Stripping off, she began to wash the scent of him off her body with slow deliberation. It had been a mistake and she wasn’t too proud to admit to mistakes. Sometimes you played and you lost. Sometimes you made a fool of yourself. That was life. But as long as you hung on to your pride and your integrity you would recover. That was life too.
A knock sounded on the door. Bella said something very rude and was then ashamed of herself. The use of bad language was childishly offensive. But, for the first time in a lot of years, her thoughts and emotions were in real chaos. She hurt. The shock of that pain sliced through her, sharp, piercing and inescapable. She had only to think of the manner in which she had thrown herself at him and she felt sick with humiliation.
Rico and she didn’t fit, didn’t suit in any way. They lived in different worlds. Had fate been kind they would never even have met. They didn’t have a thing in common. Rico was an ambitious, ruthless, fully paid-up member of the workaholic financial fraternity. He didn’t have a creative bone in his body.
For heaven’s sake, this was a guy who wore pinstriped suits, kept his desk tidy, thought of precautions against pregnancy in the midst of stormy passion! He maintained a rigorous leash on every spontaneous impulse. Her virginity had not been a gift, it had been a threat to him! How could she possibly think that she had fallen in love with someone like that? She studied herself, wide-eyed, in the mirror, searching for signs of incipient insanity.
Where had her intelligence gone over the past hour? Of course it wasn’t love! Their imprisonment had twisted and confused her emotional responses, magnifying them into something they were not. When those bullets had hit the container she had been terrified and Rico had been protective. The release from that terrible tension had sent her emotions into overload. He had offered her comfort and warmth and she had been so grateful for his presence and in such mental turmoil that she had wildly misinterpreted her own feelings.
Really, Bell…is that why you recklessly gave away the virginity you were saving for your future husband? She paled, crushing that inner voice. But right through her teens Bella had been indoctrinated by her grandfather’s moral standards. It had been an education. Cleo had had an ‘anything goes’ outlook on the morality front. But her lifestyle hadn’t made her happy.
Bitterly aware of that reality, Bella had decided that the field of sexual experimentation was not for her. If she loved someone and he loved her, and a future together was on the cards, that would have been different. But passion without love… That had been the biggest ‘do not’ in Bella’s rulebook. And she had just broken that rule. Received her just deserts in record time too, she acknowledged on another wave of pain.
Rico had illuminated another light when she emerged. What had happened to conservation? she wondered nastily. But then she saw him standing in the shadows by the curtain and her ability to be sharp and critical momentarily deserted her. She was assailed by a blinding urge to rush back into his arms and that terrified her. It was as though there were two people inside her—one trying to be sensible, one racing out of control on an emotional roller coaster. What the beck was the matter with her? Rico looked as dangerous as a prowling predator and she had already found out the hard way that she bled when he clawed.
‘I believe that I have misjudged you,’ he conceded in his silky, accented drawl which trickled down her sensitive spinal column like the caress of rich velvet.
‘Forget it. I already have.’ But her nervous antenna went on to instant red alert.
The level of physical awareness splintering through the atmosphere between them shattered her. Instead of fading with satiation, as she had naively assumed they would, the sexual vibrations had merely intensified. Bella went into restive retreat. She turned away to the fridge, her skin heating, her brain suddenly a wasteland awash with a devastating wave of unbelievably unwelcome erotic imagery. Her body ached and burned with the memory of that wild passion.
‘Lust works for me as well,’ Rico murmured in a purring undertone.
Her lashes fluttered. She froze halfway into the fridge, certain that he couldn’t have said that. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she mumbled, intimate recollection having vanquished her defences.
‘Don’t be coy, gatita. It doesn’t suit you.’
Her cheeks burning fierily, Bella straightened. ‘Look, I made a mistake, and not one I intend to repeat…’ She had forced herself to look at him and her voice trailed away as she registered that his attention was no longer directed at her.
Reaching for the light, Rico took an abrupt stride forward and held it above the stove, his glittering gaze fixed on some point above her. ‘Infierno!’ he breathed.
Dazedly Bella watched him set aside the light at speed and reach up to touch the surface of the roof round the metal flue of the chimney. ‘What is it?’ she demanded.
‘Get me the poker!’
‘But—?’ Meeting the whiplash effect of his impatience, Bella moved to oblige.
Grasping the poker, he swung it up agai
nst the roof. A piece of something like plaster or cement broke away and fell to the floor. ‘What are you doing?’ she gasped.
But as he struck the roof again and more debris flew down, sending up a cloud of dust which made her cough, she realised exactly what he was doing. When the flue for the stove had been put in a hole had naturally been cut and, for simplicity’s sake, not a circular one. A rectangle of metal had been removed. She could dimly see the edges exposed and her momentary excitement faded.
‘They welded it back in after cutting it to take the flue.’
‘That isn’t steel!’ Rico gritted. ‘And it’s only spot-welded. It’ll come out!’
With punishing force he rammed the poker up against the insert, which buckled under the blow. Her heart in her mouth, Bella watched him batter it until it came loose, and then plant two powerful hands round the flue. The upper section lifted away and dim light filtered in. With a powerful push Rico rammed the section upwards, slamming it out onto the roof to clear the aperture he had exposed.
Bella’s fingernails, which had been biting into her palms, bit even harder. Acid tears hit the back of her eyes as she looked up. ‘It isn’t big enough to take either of us!’
Rico surveyed her with raw determination. ‘With a little help from me it’ll take you,’ he asserted.
Awkwardly she climbed up onto the top of the stove and raised her head through the aperture, her eyes flying up and down and around the rafters, the sheet-iron roof above the rusting hulk of an old tractor lying in the corner. ‘We’re in a barn,’ she whispered.
‘Santa María!’ Rico slashed from below her in raw disbelief. ‘You’re not up there to see the scenery!’
Before she could react a pair of hands closed round her thighs and forced her upwards, not even giving her time to hunch her shoulders. Her collision with the edges of the rough metal hurt and she uttered a stifled shriek to which he paid no attention at all. He simply lifted her again, and this time she automatically curved her shoulders in and she went through, snaking out her hands to brace herself in amazement on the roof. With his help she hauled herself through the rest of the way.