‘You were waiting for me,’ he reminded her smoothly, surveying her with smouldering golden eyes that burned wherever they touched. ‘When I saw you in that restaurant I wanted to put my hands round your throat and squeeze hard. Where the hell have you been for the past three weeks? Why the hell did Chief Superintendent Nazenby treat me like a convicted criminal who was dangerous to women and refuse to divulge your whereabouts?’
Bella went pink and managed a jerky shrug. ‘It didn’t occur to me that you’d ask.’
‘This is not Biff you are talking to… this is Rico,’ he growled, moving forward, his handsome face as hard as iron. ‘And I can scent female deviousness a mile away. I offended your pride at the police station, and you removed yourself from my radius to let me learn to appreciate you in your absence. Then magically you reappeared in my favourite restaurant with another man—a man all primed and ready to propose holy matrimony with me as an audience!’
‘You conceited jerk!’ Bella slung at him in disbelief. ‘You actually think I would sink to that level to try and trap you?’
‘Si…’ He threw her a seething look of condemnation. ‘I might respect you more if you simply admitted how calculating you are!’
‘How did you get through the front door with an ego that size?’
‘My apologies if I did not rise to your expectation of me throwing a jealous scene! I am not the jealous type.’
‘I’ll believe you… thousands wouldn’t,’ she responded sweetly, recognising with a kind of savage pleasure that he had indeed been jealous, and ready to thank him even more sweetly for bringing it to her notice. ‘You were rude to me, rude to poor Sophie, and rude to Griff, although it probably went over his head. I don’t know what I did to earn that… And as for Sophie, my heart went out to her—’
‘What heart?’ Rico slashed back viciously. ‘Por Dios … to see you sitting there holding hands with him! You got exactly the reaction you expected—’
‘I didn’t know you would be there!’ But she knew that she was talking to a brick wall. Rico was convinced that she had set him up. Griff had set them both up, but Rico would not believe that. Why? Because Griff had been so polite that Rico had written him off as a lame brain. But Griff would never have risked offending someone as powerful and rich as Rico da Silva.
‘I want to see these famous paintings, not one of which has ever been sold,’ Rico derided, heading for the pile of canvases stacked along the entire length of the spacious room, ‘but which Nazenby considers works of pure genius… Infierno! He probably couldn’t tell an old master from a Picasso!’
‘No!’ Bella planted herself squarely in his path.
‘And what happened to your terror of the police force? I did everything within my power to support you at that police station,’ Rico reminded her rawly, setting her out of his path with one imperious hand. ‘And now Nazenby talks about you as though you’re part of his family!’
‘Face that container and you can face anything. I’d kept up the fear out of habit… No, Rico!’
‘I want to see them. You live with Hector Barsay and, unless old age has mellowed him, you have to be accustomed to criticism.’
‘Why is it so important for you to see them?’ she wailed in distress.
‘Why is it so important for you to prevent me?’
‘They’re private,’ she muttered tightly.
‘An artist whose every work is private—how thought-provoking,’ he drawled nastily, flipping back the first canvas.
‘Hector says I’m not ready to be shown yet. He thinks my interpretation needs a lot more work…more maturity,’ she proffered unsteadily, voicing her supposed flaws in advance.
The silence went on and on. She clutched her hands together, as nervous as someone watching her children jay-walking across an accident black spot. Rico shone the candelabra on about half a dozen, slowly moving from one to the next. Nothing could be read from the taut lines of his dark features. Expelling his breath, he straightened, but he was still studying an oil of children playing in the mud round a lorry.
‘You paint your childhood,’ he breathed tautly.
‘Not all the time.’
‘Hector is not only a miser, he’s a liar. He wants to hold onto you, es verdad? His own discovery. He can’t let you go. He hid away from that world out there years ago, and if he encourages you to exhibit he knows he’ll lose you!’ Rico sent her a shimmering glance, his expressive mouth compressed into a strangely bloodless line. ‘You have extraordinary talent and you cannot possibly require someone like me to tell you that.’
‘You like them?’
He set the candelabra back by the bed and stood there, watching her with hooded dark eyes. ‘I’m in shock and you know it. Why are you working as a waitress?’
‘It pays the rent. I paint in daylight, work at night. I get fabulous tips—’
‘I can imagine.’
‘The hours suit me.’
‘Biff told me you were a catering. supervisor, not a waitress—’