‘I should imagine that you will be breathalysed.’
‘I haven’t been drinking. I just don’t see the necessity to get the police!’
‘I expect they already have more than a passing acquaintance with you.’ Rico da Silva sent a glittering look of derision over her.
‘Well, we wouldn’t be complete strangers, let’s put it that way,’ Bella conceded, thinking back miserably to her earliest memories of what her travelling mother had called police harassment. No matter how hard she tried Bella had never lost that childhood terror of the uniformed men who had moved them on from their illegal camping grounds.
‘I didn’t think so. It’s a hard life on the street,’ he murmured, shooting her scantily clad, shivering figure an intent but unreadable glance. ‘Heading home from the nightshift?’
What the hell was he talking about? Struggling to concentrate, she moved even closer. ‘We could sort this out…just you and me, off the record,’ she assured him in desperation, skimming an anxious glance across the street as another car passed by, slackened speed to have a good look at the wreckage, and then drove on. Any minute now a patrol car would be along.
‘Es verdad?’ Diamond-bright dark eyes scanned her beautiful, pleading face, his strong jaw line clenching hard as a long finger stabbed buttons on the mobile phone without her even being aware of it. ‘I don’t think so. In that one field alone I prefer amateurs.’
‘Amateur what?’ Bella returned in despair, deciding that he had definitely been drinking.
And then she heard the police answering the call, registered that he had already dialled, and allowed sheer panic to take over. Snaking out a hand, she grabbed at the phone. Lean fingers as compelling as steel cuffs closed round her wrist and jerked it ruthlessly down. She burst into floods of tears, her overtaxed emotions shooting to a typically explosive Bella climax and spilling over instantaneously.
‘You bully!’ she sobbed accusingly.
With a raw gasp of male fury, the background of the police telephonist’s voice was abruptly silenced as if the man before her had cut the connection. ‘You attacked me!’ he grated.
‘I just didn’t want you to ring the police!’ she slung back, on the brink of another howl. ‘But go ahead! Have me arrested! I don’t care; I’m past caring!’
‘Stop making such a noise,’ he growled. ‘You’re making an exhibition of yourself!’
‘If I want to have hysterics, that’s my business!’ she asserted through her tears. ‘What do you think this is going to do to my insurance?’
There was a short silence.
‘You have insurance?’
‘Of course I have insurance,’ Bella mumbled, making an effort to collect herself and keeping a careful distance from him, since he had already proved that he was the aggressive type.
‘Give me the details and sign a statement admitting fault and you can be on your way,’ he drawled with unhidden relish.
Bella shot him an astonished glance. ‘You mean it?’
‘Sí… five more minutes in your company and I will understand why men murder. Not only that, I will be at the forefront of a campaign to bring in the death penalty for women drivers!’ Rico da Silva intoned between clenched teeth.
Sexist pig. Smearing her non-waterproof mascara over her cheeks as she wiped at her wet face, Bella bit back the temptation to answer in kind. After all, he was going to be civilised. If he had smashed up her Bugatti she probably would have wanted blood too. Prepared to be generous, she still, however, gave a deliberate little rub to her wrist just to let him know that he might not have drawn blood but he might have inflicted bruises.
He planted a sheet of paper on the bonnet and handed her a pen.
‘You write it; I’ll sign it,’ she proffered glumly.
‘I want it to be in your handwriting.’
But he still stood over her and dictated what he wanted her to write. She struggled with the big words he used, her rather basic spelling powers taxed beyond their limits.
‘This is illiterate,’ he remarked in a strained voice.
Bella’s cheeks flamed scarlet. Her itinerant childhood had meant that she had very rarely attended a school. Gramps had changed all that when she had gone to live with him but somehow her spelling had never quite come up to scratch. Laziness and lack of interest, she conceded inwardly, for she possessed a formidable intelligence which she focused solely on the field of art. Spelling came a very poor second.
‘But it’s fine,’ Rico da Silva added abruptly, suddenly folding it and stuffing it into the pocket of his dinner jacket.
Seeing him reach for his phone again, she gabbled the name of her insurance company in a rush.
‘I’m ringing for a tow-truck for the cars,’ he murmured, reading the reanimated fear on her expressive face.