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 let herself become pregnant just to trap herself a rich husband, and then walked out on her marriage when that baby had not even been two months old.
‘And it’s not the way I’d want to describe your behaviour in the past.’
Had she actually winced, flinching away in response to the taunt? If she had then she had recovered almost instantly, tossing her hair back and glaring defiance up into his face.
‘Equally, it’s hardly civilised to hold me prisoner like this—just because you’re stronger than me.’
‘Oh, si—and if I let go then you will run off again and I’ll never find out just what you’re up to.’
‘I’m not up to anything! And I promise I’ll stay still.’
He’d be a fool to believe that. But, all the same, he eased his grip on her arm just a little. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Giuseppe and Frederico, his damned inefficient security guards, had finally come up behind them, each one taking an approach from a different side, and he realised that he could at least afford to relax a little.
‘I’d be a fool to trust you,’ he declared, letting her hand drop in a gesture of deliberate distaste. ‘But there’s no way you can escape three of us.’
‘Three bully boys onto one little woman!’ Lucy flashed at him, her eyes sparking rebelliously. ‘That’s really balancing the odds.’
‘There will be no bullying,’ Ricardo tossed back. ‘And you’re hardly such a little woman!’
Deliberately he let his gaze slide over her tousled blonde head, her flushed face, and down the length of her body to where her narrow feet in the battered canvas shoes betrayed her mood in the way that they moved restlessly on the dusty path.
Her height had always been one of the things that he had liked most about being with her. The fact that he only had to bend his head just a little to meet her eye to eye had been a delight. The way that her mouth was just inches away from his when he did so had been a new and enjoyable experience after having to almost stoop in order to kiss the other women he had had relationships with.
Those eyes were what he remembered most about her in the past. The clear, bright blue that had seemed to reflect the colour of the sky on a summer’s day when she smiled, or sparkled in amusement like the warm waters of the lake that surrounded this private island. At other times they had flashed in deliberate provocation when she had thrown a challenge at him. And then at other, very different times darkened into cloudy sensuality, heavy lids drooping into an almost sleepy look when all the time he knew that she had never been further from sleep. That her senses were on high alert, her body warming with awakening desire, her…
No!
With a brutal mental effort he caught his thoughts back from the dangerous path they were on. They threatened to scramble