Nell swallowed.
As Luiz scanned her face his irritated scowl faded. The air of desperation in her face was not contrived. As his hooded eyes slid to her mouth he was seized by a strong and dangerous desire to kiss that look away to leave in its place the dazed, hazy look of sexual surrender he had seen when he had kissed her earlier.
‘Cheer up,’ he said, seeing her moist parted lips in his head, hearing her voice begging him to do it again. ‘It could be worse.’ The lame platitude was a safer alternative, though it still left him with a gnawing ache that didn’t feel as if it was going away any time soon.
The sleeping arrangements were going to require some careful thought. Clearly if he didn’t want to complicate this already strained situation sharing the back seat was not an option, but it was a temptation.
‘Is that a joke? No,’ she contradicted flatly. ‘For the record it could not…not be worse. Nothing could be worse than being trapped in the back of beyond with…’ she paused, sucked in a breath and finished on a husky note of sheer loathing ‘…you!’
A smile played around his mobile mouth as he scanned her face and said with an air of disappointment, ‘I thought British fortitude came into play in the face of adversity?’
Nell extended her clenched fists in an effort to impress the urgency of the situation on him. ‘Lucy needs me!’ she yelled.
‘Relax.’ At that particular moment Lucy’s needs were not to be compared with the urgency of his own.
Nell heard his laconic advice and missed the heat in his hooded eyes and the fine lines of tension bracketing his mouth. She gritted her teeth. If he said that once more she was going to hit him, though, she conceded, her glance slipping to the broad contours of his chest and shoulders, it would probably hurt her more than him. He was all hard muscle and bone.
‘I am relaxed!’ she snarled through grated teeth.
He gave an admiring whistle. ‘And you said that without a trace of irony.’
‘I will scream without a trace of irony too.’ The warning was only part black humour. She was really struggling to stay in control. She had a lump the size of a golf ball in her throat.
‘It’s a waste of time to stress about things over which you have no control.’
Nell threw up her hands and glared at him. ‘It’s easy for you to be philosophical when you don’t give a damn what happens to your cousin! You wouldn’t have lifted a finger to save him from making a mistake that could ruin the rest of his life.’ Her lips curled into a contemptuous smile as she observed him with disgust. ‘The only thing you care about is money!’ she accused wildly. ‘I pity you!’
‘I pity me too for having to contend with your sanctimonious ranting.’
‘Lucy is—’
Luiz, who was heartily sick of hearing the name, cut across her. ‘I’m sure Lucy is safely tucked up in bed.’
‘With your cousin—great!’ she snorted. ‘That’s a very comforting thought.
‘Then don’t think about it,’ he advised brutally, almost visibly becoming bored with the conversation.
Deep in denial, Nell shook her head firmly from side to side. ‘I’m not budging from this car until you take me to Lucy. I insist you take me to her.’
‘I’m flattered by your faith in my ability but making the internal combustion engine run on fresh air is beyond my capabilities.’
‘How can we be out of petrol? Didn’t you check? Or do you normally delegate tedious tasks like that to some flunky? My God!’ she exclaimed, shaking her head as she looked him up and down in disgust. ‘You’re obviously totally clueless.’
An expression of stunned shock on his face, Luiz stared at her in silence that was broken a moment later by the sound of his husky laughter. Some of the tension drained away with the sound.
‘I have been called many things before but never that,’ he admitted, his mobile lips twitching into a wry smile as he added, ‘Not to my face at least.’
Nell regarded him with unfriendly eyes. ‘I’m so glad to have amused you,’ she said frigidly. There was laid-back and then there was obtuse, and in her opinion someone who could find anything to laugh at in this situation definitely fell into the latter category.
‘You are right. I should have checked we had a full tank, but by the time I noticed it was empty we were past the point of no return.’
Nell struggled to maintain her frigid expression. The man had apologised and it wasn’t as if he had planned for this to happen. She was also uneasily aware that her own reaction to their dilemma had been slightly excessive. He couldn’t be any happier about this than she was.