Mediterranean Mavericks. Jane Porter

recalling that marriage warning he’d made.

      Raffaelle was pacing his study wondering what was the matter with him. Why had he bitten her head off like that?

      Because she wanted to go home to collect some clothes and organise her life, or because she still persisted in defending her selfish family?

      Or was it because she’d mentioned a man down there in Devon? A neighbour she had not bothered to mention before…?

      He did not know. He did not think he wanted to know. Something was happening here that scared him witless each time he came close to looking at it.

      He heard her moving about then and went to see what she was doing now. He found her in the living room with her bag in her hand.

      ‘I—can’t find my phone,’ she said and she looked pale and defensive again.

      ‘The battery was flat. I put it on the charger in my study. I’ll go and get it…’Then he paused. ‘Who do you want to call?’

      Irritation ripped down his backbone because he knew it was none of his business who she wanted to call. By the expression on her face, she thought the same thing.

      Still, she answered him. ‘I will have to ring round a few people if I am not allowed to leave here—’

      ‘No.’ Raffaelle shook his head. ‘We will do it your way, only we both go and we will use my car instead of the train.’

      ‘But—’

      ‘Ten minutes,’ he said gruffly, turning away again. ‘And don’t keep me waiting. The sooner we leave, the sooner we can get back.’

      He drove them in a silver Ferrari with the same reckless efficiency he’d driven the night before. But then, his driving had had to be nifty when they’d met with the paparazzi waiting outside for them to leave. They’d picked the car up from the basement car park but the moment they’d emerged on to the street they’d been spotted and all hell had broken loose as camera-toting reporters fell over themselves to get into their cars and give chase.

      ‘I don’t understand why they’re still hanging around,’ Rachel said after they’d lost their pursuers in a sequence of dizzying turns down narrow back streets. She hadn’t dared speak before then in case she broke his concentration and they ended up hitting a wall. ‘What do they think we are going to do? Get married on the apartment steps or something?’

      ‘They don’t know enough about you.’ He sounded so grim that Rachel felt a cold little shiver chase down her spine.

      ‘I hate this,’ she whispered. ‘I hated it when I used to get caught up in it with Elise. I don’t know how you people live your lives like this.’

      ‘We live in a celebrity-driven world,’ he answered levelly. ‘The masses are greedy for the intimate details of the rich and famous—or, for that matter, anyone who lives a high profile life. You have now joined the celebrity ranks, so get used to it, because this is only the beginning of it.’

      The beginning of it…

      After that Rachel did not speak another word. They reached the motorway and suddenly the powerful car came into its own, eating up the miles with the luxurious smoothness that promised to cut the journey time by half.

      He stopped once at a motorway service station, led her into the café and bought sandwiches and coffee.

      ‘Eat,’ he instructed, when she stared at the unappetizing-looking sandwich he’d placed in front of her. ‘You look like death and you have eaten nothing since you threw yourself at me last night.’

      And I look like death because I hardly had any sleep last night, she threw back at him without saying the words out loud. Because out loud meant opening a Pandora’s box full of what they’d been doing instead of sleeping.

      The indifferent-tasting sandwich was washed down by indifferent-tasting coffee. Rachel was surprised he ate his sandwich or drank the coffee. They just didn’t look like the kind of food this man would usually put anywhere near his mouth.

      When they hit the road again he wanted to talk. ‘Tell me how your family works,’ he invited.

      So she explained how her mother had lost her husband to a long-term illness while the twins had still been very young. ‘A few years later she married my father and then had me.’

      ‘So what is the age difference between you and the twins?’

      ‘Six years,’ she replied.

      ‘And who did the farm originally belong to?’

      ‘My father. But he—we—never differentiated between Mark and Elise and myself. And it isn’t really a farm,’ she then added because she thought she better had do before they arrived there and he saw it. ‘It’s what we call a smallholding, with three acres of land, a house, a couple of greenhouses and a couple of barns.’

      ‘Another lie, cara?’

      Rachel shrugged. ‘It’s run like a farm.’

      ‘And the…neighbour that helps you out when you need it—what does he do?’

      ‘Jack owns the land adjoining our land—and his is a farm,’ she stressed. ‘He’s been good to us since our parents died.’

      ‘Call it as it is,’ Raffaelle said. ‘He has been good to you.’

      Rachel turned to look at him. ‘Why that tone?’ she demanded.

      His grimace stopped her from becoming hooked on watching his face. ‘I don’t think I want to elaborate,’ he confessed.

      ‘Suits me,’ she said and, turning the collar up on her coat, she leant further into the seat and closed her eyes.

      His low laugh played along her nerve endings. ‘You are prickly, Miss Carmichael.’

      ‘And you are loathsome, Signor.’

      ‘Because I don’t mind saying that I dislike the way your siblings use you?’

      ‘No. You are loathsome simply because you are.’

      ‘In bed?’

      Rachel didn’t answer.

      ‘You prefer, perhaps, this Jack in bed as your lover because he is so good to you.’

      He was fishing. Rachel decided to let him. ‘Maybe.’ She smiled.

      ‘But can he make you fall apart with pleasure there as I can, or does he bring the smell of farmer to your bed, which you must overcome before he can overcome you?’

      ‘As I said. You’re loathsome.’

      ‘Si,’ he agreed. ‘However, when I said that I don’t sleep around I meant it, whereas you seemingly did not.’

      Rachel turned her head and flicked her eyes open to look at him. Once a liar always a liar, she thought heavily when she saw the grimness lashed to his lean profile.

      And a tease could only be a tease when the recipient knew he was being teased. Sitting further up the seat with a sigh, she pushed a hand through her curls and opened her mouth to tell him exactly who and what Jack was—when her attention was caught by a giant blue motorway sign.

      ‘Oh, heck,’ she gasped. ‘We need to take this next turn-off!’

      With a startled flash of his eyes and a few muttered curses, he flipped the car across several motorway lanes with one eye on the rear-view mirror judging the pace of the traffic behind them and the other eye judging the spare stretch road in front of them. By the time they sailed safely down the slip road Jack’s name had been washed right out of Rachel’s head by an intoxicating mix of nerve-fraying terror for her life and the exhilarating thrill of the whole smooth, slick power-driven manoeuvre.

      ‘Which way?’ he demanded.

      Rachel blinked and told him in a tense