“Keep quiet. Talking about it doesn’t help,” he breathed in a sudden, savage undertone that brutally ruptured the heavy silence, sentencing her to nervous paralysis.
“I ache to have you … Santa Maria, I am in torment. I want to rip your clothes off and fall on you like an animal, and in all my adult life I have never been so challenged to retain control and consider consequences!”
Bella straightened and slowly turned. Rico glowered back at her, the raw reality of what he was telling her etched in the ferocious set of his dark, startlingly handsome features.
“And if you did not want me the problem would not be t. here. I would never touch a woman without her consent,” he continued forcefully.
“But every time you look at me I see the same hunger in you.”
‘[. “
“Do not deny it,” he cut in grimly.
“And that we should be distracted by such primitive instincts when our very lives are at risk outrages my intelligence!”
“It’s the fact that we’re trapped here,” she muttered, shattered by his candour, devastated by the manner in which he was still looking at her, and shamefully lost in a colourful image of him ripping her clothes off and her liking it. Dear God, what was happening to her?
What was happening to them both?
“No dig as disparates!”
“In English?”
“Don’t talk rubbish.” He flashed her an exasperated glance, his beautifully shaped mouth twisting.
“I felt exactly the same way in my office. Why do you think I was so determined to take you to the police?”
“I had to be punished for attracting you? Are you a sadist or something?”
“Since I met you I have been crazy!” he raked back at her in a sudden explosion of raw, passionate resentment.
“I don’t know myself any more!”
Swinging on his heel, he strode through the beaded curtain. A second later she heard the fiery assault of the poker on the container doors and couldn’t help smiling to herself. Rico was as disconcerted by the attraction between them as she was. That made her feel less threatened and more in control. Neither of them wanted anything to happen. Between them they ought to be capable of behaving like civilised adults and observing proper boundaries in spite of this horribly intimate and suffocating prison.
But, dear heaven, when he threw off the ice-cool front and let the tiger roar, she thought distractedly, Rico was quite shockingly volatile—yet another trait she ran a mile from in men. Only then did it cross her mind that she found the same trait astonishingly, paradoxically attractive when Rico revealed it. The sheer elemental physicality and passion which he suppressed and controlled with cold intellect fascinated her.
She made sandwiches for lunch—no sense in letting the bread go stale. Rico sank down on the other side of the table, his every graceful movement catching her attention. She averted her eyes to her glass of milk.
“Do you have a family out there worrying about you?”
she asked abruptly.
“My parents are dead. I have an older sister, who’s married with a family, but she lives in Spain.”
“I imagine the police will have carried the news that far by now.”
Bella sighed.
Rico seemed to hesitate.
“Si…”
He reverted to his own language only when tense. No doubt he was disturbed by the idea of his sister’s current state of terror on his behalf. “Are you close?”
“Yes.”
Bella was determined to keep on talking. Maybe conversation would keep other, far more dangerous undertones at bay.
“You’re Spanish, aren’t you?”
“My father was Portuguese but my mother was Spanish.
I grew up in Andalusia. “
“Rich?”
“Rich,” he conceded almost apologetically. Involuntarily she glanced up and collided with a positively dazzling half-smile that gave her a seductive glimpse of another Rico entirely—a Rico with a sense of humour and considerable charm. That smile made her feel curiously lightheaded.
“What were your parents like? Distant?”
“Not at all.” He looked surprised by the suggestion.
“We were a happy family but I was born late in their lives. My father died when I was a teenager, my mother a couple of years ago—’ ” So what age are you? “
“Thirty-two … far too old for you,” he murmured in unwelcome addition.
“Look, we’re not going to talk about things like that!” Bella snapped, emerald-green eyes flashing reproach and reproof.
“You’re an… Aquarius … right?”
Rico frowned.
“Ah … astrology. St’.”
“We should avoid each other like the plague,” she told him morosely.
“It’s a combustible combination.”
“I do not require a horoscope to know that, gatita,” he returned with dark satire.
“So tell me about your background.”
“Forget it. It would give you indigestion.”
“I would like to know. Who were your parents?”
Bella stiffened. Of course he didn’t mean ‘who’ in the worldly sense.
He certainly wouldn’t be expecting to hear a name that he might recognise. She lifted her vibrant head, her sultry mouth compressing.
“My father was Ivan Sinclair.”
His winged ebony brows drew together in unconcealed surprise.
“The artist?”
“My mother was one of his models. They had an affair. I was the result.” She wondered why she had told him something that she usually kept very much to herself.
His dark visage was set in uninformative lines.
“There was no marriage?”
“Ivan didn’t believe in marriage. He visited Cleo on and off for a while after I was born but that eventually ground to a halt,” she admitted.
“I didn’t see him again until I was thirteen. And my mother initiated that meeting. She wanted him to take charge of me… It was a really stupid idea…”
The silence stretched and then Rico murmured,
“What happened?”
“Nothing much.” With a jerky shrug she got up and began to clear the table.
“He was furious at being put on the spot. He accused her of trying to blackmail him, even tried to say I wasn’t his… He was quite pathetic actually. He was no hero.”
“He had a lot of talent.”
“But, let’s face it, he was much better known as a drunk and a womaniser.” Bella stated the obvious for him.
“Scarcely a suitable guardian for a thirteen-year-old. Why did your mother even consider such an arrangement?”
She turned back to him, her beautiful face strong and her expression clear.
“She had a lover who didn’t want a kid hanging around,” she said bluntly.
“But her visit to Ivan wasn’t a total disapPointment.
He coughed up some cash to get rid of us; she bought a new van and dumped me with my grandfather instead. “
An ebony brow quirked.
“A new van?”
“My mother was a traveller. She wasn’t born to the life, but then few are.” Bella sighed.
“She left home when she was eighteen. She was a hippie. Gramps said she was wild. He threw her out after an argument and then regretted it, but he didn’t see her again until she showed up with me twenty-odd years later. She was only involved with Ivan for a couple of years and then she met some guy with a lorry and took to the road—’ ” For how long . until you were thirteen? “
She nodded.
“But you must have settled somewhere at some stage?”
“Never for longer than a month.” “What about your education?”
She smiled.
“I started that at thirteen.”
“It must have been an appalling life.” Rico frowned at her, his consternation palpable.
“I didn’t know anything else. Sometimes it was fun.” But her expressive eyes shadowed. She was thinking of the hunger and the cold and the wet, the lack of hygiene and privacy, the raw hostility of their reception everywhere they went. Travellers were not welcome visitors in any locality.
“Time I bashed the poker,” she announced abruptly, suddenly bewildered and alarmed by the extent to which she had allowed him to draw her out. She never told people about that old life if she could help it, and could not understand why she had revealed so much to him. It was none of his business.
She strode down to the container doors and lifted the poker. She had only struck the metal a few times when another sound broke through in startling, shattering response—a series of sharp, zinging thuds.
The poker fell from her nerveless fingers. She spun round, heard Rico behind her, then they were suddenly plunged into darkness and he was dragging her down on the bed.
“Keep quiet,” he urged in a raw breath of warning.
“But—’ Had he gone crazy? Someone was out there—someone who could open those doors and set them free!
“Those were bullets.” Rico’s hands framed her cheekbones in the darkness and she fell back, sick and weak with terror.
CHAPTER FIVE
THERE was a loud thud up on the roof. Bella shivered violently as she heard the unmistakable sound of feet walking up and down above them.
Nausea filled her stomach. Somebody laughed. There was a roaring in her eardrums. Her heart threatened to burst from her ribcage. For just a little while she had managed to close out the fear but now it was back with a vengeance.