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He watched the crowd close round the slim form of the Englishwoman and something that felt incredibly like remorse stirred.
As if he’d failed her.
Because she’d looked at him with unveiled horror and chosen the slavering mob rather than share a car with him? That niggling sense of guilt resurfaced. Nonsense, of course. In the light of day logic assured him she’d brought on her own destruction. Yet sometimes, in the dead of night, it didn’t seem so cut and dried.
But he wasn’t Lucy Knight’s keeper. He never had been.
Five years ago he’d briefly responded to her air of fresh enthusiasm, so different from the sophisticated, savvy women in his life. Until he’d discovered she was a sham, trying to ensnare and use him as she had his brother.
Domenico’s lips firmed. She’d looked at him just now with those huge eyes the colour of forget-me-nots. A gullible man might have read fear in that look.
Domenico wasn’t a gullible man.
Though to his shame he’d felt a tug of unwanted attraction to the woman who’d stood day after day in the dock, projecting an air of bewildered innocence.
Her face had been a smooth oval, rounded with youth. Her hair, straight, long and the colour of wheat in the sun, had made him want to reach out and touch.
He’d hated himself for that.
‘She’s some wildcat, eh, boss? The way she let fly—’
‘Close the door, Rocco.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The guard stiffened and shut the door.
Domenico sat back, watching the melee move down the street. A few stragglers remained, their cameras trained on the limousine, but the tinted windows gave privacy.
Just as well. He didn’t want their lenses on him. Not when he felt … unsettled.
He swiped a hand over his jaw, wishing to hell Pia hadn’t put him in this situation. What did the media frenzy matter? They could rise above it as always. Only the insecure let the press get to them. But Pia was emotionally vulnerable, beset by mood swings and insecurities.
It wasn’t the media that disturbed him. He ignored the paparazzi. It was her, Lucy Knight. The way she looked at him.
She’d changed. Her cropped hair made her look like a raunchy pixie instead of a soulful innocent. Her face had fined down, sculpted into bone-deep beauty that had been a mere promise at eighteen. And attitude! She had that in spades.
What courage had it taken to walk back into that hungry throng? Especially when he’d seen and heard, just for a moment, the pain in her hoarse curses.
For all the weeks of the trial she’d looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. How had she hidden such violent passion, such hatred so completely?
Or—the thought struck out of nowhere—maybe that dangerous undercurrent was something new, acquired in the intervening years.
Domenico sagged in his seat. He should ignore Pia’s pleas and his own ambivalent reactions and walk away. This woman had been nothing but trouble since the day she’d crossed his family’s threshold.
He pressed the intercom to speak to the driver. ‘Drive on.’
Twenty minutes till the bus came.
Could she last? The crowd grew thicker. It took all Lucy’s stamina to pretend they didn’t bother her. To ignore the cameras and catcalls, the increasingly rough jostling.
Lucy’s knees shook and her arm ached but she didn’t dare put her case down. It held everything she owned and she wouldn’t put it past one of the paparazzi to swipe it and do an exposé on the state of her underwear or a psychological profile based on the few battered books she possessed.
The tone of the gathering had darkened as the press found, instead of the easy prey they’d expected, a woman determined not to cooperate. Didn’t they realise the last thing she wanted was more publicity?
They’d attracted onlookers. She heard their mutterings and cries of outrage.
She widened her stance, bracing against the pushing crowd, alert to the growing tension. She knew how quickly violence could erupt.
She was just about to give up on the bus and move on when the crowd stirred. A flutter, like a sigh, rippled through it, leaving in its wake something that could almost pass for silence.
The camera crews parted. There, striding towards her was the man she’d expected never to see again: Domenico Volpe, shouldering through the rabble, eyes locked on her. He seemed oblivious to the snapping shutters as the cameras went into overdrive and newsmen gabbled into microphones.
He wore a grey suit with the slightest sheen, as if it were woven from black pearls. His shirt was pure white, his tie perfection in dark silk.
He looked the epitome of Italian wealth and breeding. Not a wrinkle marred his clothes or the elegant lines of his face. Only his eyes, boring into hers, spoke of something less than cool control.
A spike of heat plunged right through her belly as she held his eyes.
He stopped before her and Lucy had to force herself not to crane her head to look up at him. Instead she focused on the hand he held out to her.
The paper crackled as she took it.
Come with me. The words were in slashing black ink on a page from a pocketbook. I can get you away from this. You’ll be safe.
Her head jerked up.
‘Safe?’With him?
He nodded. ‘Yes.’
Around them journalists craned to hear. One tried to snatch the note from Lucy’s hand. She crumpled it in her fist.
It was mad. Bizarre. He couldn’t want to help her. Yet she wasn’t fool enough to think she could stay here. Trouble was brewing and she’d be at the centre of it.
Still she hesitated. This close, Lucy was aware of the strength in those broad shoulders, in that tall frame and his square olive-skinned hands. Once that blatant male power had left her breathless. Now it threatened.
But if he’d wanted to harm her physically he’d have found a way long before this.
He leaned forward. She stiffened as his whispered words caressed her cheek. ‘Word of a Volpe.’
He withdrew, but only far enough to look her in the eye. He stood in her personal space, his lean body warming her and sending ripples of tension through her.
She knew he was proud. Haughty. Loyal. A powerful man. A dangerously clever one. But everything she’d read, and she’d read plenty, indicated he was a man of his word. He wouldn’t sully his ancient family name or his pride by lying.
