The Hostage Bride (15 page)

As she lay there listening to the heavy, rhythmic thud of his heart, which was the only sound in the darkness of the night, she found that one persistent nagging question slid into her mind and wouldn't leave, no matter how hard she tried to force it away.

Had tonight been the start of something wonderful or merely the wild, passionate ending to all that she and Rico had shared?

She didn't know and no matter how hard she tried no answer would come until she was too tired to think any more. And because she was very much afraid that an ending was what it was, a single desolate tear slid from her eye and down onto Rico's chest as sleep claimed her once again.

T
HE
fax came through early in the morning.

Lying in bed, warm, relaxed and indolently lazy, with Felicity's softly perfumed body curled up next to him, Rico was at first thoroughly disinclined to do anything about it.

He knew what it was. He had asked the manager of one of his companies to send him through the details of a problem they had been having with their finances. It seemed someone had been embezzling large amounts for some time, salting them away in a variety of neatly inconspicuous ways that had meant the perpetrator was exceptionally hard to trace. A report at this time of the day, allowing for the time difference in England, could only mean one thing. They had tracked down the guilty person.

He supposed he really should go and check it out. He could be down there, assess the situation, fax the necessary instructions for the inevitable prosecution and be back in bed before Felicity even stirred.

Which was exactly how he wanted it, he thought, dropping a soft kiss on her sleep-warmed cheek. He had very special plans for the moment that she woke—and once they'd made love again he was going to ask her to marry him. If last night had taught him anything, it was that there was no way he could spend the rest of his days without this woman in his life.

‘Sleep on,
gatita
,' he whispered as after pulling on jeans and a light blue tee-shirt, he returned to kiss her once more. ‘I won't be more than a few minutes.'

When she sighed and murmured in her sleep he very nearly abandoned the idea and got back into bed with her.
But he was up now, and dressed. He might as well get it done.

The report was longer than he had anticipated. And as he read it his mood changed completely, all the lazy good humour vanishing to be replaced by shock, disbelief, and a black wave of fury that swamped every other thought in his head.

‘Joe Hamilton…' he muttered savagely, his hand clenching brutally on the paper he held. ‘Damn him to hell—and his conniving, deceiving,
lying
daughter with him!'

It was at that moment that the door was pushed slowly open and Felicity stood, still blinking sleepily, on the doorstep.

She had clearly only just got out of bed and her hair was wildly tousled—by his hands, he thought on a rush of anger, refusing to let himself remember how those soft golden strands had felt under his touch. Her cheeks were still faintly flushed and she had pulled on the nearest thing to hand—a white towelling robe—
his
white towelling robe that swamped her slim form, even though she had belted it tightly around her slender waist.

He only fully realised just
how
angry he was when he understood how his body, only too urgently receptive to just the sight and thought of her during the night, remained stubbornly unresponsive as she wandered into the room.

‘Good morning,
querida
,' he managed cynically, biting off the words with a snap.

There was something wrong here, Felicity thought—very wrong. She had woken just a few minutes ago as Rico left the room. At first she had planned to wait until he came back to bed but as the time ticked away had grown impatient for the feel of his arms around her, the touch of his lips on hers. And so she had pulled on his robe and followed him, eagerly anticipating how glad he would be to see her.

But ‘glad' described a position light years away from the one that Rico had taken up. His dark eyes were black with rejection, his beautiful mouth clamped into an ugly line, and the intonation on that
‘querida'
had turned it into a scathing insult and not the gentle term of affection she was used to.

‘Rico? What's wrong?'

Oh, but she was good! If he didn't have the proof to the contrary in his hands, he would have believed that she actually meant what she had said. That she didn't even suspect…

But of course, she didn't know that the fax he held was the evidence of her corruption. The end of her little scheme. The fact that it was also the end of those all too briefly acknowledged dreams of a future with her that he had just allowed himself to consider made his tone savage as he rounded on her.

