Stolen Bride

She stared at him wonderingly. ‘Such as?’

He cocked a glance at her, then stared at the road. ‘Such as marrying Luca Finzi,’ he said quietly.

It had been dark for hours, but it was still hot and it had not taken Cara long to discover that Finn’s hire car had no air-conditioning.

The stale, warm fumes blowing in through her window from the traffic were giving her a headache. She had a cramp in her right foot, which no amount of rubbing would get rid of. And every few moments she had to look over her shoulder, as if somehow she could pick out Luca’s car from all the others.

‘Relax,’ soothed Finn. ‘It’s highly unlikely they know what kind of car we have, or the registration. They don’t even know for certain that we’re on the autostrada or what direction we’re going in.’

Cara bit her lip. ‘I may be naive, Finn, but I’m not stupid. They’re bound to have figured out by now that it was you on the slip road. And you know as well as I that they. can’t be far behind.’

She looked at his strong profile in alternate shade and light from the other cars. ‘Tell me the truth,’ she said quietly. ‘What odds do you give for our success?’

He sighed. ‘I’d rather give odds on a dead horse winning the Kentucky Derby, if you want the truth,’ he said at last. ‘But we’re not done yet.’

They both looked in silence at the road ahead, then Finn glanced at her. ‘It’s not entirely hopeless, you know,’ he said. ‘At this precise moment, we’re free.’

‘You always were free,’ she replied softly. ‘You didn’t have to rescue me.’

He didn’t reply to that, and Cara wondered again if some ulterior motive had prompted him to come to her aid. There had to be one. He couldn’t have done it just for the sake of a book. Money, maybe? Had some other family decided the marriage would make Luca and her uncle a too-powerful combination and paid Finn to step in?

She thought of the look in Finn’s eyes when he had taken her hand in the church and sighed. Somehow she didn’t like to think he had accepted money to take her away. And besides, nobody, not even she, had known she would rebel like that at the last moment.

Maybe he was just crazy. After all, who in his right mind would bring out a book like that about Luca and then attend his wedding?

And why would a complete stranger help her for her own sake? And how did he know she spoke English?

Finn’s voice broke in on her thoughts. ‘You’re thinking so loudly it’s disturbing me,’ he remarked. ‘What’s bugging you now?

She swallowed. ‘I was wondering if you were safe to be with,’ she said frankly. ‘Because I am beginning to think you are certainly not right in the head.’

He shrugged. ‘Can you think of anybody in your family who is completely sane?’ he inquired. ‘Your uncle, for instance—’

‘Leave my uncle out of it!’ she broke in hotly.

‘All right,’ Finn went on. ‘Luca, then. Now there is a man who is definitely one plate short of a picnic basket. He is so macho your uncle probably keeps him on a leash and feeds him the remains of door-to-door salesmen.’

Cara stared at him. No one had ever spoken so casually about her family before. So insultingly. ‘How dare you!’ she fumed.

He turned to look at her briefly. ‘Okay, so I was exaggerating, but so what? The trouble with you, Cara, is that you’ve been brought up to accept unquestioningly everything your uncle and Luca tell you.’

Her mouth opened but she could think of nothing to say.

He went on. ‘I’ve studied the way your family does business for a long time. And I thought nothing could surprise me about them any more. But I have to admit I was as surprised as Luca when you turned at the altar and just said no. He looked like a guy whose pet rabbit had just pulled a gun on him.’

Cara’s jaw clenched. ‘So you think I’m just a pet rabbit?’

He held up his hand. ‘Uh-uh.’ He shook his head. ‘When you arrived at the church I thought you were a sacrificial lamb. Now...’ He put his hand on the steering wheel. ‘Now, I don’t know what to make of you. Except that you’re probably as crazy as you think I am.’

She stared out the windscreen. Sacrificial lamb, indeed. Just who did this man think he was?

He glanced at her. ‘You must be tired,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Try to sleep.’

‘I don’t want to,’ she snapped. And was immediately angry with herself for how childish she sounded. She rubbed her hands over her face and tried to stifle a yawn. ‘I can’t sleep. I still don’t even know if I can trust you or not.’

‘I’m the only hope you’ve got,’ he said drily. ‘And, in any case, what do you think I’m going to do—try to rape you with one foot on the accelerator? Interesting idea,’ he added meditatively. ‘Especially on the autostrada. But I have to admit I’m not that much of an acrobat.’

She leaned her head back. He really had the most beautiful voice, she thought sleepily. But the things he said with it! She had never, ever met a man like him.

Soon she fell into an uneasy doze, peopled with unsettling images. Finn glanced at her face, and with a wry smile kept on driving.

She woke with a start as he pulled into a service station. ‘Where are we?’ she asked muzzily.

