where it lay on the ground.
‘Go away!’ Sam snarled from between gritted teeth.
The broad shoulders lifted in one of his inimical shrugs. ‘As you wish.’
Sam watched as he turned and began to walk back to his car. Almost bursting with indignation, she ran after him. ‘You’re just going to leave me like this?’ she yelled.
He stopped and turned. ‘Was that not what you wanted?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re such a creep!’ she declared forcefully, then added, ‘And don’t think I’m not perfectly capable of putting on my own tyre.’
‘Not that tyre.’
‘Yes, that tyre.’
He shook his head and looked so smug that she wanted to scream. ‘That tyre has no tread.’
She looked at him blankly.
‘It is illegal.’
A flicker of uncertainty crossed her face. ‘It looks fine to me,’ she muttered mutinously.
‘It is useless—actually, worse than useless. Because in this weather the only place it will get you for sure is the nearest casualty department.’
‘You’re exaggerating,’ she charged.
He gave another of his magnificently expressive shrugs. ‘It’s your neck.’ Halfway through turning, he swung back. His eyes slid down the pale column of her throat before he added harshly, ‘I suggest, if you feel unable to accept my help, that you ring the nearest garage.’
Sam bit her lip. She knew the admission was going to make her look even more of an idiot than she already did as she fished her phone from her pocket and grunted, ‘My battery is low.’
He released a long hiss of irritation and wrenched open the door of his own car. ‘Get in—I will give you a lift.’
Sam, who had been looking wistfully at the luxuriously upholstered interior, stiffened at the terse invitation. There was a militant glitter in her aquamarine eyes as she released a scornful laugh. ‘You think I’d get into a car with you…?’
‘Don’t you think it is a little late to display caution?’ His nostrils flared as his eyes swept across her upturned features. ‘I find it staggering,’ he revealed, in a voice that suggested he was trying very hard not to yell, ‘that an apparently intelligent female should act with such wanton disregard for her personal safety.’
‘What do you mean?’ No man had a right to look that good with his hair plastered to his skull…but she was forgetting it wasn’t just any skull—it was the perfect variety. God, she thought, it would be so much easier not to loathe the wretched man if you could discover one minor imperfection.
‘Dio…!’ he gritted. Muttering under his breath in angry Italian, he let his head fall back, revealing the strong lines of his supple brown throat. Then, as she stared through the rain and the mesh of her spiky lashes, he dug both hands into his drenched sable hair and pulled it back in a way that sent water streaming down his olive-skinned face and neck.
Sam, unable to tear her eyes from the spectacle—which oughtn’t to have been erotic but was—felt things move deep inside her. Unspecified, but deeply disturbing things. She reluctantly recognised that something far more worrying than the rain was responsible for the drowning, breathless sensation she was experiencing as she watched the water glide over his smooth brown skin.
Alessandro’s head came up, and guiltily her eyes dropped.
Jaw clenched, he glared at her downbent head. ‘You have been standing at the side of a lonely road, fluttering your eyelashes…’
The injustice of this harsh accusation brought her head up. The first thing her distracted gaze lighted on was the silvered drops of rain trembling on the tips of his own preposterously long eyelashes.
Eyelash-fluttering would get him further than it would me, she thought.
‘I haven’t…’ Her voice faded away as her eyes connected with his.
‘And,’ he continued, once she had lapsed into silence, ‘inviting the attention of any psychopathic lunatic who happens to drive by. You either have an unhealthy addiction to danger or you have no sense of self-preservation whatever. I suspect both,’ he concluded grimly.
The awful part was, he had a point. ‘Well, I’d prefer to get into a car with a psychopath than you!’ she blurted out childishly. Then, lowering her eyes, she added in a small voice, ‘Could I use your phone?’
At that moment another articulated truck went by and blasted its horn.
Alessandro followed the vehicle with his eyes until it vanished from view over the brow of the hill. When he turned his attention back to her his jaw was set and his eyes held a steely look of determination.
‘Get in!’
His attitude did not suggest compromise, but she’d try anyway. She looked at his mouth, and her defences slipped just enough to let through one forbidden thought. I kissed that.
If she got into that car who was to say she wouldn’t repeat the performance? Chance would be a fine thing. She took a deep breath and told herself sternly that thinking that way was going to get her into trouble.
‘If you would just let me use your ph—’
‘Get in, or I will put you in,’ he interrupted, not sounding like a man with kissing on his mind. ‘I have no intention of being interviewed by the police as the last person who saw you alive.’
Sam paled a little at the image his brutal words conjured. ‘There’s no need to be so dramatic.’
Ignoring her scornful complaint, he swivelled his eyes significantly towards the door of the car. ‘I do not have all day.’
Sam hesitated. ‘You wouldn’t…?’ Their eyes met and she gulped. He would.
I need therapy, she decided, appalled by the gut-tightening excitement in her belly. When did I turn into the sort of woman who gets turned on at the idea of being man-handled? Her eyes ran up the long, lean length of the man who stood there radiating impatience, and she thought, Not any man.
With as much dignity as a person who was literally dripping could muster, she arranged herself in the front seat as he stood and watched. His expression suggested that the outcome had never been in question.
Did people always do what he wanted? she wondered as she snuggled down into the cream leather upholstery. She looked blankly at the hand he’d inserted.
‘Keys…I need to lock up your car. Not that it would be the car of choice for most self-respecting car thieves,’ he said, sliding a contemptuous look towards her ancient Morris Traveller.
‘It’s a classic,’ she said, dropping the keys into his palm. ‘And it has character.’
‘It’s a heap. And it doesn’t go,’ he contradicted,
