'Please don't let me inhibit you,' he murmured.
And Darcy burst out laughing again.
'Who did you come here with tonight?' he queried.
'Nobody...I'm a gatecrasher,' she confided daringly.
'A gatecrasher?'
'You sound shocked...'
'Security is usually very tight at the Palazzo d'Oro.'
'Not if you enter just in front of a party who require a great deal of attentive bowing and scraping.'
'You must've had an invitation?'
'It landed at my feet in the Piazza San Marco. A beautiful brunette flung it at her boyfriend. I thought you asked me to dance,' she complained, since they had yet to move. 'Are you now planning to have me thrown out?'
'Not just at present,' he confided, folding her closer and staring down at her with narrowed eyes. 'You are a very unusual woman.'
'Very,' Darcy agreed, liking that tag, which hinted at a certain distinction.
'And your name?'
'No names, no pack drill,' she sighed. 'Ships that pass and all that—'
'I want to board...'
'No can do. I am not my name...my name wasn't even chosen with me in mind,' she admitted with repressed bit¬terness, for Darcy had always been a male name in her family. 'And I want to be someone else tonight.'
'Very unusual and very infuriating,' he breathed.
'I am a woman who is very, very sure of herself, and a woman of that stature is certain to infuriate,' she returned playfully, leaning in to his big powerful body and smiling up at him, set free by anonymity to be whatever she wanted to be.
And so they danced, high above the Grand Canal, all the lights glittering magically in her eyes until she closed them and just drifted in a wonderful dreamy haze...
CHAPTER FOUR
A BURST of forceful Italian dredged Darcy out of that sleepy, seductive flow of memory. Eyelids fluttering, she returned to the present and frowned to find the Land Rover at a standstill, headlights glaring on the high banks of a narrow lane.
'What...where—?' she began in complete confusion.
'We have a flat tyre,' Luca delivered in a murderous aside as he wrenched open the rattling driver's door.
Darcy scrambled out into the drizzling rain. 'But the spare's in for repair!' she exclaimed.
Across the bonnet, Luca surveyed her with what struck her as an overplay of all-male incredulity. 'You have no spare tyre?'
'No.' Darcy busied herself giving the offending flat tyre a kick. 'Pretty far gone, isn't it? That won't get us home.' She looked around herself. 'Where on earth are we?'
'It is possible that in the darkness I may have taken a wrong turn.'
Considering that they were in a lane that came to a dead end at a field twenty feet ahead, Darcy judged that a miracle of understatement. 'You got lost, didn't you?'
Luca dealt her a slaughtering, silencing glance.
Darcy sighed. 'We'd better start walking—'
'Walking?' He was aghast at the concept.
'What else? How long is it since you saw a main road?'
'Some time,' Luca gritted. 'But fortunately there is a farmhouse quite close.'
'Fat lot of use that's going to be,' Darcy muttered. 'At two in the morning, only an emergency would give us the excuse to knock people up out of their beds.'
"This is an emergency!'
Darcy drew herself up to her full five feet two inches. 'I am not rousing an entire family just so that we can ask to use their phone. In any case, who would you suggest I contact?'
'A motoring organisation,' Luca informed her with ex¬aggerated patience.
'I don't belong to one.'
'A car breakdown recovery business?'
'Have you any idea what that would cost?' Darcy groaned in horror. 'It's not worth it for a flat tyre! The local garage can run out the spare in the morning. They'll only charge me for their time and petrol—'
'I am not spending the night in that filthy vehicle,' Luca asserted levelly.
'You figure cosying up to those cows would be more fun?' Darcy could not resist saying, surveying the curious beasts who, attracted by the light and the sound of their voices, had ambled up to gawk over the gate at them.
'I passed through a crossroads about a kilometre back. I saw an inn there.' With the decisive air of one taking com¬mand, Luca leant into the car. 'I presume you have a torch?'
"Fraid not,' Darcy admitted gruffly.
Not a male who took life's little slings and arrows with a stiff upper lip, Darcy registered by the stark exhalation of breath. Not remotely like the charming, tolerant male she had encountered in Venice three years ago. And how the heck she had contrived to imagine the faintest resem¬blance now quite escaped her. This was a male impatient of any mishap which injured his comfort—indeed, almost outraged by any set of circumstances which could strand him ignominiously on a horribly wet night in a muddy country lane.
So they walked.
'I should have paid some heed to where we were going,' Darcy remarked, proffering a generous olive branch.
'"If onlys" exasperate me,' Luca divulged.