‘Past Rome,’ he replied. ‘Nearly at Florence. ‘It’s about two o‘clock, and if we keep this up, we should be in France for lunch tomorrow.’

Lunch. Her brain seemed to wake up all of a sudden at the word, and she tried to remember when she had last eaten. She looked at him hopefully. ‘I don’t suppose we could have something to eat now?’ she ventured.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said, getting out of the car. ‘Keep your head down.’

Cara looked at the parking area in front of the shop and restaurant. Even at this hour in the morning it was busy. And noisy. The people were mostly families and some young couples, all eating snacks and laughing in the velvet darkness. There was no danger here. Nobody looked like one of Luca’s men.

But it was still difficult not to feel scared. Not to wonder if even now Luca was pulling up behind them and getting out of his car... She shook herself crossly. She mustn’t think like that. She couldn’t afford to panic.

Sliding down in her seat, Cara noticed a briefcase on the floor. She must have knocked it off the back seat when Finn was smuggling her past Luca’s men. She grabbed the handle to heft it up, but the catch hadn’t been fastened, and a bundle of papers cascaded over the floor.

Muttering crossly under her breath she began to pick them up, and then stopped, amazed, as she read her name.

The papers were cuttings, from English newspapers, and she frowned in concentration as she began to read. Talking to Finn had brought everything she had forgotten flooding back.

Including some things, maybe, that were best left untouched in her memory, like Sarah and her uncle having that enormous row when she had been about eleven. Sarah had left shortly after that. All that had been left were a few classic novels with Sarah’s name written on the flyleaf. Occasionally Cara read them, but only occasionally. The clean, expensive smell of the thick cream pages was enough to bring back the memory of a woman she had once hoped would become her stepmother. And who instead had disappeared out of her life for ever.

‘Carenza Gambini.’ She stared in amazement at her printed name, her mind focusing once more on the present. What was she doing in a newspaper? ‘The beautiful but obviously gormless niece of one of the Mafia’s greatest mobsters is set to marry the equally ruthless Luca Finzi. She better get his breakfast eggs just right, or Lucky, as he is so imaginatively known, will probably be signing quite another contract for her. Until death do they part...’

Cara’s heart pounded as she read the piece over and over again. Is this what people all over England had read about her? There was a crunch of gravel by the car and she looked up, straight into Finn’s eyes.

‘And may I ask why you’re rummaging around in my briefcase?’ he demanded.

She held the cutting out to him with shaking fingers. ‘Did you have anything to do with this?’ she demanded.

He looked straight into her eyes. ‘I wrote it.’

‘You wrote it!’ she screeched. ‘It’s rubbish!’

He shrugged. ‘It pays.’

She pushed against the door. ‘Let me out of the car,’ she snapped.

‘What are you going to do?’ he drawled. ‘Stick me with a hairpin?’

‘Let me out!’ she repeated.

‘It’s all gravel out here,’ he said. ‘You’ll hurt your feet.’

She glared at him. ‘I want to hurt you!’

He shifted his weight and opened the door. She swung her legs out of the car. He was right, it was gravel. Determinedly she stood to face him, then grabbed at her shorts as they fell down.

‘You could use your tights as a belt,’ Finn offered.

‘Don’t give me advice,’ she snarled. ‘How many other lies have you written about me?’

He rubbed his chin. ‘I don’t know. After meeting you I’m not sure what the truth is any more.’

Crossly she stamped her foot on the gravel and stifled a yelp of pain. ‘How dare you call me gormless!’

‘It was a logical assumption,’ he replied calmly. ‘Given that you had just agreed to marry Luca.’

She pulled out another cutting and waved it in his face. ‘And this!’ she yelled. ‘This one claims I spend all my time shopping!’

‘Don’t you?’ he asked, interested.

She drew in her breath sharply and glared at him. ‘I’m going to the ladies’,’ she snapped, and before he could do anything she had spun round and scuttled barefoot to the main building, the gravel like hot coals on her feet.

In the ladies’ her face looked like a ghost’s in the brightly lit wall of mirrors. She rubbed hastily at her cheeks with a dampened paper. towel. With almost savage satisfaction she wiped off the too-bright lipstick and the thick mascara the professional make-up girl had insisted on.

That had been for the wedding pictures, she had been told. She had hated it, but naturally enough, her opinion had not been taken into account. She ran her fingers through her disordered hair and rinsed her mouth.

Strange, really, that she should belong to such a thoroughly Italian family and yet look nothing like them. Thick gold hair, pale skin that, if she wasn’t careful, burnt before it tanned, and those wide hazel eyes.

