coldly.
'I’m insured,' Jodie protested, but a cold, hard knot
of anxiety gripped her stomach as she remembered
her cousin warning her about the problems she would
face if she were to be involved in an accident.
'I doubt that will benefit you, especially when I
inform the authorities that you were driving on a private
road, and in doing so that you endangered not
just your own life but mine as well. You are going to
need a very good solicitor, and that will be very expensive.'
'But that’s not true!' she protested. 'You weren’t
even here when…'
Her voice trailed away as she saw the look in
his eyes.
'You’re trying to frighten me and — and blackmail
me!' she accused him.
He shrugged and continued to walk back to his car.
She watched helplessly as he opened the door, whilst
her emotions raged in impotent fury. He was the most
hateful, horrible man she had ever met — arrogant, selfish,
and the very last kind of man she would have
wanted to marry for any kind of reason. But a logical,
practical voice inside her head was pointing out that
it was late at night and she was miles from anywhere
down a private road, wholly dependent on the goodwill
of the man now about to leave her here.
He had started the engine and was pulling out to
drive past her. Panic filled her. She started to run towards
the car, gasping at the pain in her weak leg as
she flung herself at the driver’s door and banged on
it.
Expressionlessly, Lorenzo opened the window.
'All right, I’ll do it,' she told him recklessly. 'I’ll
marry you.'
He was staring at her so impassively that she wondered
if he had changed his mind. Her heart started
hammering uncomfortably fast, making her feel
slightly sick.
'You’re agreeing to marry me?'
Jodie nodded her head, and then exhaled shakily in
relief as he pushed open the passenger door of the car
and said brusquely, 'Give me your keys and wait here
whilst I get your things.'
It was a warm night, but anxiety and exhaustion
were making her shiver slightly, so that her fingers
trembled against the impersonal hand he had stretched
out for her car keys. A prickle of unwanted sensation
raced up her arm, causing her to recoil from her physical
contact from him. He had long, elegant hands,
with lean, strong fingers — unlike John, who had had
somewhat plump hands with short fingers. The
knowledge that the stroke of those hands against a
woman's body would deliver a dangerous level of
sensual pleasure pierced the thin skin of her defences,
making her emotional recoil from it even more intense
than her physical recoil from his touch.
Lorenzo frowned as he got out of the Ferrari and
strode over to Jodie’s hire car, unlocking the boot.
Her recoil from him had the hallmark of a kind of
sexual inexperience he had imagined no longer existed.
In fact, the last time he had seen a grown
woman recoil like that from a man's casual touch had
been the last time he had visited his grandmother,
when he had sat with her watching one of the old
fashioned black and white films she’d loved so much.
He lived in a world peopled by the sophisticated, the
blase., the experienced, the rich and the aristocratic: a
world driven by cynicism and greed, by self-interest
and envy. Power did not go hand in hand with goodness,
as he had every reason to know. Jodie Oliver
wouldn’t survive a month in that world.
He shrugged away his thoughts. Her survival was
not his concern. He had other matters, another kind
of survival, to worry about, and she was merely the
instrument by which he would achieve that. Had he
genuinely wanted to marry her… His frown deepened.
What kind of thought was that? He had no desire
to marry anyone, much less a thin, wan-faced
young woman who had 'broken heart' written all over
her.
He glanced down at the small case he had removed
from the boot of the car, and then went to check the
interior of the car itself.
'How long did you say you intended to stay away
from your home for?' he asked Jodie wryly as he
carried her things back to the Ferrari.
Jodie flushed at the implication she could hear in
his voice. 'I have enough with me for my needs,' she
told him defensively, adding with angry dignity, 'And
there are such things as laundries, you know.' She
wasn’t going to tell him that she had chosen her small
trolley case specifically because it was light enough
for her to lift, and that the last thing she had felt like
when she was packing had been bringing with her all
the pretty things she had bought for her honeymoon.
She felt the increase in weight of the car as Lorenzo
got back into the driver’s seat. There was a disconcerting
intimacy about being in a machine like this
one with a man who was so very much a man.
