She threw him a look. ‘Do you mind not blaspheming?’
He pushed himself away from her car and came to stand close enough for her to smell the heat of his arrantly male flesh: sweat and hard work with a grace note of citrus that swirled around her nostrils, making them involuntarily flare. She took a prickly little breath and stepped backwards but one of her heels snagged on the crushed limestone and she would have fallen but for one of his hands snaking out and capturing her by the wrist.
Her breath completely halted as his long, tanned fingers gripped her like a steel manacle. An electric charge surged through her skin as soon as those calloused fingers made contact with her skin. She felt it sizzling all the way to the bones of her wrist; they felt like they were going to disintegrate to fine powder. She swept her tongue out over her lips as she tried to muster as much icy hauteur as she could, but even so her heart fluttered like a hummingbird behind the scaffold of her ribs as his eyes meshed with hers. ‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?’ she asked.
One corner of his mouth came up in a sardonic smile. ‘Now look who’s blaspheming.’
Bella’s stomach dropped like an out-of-control elevator when his thumb pressed against her leaping pulse on the underside of her wrist. She hadn’t been so close to him in years. Not since that kiss. Ever since that night, she had assiduously avoided any physical contact with him. But now her skin on her wrist felt like it was being scorched. It felt hot and tingly, as if electrodes had zapped the nerves. ‘Get your filthy hands off me,’ she said but her voice came out raspy and uneven.
His fingers tightened for an infinitesimal moment, his unusual blue-green eyes holding hers, sending a riot of sensations tumbling down the length of her spine. She could sense him so close to her pelvis, that essential part of him that defined him as a virile and potent male. Her body felt its primal magnetic pull just as it had all those years ago. What would it feel like to press against him now that she was no longer that gauche, inexperienced, slightly inebriated teenager?
‘Say please,’ he said.
She gritted her teeth. ‘Please.’
He released her and she rubbed at her wrist, shooting him a livid glare. ‘You’ve made me all dirty, you bastard,’ she said.
‘It’s good clean dirt,’ he said. ‘The kind that washes off.’
Bella looked at the cuff of her shirt below the sleeve of her jacket that now had a full set of his dusty fingerprints on it. She could still feel the pressure of his fingers as if he had indelibly branded her flesh. ‘This shirt cost me five-hundred pounds,’ she said. ‘And now you’ve completely ruined it.’
‘You’re a fool, paying that for a shirt,’ he said. ‘The colour doesn’t even suit you.’
She stiffened her shoulders in outrage. ‘Since when did you become a personal stylist?’ she jeered. ‘You don’t know the first thing about fashion.’
‘I know what suits a woman and what doesn’t.’
She scoffed. ‘I bet you do,’ she said. ‘The less clothes the better, right?’
His eyes glinted as they did a lazy sweep of her form. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’
Bella felt her skin tingle all over as if he had physically removed her clothes, button by button, zip by zip, piece by piece. She couldn’t stop herself from imagining how his work-roughened hands would feel on the softer smooth skin of her body. Would they catch and snare like a thorn on silk? Would they scratch or would they caress? Would they...?
She pulled back from her wayward thoughts with a hard mental slap. ‘I’m going inside to say hello to Mrs Baker,’ she said and swished past him to go to the front door.
‘Mrs Baker is away on leave.’
Bella stopped as if she had suddenly come up against an invisible wall. She turned around to look at him with a quizzical frown. ‘So who’s doing the cooking and cleaning?’ she asked.
‘I’m taking care of it.’
Her frown deepened. ‘You?’
‘You have a problem with that?’ he asked.
Bella blew out a little breath. She had a very big problem with it. Without Mrs Baker bustling about the place, she would be alone in the house with Edoardo. She hadn’t planned on being alone with him. It was a very big house, but still...
In the past he had lived in the gamekeeper’s cottage. But, since her father had left him Haverton Manor, he had the perfect right to live inside the house. He managed her father’s investments and operated his own property-development business out of the study next to the library. Apart from the occasional business trip abroad, he lived and worked here.