‘It seems that I owe it to him to help him save face with his colleagues in the office.’
‘He never said that, surely?’
‘I don’t think he even realises that that is what he said. I’ll pack. It’s time I went home anyway.’ A rueful smile curved Bella’s lips. ‘Thanks for having me, but I’ve got to face the music sooner or later. Not that I’m expecting to be mobbed. I’m old news since our kidnappers were caught. There won’t be much interest now until the case reaches court,’ she pointed out.
‘Don’t you believe it… You’ve got a price on your head whether you like it or not! And the longer you keep quiet about your ordeal,’ Liz said grimly, ‘the more outrageous become the tabloid fantasies. You’d be better off issuing a statement.’
Bella sat silently in Griff’s BMW as it transported her back to London. The more questions he asked about Rico the tenser she became. Why the heck couldn’t he just take the hint and shut up?
It had been three weeks since she had been dropped by the chief superintendent at her friend’s cottage. Hector had packed a case for her and Liz had collected it covertly from his back door, because the Press had been encamped at the front continuously during those first days after her ca
ptors’ arrest. She had twice been collected and smuggled into a central London police station where the evidence against their kidnappers was being carefully stockpiled. But all that was over, bar the court case.
Only now did she wonder if it would ever be over. The Press had ferreted into her past and published everything —her colourful parentage, her cursory education, her artistic talent. It seemed to her that everyone she had ever known in life had talked about her to the tabloids—Gramps’ neighbours, fellow students at the college, her tutor, former boyfriends—bitter and otherwise. ‘Frigid’, had said one; ‘wild’, had said another. I’M STILL IN LOVE WITH HER, had screamed the headline given by an ex she barely recalled from six months ago.
She didn’t recognize the femme fatale the tabloids had depicted her as. Her every piece of privacy had been ripped from her resistant body. She had been invaded, raped in print and twisted into something she was not, and as far as she could see there was not a damn thing she could do about it!
‘Here?’ Bella gasped when she realised where Griff was planning that they should dine. ‘You’ll be broke for six months!’
‘Will you keep your voice down?’ he hissed at her, paling to the same shade as his brand-new dinner jacket. ‘I can well afford to splash out occasionally.’
Only he had never splashed out for her benefit before. Griff might have earned a very healthy crust as a partner in a busy legal firm but he was careful with his cash. Was he celebrating something—a more than usually lucrative divorce?
The head waiter looked at her with recognition. She threw her slim shoulders back and smoothed her elbow-high black gloves up her arms. Her figure-hugging black velvet dress could mercifully hold its own in any company. A seventies designer original, the colour spectacular against her wealth of vibrant Titian hair and creamy skin, its deceptively simple cut made the most of her lithe, female shape and fabulous legs.
Their table was right in the very centre of the crowded dining room. ‘Are we celebrating something?’ Bella whispered, maddeningly conscious of heads turning in their direction. Surely not all these beautiful people read the same rubbishy tabloids?
‘I hope so.’ Griff gave her a wide, self-satisfied smile as their menus arrived and he ordered wine in execrable French.
‘I don’t drink,’ she reminded him.
He leant almost confidingly closer. ‘I believe you’ll break that rule tonight.’
Just as she was on the brink of questioning the peculiarity of his behaviour, Bella’s attention was stolen. Griff could have stood up and stripped and she wouldn’t have noticed. Rico da Silva was in the act of taking a seat at a table about fifteen feet away. She froze, her heartbeat slowing to a dulled thud as if she was being forced to witness a disaster. And, inside herself, indeed she was…
For three endless weeks Bella had rationalised away every single feeling that Rico had inspired in her. She had blamed fear, propinquity, hysteria and her own repressed sexuality. She had lost weight, endured sleepless nights and stubbornly considered herself cured of emotions that she refused to rate higher than the level of an adolescent infatuation.
But at the same second as her shocked gaze located him and everyone else in the room vanished from her awareness, her so-called cure came apart at the seams. A hunger so intense that it was agonising clawed at her. Her mesmerised eyes roved from his dark head to the soles of his hand-made shoes and back up again. Worst of all, she couldn’t stop herself from doing it.
‘Your wine..: Griff prodded her fingers with the glass at the same instant as Rico’s dark, restive gaze landed on her. Bella watched his hard, bronzed face tauten with something that looked very much like savage disbelief, and hurriedly she tore her dazed scrutiny from him. She fumbled for the wine and drank the whole glass down in one go.
‘I do realise that you haven’t indulged before,’ Griff reproved, ‘but one is supposed to enjoy the bouquet.’
The waiter was already refilling her glass.
‘Now…’ Griff dealt her an expectant look.
‘Now what?’
Belatedly she noticed the ring glittering in the palm which he was extending to her. ‘What do you want me to do with that?’ she muttered helplessly.
‘I am asking you to marry me,’ he told her smugly, reaching for her hand.
‘You’re what?’
Everything happened at once. A camera flash went off somewhere near by. The head waiter looked shattered. A man in a dinner jacket, clasping a camera, raced past… ‘Thanks mate!’ he tossed back, apparently at Griff, as he headed for the exit fast.
‘I’m sure you won’t mind if we join you.’