Lily couldn’t speak.
But even if she had been able to she wouldn’t have had the strength to argue.
CHAPTER SIX
ALMOST as breathtaking as the skill with which he had assumed the act was the speed with which he dropped it.
Sitting beside him in the low passenger seat, her blood still thrumming from his touch, Lily darted a surreptitious glance at Tristan. The moment they had left Stowell he had distanced himself from her completely, and in the light of the dash board his face was emotionless. The face of a handsome stranger. She shivered.
‘Are you cold?’ he asked with distant courtesy.
‘No. Well, a little.’
He flicked a switch and warm air caressed her. ‘I think we should get married as soon as possible,’ he said, effortlessly guiding the sleek black sports car around a bend in the road without seeming to slow down.
Lily clung to the edge of her seat. ‘So fast…’ she murmured anxiously.
‘Sorry.’ He slowed down sharply. ‘I’m not used to having a passenger.’
A gust of laughter escaped her. ‘I wasn’t referring to your driving. I meant life.’ But as the words left her lips she knew that he wasn’t used to having passengers in that either. And that was what she had become.
He showed no sign of having heard. ‘What are your work commitments for the next few weeks?’
She shrugged. ‘Not much. When I got back from Africa and I wasn’t well I told my agent not to take anything else on. And when I…well, since I found out about the baby…’ the words gave her a warm little glow, like a tiny candle, deep inside; gentler, sweeter than the blowtorch of feeling he unleashed in her ‘…I haven’t gone for any jobs. I’m still under contract to the couture people, though, and we’re shooting another perfume commercial in Rome in two weeks time. And then, after that I’m pretty free, until the beginning of December…’
She bit back a hysterical giggle. It was as if she were making a dentist appointment, not arranging what should have been the most important event of her life.
‘Good,’ he said shortly. ‘Keep it that way. I’ll make all the necessary legal arrangements for the marriage and you can fly straight from Rome to Barcelona for the wedding.’
Lily swung her head round to look at him. ‘Barcelona?’
One corner of Tristan’s mouth lifted into an ironic smile. ‘You’re going to be a Romero bride. You have to get married in Spain.’
Her stomach clenched and her throat felt suddenly as if it were full of sand. She folded her hands over her stomach in an automatic gesture of comfort.
Romero bride.
‘Of course,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I didn’t think. Your family—’
‘Leave them to me.’ He frowned, as if something had just occurred to him. ‘What about your family? Do you want them to be there?’
‘God, no.’ Lily swept her hand over the frosted window, clearing a space and looking out into the blackness beyond the cocoon of the car. ‘My mother’s in some ashram in India, balancing her chakras or something.’
Susannah Alexander had been searching for spiritual enlightenment and inner peace for as long as Lily could remember, but the search had shifted to more high-budget locations since being funded by Lily’s modelling income.
‘And your father?’
Lily gave a soft laugh. ‘I wouldn’t know where to send the invitation.’
Tristan said nothing, merely flicking a glance towards the rear-view mirror as he pulled out to overtake a line of cars and accelerate away into the darkness beyond. Lily was pressed back into the soft leather upholstery. The speed ought to have been frightening, but not for a second did she doubt that he was in absolute control of the powerful car.
Of everything.
‘What’s happening at the beginning of December?’ he asked eventually.
‘I’m going back to Africa.’ she said, unable to maintain her frostiness and keep the enthusiasm from her voice as the words spilled out of her. ‘It’s early days yet, but I’ve been asked to be an ambassador for a children’s medical charity, and at the moment it’s just a case of finding out exactly what I can do, and what issues I can best highlight. I’m just hoping they’ll continue to use me because I’d love to give up modelling and do it full time. I’ve only been over there once so far…’ she faltered ‘…just after we—’
‘So you said.’ There was a dangerously silky note in Tristan’s voice as he cut her off. ‘It was where you picked up the bug that put us in our current position.’ He gave a short, scornful laugh. ‘You can’t seriously be thinking of going back?’
