As her old car bounced along the lane there were lots of ominous creaks and crunches, but nothing could distract Annalisa from keeping the accelerator pedal flat to the floor. As she landed with one particularly bone-crunching jolt the car stalled and refused to start again. Then, when she finally got it going, an ominous grinding noise accompanied her the rest of the way to Ramon’s.
‘Good,’ she muttered fiercely, seeing his unmistakable rangy figure poised beside the Porsche. He was obviously on the point of setting out to pick her up. Well, she had saved him the trouble! Stamping her foot down on the brake, she managed to slew to a halt a hair’s breadth away from his car. And then she almost fell out of the door in her rush to apprehend him.
But he moved a lot faster than she did and, executing a clean leap past her, dived into the driver’s seat she had just vacated. Wrenching on the handbrake, he called through the open door, ‘I think you forgot something.’
She clamped her angry mouth shut as he climbed out again and watched him shoot a wry glance at the driver’s door that refused to close until his third and most vigorous attempt.
‘No damage done,’ he said, patting the roof of her bargain basement car.
‘Save your condescension and the sarcasm,’ Annalisa warned. ‘I’ve got something to say to you.’
‘But there will be plenty of chance to talk over dinner,’ he reminded her in an infuriating drawl, his eyes glinting with amusement as he looked her up and down. ‘Is mud art the latest fashion, or have I missed something?’
‘No,’ she said clamping her hand over her bare thigh. ‘And I don’t know how you have the nerve to mention dinner.’
‘Wasn’t that what we arranged?’ he said mildly. ‘Dinner seems a perfectly reasonable topic of conversation to me.’
‘Well, that’s because you haven’t seen what I’ve seen.’
‘Clearly,’ he agreed, shooting a sideways look at her.
She would find some way to extinguish that smile in his eyes. Planting her hands on her hips, she glared. ‘Don’t pretend you have no idea what I’m talking—’
‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded, cutting over her with brutal force. ‘What exactly am I being accused of now?’
As he prowled closer she threw up her arms to ward him off, but again he was far too quick for her. ‘Let go of me!’ Annalisa protested, shaking her arm in a fruitless attempt to throw him off. His hold only tightened.
‘Oh, no,’ Ramon told her in a tightly controlled voice. ‘You don’t get away so easily. You have to take responsibility for your accusations as well as your actions, Señorita Wilson. We’re taking this inside.’
‘I’m not setting one foot inside your house,’ she said furiously, tugging back.
His short laugh left her in no doubt as to the outcome. ‘This is my territory and I make the decisions here.’ And, sweeping her up in one arm, he carried her into the house. Shouldering open the door to a large airy salon, he dropped her down on a cream leather sofa. ‘Explain.’
‘OK!’ she said, springing up again.
‘Whoa!’ he exclaimed, raising his hands in mock alarm. ‘Let’s talk about this calmly. I can see that you’re upset—’
‘Understatement of the year! My trees are destroyed—’ She had no money to replace them but he didn’t need to know that. ‘And you expect me to be calm!’
‘Here. Wipe your face,’ he said, dangling a spotless white handkerchief in front of her eyes.
She hadn’t even realised that she was crying, thanks to the battering her emotions had taken, and it wasn’t anything to do with the vandal in the orange groves, she thought, avoiding his fingers as if they were red-hot.
‘Let me,’ Ramon suggested. ‘You look like you’ve fallen head-first into a bucket of mud. I’m sure you’ll feel better when you’ve had a chance to talk about it,’ he murmured, removing from her hands the fine lawn handkerchief she was twisting into a rope of string. Shaking it out, he began to work on the worst of the smudges.
‘There’s no need,’ Annalisa insisted, squaring her shoulders. Predictably, he ignored her. She tried pulling the handkerchief away from him but he only moved in closer, forcing her to push against his chest…and then her fingers softened and eased into a caress. Horrified, she snatched her hands away. ‘You can’t get out of this,’ she flared, badly shaken. ‘I want an explanation.’
‘Then we’re both going to get what we want if you come and sit down and we discuss things reasonably,’ he countered.