The shore where she had left the boat was just around the corner. If she could just put on one last spurt, force her tiring and shaking legs into action, she might just do it. But whether she could get the boat onto the lake and actually get away was a very different matter.
Making a last effort, she pushed herself to breaking point, her breath coming in laboured gasps as a lack of fitness resulting from the past few months started to tell on her. She couldn’t look where she was going, caught her toe on a clump of grass, missed her footing and fell headlong.
Or, rather, started to fall.
Just as she felt herself totally lose her balance, convinced that the ground was coming up to meet her, she felt a hand grab her flailing arm, clamping tight around her wrist and holding firm.
‘Got you!’
With a jarring jolt she was jerked back from the fall, hauled upwards so that she balanced upright for just a moment, swaying precariously, before tumbling the other way. Straight into the arms of the man behind her.
‘Oh, no!’
She hit him like a ton of bricks but, although he staggered back, he didn’t fall and the punishing grip around her arm didn’t loosen for a moment. If anything, it tightened bruisingly so that she had no hope of pulling away.
‘So who the devil are you?’
There was no way that Lucy could answer him. Her mouth seemed to have dried so much that her tongue couldn’t form a word and her throat felt as if it had tied itself into knots.
But Ricardo didn’t seem to need an answer. Instead, he adjusted his hold so that he could spin her round, bringing her to a position facing him where he could see her for himself.
‘I said…you!’
It took every nerve in Lucy’s body to force herself to look him in the face, though she flinched away from meeting his eyes, terrified of the darkness she would see there. She could almost feel the cold burn of his glare on her skin, flaying it from her bones.
‘Me,’ she managed and the uncomfortably jagged beat of her heart made her voice sound brittle and defiant.
The stunned silence that greeted her response stretched her nerves to near breaking point. In desperation, knowing he wasn’t going to be the one to break it, she pushed herself to say something—anything—to try to show that he didn’t totally have control of this situation.
‘Buona sera, Ricardo.’
The sound of Ricardo’s breath hissing in between his teeth told her that she’d caught him on the raw and the way his hand tightened about her arm betrayed the struggle he was having with himself to control the burning temper that she knew was flaring inside him.
But all he said was one word—
‘Lucia…’
Her name. Or rather the Italianised form of it that only he had ever used. The low, almost whispered syllables slid off his tongue in a way that could have been a verbal caress or then again might have been the hiss of an angry snake, preparing to strike. And not knowing which brought her eyes up in a rush to clash with his glittering black gaze, the ice in their burning depths making her shiver in uncontrolled response.
‘Lucia.’
He said it again and this time there was no doubting the way that he meant it. The venom injected into the syllables of her name made her quail inside, shrinking away from him as far as his cruel grip on her arm would let her.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
Don’t tell him the truth.
The warning words slid into her thoughts as if spoken aloud.
Don’t say a word about Marco. If you put that weapon into his hands, then he will use it against you.
‘I said…’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’
Somehow she found the strength to answer him, to put a note of defiance into her tone. She even managed to lift her chin in an expression of rebellion that was a million miles from what she was actually feeling. And although she actually made a pretence of looking into his eyes, of meeting their savage glare head on, the truth was something so very different. Deliberately she let her gaze slip out of focus so that all she could see was the dark blur of his face up above her. The jet-black pools of his eyes were bleak hollows where no light, no hint of feeling showed in their depths.
‘I certainly haven’t come to try to renew our marriage.’
‘As if I’d think that was why you were here.’
Ricardo’s tone was rough but laced with a deadly control that refused to allow any real emotion into the words. And although he still held her, she felt that his attention was not on what he was doing but on the thoughts that were inside his head. The thoughts that his icy command refused to let show in his face.
‘Our marriage is over. It was over before it really started.’
From the moment he had accused her of trapping him into marriage. Of letting herself get pregnant purely to get her hands on some of the vast wealth he possessed.
‘Well, that’s something we both agree on, at least.’
Lucy tried an experimental tug to try to free her arm, recognising how much of a mistake the action was when Ricardo’s grip tightened, restraining her without any real effort.
‘If it’s not that—grazie a Dio—then what is it?’
He was finally starting to recover from the shock of seeing her, Ricardo admitted privately to himself. Finally coming to terms with the fact that she was here, in front of him—the woman he had never wanted to see again for the rest of his life. The woman who had deceived him, played him like a fool. The woman he had thought was gone for good, out of his life for ever, and that had suited him to perfection.
And yet here she was, standing before him, her arm tensed against the pressure of his, her head flung back, her small chin raised, and those blue, blue eyes glaring into his in wide, determined defiance.
She hadn’t changed much, he acknowledged unwillingly because he didn’t want to notice anything about her. He didn’t even want to look into her face, into that lying, devious face, and see the beauty that had once caught him, entrapped him—deceived him. A beauty that had once knocked him so off balance that he had forgotten all the careful rules by which he lived his life.
More than forgotten. He had ended up breaking every single one of them and had turned his life into a form of hell from which he had been only too glad to escape. The one and only time he’d broken his self-imposed rule, he’d been caught by a scheming gold-digger in the guise of an innocent lamb. And he was not about to let that happen again.
She had lost weight, it seemed, losing some of the softness of her face and her body. He wouldn’t be human—or male—if he didn’t feel a pang of regret at the loss of the soft swell of her breasts, the curve of her hips. But then she had been pregnant for so much of the time they had been together that naturally her figure had been more lush, the feminine parts of her body more emphasised. If she hadn’t been pregnant then he would never have married her, would never have rushed into the union that he had come to regret so badly. Would never have tied himself to a woman he had come to detest so savagely and so soon.
‘If you’ll let go of my arm, then maybe we can discuss this like civilised human beings!’
‘Civilised!’ Ricardo scorned. ‘That’s not the word that comes to mind when I think of how I’d like to be where you are concerned.’
Now there was a word he would never use to describe Lucy Mottram—Lucy Emiliani as she was now, though the thought of his family name being attached to someone like her brought a sour taste into his mouth. Civilised didn’t describe a woman who had deliberately