Her father had been like that, too, her uncle had said. A throwback to Roman times, he had told her, laughing. But her parents had died when she was a baby, and the photographs she had of them were blurred and mostly out of focus.

Perhaps Finn could tell her more. She had never seen the book he had written about Luca. She had just accepted that it was a lie. Money-grubbing filth, as Luca had put it. Now she began to think she would very much like to read it.

Washing her face and hands in cool water was heaven after that long, hot drive. She soaked another paper towel and bathed the back of her neck, then, shrugging helplessly at her reflection, went outside.

The car was not where Finn had parked it. She registered the fact almost unconsciously, and then as she realised the implications her heart flopped sickeningly.

He had left her. Deserted her. She stared at the spot where the car had been, then looked wildly around. Had he really gone?

She almost screamed when a hand descended on her shoulder and spun her round. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Finn snapped.

She gazed at him in shock. ‘I... I told you, I went to the ladies’,’ she replied as calmly as she could.

‘On which planet?’ he demanded. ‘Do you know how long you’ve been? I could have filled up ten cars at that gas station in the time it’s taken you to mess about in there.’

She glared at him, anger replacing her fear. ‘What’s it to you?’ she retorted.

CHAPTER THREE

FINN grabbed her wrist and pulled her to him. ‘We are not on some Sunday jaunt,’ he said quietly, emphasising every word. ‘This is a dangerous game you’ve started, and it doesn’t pay to play around with your relatives. Didn’t it ever occur to you that I might think the worst when you didn’t immediately come back?’

She stared into his eyes. ‘I know more about my relatives than you do,’ she told him.

‘I doubt it,’ he drawled.

‘You are so arrogant,’ she said at last. ‘You always think you know best. Don’t you? I bet the only reason you were angry when I didn’t come back was because you thought the source for your latest book had just gone west.’

He stared, and she dropped her eyes. Then he sighed and released her.

She stood back, rubbing her wrist as though he had hurt her, and he shrugged irritably and pushed his fingers through his hair. A lock of it, like an untidy comma, fell over his forehead, and she stifled an entirely unreasonable instinct to reach up and brush it back.

‘You can leave right now, if you want to,’ he said softly.

She glared at him, reddening, knowing he was aware of the way she had been staring at him. ‘You know I can’t,’ she answered. ‘That’s a rotten thing to say to me.’

‘Maybe,’ he agreed, his eyes as hard as ice on a cold night. ‘But then I’m a rotten kind of person.’ He turned on his heel and Walked away, and after a few seething seconds Cara stalked after him, her teeth clenched as the gravel bit into her feet.

The car was parked in darkness near the exit, and she watched silently as Finn unlocked it. And then her eyes slid away from his angry eyes and taut face, seeing without registering at first a dark blue car coasting into the garage forecourt.

A very familiar dark blue car, empty except for one man. Luca.

‘Finn,’ she breathed, unable to say any more, the hairs lifting on the back of her neck.

Luca was easing his bulk out of the car. Then, halfway out, he saw her.

She stood stock-still, staring at him, as he slammed the door and came towards them with all the horrible inevitability of a runaway tank.

Finn spun round. ‘Get in the car,’ he ordered.

She put a shaking hand on his arm. ‘No,’ she pleaded. ‘Maybe he will listen to me.’

‘Cara.’ Finn bit the words out. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, that is a gun in his hand, and he doesn’t look too pleased to see you. Now, get in the car.’

She looked at Luca’s hand, the sodium lights of the service station glinting dully off the absurdly small object he was carrying, and stood up straighter. ‘I’d rather face him,’ she said, her voice sounding strangely high.

Finn reached for her arm and squeezed it. ‘Everything’s going to be all right, Cara,’ he said quietly. ‘Just get into the driving seat and start the engine.’

She looked at him, his eyes once more on Luca, then did as she was told.

Finn, too, got into the car and pulled the door closed just as Luca came to a stop about three feet from them. ‘I should kill you where you sit,’ the Italian said. ‘Both of you.’

‘Bit messy,’ Finn remarked, his hand inside a paper sack he picked from the floor. ‘And besides—’ he shrugged ‘—what’s to say I won’t shoot first?’

He lifted his hand out of the bag, and the Italian glanced in surprise at the pistol Finn was holding. ‘You wouldn’t dare shoot,’ he blustered. ‘I have men all around.’

‘Not true,’ said Finn conversationally. ‘On both counts.’ He waggled the gun at Luca and added, ‘If you shoot me, I’ll shoot you, and that won’t get either of us anywhere. I’d go away and get some reinforcements if I were you.’

Cara swallowed hard. She had never heard anyone talk to Luca like that before. And yet Finn seemed so relaxed about it. As if he really didn’t care whether he upset him or not.

