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CHAPTER TWO
IT WAS the unmistakable sound of Aldo’s Ferrari’s engine being inexpertly fired that first alerted Marco to what was going on.
Sprinting towards the main road, he reached it just in time to see the two blonde heads of the female thieves who had stolen the car, which was now being driven with teeth-clenching lack of expertise towards the Tuscan countryside.
However, it wasn’t the lack of driving expertise they were displaying that brought a grim look of tension to Marco’s mouth. No, what was concerning him was the fact that he feared an accident, and, having already lost a much-loved cousin as well as having had to identify both his and the destroyed body of what had originally been a very pretty young woman, he had no wish to see history repeating itself.
He was already reaching for his mobile to report the theft when he heard and saw the collision he had been dreading.
To his relief he realised immediately that the crash was not a serious one. The driver of the other car was already out of his vehicle and heading for the Ferrari, which Marco could see had barely been damaged by the impact at all.
Cancelling the call, he started to run towards the scene.
Above the sound of Louise’s frantic screams, Alice could hear the sound of approaching Italian voices. Her head ached where she had banged it on the windscreen, and as she tried to blink the pain away she realised that Louise was already standing on the pavement, beside the car, whilst somehow she herself was lying across both seats, with her head now against the driver’s headrest.
She knew she had to get out of the car. And she knew the easiest way to do that would be to slide her legs over to the driver’s side of the car, but her thoughts would only assemble in slow and painful motion as they fought their way through the dizzying sickness of her shock.
Someone, predictably a man, was comforting Louise, who was crying hysterically, but no one, Alice noticed, was bothering to help her. Somehow, though, she managed to get herself out of the car, just as the crowd that was surrounding it parted to allow through the tall, dark-haired and even darker-browed man who was now talking with the driver of the car they’d crashed into, handing him his card.
Then as he turned to look at her she recognised him. Alice thought she was going to faint. She would have recognised that eagle-eyed, imperious topaz stare anywhere, and she could tell from the way his glance moved from her face down to her breasts that he remembered exactly who she was as well.
It was the man she had seen earlier that morning, the man who…. Her head was throbbing and instinctively Alice pressed her hand to her temple. She felt so dizzy and sick, so unable somehow to draw her own gaze away from that angry, burning hostility of pure male fury. The shock of what had happened seemed to have robbed her of her normal self-control and maturity. Feeling as though she was going to cry, she longed desperately to have someone to turn to, some sturdy, reliable, pro-Alice male presence there to support and protect her. Such unfamiliar and undermining thoughts increased her sense of alienation from her normal ‘self’.
He of the angry eyes and hard, forbidding mouth was focusing on her so intently that she felt like a helpless specimen trapped beneath a microscope.
In the distance Alice could hear Louise sobbing frantically, ‘It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything. She was the one who was driving the car. Not me…’
But although she registered what Louise was saying it barely made any impact on her at all. And the reason for that was the man now standing in front of her, towering over her, all six-foot odd, furiously cold, dangerously angry and intensely male of him, addressing her in icily perfect and whiplash sharp English as he demanded, ‘If you are the perpetrator of this…this atrocity, then let me tell you now I fully intend to see that you pay for it. Have you any idea what you have done? The danger…the risk…someone could have been killed.’ His voice became acidly sharp and harsh. ‘Have you ever seen a victim of a serious road accident? Do you have any idea what it can do to the human body?’
Fresh nausea overwhelmed Alice. He wasn’t saying anything to her she hadn’t already thought for herself, but Louise, who could hear him, was now silent and ashen-faced, and instinctively Alice felt her first duty was to protect her. And now that she could see both cars, she could see too that surely he was overreacting. Anxiously she looked towards his car. The passenger door was crushed, there was broken glass all over the road. The car they had hit had lost its bumper and sustained a large dent, although fortunately its driver seemed to be unhurt, and indeed he was very evidently comforting Louise, who was shaking uncontrollably, telling everyone who would listen to her that it had been Alice who had been driving the car and not her.
Alice opened her mouth to correct her and defend herself and then closed it again.
How could she? Louise was seventeen; she had only just passed her driving test. Last night she had been drinking so heavily that she probably still had a dangerously high level of alcohol in her bloodstream, and she was in Alice’s charge…Alice had promised her sister that she would take care of her…
Unaware of what she was doing, she looked up at the man confronting her in helpless appeal.
