Nell saw the smile and felt her anger surge.
‘What I don’t understand,’ he continued, ‘is why you?’
Nell shook her head in impatient bafflement. ‘What do you mean, why me?’
‘Well, does this niece of yours not have parents? Your brother or sister?’
Nell, who could see where he was going with this, gave a shrug. ‘Lucy is my sister Clare’s eldest.’ Clare also had a new baby.
‘So why does the task fall on your shoulders?’
‘It was me that Lucy contacted. She wanted me to tell her parents.’
‘But you didn’t.’
Her lips tightened at the implied criticism she read in his comment. ‘If I get to Lucy in time there won’t be any need to worry them.’
‘They are parents—worry is included in the job description.’
‘And I’m only the aunt, you mean. It just so happens that Lucy and I are very close.’ Nell heard the defensive note in her voice and frowned. Why was she explaining herself to him?
Maybe because she thought he might be right? Wasn’t her reaction to the e-mail a bit over the top? Was this a rescue mission or was she running away?
Nell closed down the line of internal dialogue and gave a scornful sniff.
‘I suppose you think I should just let her sink or swim?’ The ice-queen expression was beginning to make her face ache.
‘That was certainly an option. We learn by our mistakes.’
Nell regarded him with disgust. ‘Are you saying you did—that at some point you have made a mistake? Imagine my shock—I thought you achieved infallibility in the cradle.’ The only effect of her acid jibe was one of his trademark lopsided smiles.
The man had the hide of a rhino and he had probably been perfecting that smile to its full drop-dead gorgeous potency for the last ten years in a mirror.
‘We’re not all as tough as you are, Mr Santoro. Or as smug,’ she added under her breath.
‘I think you’d better make it Luiz while that ring is on your finger.’
Nell’s eyes slid automatically to her finger where the rock that belonged in a bank vault or a museum sparkled. Without responding to his comment beyond a fulminating look of dislike directed at his hatefully perfect patrician profile, she began struggling to wrench it off her finger. There was after all no reason for the trappings of this now, with no one here to see it.
‘The damn thing’s stuck!’ she panted. ‘It won’t budge an inch,’ she wailed, still wrestling with the heavy ring.
His brows lifted. ‘Don’t worry, there’s always amputation. There was also the option to tell the girl’s parents, but you didn’t.’
The change of subject caused Nell to stop struggling with the ring.
‘This was their problem, not yours.’
‘I’ve already explained they couldn’t have done anything.’ She had done the right thing, hadn’t she…? Although a note to Clare might have been a good idea—my God, they might even be searching for me!
His brows lifted. ‘But you can?’
Nell, her jaw tight, viewed him through the veil of her lashes. ‘In case you’ve not noticed, I am doing something, always supposing you’re right and they are in this cottage and I’m not too late.’ She sucked in a startled breath and braced her arms to steady herself when without warning Luiz swerved to avoid a fallen branch that lay across the road.
Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash did he act as though anything untoward had happened even though they had come perilously close to the edge—and there was a very deep drop.
‘Would it be so very bad if they were married?’
Nell tore her eyes from the very deep drop, leaned back in her seat and, holding back her hair from her face with one forearm, looked across at him incredulously.
‘Bad!’ she echoed. ‘Bad! Are you mad? Lucy is nineteen, she has her entire life in front of her…a place at university…a career. This is the time in her life when she should be having adventures, discovering who she is, play house if she wants to, but she can’t marry some…some…some…’ Nell subsided into her seat shaking her head as words and breath failed her at the same moment.
He arched a brow and looked mildly amused by her vehemence. ‘Spaniard?’
‘I don’t care what nationality he is, though the fact he’s from the same gene pool as you is no recommendation.’
His grin broadened. ‘Felipe does not resemble me.’ His young cousin was considered, at least by his overprotective parents, the sensitive soul of the family.
Nell snorted and tossed her head before pressing her nose to the window. She watched the window fog with her breath. After the events of the day—was it really only a day?