hand clamped round her slim shoulder. ‘Are you hurt? Have you passengers?’
‘No!’ Taken aback by someone with even faster reactions than her own, Bella hovered in the biting wind tunnelling down the street as the powerful head and shoulders ducked into the cluttered interior of her car, which more closely resembled a travelling dustbin than a vehicle. Her teeth chattered with shock, her aghast attention logged onto the truly appalling amount of damage done to her car. The whole bonnet was wrecked.
‘You madman!’ she burst out helplessly. ‘What were you doing on the wrong side of the road?’
The large presence straightened. Bella was not small and she was wearing very high heels, but the male beside her still towered above her. In the streetlight his hard, dark features were as unyielding as hewn granite.
‘What was I doing?’ he repeated in a raw tone of disbelief, and this time she caught the foreign inflexion, the thickness of an accent that was certainly not British.
‘Did you forget we drive on the left here?’ Bella asked furiously.
‘You stupid bitch... you’re on a one-way street!’ With that he strode back to his own car.
A one-way street? About to open her mouth and loudly disclaim that ridiculous assertion at the same time as she asked him who the hell he thought he was calling a stupid bitch, Bella looked back to the corner and saw the sign. A one-way street. She had turned right into a one-way street and not unnaturally had had a head-on collision. Devastated by the realisation that the accident was entirely her fault, Bella leant against the wing of the Skoda because her knees were threatening to give way.
The other driver was lifting something out of his car. Oh, dear God, what had she hit? For the first time she looked at the other vehicle. It had a hideous déjà vu familiarity, only it had looked considerably more pristine earlier. A Bugatti. She had wrecked a Bugatti Supersport which retailed at somewhere around a quarter of a million pounds. She wanted to throw herself down on the road and scream like a banshee in torment. Her insurance premium would rocket into outer space after this... correction; she’d be lucky to get insurance. This wasn’t her first accident, although it was certainly by far the worst. Dammit, what was the guy’s name? Why, oh, why had she let her temper rip and called him a madman?
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded in a weak voice, moving forward.
He was lounging against his status-symbol car, which was not quite the status symbol it had been. And he had a mobile phone in his hand. Just her luck—a guy with a phone in his car!
‘I am calling the police,’ he imparted, with a decided edge of, And aren’t you going to enjoy that? in his growling delivery.
‘The p-police?’ Bella stammered shrilly, plunged into further depths of unhidden horror. She turned as white as a sheet.
‘Naturally. Why don’t you get back into your vehicle and await their arrival?’
‘Do we need the police?’ she asked in a shaky voice, her heart sinking to the soles of her feet at the prospect of being arrested on a charge of careless driving.
‘Of course we need the police.’
Bella took another desperate step forward. ‘Please don’t get the police!’ she muttered frantically.
‘I should imagine that you will be breathalysed.’
‘I haven’t been drinking. I just don’t see the necessity to get the police!’
‘I expect they already have more than a passing acquaintance with you.’ Rico da Silva sent a glittering look of derision over her.
‘Well, we wouldn’t be complete strangers, let’s put it that way,’ Bella conceded, thinking back miserably to her earliest memories of what her travelling mother had called police harassment. No matter how hard she tried Bella had never lost that childhood terror of the uniformed men who had moved them on from their illegal camping grounds.
‘I didn’t think so. It’s a hard life on the street,’ he murmured, shooting her scantily clad, shivering figure an intent but unreadable glance. ‘Heading home from the nightshift?’
What the hell was he talking about? Struggling to concentrate, she moved even closer. ‘We could sort this out...just you and me, off the record,’ she assured him in desperation, skimming an anxious glance across the street as another car passed by, slackened speed to have a good look at the wreckage, and then drove on. Any minute now a patrol car would be along.
‘Es verdad?’ Diamond-bright dark eyes scanned her beautiful, pleading face, his strong jaw line clenching hard as a long finger stabbed buttons on the mobile phone without her even being aware of it. ‘I don’t think so. In that one field alone I prefer amateurs.’
‘Amateur what?’ Bella returned in despair, deciding that he had definitely been drinking.
And then she heard the police answering the call, registered that he had already dialled, and allowed sheer panic to take over. Snaking out a hand, she grabbed at the phone. Lean fingers as compelling as steel cuffs closed round her wrist and jerked it ruthlessly down. She burst into floods of tears, her overtaxed emotions shooting to a typically explosive Bella climax and spilling over instantaneously.
‘You bully!’ she sobbed accusingly.
With a raw gasp of male fury, the background of the police telephonist’s voice was abruptly silenced as if the man before her had cut the connection. ‘You attacked me!’ he grated.
‘I just didn’t want you to ring the police!’ she slung back, on the brink of another howl. ‘But go ahead! Have me arrested! I don’t care; I’m past caring!’
‘Stop making such a noise,’ he growled. ‘You’re making an exhibition of yourself!’
‘If I want to have hysterics, that’s my business!’ she asserted through her tears. ‘What do you think this is going to do to my insurance?’
There was a short silence.
‘You have insurance?’
‘Of course I have insurance,’ Bella mumbled, making an effort to collect herself and keeping a careful distance from him, since he had already proved that he was the aggressive type.
‘Give me the details and sign a statement admitting fault and you can be on your way,’ he drawled with unhidden relish.
Bella shot him an astonished glance. ‘You mean it?’
‘Sí... five more minutes in your company and I will understand why men murder. Not only that, I will be at the forefront of a campaign to bring in the death penalty for women drivers!’ Rico da Silva intoned between clenched teeth.
Sexist pig. Smearing her non-waterproof mascara over her cheeks as she wiped at her wet face, Bella bit back the temptation to answer in kind. After all, he was going to be civilised. If he had smashed up her Bugatti she probably would have wanted blood too. Prepared to be generous, she still, however, gave a deliberate little rub to her wrist just to let him know that he might not have drawn blood but he might have inflicted bruises.
He planted a sheet of paper on the bonnet and handed her a pen.
‘You write it; I’ll sign it,’ she proffered glumly.
‘I want it to be in your handwriting.’
But he still stood over her and dictated what he wanted her to write. She struggled with the big words he used, her rather basic spelling powers taxed beyond their limits.
‘This is illiterate,’ he remarked in a strained voice.
Bella’s cheeks flamed scarlet. Her itinerant childhood had meant that she had very rarely attended a school. Gramps had changed all that when she had gone to live with him but somehow her spelling had never quite come up to scratch. Laziness and lack of interest, she conceded inwardly, for she possessed a formidable intelligence which she focused solely