Marco felt himself stiffen as he saw the look Alice was giving him. She looked more like a child than a woman, with the pale swathe of her cheeks and her huge bruised eyes and trembling mouth; her delicately slender body. But he of course already knew about the sensuality and the voluptuousness of the breasts that were now concealed by a much bulkier top than the little strappy one she had been wearing earlier in the day when he had seen her.
Disconcertingly and with unexpected force his body responded to that memory and to her. Immediately Marco quelled his swift surge of unwanted physical reaction, waiting for what he already knew she was going to say to him, the appeal she was going to make to him, on behalf of herself and her companion.
He had seen beautiful women using their beauty to get what they wanted so many many times before. And of course the first thing this beautiful woman was going to do was to tell him what he had already worked out for himself—that she had not been the one who’d been driving the car. Cynically he waited for her to say as much, and to implicate her friend whilst pleading her own innocence. It was obvious to him from the one assessing look with which he had taken in the whole of the scene in front of him that there was no way that this woman could have been the one driving his car; to anyone with even half a trained eye it was blindingly obvious that the other younger, over-made-up girl with her skimpy clothes and frightened, sullen face had been the driver. As he waited for the woman facing him to denounce her companion Marco fiercely reminded himself of all the reasons why he had been opposed to his cousin’s marriage to his English model girlfriend.
Cross-cultural marriages were always, by the very necessity of their nature, bound to be more of a risk than those between people who shared the same background and upbringing. For those marriages to work both parties had to be dedicated to their love and to one another, to believe in it, to be one hundred and fifty per cent committed to it and to be mature and strong enough to make it work. That was a very tall order indeed in today’s modern climate.
He himself had never been sexually promiscuous. He was too fastidious, too proud, too controlled to ever allow his appetites to control him, and it added to his already short temper to realise just how intense his physical reaction was to the woman standing in front of him.
‘Are you the one who stole my car?’ he demanded curtly, suddenly impatient to get the whole thing over and done with and the woman and her companion turned over to the police.
But, to his disbelief, instead of immediately denying that she was to blame and incriminating her friend, he heard her saying in a soft, shaky voice, ‘Yes…Yes, I’m afraid…that…that it was me.’
As she heard herself confessing to a crime she most certainly had not committed Alice felt her heart lurch joltingly against her ribs. She still felt sick and dizzy and her heart was thumping erratically in panic. Panic because of the trouble she was going to be in, she quickly insisted to herself, and not in any way because of the effect the man standing watching her with that masklike, uninterpretable, assessing look was having on her.
Heavens, but he was formidable…Formidable and sexy…The sexiest man she had ever seen. So sexy in fact that he was making her feel…
‘Yes?’
She could hear the fury in his voice as he repeated her admission. ‘Yes?’ he repeated as though he wanted to make sure he had heard her correctly. ‘Yes, it was you?’
It was almost as though he wanted her to deny the crime, Alice thought dizzily. But why? So that he could indulge in the pleasure of berating her, accusing her of being a liar as well as a thief? Well, she wasn’t going to give him that pleasure!
Bravely pushing to one side her own shock and fear, she told him firmly, ‘Yes. It was I. I stole your car.’
She could hear Louise making a soft, moaning, hiccupping sound and instinctively Alice looked anxiously towards her.
The younger girl’s tears had washed tracks of make-up from her face, giving her a clown-like appearance of vulnerable youthfulness, and as she saw the panic and fear in Louise’s eyes Alice found her heart aching with compassion for her.
It must have given her a dreadful shock when they had crashed. No wonder she was looking so afraid. Instinctively, Alice felt protective towards her, overcoming her own feelings of shock and hostility towards the man confronting her and the feelings he was engendering within her to tell him quietly, ‘I apologise for…what has happened and, of course, I will make good the damage to your car, but my…my…friend is very shocked. We are due to catch a flight home to England this afternoon, and we still have to collect our luggage from our hotel, so if there is some way in which we can expedite matters…I can give you all my details. My name is Alice Walsingham and…’ She stopped as she saw the frown darkening his face as he listened to her.
‘Your name is what?’ he challenged her softly.
‘Alice…Alice Walsingham,’ Alice repeated, her voice starting to tremble a little as a feeling of foreboding rushed over her like a cold incoming tide.
