eyebrows launched up her forehead. “I’m not going back to New York,” she said, sounding adamant for a woman who looked as if she was about to collapse. But then the box she was holding slipped. She struggled to regain it, stumbled, and then yelped as her bare foot landed on a rock.
“Okay, this conversation’s over,” he said.
Stepping forward, he scooped her and the box into his arms.
She gasped and went rigid. “Put me down.” The angry glare infused the rest of her face with a shade of red to match her sunburn.
“Nope.” The spicy scent of lemon, sea salt and female sweat tightened the screaming tension in his gut as he marched up the track toward his car.
“What do you mean no? I... Oof!”
He dumped her unceremoniously into the passenger seat and slammed the door. After striding around the front of the muscle car, he climbed into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. “This isn’t a negotiation.”
Placing his arm across the back of her seat, he began to reverse down the track, wincing when he heard the muffler bounce off another rock.
“I see you still get off on ordering women about,” she said, but the insult lacked heat.
He slipped his sunglasses on and ignored her. From their sparring matches five years ago, he knew her default position was mouthy and it was better not to engage.
Katherine Whittaker had always been a piece of work. But, if the tabloid press was to be believed, her behavior had gotten a whole lot worse in the years since her old man’s trial and their aborted kiss in her housekeeper’s Brooklyn apartment. She’d dropped off the radar for the past few months, but according to Dario that was only because she’d left Manhattan and had been bumming around Europe on her own, freaking her sister out. So, basically, Katherine Whittaker had just spent the last few months causing trouble incognito.
He backed onto the coast road, slotted the transmission into drive and hit the gas. He could feel her angry glare but didn’t trust himself to speak.
This woman had everything—a lavish home, a family who loved her and the smarts to make something of herself. Instead of which, she’d chosen to thumb her nose at it all and behave like a kid in a candy store for years, probably all on Dario’s dime.
“I don’t know where you think you’re taking me, but you can’t make me do anything,” she said.
He glanced across the console. Her tip-tilted eyes had gone squinty around the corners.
“I’m not nineteen years old anymore,” she added. “And I don’t take orders from anyone, least of all you.”
He turned back to the road, but not before he’d noticed the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the soft cotton of her tank top.
“You want to get out and walk some more?” he asked, calling her bluff.
She glared at him but then swung her face away.
I didn’t think so.
Her slim shoulders slumped against the seat—reminding him of the troubled nineteen-year-old with a big mouth and a crush on him he’d taken great pains to ignore, until she’d gotten under his guard for a few gut-wrenching seconds.
The dying sunlight caught the gold in her hair and made the sweat misting the slopes of her breasts glimmer. Reaction kicked him hard in the gut.
Sometime in the last five years, the gawky duckling with the smart and way too tempting mouth had turned into a long-legged and stunningly beautiful swan, even under the layer of dirt, sweat and animosity.
He punched the gas to pass a truck laden with fruit trees. The sooner he got rid of Katherine Whittaker, the better.
“Why are you even in Italy?” she murmured. “Please tell me you didn’t come all this way just to get in my face?”
He let the snotty comment go, because even the hostile tone couldn’t disguise the weary resignation.
“I’m staying on Capri until Monday,” he said. “The company’s running security for the press opening of the new Venus resort. Dario contacted me to coordinate the search when you texted Megan this morning.”
“How fortuitous,” she said, the bite of sarcasm dulled by fatigue.
Not that fortuitous, really. The Venus project was a major contract, but Jared hadn’t planned to attend the event in person—despite all the noise from his PR department about the great publicity it would generate in the European market if he showed up for the four-day press launch. But his plans had changed this morning when Dario’s call had come in from New York, interrupting him in Naples during a meeting where he’d been finalizing the takeover of a small tech-security firm.
The urgency in Dario’s voice had hit first, then the wave of shame at the mention of a girl he had tried very hard to forget in the last five years.
When he’d discovered that Katherine was missing on the Amalfi Coast somewhere, that her sister Megan was freaking out big time and that they hadn’t been able to contract her, Jared hadn’t hesitated.
He’d redirected a team of his men from the Venus project to kick-start the search, and then taken a helicopter to Sorrento.
He tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel. He still didn’t know where that impulse had come from. Probably just his loyalty to Dario. It was true he’d never quite been able to forget Katherine Whittaker—and the desolation in her eyes after that aborted kiss—but he never got sentimental about women. Especially not women as troublesome as this one.
“How did you end up lost in Campania barefoot?” he asked, attempting to defuse the situation and get some answers. Although he suspected he already knew what had happened.
The Amalfi Coast was a mecca for billionaire property development and high-end tourism but, when you factored in the deprivation in Naples’ slums less than thirty miles away, opportunistic robberies weren’t uncommon.
“I’m not lost,” she said, snapping his olive branch in two. “I know where I am. And where I want to go. And it’s not back to New York.”
Yeah, it was. But he’d deal with the problem of getting her on a plane once they got to the airport. First he needed to swing by wherever she was staying so she could wash up and they could grab her luggage and travel documents.
Once she was on her way home, he’d follow up with the police on the investigation. Even if she hadn’t been hurt, he wanted the little bastards who had done this to her caught and prosecuted.
“So, where were you headed with no transport and no shoes?”
“Sorrento. If you could drop me there, that would be terrific. Then you can tell Dario you’ve done your bit.”
“Is that where you’re based? In Sorrento?” he asked.
She cleared her throat. “Not exactly.”
He glanced at her. The rosé blush was heading for her hairline at an alarming rate.
“Then
