ‘When I inform my insurance company of this they will insist that I bring in the police and they will pursue you for the outstanding monies in a civil case.’

Bella went white and twisted her hands, moving from one long, shapely leg on to the other with stork-like restiveness. ‘Please don’t get the police. Somehow I’ll pay you back... I promise!’ she swore unsteadily.

‘Is Hector going to pay?’

Bella flinched. ‘No,’ she mumbled.

‘I’ve already had a quote for the damage to my car.’ He gave it to her. Bella watched the carpet tilt and rise as she fought off a sick attack of dizziness brought on by shock. ‘Somehow I don’t think that you can come up with that kind of cash.’

‘Only in instalments.’ And if I starved, lived rough and went naked, she added mentally, beginning to tremble. He had spelt out the cold, hard facts and her vague idea that they might somehow be able to come to an arrangement had bitten the dust fast. She couldn’t expect him to pay for the repairs to the Bugatti and wait for twenty years for her to settle the debt. Intelligence told her that, but a numbing sense of terror was spreading through her by the second.

‘Not acceptable. So therefore it goes through on the record with the police,’ Rico da Silva informed her flatly.

Already she was backing away, knowing that she was about to break her most unbreakable rule and copy Cleo. She was going to run, pack a bag and leave London—go back to the old life where there were no names, no pack drill, little chance of being caught by the authorities. How had she ever got the idea that she could make it in this other world with all its rules and regulations?

‘You’re not leaving,’ he warned her grimly.

‘You can’t keep me h-here!’ Bella stammered fearfully. ‘You can put the police on to me but you can’t keep me here!’

‘I call Security or I call the police. I’m not a fool. If you walk out of here you’ll disappear. Maybe the police are already looking for you,’ Rico da Silva suggested, studying her slender, quivering, white-faced figure with cool assessment. ‘For some other offence?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘You’re terrified.’ His shrewd gaze rested intently on her. ‘A bit over the top for a charge of careless driving and doing so without insurance. If it’s a first offence you’ll be fined. However, if this is merely the latest in a line of other misdemeanours I can quite see why you wouldn’t want the police brought in.’

In his mind she had already gone from being a lousy driver to being a persistent offender. She had met prejudice like that before. Her first year with Gramps had been hell outside the sanctuary of his home. Neighbours, teachers and classmates had been all too ready to point the finger at Bella when there had been a spate of thieving in school. Bella had never stolen anything in her life, but had the true culprit not been caught in the act she was well aware that everyone would have continued to believe her guilty.

With the last ounce of her pride she thrust her head high. ‘I have a clean record!’

‘Excelente. Then you will not throw a fit of hysterics when I take you to the police station.’

‘You ... take me to the p-police station?’ The fire in her was doused, cold fear taking over.

‘Tell me why you are so petrified of the police,’ he invited, almost conversationally.

‘None of your bloody business!’

His strikingly handsome features clenched. ‘It’s not my problem. I suggest we get this over with. I have a busy day ahead of me.’

‘I’m not going to any police station with you!’ Bella gasped strickenly. ‘You’d have to knock me out and drag me by the hair!’

‘Don’t tempt me.’ Rico da Silva sent a look of pure derision raking over her, his eloquent mouth compressing. ‘And stop play-acting. I’m not impressed. You’re no shrinking violet, querida. What you’ve got you flaunt!’

‘Don’t talk to me like that!’

‘I took pity on you last night, but when you strolled in here today you made a very big mistake,’ he asserted with cold emphasis. ‘You thought all you had to do was flash those fabulous legs and the rest of that devastating body and I’d be willing to... shall we say... negotiate?’

‘I didn’t think that!’ Bella objected in sick disbelief.

‘Sí...yes, you did.’ Rico vented a harsh laugh that chilled her. ‘Dios mío...you may not be able to spell anything above two syllables but you market flesh like a real professional. Hot and cold. I could have had you last night if I had wanted you. And I did want you. Just for a moment. There isn’t a man in this building who wouldn’t want you... You’re an exceptionally beautiful young woman,’ he conceded very drily. ‘But I don’t play around with whores. I never have and I never will.’

She was shattered by his view of her, could not begin to understand what she had done to arouse such brutal hostility. Nausea stirred in her stomach. She felt soiled. Apart from that final moment inside his limousine last night she had been totally unaware of him as a man, even as a very attractive man. She had made no attempt to attract him. She hadn’t flirted or looked or done anything which could have warranted this attack on her.

Yet now he was calling her a whore again, clearly still convinced that she was at the very least promiscuous and the kind of woman who used her body like a bargaining counter in a tight corner. It was an image so far removed from reality that she told herself she should be laughing. But instead it hurt—it hurt like a knife inside her breast just the way it had hurt when the village had whispered about her behind her back all those years ago.

