an imperious look. ‘Of religion.’
He threw back his head and laughed. It wasn’t quite the reaction Bella had been expecting. It annoyed her that he found her news so amusing. She wasn’t used to him showing any emotion, much less amusement. He rarely smiled, apart from those mocking tilts of his mouth, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had heard him laugh out loud. She found his reaction over the top and completely unnecessary. How dared he mock the man she had decided she was going to marry? Julian was everything Edoardo was not. He was sophisticated and cultured; he was polite and considerate; he saw the good in people, not the bad.
And he loved her, rather than hating her, as Edoardo did.
‘What’s so funny?’ she asked with an irritated frown.
He swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, still chuckling. ‘I can’t quite see it somehow,’ he said.
She sent him a narrowed glare. ‘See what?’
‘You handing around tea and scones at Bible study,’ he said. ‘You don’t fit the mould of a preacher’s wife.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked.
His eyes ran over her long black boots and designer skirt and jacket, before taking a leisurely tour of the upthrusts of her breasts, finally meeting her gaze with an insolent glint in his. ‘Your skirts are too high and your morals too low.’
Bella wanted to thump him. She clenched her hands into fists to stop herself from actually doing it. She wasn’t going to touch him if she could help it. Her body had a habit of doing things it shouldn’t do when it came too close to his. Her nails bit into her palms as she tried to rein in her temper. ‘You’re a fine one to talk about morals,’ she threw back. ‘At least I don’t have a criminal record.’
Something hardened in his gaze as it pinned hers: diamond-hard. Anger-hard. Hatred-hard. ‘You want to play dirty with me, princess?’ he asked.
This time Bella felt that tingly sensation at the base of her spine. She knew it had been a low blow to refer to his delinquent past, but Edoardo always triggered something dark, primal and uncontrollable in her. She didn’t know what was it about him that got her back up so quickly, but he needled her like no other person.
He had always done it.
He seemed to take particular delight in getting a rise out of her. It didn’t matter how much she promised herself she would keep a lid on her temper. It didn’t matter how cool and sophisticated she planned to be. He always got under her skin.
Ever since that night when she was sixteen, she had done her best to avoid her father’s bad-boy protégé. For months, if not years, at a time she would keep her distance, barely even acknowledging him when she came home for a brief visit to her father. Edoardo brought out something in her that was deeply unsettling. In his company she didn’t feel poised and in control.
She felt edgy and restless.
She thought things she should not be thinking. Like how sensual the curve of his mouth was, the way the lower lip was fuller than the top one; how his lean jaw always seemed to need a shave. How his hair looked like it had just been combed with his fingers. How he would look naked, all tanned, whipcord-lean and fit.
Like how he always looked at her with that hooded, inscrutable gaze as if he was seeing through the layers of her designer clothes to her tingling body beneath …
‘Why are you here?’ he asked.
Bella gave him a defiant look. ‘Are you going to march me off the premises for trespassing?’
A glint of something menacing lurked in his gaze. ‘This is no longer your home.’
Her look hardened to a cutting glare. ‘Yes, well, you certainly made sure of that, didn’t you?’
‘I had nothing to do with your father’s decision to bequeath me Haverton Manor,’ he said. ‘I can only presume he thought you were never very interested in the place. You hardly ever visited him, especially towards the end.’
Bella’s resentment boiled inside her—resentment and guilt. She hated him for reminding her of how she had stayed away when her father had needed her the most. The permanency of death had made her run for cover. The thought of being left all alone in the world had been terrifying. The desertion of her mother just before her sixth birthday had made her deeply insecure; people she loved always left her. She had buried her head in the social scene of London rather than face reality. She had made the excuse of studying for her final exams, but the truth was she had never really known how to reach out to her father.
Godfrey had come to fatherhood late in life, and after her mother had left, he had not coped well with the role of being a single parent. Consequently their relationship had never been close, which had made her insanely jealous of the way in which her father had fostered his relationship with Edoardo. She suspected Godfrey saw Edoardo as a surrogate son—the son he had secretly longed for. It made her feel inadequate, a feeling that was only reinforced a hundredfold when she found out the way her father had left his estate. ‘I’m sure you worked my absence to your advantage,’ she said, shooting him another embittered glare. ‘I bet you sucked up to him every chance you could, all the while painting me as a silly little socialite with no sense of responsibility.’
‘Your father didn’t need me to point out how irresponsible you are,’ he said with that annoying, trademark lip-curl. ‘You do a fine job of that all by yourself. Your peccadilloes are splashed across the newspapers just about every week.’
Bella simmered with fury even though there was some truth in what he said. The press always targeted her, making her out to be a wild child with more money than sense. She only had to be in the wrong place at the wrong time for some ridiculous story to come out about her.
But things would be different soon.
Once she was married to Julian, the press would hopefully leave her alone. Her reputation would be spotless. ‘I’d like to stay for a few days,’ she said. ‘I hope that won’t inconvenience you?’
Those intriguing eyes glinted dangerously again. ‘Are you asking me or telling me?’
Bella put on a beseeching expression, her hatred of him tightening her spine until she could feel every knob of her vertebrae. It was positively galling to have to ask for permission to stay at her childhood home. That was one of the reasons she had turned up unannounced. She’d figured he might not be able to turn her away with the household staff looking on. ‘Please, Edoardo, may I stay for a few days?’ she asked. ‘I won’t get in your way. I promise.’
‘Do the press know where you are?’ he asked.
‘No one knows where I am,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anyone to find me. That’s why I came here. No one would ever dream of finding me here with you.’
His chiselled jaw was locked like a vice, a muscle on the left side moving in and out like a tiny heart beating under the skin. ‘I’ve a good mind to send you on your way.’
Bella pushed her bottom lip out. ‘It’s about to snow again,’ she said. ‘What if I run off the road or something? My death would be on your hands.’
‘You can’t just turn up here and