She stared straight ahead, looking out of the corner of her eye at the people crowded around the restaurant. So far they seemed oblivious to what was going on, but she wondered if Luca would do anything in such a public place.

He was glaring at them as if he was thinking about what Finn had said. ‘You wouldn’t dare shoot me,’ he repeated at last.

‘Try me,’ replied Finn. He added in an undertone to Cara, ‘Get going, for God’s sake.’ With one terrified glance at Luca she pressed her foot down on the accelerator, and the car leapt away spitting gravel. There were two sharp noises, as if a car had backfired, then they were on the autostrada once more.

‘He shot at us,’ gasped Cara, changing gear and forgetting to put the clutch down. ‘He actually shot at us.’

‘Yes,’ replied Finn shortly. ‘Still think you can persuade him to see reason?’

‘You had a gun, too,’ she retorted. ‘That makes you just as bad as the rest of them.’

He looked at what he was carrying and smiled. ‘Not quite.’

There was a pause, then Cara glanced curiously at him. ‘Would you have shot him?’

There was an expression on his face she couldn’t read at all. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

He hefted the gun in his hand and gazed at her rather apologetically. ‘I don’t think this would hurt anyone,’ he said at last. ‘Although I suppose it could make their teeth fall out.’

She wondered if she was hearing correctly. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked tentatively. ‘Shock can do funny things to people.’

‘You think I’m crazy, don’t you?’ replied Finn, and then her heart stopped as he put the gun in his mouth.

‘Mother of God!’ she shouted. ‘What the hell are you playing at now?’ With an enormous effort of will she kept driving. ‘Look,’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘Don’t do this. Please. I beg you. I—I’m sorry I said all those things to you back at the service station. Your nerves obviously can’t take all the strain. Maybe we should get a doctor or something.’

He removed the gun from his mouth and grinned broadly at her. ‘You’re really sorry?’

She nodded hastily. ‘Absolutely.’

To her utter amazement his smile widened. ‘Such a shame the gun is only made of chocolate, isn’t it?’ he remarked. And then putting the fake gun once more in his mouth he bit off a piece and relaxed in his seat. ‘Want a bite?’

Her hands felt wet on the wheel. She rubbed them briskly on her shorts and took several deep breaths. ‘No, thank you,’ she said shortly.

‘I always think it’s a shame you can’t get chocolate bullets, as well,’ he mused, breaking off the trigger and offering it to her.

‘What about a chocolate cruise missile, full size, that I could drop on your head?’ she retorted, taking the piece without even noticing what she was doing.

‘Do you always drive like this?’ he inquired.

She glared at him, but before she could say anything be asked interestedly, ‘Did you have lessons? Or are you learning as you go along?’

She clenched her jaw. ‘One of my uncle’s bodyguards taught me.’

‘That makes me feel much better,’ he said drily. ‘I’ve already aged twenty years this afternoon. By the time you’re finished I’ll need a wheelchair and an oxygen mask.’

Cara’s fingers tightened on the wheel. ‘Yes, well, you’re not the only one,’ she said icily. ‘If Luca had known about that gun...’ Her voice trailed away, her mind almost refusing to accept what had just happened. ‘How could you do that?’ she whispered.

He shrugged. ‘We didn’t really have much choice, did we?’ he remarked. ‘It was either bluff him or give up.’

‘But the gun.’ Cara thought of what he had done.

Finn stared expressionlessly out the window. ‘You said you were hungry,’ he remarked. ‘And when I went to get you something, they only had sweets left. It was either the gun or a sherbet lollipop.’ He shrugged. ‘I bought both, actually, but somehow, when it came to the crunch, I didn’t think Luca would feel very threatened by a lollipop.’

Cara shook her head. ‘If only he knew,’ she said softly.

‘He’s hardly likely to, though, is he?’ said Finn, stretching out in his seat. ‘You’ve eaten practically all the evidence.’

‘I was hungry!’ she retorted earnestly, and then realising that he was winding her up once more, thumped the steering wheel. ‘Do you want to drive?’ she demanded.

‘No,’ he said innocently. ‘No. I like being driven at a hundred and twenty miles an hour on an Italian motorway by a beautiful woman eating a chocolate gun.’

She shot a furious glance at him. ‘Surely you mean a beautiful but gormless woman,’ she snapped.

He lifted his hands in mock appeal. ‘I didn’t know you then,’ he said.

She pressed her foot down harder. ‘Well, you’re not going to get the chance to know me any better now.’

‘Is that because you’re going to drive us into the middle of next week?’ His hand rested lightly on her arm, and she jumped at the contact. ‘Slow down, Cara. We don’t need to go this fast.’

She eased back jerkily on the accelerator. He nodded. ‘That’s better,’ he said.

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