‘What's wrong?
Por Dios—this—this
is what's wrong!'

Felicity stared blankly at the paper he thrust at her, not understanding. But then when he crammed it into her hands, his dark scowl looking positively murderous, she had no alternative but to take it from him and try to read it.

At first the letter blurred and danced before her eyes but finally she forced herself to focus and immediately wished that she hadn't. ‘Oh.'

‘Oh!' he echoed with suppressed violence, the scathing note in his voice flaying off a protective layer of skin and leaving her nerves exposed and vulnerable. ‘
Oh
. Is that all you can say?'

‘What else would you want me to say?' Pain made her voice high and sharp. ‘That it isn't true?'

He would be fool enough to believe her if she did. He would believe it because he wanted to. Because he wanted
her to have nothing to do with this. If she had known, then how would he ever be able to convince himself that she had gone to bed with him because she cared and not just as the next stage in whatever malicious little scheme she had cooked up with her father?

‘Is it true?'

‘Yes.'

It was just a thin thread of sound, too weak to be clear even though he was so very close.

‘What?'

‘I said,
yes
! Yes it's true. Yes, my father got into debt; and yes, he took your money; and yes, I was going to marry Edward because he promised me if I did that he would make sure the money was paid back and you never found out.'

His head went back sharply, his eyes growing even darker. He hadn't even thought about that. He'd forgotten—he'd actually
forgotten
—that she had been about to marry Edward Venables.

He'd never known a pain like it. The sense of betrayal was like acid in his guts, eating away at him savagely. Only that morning, in the long, silent hours before dawn, he'd come to realise how much this woman meant to him. He'd admitted to himself that he loved her—the first time he had ever used that word about any female he'd been involved with. If the fax had come through just an hour or so later he would actually have told her…asked her…

‘But I did find out,
gatita
,' he snarled. ‘I found out and now all your scheming, all your lying, was for nothing. You even made the ultimate sacrifice and went to bed with me—to no avail.'

‘The ultimate…'

The words knotted in her throat, choking off the rest of the sentence.

‘Oh, no! No! No!'

‘Oh, come now,
querida
, please.'

His derision was harder to take than his anger as he leaned back against the side of the desk, black eyes mocking her cruelly.

‘Don't tell me that you're still trying to stick to your story of last night. That you're still claiming you wanted me for myself.'

‘But I did! I did!'

She flung the words into his set, stony face, anguish tearing at her heart as she saw the way that not even a flicker of movement betrayed any sort of feeling. He was closed off from her completely, shutting her out, and she could pound on the barriers he had built up around him until her hands were raw and bleeding and there would never be any response.

‘Spare me the pretence,' he scorned. ‘I may have swallowed it last night, but this morning the blinkers have very definitely gone from my eyes. I can see you for what you really are and, believe me, I don't like what I find.'

‘Do you really think—?'

‘I don't think—I know,' Rico shot back. ‘I know that you're a liar and a cheat and that you and your father are two of a kind. So tell me,
gatita
…'

His use of the once gentle word made her bare toes curl in horror on the polished wooden floor.

‘All those nights you spent in that nightclub—was that your own money you were wasting or—'

‘Nightclub?' Felicity broke in sharply. ‘I don't know what you're talking about! What nightclub?'

‘The Top Hat, I believe it was called. You were seen—I had someone watching you.'

‘You…'

Her head spun with the horror of it all, the bitter realisation that he actually believed…

‘Then you were wrongly informed! Your detective or
whoever you employed clearly didn't do their job properly because if they had they would have known that I wasn't enjoying myself in that place! I wasn't spending your money or anyone's money—I was earning it! I was working there, damn you!'

‘But you already had a job…'

‘But not one that earned enough to go any way towards paying back what my father owed! What he'd stolen from you!'