Marco could hardly believe his ears. So this was the woman he had waited in vain to interview, this small scrap of female humanity with her slender body, her provocative breasts, her pale blonde hair, her far-too-pretty face, and her certainly far-too-dangerously potent effect on his hormones!
That such a thing should happen to him and with this woman of all women! A woman who excited such interest in the street from his own sex that a member of it was unable to refrain from extolling the pleasure the sight of her body gave him. A woman who had been an accomplice to the theft of his car…a woman apparently so careless of human life that she could have been an accomplice to an accident of even more hideous and fatal proportions than the one he had already had to endure. A woman who had lied and implicated herself in a theft to protect the true thief, who Marco could now see when he looked at her properly was much younger than he had first thought. A teenager, in fact. Against the urgings of his own self-protective instincts, he found himself remembering certain incidents from his cousin Aldo’s youth, certain irresponsible actions from which he, as Aldo’s elder and family mentor, had been obliged to extricate the younger man.
After all, he reminded himself with reluctant fair-mindedness, he had seen the look of discomfort on Alice’s face when she had heard the ice-cream seller’s full-bodied compliment; and she had too looked shocked to the point of actual nausea after the accident. As for the effect she had on him!
The one thing about Alice that had caught his attention when he’d read through her application and the letters of recommendation that had accompanied it was the emotional input she put into caring for her charges. It was that degree of involvement that he wanted for Angelina! He had expected her to be an emotional woman, and one with a deeply protective instinct, but what he had not anticipated and what he most certainly did not want was her totally unexpected aura of sensuality! She wore it as lightly and easily as though she herself was totally unaware of it, which made it even more of a danger than if she had wantonly flaunted it, Marco recognised.
Grimly he turned to Louise. ‘And you,’ he questioned her. ‘You are?’
‘Louise is in my charge,’ Alice answered for her, assuming a firmness and authority she was far from feeling. She had bumped her head on the impact of the crash and it was aching horridly still and making her feel very poorly, but she had Louise to protect and that had to come before her own discomfort.
‘She is only young and, as you can see, very upset. Her parents are expecting her return on this afternoon’s flight and…it is my duty…my responsibility to see that she is on that flight.’
‘Your duty…and your responsibility,’ Marco emphasised. ‘Where were those undoubtedly admirable virtues, I wonder, when you stole my car, risking not only your own lives, but those of other people as well? Have you any idea what a car smash can do, what carnage, what…destruction it can cause?’ Marco demanded harshly as the nightmare images of the crash scene he had been called upon to witness when Aldo had driven away from the palazzo in the temper that had killed both him and his wife resurfaced.
With no way of knowing what he was thinking, Alice could feel her face starting to burn.
‘I…It…I couldn’t help myself,’ she started to fib desperately. ‘I have always loved…’ Helplessly she looked at the car for inspiration, unable to remember in her panic just what kind of car it actually was…
Against his will Marco found himself being both intrigued and impossibly almost even amused as he witnessed her confusion as she hunted wildly for a rational explanation to cover both her behaviour and her protective fib. Anyone with any remote pretence to being a car lover would not have had to look wildly at the bonnet to realise what make of car they’d been driving.
‘Maseratis,’ he supplied dryly for her, his voice drowning out Louise’s frantically whispered, ‘Ferrari!’
‘Yes. Maseratis,’ Alice agreed, gratefully seizing on the name he had given her. ‘Well, I’ve always loved them and when I saw yours, just couldn’t resist. It was so tempting. And you had left the keys in the ignition,’ she told him reprovingly.
‘So in effect it was my fault that you stole the car,’ Marco suggested dryly.
She had the most revealing eyes, he decided, their colour a clear blue-green that was almost turquoise.
‘Have you any idea just what his car means to an Italian man?’ he asked her, speaking swiftly in Italian.
Without the slightest pause, she responded in the same language, telling him simply, ‘I shouldn’t have done it, I know.’
So she hadn’t lied about her ability to speak his language, Marco recognised, and despite all reasons he knew he should summon the police and set about finding himself another nanny for Angelina, he knew that he was going to do no such thing.
A woman who for whatever reason was prepared to implicate herself in a crime to protect a younger person in her charge must have a protective instinct that would keep any child entrusted to her care safe and loved. And, so far as Marco was concerned, what Angelina needed more than anything else was just that very kind of security, even if it came wrapped up in a tantalising package with ‘danger’ written all over it!