A small dart of alarm shot through Lily, leaving a trail of bright anger in its wake. ‘And you can’t seriously be thinking that I won’t!’ she said tersely. ‘If you’d seen what I saw… Orphaned children, sick and malnourished. Babies whose mothers were too ill to feed them, or even to pick them up and cuddle them; ten-year-old boys forced to take on the role of father to their brothers and sisters, desperately trying to keep their families together—’
‘Thanks, but you can spare me the humanitarian lecture.’
He sounded almost bored. The spark of anger flowered into a blaze, fuelled by the anxiety and the frustration and uncertainty of the evening. ‘And spare me the autocratic alpha male routine!’ she hissed. ‘You were very quick to tell me that you had no intention of having your life disrupted, but I assume that as a Romero bride I’m not to enjoy the same freedom? Well, I’ve gone along with you this far, Tristan, and I’ve tried to respect your family and your history because that’s going to be the heritage of the child that I’m carrying, but just because you have wealth and privilege and titles doesn’t mean you have the right to bully or control or intimidate me.’
‘I thought you wanted to keep this baby.’ Tristan’s voice was icy cold, but in the sodium glow of the streetlights Lily could see a muscle flickering in his cheek.
She sat bolt upright, feeling the seat belt pull tight against her. It was holding her back, restraining her, just like Tristan. Angrily she yanked it away from her body.
‘I do! I want that more than anything, I—’
‘Then I would have thought,’ he said with a lethal softness that chilled her to the bone, ‘that you’d want to do what was best for it. Your desire to help is laudable, but do you really think that the most deprived and disease-ridden parts of Africa are the best place for a pregnant woman? You were ill last time. Who’s to say you won’t pick up something again?’
Lily sank back against the seat, turning away from him and closing her eyes as horror at her own stupidity hit her, along with another wave of dizzying sickness, as if the baby too were trying to remind her of its presence. Groping blindly for the controls for the window to let in some air, she mistakenly took hold of the door handle. The next moment there was a roaring sound as the door swung open and a wall of cold air hit them like an avalanche.
Tristan’s reactions were like lightning. Steadying the wildly swerving vehicle with one hand, he pushed her back against the seat with the weight of his body as, with an ear-splitting screech of tyres, he hauled the steering wheel round to bring the car into the side of the road. The engine cut out, and the sudden silence was filled by the sound of their rapid breathing.
Very slowly Lily turned her head to look at him. His head was bent, his eyes closed, and his arm still lay across her body, shielding her, protecting her more surely than any seat belt.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
For a moment he didn’t move. Then she watched as the fingers of the hand that lay on her thigh curled slowly into a tight fist before he straightened up, placing it with terrifying precision on the steering wheel.
When he turned to her the expression on his face made Lily’s heart turn over.
‘Understand this, Lily. I will never be a good husband or a perfect father, but I am not a tyrant. I will never bully or control you.’ Just for a second his mask of control cracked and Lily caught a glimpse of the terrible bleak ness and anguish that lay behind it. She felt her lungs constrict, sucking her breath inwards in a sort of hiccupping gasp, as all her instincts told her to reach out to him. But it was too late. The mask was back, more chillingly perfect than ever. ‘I can’t offer you love,’ he said in a low voice, ‘but I’ll give you security. I will do everything in my power to protect you and the baby, and keep you safe. Do you understand?’
Shocked into silence, Lily nodded mutely.
Tristan pulled up outside the Primrose Hill address he’d managed to extract from Lily just before she fell asleep. He looked up at the house—a pretty Victorian town house with a late-flowering rose trailing over the stucco frontage—and then across into the sleeping face of the girl beside him. The streetlight above gleamed on the flawless skin, and cast deep shadows beneath the sweep of her thick eyelashes and sharp cheek bones. It was a composition that would have made photographers and magazine editors the world over sigh with bliss.
Gripping the steering wheel tightly, he exhaled a long, slow breath and closed his eyes.