He hadn't expected that; it was there in the stunned look to those beautiful dark eyes. She couldn't even begin to guess if he believed her or not but she was past caring. If she had ever been fool enough to believe that there might be a chance of a future for herself and Rico, then she knew now that that dream had been nothing but an illusion. It had died, shrivelling to nothing in her wounded heart, when she had looked into his eyes and seen nothing there but black disgust and total rejection.

‘Oh, I know that what I earned could have been nothing more than a drop in the ocean of debts that Dad owed but I had to do something! I still do. Rico—please…'

She couldn't stop herself from coming forwards, taking hold of his hands, her bruised-looking grey eyes pleading with him to listen to her, even though she knew she was risking the sort of rejection that would tear her heart in two.

‘Please, just give me a chance—give me time. My father has—had—a gambling problem. It got him into terrible debt and the only way out of that debt that he could see was one that made matters even worse. But he knows what he's done is wrong and he's going to try—he's seeing an addiction counsellor and I'm sure he's on the road to recovery. I'll do anything I can—everything I can…'

The words died on her lips as Rico shook off her clinging hands with a cold disdain, straightening up and walking to the window. With his shoulders hunched and his hands
pushed deep into the pockets of his jeans, he stared out, seeing nothing, for a long, long moment. Then at last he turned.

‘Anything?' he questioned harshly and the coldness of his eyes, the carefully blanked off expression sent a shiver crawling down Felicity's spine.

‘A-anything,' she managed apprehensively.

To her astonishment he actually smiled. But the smile was far worse than the coldness, the harsh rejection of only moments before.

‘Well, then, we don't have a problem.'

‘We—we don't?'

‘No, we don't.'

Coming back to the desk, he rested both hands flat on its polished surface, leaning forwards to look straight into her face. Felicity had to fight hard against the desire to flinch away from that brutally glacial, emotionless survey that swept over her from the top of her blonde head to where her small, bare feet rested on the polished floor.

‘I think I have a solution that will suit us both.'

A solution. It was what she desperately needed, so why did it not sound right? Why did those words that should have lifted her heart, made it sing in hope and relief, instead weigh her down more than ever, threatening to drag her deep into a bottomless pit of despair?

‘What sort of solution?'

If only she didn't have to look at him. If only she could close her eyes tight so that she didn't have to be so painfully aware of the hard masculine beauty of his face, the brilliance of his eyes, the softness of the glossy black hair. If only she could blot out the awareness of the forceful physical impact of his long, lithe body, the hard strength of muscle in the taut arms that supported him, the trim waist and hips, the powerful length of leg in the closefitting denims.

As always, her sensual response to him scrambled her thoughts, muddling and confusing her just when she most needed to be able to concentrate and think clearly.

‘The solution where we all get exactly what we want. Not quite
how
we wanted it, perhaps, but that would be perfection and perfection is impossible to attain.'

Felicity shook her head in bewilderment.

‘I don't understand.'

‘Marry me.'

The words were like a slap in the face, stopping her dead and making what little colour she had left leach from her skin leaving her ashen and drained, her eyes looking like two dark bruises about her pale cheeks.

‘Marry…'

There was that travesty of a smile again and it was so much worse this time.

‘There's something in it for all of us. You get the rich husband you were after from the start—a far wealthier one than ever Venables could have been. You get your father's debts paid off, making him safe from prosecution…'

‘And you?'

‘Isn't it obvious,
mi ángel
? I get you in my bed every night.'

Misery tasted sour in Felicity's mouth. She couldn't swallow it down for fear she would actually be physically sick and so she could only shake her head in silent despair at what he was suggesting.

‘No?' Rico questioned sceptically. ‘You're actually turning me down?'

‘I won't even give your suggestion the honour of considering it!' Felicity flung at him, pain forcing her to speak at last. ‘I don't know how you could even believe I would. I could never marry you under those conditions!'

‘Why not? You were prepared to marry Edward.'

‘Yes, but…'

Yes, but I didn't love Edward.

Horrified at what she had been about to reveal, she caught herself up hastily.

‘But I—I couldn't think of anything else to do.'