atrocity, then let me tell you now I fully intend to see that you pay for it. Have you any idea what you have done? The danger…the risk…someone could have been killed.’ His voice became acidly sharp and harsh. ‘Have you ever seen a victim of a serious road accident? Do you have any idea what it can do to the human body?’
Fresh nausea overwhelmed Alice. He wasn’t saying anything to her she hadn’t already thought for herself, but Louise, who could hear him, was now silent and ashen-faced, and instinctively Alice felt her first duty was to protect her. And now that she could see both cars, she could see too that surely he was overreacting. Anxiously she looked towards his car. The passenger door was crushed, there was broken glass all over the road. The car they had hit had lost its bumper and sustained a large dent, although fortunately its driver seemed to be unhurt, and indeed he was very evidently comforting Louise, who was shaking uncontrollably, telling everyone who would listen to her that it had been Alice who had been driving the car and not her.
Alice opened her mouth to correct her and defend herself and then closed it again.
How could she? Louise was seventeen; she had only just passed her driving test. Last night she had been drinking so heavily that she probably still had a dangerously high level of alcohol in her bloodstream, and she was in Alice’s charge…Alice had promised her sister that she would take care of her…
Unaware of what she was doing, she looked up at the man confronting her in helpless appeal.
Marco felt himself stiffen as he saw the look Alice was giving him. She looked more like a child than a woman, with the pale swathe of her cheeks and her huge bruised eyes and trembling mouth; her delicately slender body. But he of course already knew about the sensuality and the voluptuousness of the breasts that were now concealed by a much bulkier top than the little strappy one she had been wearing earlier in the day when he had seen her.
Disconcertingly and with unexpected force his body responded to that memory and to her. Immediately Marco quelled his swift surge of unwanted physical reaction, waiting for what he already knew she was going to say to him, the appeal she was going to make to him, on behalf of herself and her companion.
He had seen beautiful women using their beauty to get what they wanted so many many times before. And of course the first thing this beautiful woman was going to do was to tell him what he had already worked out for himself—that she had not been the one who’d been driving the car. Cynically he waited for her to say as much, and to implicate her friend whilst pleading her own innocence. It was obvious to him from the one assessing look with which he had taken in the whole of the scene in front of him that there was no way that this woman could have been the one driving his car; to anyone with even half a trained eye it was blindingly obvious that the other younger, over-made-up girl with her skimpy clothes and frightened, sullen face had been the driver. As he waited for the woman facing him to denounce her companion Marco fiercely reminded himself of all the reasons why he had been opposed to his cousin’s marriage to his English model girlfriend.
Cross-cultural marriages were always, by the very necessity of their nature, bound to be more of a risk than those between people who shared the same background and upbringing. For those marriages to work both parties had to be dedicated to their love and to one another, to believe in it, to be one hundred and fifty per cent committed to it and to be mature and strong enough to make it work. That was a very tall order indeed in today’s modern climate.
He himself had never been sexually promiscuous. He was too fastidious, too proud, too controlled to ever allow his appetites to control him, and it added to his already short temper to realise just how intense his physical reaction was to the woman standing in front of him.
‘Are you the one who stole my car?’ he demanded curtly, suddenly impatient to get the whole thing over and done with and the woman and her companion turned over to the police.
But, to his disbelief, instead of immediately denying that she was to blame and incriminating her friend, he heard her saying in a soft, shaky voice, ‘Yes…Yes, I’m afraid…that…that it was me.’
As she heard herself confessing to a crime she most certainly had not committed Alice felt her heart lurch joltingly against her ribs. She still felt sick and dizzy and her heart was thumping erratically in panic. Panic because of the trouble she was going to be in, she quickly insisted to herself, and not in any way because of the effect the man standing watching her with that masklike, uninterpretable, assessing look was having on her.
Heavens, but he was formidable…Formidable and sexy…The sexiest man she had ever seen. So sexy in fact that he was making her feel…
‘Yes?’
She could hear the fury in his voice as he repeated her admission. ‘Yes?’ he repeated as though he wanted to make sure he had heard her correctly. ‘Yes, it was you?’
It was almost as though he wanted her to deny the crime, Alice thought dizzily. But why? So that he could indulge in the pleasure of berating her, accusing her of being a liar as well as a thief? Well, she wasn’t going to give him that pleasure!
Bravely pushing to one side her own shock and fear, she told him firmly, ‘Yes. It was I. I stole your car.’
She could hear Louise making a soft, moaning, hiccupping sound and instinctively Alice looked anxiously towards her.
The younger girl’s tears had washed tracks of make-up from her face, giving her a clown-like appearance of vulnerable youthfulness, and as she saw the panic and fear in Louise’s eyes Alice found her heart aching with compassion for her.
It must have given her a dreadful shock when they had crashed. No wonder she was looking so afraid. Instinctively, Alice felt protective towards her, overcoming her own feelings of shock and hostility towards the man confronting her and the feelings he was engendering within her to tell him quietly, ‘I apologise for…what has happened and, of course, I will make good the damage to your car, but my…my…friend is very shocked. We are due to catch a flight home to England this afternoon, and we still have to collect our luggage from our hotel, so if there is some way in which we can expedite matters…I can give you all my details. My name is Alice Walsingham and…’ She stopped as she saw the frown darkening his face as he listened to her.
‘Your name is what?’ he challenged her softly.
‘Alice…Alice Walsingham,’ Alice repeated, her voice starting to tremble a little as a feeling of foreboding rushed over her like a cold incoming tide.
Marco could hardly believe his ears. So this was the woman he had waited in vain to interview, this small scrap of female humanity with her slender body, her provocative breasts, her pale blonde hair, her far-too-pretty face, and her certainly far-too-dangerously potent effect on his hormones!
That such a thing should happen to him and with this woman of all women! A woman who excited such interest in the street from his own sex that a member of it was unable to refrain from extolling the pleasure the sight of her body gave him. A woman who had been an accomplice to the theft of his car…a woman apparently so careless of human life that she could have been an accomplice to an accident of even more hideous and fatal proportions than the one he had already had to endure. A woman who had lied and implicated herself in a theft to protect the true thief, who Marco could now see when he looked at her properly was much younger than he had first thought. A teenager, in fact. Against the urgings of his own self-protective instincts, he found himself remembering certain incidents from his cousin Aldo’s youth, certain irresponsible actions from which he, as Aldo’s elder and family mentor, had been obliged to extricate the younger man.
After all, he reminded