‘By rights I should summon the police and hand you both over to them,’ he told Alice sternly, waiting for a few seconds as the colour drained from her face and she made a small, instinctive sound of protest and distress.
‘However…you say that you are both booked on an afternoon flight back to England…but you,’ he told her smoothly, ‘or so I thought, were supposed to be being interviewed for a post here in Italy…’
Alice gaped at him. ‘How do you know that?’ she began, and then stopped as the unwanted, impossible, appalling truth began to seep hideously into her shocked brain.
‘No!’ she whispered, her eyes huge with despair.
‘No. You can’t be!’
‘I can’t be who?’ Marco challenged her grimly.
Nervously Alice flicked her tongue-tip over her suddenly nervously dry lips, a gesture which Marco’s eyes monitored whilst his body registered her action in a way that made him glad of the strength of will-power! Glad that it was strong enough to prevent him from covering the softness of her full lips with his own mouth. Richly pink, free of make-up, they reminded him unwantedly of the taut thrust of her nipples against her top.
Angrily he pushed his wanton thoughts away. He had neither the time to waste on self-indulgent analysis of them, nor the inclination to do so. Some things were best left undisturbed, unexamined…Her skin would be delicately pale, her breasts crowned with rose-red nipples and when he touched them with his lips she would…
As Alice heard him curse beneath his breath she jumped nervously. The heat beating down on her uncovered head was beginning to affect her. She felt confused and muzzy, and she wanted badly to be able to lie down somewhere cool—somewhere cool that did not include this formidable, sexy, downright disturbing man, she corrected herself shakily.
‘I…My interview was with…I was supposed to be seeing…’ she began to protest.
‘Me,’ Marco supplied for her with a softness that belied the steel-hard look he was giving her. ‘Only you did not keep our appointment, which makes you unreliable as well as untrustworthy—and yet according to your agency…’
‘I-I’m sorry I was late,’ Alice began to stammer with what she knew to be ludicrous consternation. He thought she had stolen his car, after all, and here she was apologising for being late.
‘To be late is an offence against the laws of good manners, and thus punishable by one’s own conscience,’ he agreed urbanely. ‘But theft is an offence against the laws of the land and as such it is punishable by a term in prison…’
The way he was looking at her, his eyes now almost the colour of obsidian and just as empty of any kind of humane emotion as a piece of unfeeling stone, made her blood quite literally run icily cold in her veins. Shock and then fear crept over her in a painful tide. Prison! She knew that her fear showed in her face, and only her pride stopped her from protesting out loud.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see Louise, silent now, her shock as obvious as Alice’s own in her suddenly very youthful, drawn white face.
As she struggled to find something to say a mobile phone started to ring imperiously. Almost as though she were observing the whole scene at a distance, Alice saw the man she now realised must be her once-prospective employer, the aristocratically named Conte di Vincenti, reaching to his pocket and removing his phone, swiftly responding to the call.
With her excellent grasp of Italian, Alice easily translated what he was saying and a fresh surge of anxiety seized her body, not this time for herself, but on behalf of the baby, whose sudden inexplicable and frightening sickness was the cause of the telephone call.
Swiftly instructing that a doctor was to be called, Marco ended the call, his face drawn into lines of harsh anxiety.
The nursemaid Angelina’s mother had hired to look after the baby was not in his opinion a suitable person to have charge of such a young child. Bored and slovenly, she had no proper training for such a job, and so far as he could see no real love for the baby, but she was, apart from himself, the only person who was truly familiar to her and for that reason, until he found a suitable replacement nanny, he had felt unable to terminate her employment and send her back to Rome where he knew she would feel much more at home than in the Tuscan countryside.
It had been left to his housekeeper to telephone him and advise him of baby Angelina’s sickness. The palazzo was over an hour’s fast drive away, and Marco had no time now to waste on a mere car accident in which mercifully no one had been hurt.
On Alice’s CV had been the fact that she had some nursing experience, having done voluntary work in a local hospital, both as teenager and later too, when her employment commitments had allowed. Had it not been for his own too stubborn wariness where Englishwomen were concerned, Marco knew that Alice’s obvious dedication to others would have inclined him towards selecting her as Angelina’s nanny even over more highly qualified applicants.
