—Romantic Times Mothers-To-Be(20)
Gramps had enrolled Bella in the art club long before she’d attended art college at seventeen. She had been the youngest in the class and had had no training whatsoever, but from her first visit the instructor had been excited by what he’d called her ‘raw talent’.
More worded than pleased by his enthusiasm, her grandfather had got in touch with Hector through the medium of one of Cleo’s fleeting visits. It had been Hector who had advised them on what art college and which course, Hector who had taken charge of her artistic development.
She made a dive for Liz’s phone, suddenly desperate to hear Hector’s querulous but familiar voice.
“I was worried sick when those nosy policemen landed on the doorstep,”
he complained furiously, making her smile.
“And I don’t want any blasted reporters following them!”
“I’ll stay here until the fuss blows over. I’ll ring the restaurant and tell them I’m sick,” she muttered, speaking her thoughts out loud on the subject of her job.
“That Griff character has been calling too. Give him a ring,” Hector advised irritably, and then added as an afterthought, “You didn’t damage your hands, did you?”
“Just my heart.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind. I’ll keep in touch.”
“Phone calls cost a fortune,” he reminded her in dismay.
The Royal Mail is expensive but considerably cheaper in comparison. “
She came off the phone and laughed until she cried. Through her tears she picked up Liz’s sketch-pad and began to draw, her agile fingers moving at speed over the paper. Only when she registered what she was drawing did she stop. With a choking sensation in her throat she looked down sickly at the slashing lines of Rico’s impassive face as she had last seen him.
She threw the pad aside, in more turmoil than ever. She would work through this, get her feet pinned back down hard to ground level and gather her common sense if it killed her! After all, a week ago she hadn’t even known Rico da Silva walked the same earth. But he didn’t, she reflected with sudden fierce anger; he didn’t walk the same earth at all.
“I feel like an idiot … a total, absolute idiot!” Griff complained for the third time.
“Every one of my partners is sniggering behind his hands. So what did happen in that blasted container between the two of you? I have a right to know I’ ” The same way I have the right to know who was with you the night of my birthday? ” As soon as she said it she regretted it. Griff was very handsome but suddenly, betrayed by his fair skin, he looked like a guilty beetroot that had been stabbed unexpectedly in the back by a pickle fork.
“Well, I … I don’t know what you’re talking about! I was working that night.”
He lied so badly that she was embarrassed for him. Why was he being so possessive all of a sudden? Why was it that even an unfaithful man suddenly hung on like grim death when he sensed that you were ready to break it off. 9 It crossed her mind that Rico hadn’t hung on . Rico had been off like an Olympic sprinter. Only good manners had made him let her out of the door in front of him.
N
“OK.” Griff heaved a constricted sigh.
“Guilty … but was only a flirtation… I was tempted, that’s all. Unforgi’ able, I know, on your birthday—’ ” Don’t you think that date was subconsciously chosen hurt most? “
He looked blankly back at her. She was too clever for him, could practically tell him what he was about to s before he parted his lips, and whatever had been bet we them had evaporated entirely on her side. She decided lei him off the hook.
“Look, it doesn’t matter, does it.9 We’re finished. Go, friends still, I hope,” she stressed gently.
“But that’s a Griff.”
“I didn’t sleep with her!” He startled her by surgi: across Liz’s tiny lounge with an amount of emotion s would never have expected from a male usually so cc and controlled.
“And I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again,” swore, grasping both her hands.
He had slept with that other woman. She could tell, it was not her place, after what had happened with Rk to stand in pious judgement.
“Let’s go out to dinner somewhere very public,” he urg tautly.
“You have to come out of hiding some time. l Silva’s ” no comment” is beginning to fall pretty hard, my ears! You’re my girlfriend, for God’s sake, but all t[ trash in the tabloids and your disappearance is giving eve one the idea … well, that you’ve got something to ashamed of!”
Liz walked into the tiny bedroom where she was changiJ “You’re going out with him?”
“It seems that I owe it to him to help him save face w his colleagues in the office.”
