‘I beg your pardon?’ Reeling with exhaustion and shock at his sudden appearance, Bella slumped down on the stairs and focused on him with dazed eyes.
‘Por qué… why?’ he slammed at her with unhidden savagery.
She could feel the violence in him, coiled up tight like a cobra ready to strike. He was struggling to contain it, on the edge. Her brain was moving in slow motion, could not yet comprehend what on earth was the matter with him. ‘Rico…I—’
‘Don’t try to lie to me!’ he grated with vicious bite. ‘You’ve been out all night. You’re still wearing the clothes you had on at breakfast yesterday. Madre de Dios, I trusted you, I actually trusted you! But I make one wrong move and you react like a whore—’
‘A whore?’ She framed the words with the greatest of difficulty, scrutinising him with wide, incredulous eyes.
Outraged by her lack of response, Rico reached for her with hard hands and hauled her upright. ‘You thought I wouldn’t find out, es verdad?’ he seethed down at her in a blaze of fury, his diction destroyed by the thickness of his accent. ‘You would’ve told me that you came up to see Hector and stayed the night here. If I hadn’t seen you coming back
this morning I wouldn’t have known that you had been with Atherton all night!’
The penny finally dropped with Bella. Her stomach heaved with nausea. ‘The butler talked,’ she said with heavy irony. ‘He told you that I left Winterwood with Griff.’
As Rico released her with a vicious burst of Spanish she slumped back down again, feeling really ill. That Rico could believe for one second that she could be that treacherous, that disloyal and that cheap filled her with shrinking distaste.
When she spoke it was more like talking to herself than to Rico. ‘I meant to phone last night and leave a message for you but I was so upset that I forgot. It didn’t even occur to me that you would distrust me to this extent… that you could… Dear God.’ Bella groaned, staggering upright on a wave of nausea more powerful than any she had yet managed to ride out and heading blindly for the sanctuary of the downstairs cloakroom, ‘I’ve been sleeping with a stranger…
“‘I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee,”’ she mumbled in a daze as she yanked open the door. ‘“He was a gentleman on whom I built An absolute trust.”’
‘Othello and Macbeth,’ Rico growled in incredulous recognition. His bewilderment and frustration unconcealed, he simply stood there glowering at her. The phone started ringing. Neither of them paid it any heed.
To the accompaniment of the phone shrilling, Bella just managed to shut the door before she was horribly sick. As someone who had always rejoiced in an iron digestive systems, she was shaken by her own bodily weakness. Afterwards she clung to the sink and rinsed her mouth out. At least the phone had finally stopped.
The door opened. ‘Go away,’ she said thickly.
‘The phone,’ Rico breathed tautly. ‘It’s some cousin of Hector’s. He wants to know what hospital Hector’s in… He’s waiting for an answer.’
Bella swallowed hard and gave the answer, then listened dully to him concluding the call.
‘How bad is it?’ Rico murmured even more tautly. ‘Dios, you look terrible—’
He was a quick study. Reasoning had returned, suggesting the real explanation for her overnight absence. Bella wished that the call hadn’t come. She would have left Rico to stew in his own vile assumptions. He didn’t deserve to be let off the hook this quickly and this easily. This was the male she had sacrificed her dreams for, the male she had burnt her rulebook over… and where had it got her? Maybe exactly where she deserved to be.
‘Bella, Hector’s not…?’
‘No, he’s still hanging in there.’ As she spoke he attempted to curve an arm round her. Jerking dizzily away and grabbing hold of the banister, she gasped, ‘Leave me alone!’
Ignoring her demand, Rico closed his arms round her from behind. ‘Forgive me,’ he said tightly.
She was too physically weak to fight him. ‘Why can’t you just go? I’ve been at the hospital all night and I’m not in the mood for you or any of this… It’s probably my fault he’s in there in the first place!’ she completed with a stifled sob, her hand flying up to her wobbling mouth.
‘It couldn’t possibly be your fault.’
‘He was upset when I moved in with you!’ she slung at him shakily.
She heard him expel his breath.
‘Oh, just go away,’ she mumbled, barely able to stand, she felt so faint.
‘I’m not leaving you like this. I’ll take you back to my apartment—’
‘I’m staying here.’
Rico swept her up into his arms. ‘You’re not well. You can’t stay here alone. You should be in bed.’
‘Someone should be here to answer the phone—’