However, now a new complication had entered the equation. The one thing that Marco had not been prepared for when he had mentally reviewed and tabulated the pros and cons of hiring Alice was that he himself might find her desirable! His reaction to her had caught him off guard. He had believed that he was armoured against any woman who was made in the same mould as the free-living, free-loving girl students he had encountered in England. So what was he saying? he asked himself sardonically, whilst he worried about Angelina.
That he could not control his own libido? No way!
Quickly Marco came to a decision. He would normally have been averse to having his hand forced by events, but now he wasn’t concerned about that. He did not want to examine his decision more analytically—because of his concern for Angelina, he told himself. After all, his physical reaction to Alice was something he could control; baby Angelina’s sickness was not.
‘What time did you say your flight left?’ he demanded.
White-faced with contempt and disbelief, Alice stared at him. What kind of man…what kind of father was he to give something as minor as a small car accident precedence over the health of his baby daughter? In his shoes the last thing she would have done would be to stand here, worrying about a mere car! Instead she would have been making her way as fast as she could to her baby’s side.
So much for the myth that Italian men were wonderful fathers, who adored and protected their children!
Instinctively she felt a surge of desire to protect the baby and to castigate her father for his lack of concern; to show him just how contemptuous she felt of him in every way; as a trained professional, as an innocent victim of a crime she had not committed, and most of all as a woman.
A woman who had foolishly allowed herself to react to him in a way she was determined not to repeat!
Ignoring her throbbing headache, she accused him wildly, ‘That poor baby! How can you be more concerned about your wretched car than her health?’ Emotional tears filled her eyes, which she proudly refused to hide. She was not ashamed to show that she had normal human feelings, no matter how contemptuously that fact made him regard her. ‘I thought that Italian men were supposed to love children,’ she threw at him scornfully, unable to stop herself. ‘But in your case it seems that your love of your car means more to you than the health of the baby.’
Something flickered in his eyes, an expression Alice could not quite catch, almost as though in some way her outburst had pleased him, but then as she focused more closely on him his expression changed, his hooded gaze seeming to deliberately conceal his reaction.
Turning his back on her, he flicked on his mobile and started issuing instructions into it.
When he had finished he turned back to her, and told her coolly, ‘You are coming with me to the palazzo. Your…friend will be escorted to the airport and put on her flight home…’
Alice stared at him, hardly able to credit that she had heard him correctly. He was making her stay here, in Italy, at his home. Why? Shock, panic, fear, and a sharp, breath-snatching feeling she didn’t want to name, but that she was forced to acknowledge came pretty close to a form of dangerous excitement, swirled the blood to her head. Was the heat of the Italian sun somehow affecting her brain?
It must be surely; there was no other acceptable explanation for that sharp, shocking, piercingly wanton feeling burning hotly through her body.
This man possessed none of the virtues she could ever want in a man; none of them, she insisted firmly to herself.
‘You can’t make me stay in Italy.’ she began warningly.
She had already made up her mind that she was glad that she had not had the opportunity to be interviewed by him because there was totally no way she could ever countenance working for him.
His arrogance both infuriated and antagonised her, arousing emotions within her that she was totally unfamiliar with, making her feel, giddy, dizzy, dangerously close to losing her head. It was making her feel very much like a child exposed to danger, immediately wanting to run from it back to safety. She didn’t like him. Not one little bit, but what she had just learned about his attitude towards his baby had aroused within her not just a furious sense of disgust and distaste for him as a man, but also an intense surge of pity for the small baby who was so dependent on him.
All she had been told about her prospective employment had been that she would have virtually sole charge of a six-month-old baby girl whose mother had recently died, and who needed a constant and loving female presence in her life.
That alone had been enough to make her yearn to provide her potential charge with all the protection and love she could give her. Those feelings were still there, intensified if anything by the cold-hearted manner of the little Angelina’s father.
‘You can’t force us to do anything,’ she responded forcefully.
‘No?’ Marco overrode her grimly. ‘You have two choices, Alice Walsingham. Either you come with me now, or both you and your friend face the legal consequences of your crime. And to be honest I should have thought, having read your CV and the reports from your agency, that the decision would have been an easy and an automatic one for you. What was it they said about you? That you possessed an extremely strong nurturing instinct and a genuine love and concern for children? It seems to me that somewhere along the line you must have deceived them.’
Before she could speak in her own defence, Alice heard Louise give a faint sob of terror.
