The very real possibility he would be forced to spend the night in his four-wheel drive was not a pleasant one, but to his mind it constituted inconvenience rather than disaster.
He rounded a bend and swore softly under his breath as he just managed to stop before he collided with the car that was slewed half across the road. Dark head bowed against the driving snow, he got out to check out the abandoned vehicle. The fact the car was locked made it seem likely that the occupants had escaped relatively unscathed.
Continuing in these weather conditions was clearly no longer a viable option. According to the last news bulletin he had heard half of the West Country was snowed in and the police were appealing to motorists to make only urgent journeys.
Stay at home, they urged. You had to get there first, he mused as he tramped back to his own vehicle. He had almost reached it when he spotted the lights in the distance. It took him another ten minutes of painful progress before he reached them.
From the look of the snow-covered vehicles in the car park of the roadside inn he had not been the only snow-bound traveller that had chanced upon this sanctuary in the middle of the bleak moor.
He was reaching for the door when his phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID and was tempted not to respond; the last time his stepmother had contacted him she had just been arrested for shoplifting.
The time before when he hadn’t picked up she had raised the money she had wanted him to supply by selling off a piece of family jewellery that wasn’t hers to sell, and buying it back discreetly had been time consuming.
His stepmother was time consuming, but it was dangerous to ignore her.
When he’d been young and Livia had been making a fool of his father while doing her best to turn him against his son, Severo had comforted himself with thoughts of the revenge he would one day be in a position to exact.
Now he was in that position, but Severo’s priorities had changed. His father was in a place where his gold-digging wife could no longer hurt him, and the only power the woman who had once made his life hell wielded was to embarrass him. Actually not him—more the family.
When it came to embarrassment Severo was pretty much bomb-proof these days. As for pride in an old name, he took the view that less pride, less romanticising on past triumphs, and less being worried about getting their aristocratic hands dirty and the fortunes of the Constanza family would not have been so sadly depleted when he had been passed the mantle of power by his father.
The truth was Severo had simply lost his appetite for revenge. Not because he’d forgiven his stepmother or even that he had grown to pity her—and Livia Larsen, one-time IT girl and society hostess, had become an object of some people’s pity.
Why waste time and energy when Livia was doing a pretty good job of messing up her own life without any help from him? All Severo wanted these days was for her to stay long enough in one of the expensive clinics she frequently booked herself into to actually clean up her act.
‘Livia.’
He held the phone a little way from his ear, wincing at the sound of his stepmother’s shrill voice berating him for his lack of feeling.
‘How am I expected to live on the pittance you give me?’ she demanded. ‘You have more money than you need!’ she complained. ‘Everyone knows you’re disgustingly rich. Everything you touch turns to gold.’
Severo rubbed his hand across his eyes—they felt gritty with exhaustion—and continued to listen with half an ear. It was a familiar tirade and one that did not alter no matter how much money he gave Livia, but what was the alternative?
Livia’s voice became a coaxing whine. ‘Just a loan?’
Severo sighed. There had been many loans and he had no doubt there would be many more.
‘I’ll pay you back—with interest. I know it’s what your father would have wanted. Your father would have—’ Her voice was drowned out by loud static before the line went dead.
He slid the phone back into his pocket, not feeling unhappy that the signal had been lost.
He was approaching the entrance to the inn when a small figure exploded from the double doors, barrelling straight into him. Coatless and hatless and seemingly oblivious to the arctic blast of air howling down from the surrounding hills, the slim jean-clad female wearing a bright pink sweater covered with yellow daisies righted herself before running past him, then stopped and turned.
‘Did you see her?’
Her eyes were wide, anxious and blue—very blue. So blue, in fact, that for a split second he registered nothing but the colour and then the moment and the opportunity to respond was gone. She was belting on and past him out into the snowy car park.
Her figure stood out, a dark blur in the swirl of white, still managing to emanate high-voltage anxiety across the space that separated them. Through the howl of the wind he heard her dismayed exclamation at the sight of a car pulling out onto the road.
‘Oh, God, no!’
Severo was not a man who felt impelled to ride to the rescue of maidens in distress—such actions were open to misinterpretation and it was his experience that distress could be easily and often artistically feigned. Yet he found himself responding, albeit with reluctance, to some dormant protective instinct.
He was still a few feet from the flame-haired figure when her slumped shoulders straightened and she jumped into one of the parked vehicles and pulled away at a reckless speed. There was a time lag of several seconds before Severo realised that the lights receding into the distance belonged to his own car.
He had not only left the keys in the ignition and a laptop containing extremely sensitive information on the passenger seat, he had stood there and watched while someone stole his car, oblivious to everything except the brilliance of a pair of electric-blue eyes and a desire to offer his assistance.
He closed his eyes, called himself several rude names, not having any cathartic effect, then took a deep breath and strode into the inn.
Chapter Two
THERE was a lull in the buzz of conversation and laughter inside the crowded bar as the door was flung open. The lull lengthened into a silence as people absorbed the details of the new arrival’s appearance.
Tall enough to be obliged to duck his head to avoid collision with the top of the doorjamb, the dark-haired figure who stood framed in the doorway appeared utterly oblivious to the stares directed his way.
Most of his fellow stranded travellers had arrived at this sanctuary feeling to varying degrees stressed and dishevelled. This man did not look stressed, he looked irritated, and, as for dishevelled, he looked like a walking advertisement for what a glossy magazine might suggest a well-heeled, fashion-conscious business executive—always supposing he had a profile like a Greek god and a body like an Olympic rower—should aspire to achieve.
The only clue to the blizzard conditions he had just driven through was the sprinkling of rapidly melting snow on his dark mohair overcoat, open at the neck to reveal the white collar of a pristine shirt and a perfectly knotted silk tie, and the slightly wind-ruffled quality to his well-cut hair that was jet black, had outgrown a crop and was beginning to curl into his neck.
His deep-set