“He never said that, surely?”
“I don’t think he even realises that that is what he sa I’ll pack.
It’s time I went home anyway. ” A rueful sin curved Bella’s lips.
“Thanks for having me, but I’ve go face the music sooner or later. Not that I’m expectin be mobbed. I’m old news since our kidnappers were caul There won’t be much interest now until the case reac court,” she pointed out.
“Don’t you believe it… You’ve got a price on your h whether you like it or not! And the longer you keep qu about your ordeal,” Liz said grimly, ‘the more outrage become the tabloid fantasies. You’d be better off issuinl statement. “
Bella sat silently in Griff’s BMW as it transported l back to London.
The more questions he asked about R the tenser she became. Why the heck couldn’t he just take the hint and shut up?
It had been three weeks since she had been dropped the chief superintendent at her friend’s cottage. Hector packed a case for her and Liz had collected it covertly from his back door, because the Press had been encamped at front continuously during those first days after her captc arrest. She had twice been collected and smuggled into central London police station where the evidence again their kidnappers was being carefully stockpiled. But all t was over, bar the court case.
Only now did she wonder if it would ever be over. The Press had ferreted into her past and published everything her colourful parentage, her cursory education, her artis talent. It seemed to her that everyone she had ever known in life had talked about her to the tabloids—Gramps’ neig hours, fellow students at the college, her tutor, former be friends—bitter and otherwise.
“Frigid’, had said one; ‘wil, had said another. I’M STILL I4 LOVE WITH HER, h screamed the headline given by an ex she barely recall from six months ago.
She didn’t recognize the femme fatale the tabloids h depicted her as.
Her every piece of privacy had been ripp from her resistant body. She had been invaded, raped print and twisted into something she was not, and as far as she could see there was not a damn thing she could do about it!
“Here?” Bella gasped when she realised where Griff was planning that they should dine.
“You’ll be broke for six months I’ ” Will you keep your voice down? ” he hissed at her, paling to the same shade as his brand-new dinner jacket.
“I can well afford to splash out occasionally.”
Only he had never splashed out for her benefit before. Griff might have earned a very healthy crust as a partner in a busy legal firm but he was careful with his cash. Was he celebrating something—a more than usually lucrative divorce?
The head waiter looked at her with recognition. She threw her slim shoulders back and smoothed her elbow-high black gloves up her arms.
Her figure-hugging black velvet dress could mercifully hold its own in any company. A seventies designer original, the colour spectacular against her wealth of vibrant Titian hair and creamy skin, its deceptively simPle cut made the most of her lithe, female shape and fabulous legs.
Their table was right in the very centre of the crowded dining room.
“Are we celebrating something?” Bella whispered, maddeningly conscious of heads turning in their direction. Surely not all these beautiful people read the same rubbishy tabloids?
“I hope so.” Griff gave her a wide, self-satisfied smile as their menus arrived and he ordered wine in execrable French.
“I don’t drink,” she reminded him.
He leant almost confidingly closer.
“I believe you’ll break that rule tonight.”
Just as she was on the brink of questioning the peculiarity of his behaviour, Bella’s attention was stolen. Griff could have stood up and stripped and she wouldn’t have noticed. Rico da Silva was in the act of taking a seat at a table about fifteen feet away. She froze, her heartbeat slowing to a dulled thud as if she was being forced to witness a disaster. And, inside herself, indeed she was. For three endless weeks Bella had rationalised away every single feeling that Rico had inspired in her. She had blamed fear, propinquity, hysteria and her own repressed sexuality. She had lost weight, endured sleepless nights and stubbornly considered herself cured of emotions that she refused to rate higher than the level of an adolescent infatuation.
But at the same second as her shocked gaze located him and everyone else in the room vanished from her awareness, her so-called cure came apart at the seams. A hunger so intense that it was agonising clawed at her. Her mesmerised eyes roved from his dark head to the soles of his hand-made shoes and back up again. Worst of all; she couldn’t stop herself from doing it.