not, he answered his own question.
With a heavy sigh he took the disgorged clothes, stuffed them randomly back into the suitcase, and made a futile attempt to close the lid. Then he took her arm.
‘Let’s get you back on the pavement safely,’ he said.
He started to draw her upright. Her face lifted. Tears were pouring in an avalanche down her cheeks, and broken, breathless sobs came from her throat. But Anatole was not paying attention to her emotional outburst. As he stood her up on her feet, his brain, as if after a slow motion delay, registered two things.
The woman was younger than he’d first thought. And even weeping she was breathtakingly, jaw-droppingly lovely.
Blonde, heart-shaped face, blue-eyes, rosebud mouth...
He felt something plummet inside him, then ascend, taking shape, rearranging everything. His expression changed.
‘You’re all right,’ he heard himself say. His voice was much gentler, with no more anger in it. ‘It was a narrow escape, but you made it.’
‘I’m so sorry!’ The words stuttered from her as she heaved in breath chokily.
Anatole shook his head, negating her apology. ‘It’s all right. No harm done. Except to your suitcase.’
As she took in its broken state her face crumpled in distress. With sudden decision Anatole hefted the suitcase into the boot of his car, opened the passenger door.
‘I’ll drive you to wherever you’re going. In you get,’ he instructed, all too conscious of the traffic building up behind him, horns tooting noisily.
He propelled her into the car, despite her stammering protest. Throwing himself into his driver’s seat, he turned off the hazard lights and gunned the engine.
Absently, he found himself wondering if he would have gone to so much personal inconvenience as he was now had the person who’d stepped right out in front of his car not been the breathtakingly lovely blonde that she was...
‘It’s no problem,’ he said. ‘Now, where to?’
She stared blankly. ‘Um...’ She cast her eyes frantically through the windscreen. ‘That side street down there.’
Anatole moved off. The traffic was still crawling, and he threw his glance at his unexpected passenger. She was sniffing, wiping at her cheeks with her fingers. As the traffic halted at a red light Anatole reached for the neatly folded clean handkerchief in his jacket pocket and turned to mop at her face himself. Then he drew back, job done.
Her eyes were like saucers, widening to plates as she looked back at him. And the expression in them suddenly stilled him completely.
Slowly, very slowly, he smiled...
Tia was staring. Gawping. Her heart was thudding like a hammer, and her throat was tight from the storm of weeping triggered by the man whose car she had so blindly, stupidly, stepped in front of when he had laid into her for her carelessness. But it had been building since the grim, sad ordeal of watching an elderly, mortally ill man take his leave of life, reminding her so much of the tearing grief she’d felt at her mother’s death.
Now something else was overpowering her. Her eyes were distended, and she was unable to stop staring. Staring at the man who had just mopped her face and was now sitting back in his seat, watching her staring at him with wide eyes filled with wonder...
She gulped silently, still staring disbelievingly, and words tumbled silently, chaotically in her head.
Black hair, like sable, and a face as if...as if it was carved... Eyes like dark chocolate and smoky long, long lashes. Cheekbones a mile high... And his mouth...quirking at the corner like that. I can feel my stomach hollowing out, and I don’t know where to look, but I just want to go on gazing at him, because he looks exactly as if he’s stepped right out of one of my daydreams... The most incredible man I’ve ever seen in my life...
Because how could it be otherwise? How could she possibly, in her restricted, constricted life, during which she had done nothing and seen nothing, ever have encountered a man like this?
Of course she hadn’t! She’d spent her teenage years looking after her mother, and her days now were spent in caring for the sick and the elderly. There had never been opportunity or time for romantic adventures, for boyfriends, fashion, excitement. Her only romances had been in her head—woven out of time spent staring out of windows, sitting by bedsides, attending to all the chores and tasks that live-in carers had to undertake.
Except that here—right now, right here—was a man who could have sprung right out of her romantic fantasies...everything she had ever daydreamed about.
Tall, dark and impossibly handsome.
And he was here—right here—beside her. A daydream made real.
She gulped again. His smile deepened, indenting around his sculpted mouth, making a wash of weakness go through her again, deeper still.
‘Better?’ he murmured.
Silently, she nodded, still unable to tear her gaze away. Just wanting to go on gazing and gazing at him.
Then, abruptly, she became hideously aware that although he looked exactly as if he’d stepped out of one of her torrid daydreams—a fantasy made wondrously, amazingly real—she was looking no such thing. In fact the complete, mortifying opposite.
Burningly, she was brutally aware of how she must look to him—the very last image a man like him should see in any daydream, made real or not. Red eyes, snuffling nose, tear runnels down her cheeks, hair all mussed and not a scrap of make-up. Oh, yes—and she was wearing ancient jeans and a bobbled, battered jumper that hung on her body like a rag. What a disaster...
As the traffic light changed to green Anatole turned into the side street she’d indicated. ‘Where now?’ he asked.
It came to him that he was hoping it was some way yet. Then he crushed the thought. Picking up stray females off the street—literally, in this case!—was not a smart idea. Even though...
His glance went to her again. She really is something to look at! Even with those red eyes and rubbish clothes.
A thought flashed across his mind. One he didn’t want but that was there all the same.
How good could she look?
Immediately he cut the thought.
No—don’t ask that. Don’t think that. Drive her to her destination, then drive on—back to your own life.
Yes, that was what he should do—he knew that perfectly well. But in the meantime he could hardly drive in silence. Besides, he didn’t want her bursting into those terrifyingly heavy sobs again.
‘I’m sorry you were so upset,’ he heard himself saying. ‘But I hope it’s taught you never, ever to step out into traffic.’
‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she said again. Her voice was husky now. ‘And I’m so, so sorry for...for crying like that. It wasn’t you! Well, I mean...not really. Only when you yelled at me—’
‘It was shock,’ Anatole said. ‘I was terrified I’d killed you.’ He threw a rueful look at her. ‘I didn’t mean to make you cry.’
She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t because of that—not really,’ she said again. ‘It was because—’
She stopped. All thoughts of daydream heroes vanished as the memory of how she’d spent the night at the bedside of a dying man assailed her again.
‘Because...?’ Anatole prompted, throwing her another brief glance. He found he liked throwing her glances. But that he would have preferred them not to be brief...
Perhaps they need not be—
She was answering him, cutting across the thought he should not have. Most definitely should not have.
‘It