She hoped.
Jerkily she nodded.
‘Va bene.’ He eased the case from her white-knuckled grip and turned, propelling her through the crowd with his palm at her back, its heat searing through her clothes.
Questions rang out but Domenico Volpe ignored them. With his support Lucy rallied and managed not to stumble. Then suddenly there was blissful space, a cordon of security men, the open limousine door.
This time Lucy needed no urging. She scrambled in and settled herself on the far side of the wide rear seat.
The door shut behind him and the car accelerated away before she’d gathered herself.
‘My bag!’
‘It’s in the boot. Quite safe.’
Safe. There it was again. The word she’d never associated with Domenico Volpe.
Slowly Lucy turned. She was exhausted, weary beyond imagining after less than an hour at the mercy of the paparazzi, but she couldn’t relax, even in this decadently luxurious vehicle.
Deep-set grey eyes met hers. This time they looked stormy rather than glacial. Lucy was under no illusions that he wanted her here, with him. Despite the nonchalant stretch of his long legs, crossed at the ankles, there was tightness in his shoulders and jaw.
‘What do you want?’
‘To rescue you from the press.’
Lucy shook her head. ‘No.’
‘No?’ One dark eyebrow shot up towards his hairline. ‘You call me a liar?’
‘If you’d been interested in rescuing me you’d have done it years ago when it mattered. But you dropped me like a hot potato.’
Her words sucked the oxygen from the limousine, leaving a heavy, clogging atmosphere of raw emotion. Lucy drew a deep breath, uncaring that he noted the agitated rise and fall of her breasts as she struggled for air.
‘You’re talking about two different things.’ His tone was cool.
‘You think?’ She paused. ‘You’re playing semantics. The last thing you want is to rescue me.’
‘Then let us say merely that your interests and mine coincide this time.’
‘How?’ She leaned forward, as if a closer view would reveal the secrets he kept behind that patrician façade of calm. ‘I can’t see what we have in common.’
He shook his head, turning more fully. Lucy became intensely aware of the strength hidden behind that tailored suit as his shoulders blocked her view of the street.
A jitter of curious sensation sped down her backbone and curled deep within. It disturbed her.
‘Then you have an enviably short memory, Ms Knight. Even you can’t deny we’re linked by a tie that binds us forever, however much I wish it otherwise.’
‘But that’s—’
‘In the past?’ His lip curled in a travesty of a smile. ‘Yet it’s a truth I live with every day.’ His eyes glowed, luminous with emotions she’d once thought him too cold to feel. His voice deepened to a low, bone-melting hum. ‘Nothing will ever take away the fact that you killed my brother.’
CHAPTER TWO
LUCY KNIGHT SHOOK her head emphatically and for one crazy moment Domenico found himself mourning the fact that her blonde tresses no longer swirled round her shoulders. Why had she cut her hair so brutally short?
After five years he remembered how that curtain of silk had enticed him!
Impossible. It wasn’t disappointment he felt.
He’d spent long days in court focused on the woman who’d stolen Sandro’s life. He’d smothered grief, the urgent need for revenge and bone-deep disappointment that he’d got her so wrong. Domenico had forced himself to observe her every fleeting expression, every nuance. He’d imprinted her image in his mind.
Learning his enemy.
It wasn’t attraction he’d felt then for the gold-digger who’d sought to play both the Volpe brothers. It had been clear-headed acknowledgement of her beauty and calculation of whether her little girl lost impression might prejudice the prosecution case.
‘No. I was convicted of killing him. There’s a difference.’
Domenico stared into her blazing eyes, alight with a passion that arrested logic. Then her words sank in, exploding into his consciousness like a grenade. His belly tightened as outrage flared.
He should have expected it. Yet to hear her voice the lie strained even his steely control.
‘You’re still asserting your innocence?’
Her eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened. Was she going to blast him with a volley of abuse as she had Rocco?
‘Why wouldn’t I? It’s the truth.’
She held his gaze with a blatant challenge that made his hackles rise.
How dare she sit in the comfort of his car, talking about his brother’s death, and deny all the evidence against her? Deny the testimony of Sandro’s family and staff and the fair judgement of the court?
Bile surged in Domenico’s throat. The gall of this woman!
‘So you keep up the pretence. Why bother lying now?’ His words rang with the condemnation he could no longer hide.
Meeting her outraged his sense of justice and sliced across his own inclinations. Only family duty compelled him to be here, conversing with his brother’s killer. It revolted every one of his senses.
‘This is no pretence, Signor Volpe. It’s the truth.’
She leaned closer and he caught the scent of soap and warm female skin. His nostrils quivered, cataloguing a perfume that was more viscerally seductive than the lush designer scents of the women in his world.
‘I did not kill your brother.’
She was some actress. Not even by a flicker did she betray her show of innocence.
That, above all, ignited his wrath. That she should continue this charade even now. Her dishonesty must run bone deep.
Or was she scared if she confessed he’d take justice into his own hands?
Domenico imagined his hands closing around that slim, pale throat, forcing her proud head back … but no. Rough justice held no appeal.
He wouldn’t break the Volpe code of honour, even when provoked by this shameless liar.
‘Now who’s playing semantics? Sandro was off balance when you shoved him against the fireplace.’ The words bit out from between clamped teeth. ‘The knock to his head as he fell killed him.’ Domenico drew in a slow breath, clawing back control. The men of his family did not give in to emotion. It was unthinkable he’d reveal to this woman the grief still haunting him.
