recognise a man so far beyond her league, was deliberate.
Lucy refused to let him see how that stung. Blank-faced withdrawal was a tactic she’d perfected as a defence in the face of aggression.
How could his words harm her after what she’d been through?
‘I remember you.’ As if she could forget. Once she’d almost believed... No. She excised the thought. She was no longer so foolishly naïve.
The sight of him evoked a volley of memories. She made herself concentrate on the later ones. ‘You never missed a moment of the trial.’
The shouts of the crowd were a reminder of that time, twisting her insides with pain.
He didn’t incline his head, didn’t move, yet something flickered in his eyes. Something that made her wonder if he, like she, held onto control by a slim thread.
‘Would you have? In my shoes?’ His voice was silky but lethal. Lucy remembered reading that the royal assassins of the Ottoman sultan had used garrottes of silk to strangle their victims.
He wouldn’t lower himself to assault but he wouldn’t lift a finger to save her. Yet once long ago, for a fleeting moment, they’d shared something 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
