A Night In His Arms. Annie West
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fragile and full of breathless promise.
Her throat tightened as memories swarmed.
What was she doing here, bandying words with a man who wished her only ill? Silently she turned but found her way blocked by a giant in a dark suit.
‘Please, signorina.’ He gestured to the open car door behind her. ‘Take a seat.’
With Domenico Volpe? He personified everything that had gone wrong in her life.
A bubble of hysterical laughter rose and she shook her head.
She stepped to one side but the bodyguard moved fast. He grasped her arm, propelling her towards the car.
‘Don’t touch me!’ All the shock and grief and dismay she battled rose within her, a roiling well of emotions she’d kept pent up too long.
No one had the right to coerce her.
Not any more.
Not after what she’d endured.
Lucy opened her mouth to demand her release. But the crisp, clear order she’d formulated didn’t emerge. Instead a burst of Italian vitriol spilled out. Words she’d never known, even in English, till her time in jail. The sort of gutter Italian Domenico Volpe and his precious family wouldn’t recognise. The sort of coarse, colloquial Italian favoured by criminals and lunatics. She should know, she’d met enough in her time.
The bodyguard’s eyes widened, his hand dropping as he stepped back. As if he was afraid her lashing tongue might injure him.
Abruptly the flow of words stopped. Lucy vibrated with fury but also with something akin to shame.
So much for her pride in rising above the worst degradations of imprisonment. As for her pleasure, just minutes ago, that she’d left prison behind her... Her heart fell. How long would she bear its taint? How irrevocably had it changed her?
Despair threatened but she forced it down.
Fingers curling tight around the handle of her bag, she stepped forward and the bodyguard made way. She kept going, beyond the cordon that kept Domenico Volpe from the straining paparazzi.
Lucy straightened her spine. She’d rather walk into the arms of the waiting press than stay here.
* * *
‘I’m sorry, boss. I should have stopped her. But with the media watching...’
‘It’s okay, Rocco. The last thing I want is a press report about us kidnapping Lucy Knight.’ That would really send Pia into a spin. His sister-in-law was already strung out at the news of her release.
He watched the crowd close round the slim form of the Englishwoman and something that felt incredibly like remorse stirred.
As if he’d failed her.
Because she’d looked at him with unveiled horror and chosen the slavering mob rather than share a car with him? That niggling sense of guilt resurfaced. Nonsense, of course. In the light of day logic assured him she’d brought on her own destruction. Yet sometimes, in the dead of night, it didn’t seem so cut and dried.
But he wasn’t Lucy Knight’s keeper. He never had been.
Five years ago he’d briefly responded to her air of fresh enthusiasm, so different from the sophisticated, savvy women in his life. Until he’d discovered she was a sham, trying to ensnare and use him as she had his brother.
Domenico’s lips firmed. She’d looked at him just now with those huge eyes the colour of forget-me-nots. A gullible man might have read fear in that look.
Domenico wasn’t a gullible man.
Though to his shame he’d felt a tug of unwanted attraction to the woman who’d stood day after day in the dock, projecting an air of bewildered innocence.
Her face had been a smooth oval, rounded with youth. Her hair, straight, long and the colour of wheat in the sun, had made him want to reach out and touch.
He’d hated himself for that.
‘She’s some wildcat, eh, boss? The way she let fly—’
‘Close the door, Rocco.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The guard stiffened and shut the door.
Domenico sat back, watching the melee move down the street. A few stragglers remained, their cameras trained on the limousine, but the tinted windows gave privacy.
Just as well. He didn’t want their lenses on him. Not when he felt...unsettled.
He swiped a hand over his jaw, wishing to hell Pia hadn’t put him in this situation. What did the media frenzy matter? They could rise above it as always. Only the insecure let the press get to them. But Pia was emotionally vulnerable, beset by mood swings and insecurities.
It wasn’t the media that disturbed him. He ignored the paparazzi. It was her, Lucy Knight. The way she looked at him.
She’d changed. Her cropped hair made her look like a raunchy pixie instead of a soulful innocent. Her face had fined down, sculpted into bone-deep beauty that had been a mere promise at eighteen. And attitude! She had that in spades.
What courage had it taken to walk back into that hungry throng? Especially when he’d seen and heard, just for a moment, the pain in her hoarse curses.
For all the weeks of the trial she’d looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. How had she hidden such violent passion, such hatred so completely?
Or—the thought struck out of nowhere—maybe that dangerous undercurrent was something new, acquired in the intervening years.
Domenico sagged in his seat. He should ignore Pia’s pleas and his own ambivalent reactions and walk away. This woman had been nothing but trouble since the day she’d crossed his family’s threshold.
He pressed the intercom to speak to the driver. ‘Drive on.’
* * *
Twenty minutes till the bus came.
Could she last? The crowd grew thicker. It took all Lucy’s stamina to pretend they didn’t bother her. To ignore the cameras and catcalls, the increasingly rough jostling.
Lucy’s knees shook and her arm ached but she didn’t dare put her case down. It held everything she owned and she wouldn’t put it past one of the paparazzi to swipe it and do an exposé on the state of her underwear or a psychological profile based on the few battered books she possessed.
The tone of the gathering had darkened as the press found, instead of the easy prey they’d expected, a woman determined not to cooperate. Didn’t they realise the last thing she wanted was more publicity?
They’d attracted onlookers. She heard their mutterings and cries of outrage.
She widened her stance, bracing against the pushing crowd, alert to the growing tension. She knew how quickly violence could erupt.
She was just about to give up on the bus and move on when the crowd stirred. A flutter, like a sigh, rippled through it, leaving in its wake something that could almost pass for silence.
The camera crews parted. There, striding towards her was the man she’d expected never to see again: Domenico Volpe, shouldering through the rabble, eyes locked on her. He seemed oblivious to the snapping shutters as the cameras went into overdrive and newsmen gabbled into microphones.
He wore a grey suit with the slightest sheen, as if it were woven from black pearls. His shirt was pure white, his tie perfection in dark silk.
He looked the epitome of Italian wealth and breeding. Not a wrinkle marred his clothes or the elegant lines of his face. Only his eyes, boring into hers, spoke of something less than cool control.
A spike of heat plunged right through her belly as she held his eyes.
He stopped before her and Lucy had to force