He closed a firm hand round her arm and propelled her out of his office towards the lift. Her dazed eyes caught the amazement on his secretary’s face as she appeared in a doorway. Bella was too shocked to relocate her tongue before they were inside the lift.

‘You’re out of your mind,’ she whispered, her temples thumping with tension.

‘Tell it to the police.’

‘You’re not t-taking me to the police!’ Panic set in again as she was recalled to the reality of his intentions. Like an animal suddenly finding herself in a trap, she whirled round, hands flailing against the stainless-steel walls as she sought escape.

He grabbed her with strong hands and settled her back against the wall.

‘Let go of me!’ she screamed, without warning running violently out of control. Fear was splintering through her in blinding waves. ‘Let me go, you bastard!’

He pinned her carefully still with the superior weight and strength of his hard-muscled length. He spat something at her in Spanish, glaring down at her with incandescent eyes of gold and blatant incomprehension. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. Why are you behaving like this? Calm down,’ he bit out from between even white teeth.

‘Let me go... Let me go!’ she chanted wildly. ‘Please!’

‘If I don’t take you to the police I’ll take you home.’ Every muscle in his dark features rigid, he slung her a look of smouldering sexual appraisal which was flagrant enough to make her knees sag and her darkened eyes fill with an ocean of sheer shock. ‘Sí...and bed you like you’ve never been bedded before! I have never wanted anything as badly as I want you, and the knowledge that I can afford you doesn’t help. It’s a sick craving and I am not yielding to it,’ he muttered roughly, so close now that she could feel his breath on her cheek as his dark head lowered, degree by mesmerising degree. ‘And, if I did, you’d be sorry. Believe me, the police are the soft option...’

His voice seemed to be coming from miles away. There were so many other things stealing her attention—the heat of his body and the warm, oddly familiar scent of him, the pounding in her veins and the race of her heartbeat, the hot, tight, excitement clutching at her. These were sensations so new and so powerful that they imprisoned her.

His mouth crashed down on hers. Electric shock sizzled through every skin cell. Nothing that intense had ever happened to her before. His tongue stabbed between her lips and heat surged between her thighs. She quivered, letting him splay his hands intimately to the swell of her hips, lifting her to him, melding every inch of her screamingly willing body to the hungry threat of his. It still wasn’t close enough to satisfy. A moan escaped huskily from the back of her throat—a curiously animal moan that she did not recognise as her own.

Abruptly he broke the connection. He broke it with such force, thrusting her back from him, that momentarily she slumped back against the cold wall, surveying him with unseeing eyes glazed by confusion. The lift doors suddenly glided back, letting in a rush of cold air, bringing her to her senses.

Every instinct Bella had was urging her to run. She took off through the doors, the blurred images of parked cars assailing her on all sides. A car park, an underground car park. Two large men were standing just beyond the lift, both of them moving forward, then hesitating, twin expressions of stunned incredulity freezing their faces.

‘Get the hell out of here!’ Rico da Silva roared at them.

‘But Mr da Silva—?’

‘Out!’

Seconds later Bella’s run was concluded. She made it about halfway down the shadowy aisle of cars before she was intercepted by a hand hauling her back as if she were a rag doll. As he spun her round she kicked him in the shin, and would have kicked him somewhere that hurt even more if she had had the time to aim better.

‘You pervert!’ she sobbed with rage.

‘You loved it,’ he slung at her, grimacing with pain as he hauled her back to him with remorseless determination.

‘Don’t move... If you don’t move, nobody will get hurt,’ a completely strange male voice intoned flatly in a startling interruption.

‘What the—?’ As Rico’s head spun round he fell silent, his entire body freezing with a tension that leapt through Bella as well like a lightning bolt.

Following the stilled path of his gaze, Bella looked in turn at the two men standing there. They were wearing black Balaclavas. Both of them had guns. Her jaw dropped, a sharp exhalation of air hissing from her.

‘Keep quiet... Now back away from him slowly.’ The taller one was addressing her. Her! Bella blinked, paralysed to the spot, unable to believe that the men weren’t a figment of her imagination, and yet, on some sixth-sense level, accepting them, fearing them, sensing their cold menace. ‘Move... What a clever girl you’ve been, getting rid of his guards, but frankly you’re surplus to requirements. Is she worth anything to you?’

The scream just exploded from Bella. She didn’t think about screaming, didn’t even know it was coming. The noise just whooshed up out of her chest and flew from her strained mouth—a long, primal wail of terror. And the taller man flew at her, knocking her to the ground so hard that he drove the breath from her lungs and bruised every bone in her body. A large hand closed over her mouth and then something pricked her shoulder, making her gasp with pain... and she was plunging down into a frightening, suffocating tunnel of darkness.

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