The Valtieri Marriage Deal by Caroline Anderson Read Free Book Online Page B

does this whole straightforward journey take you?’
    She shrugged. ‘Forty-five minutes?’
    He swore—in English, so she could understand this time, his accent heavier as he became frustrated with her—and went on, ‘I’m taking you home. Get used to it.’
    ‘Only if I tell you the address—which I have no intention of doing. It’s bad enough that you know where I work.’
    ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Isabelle! If I wanted to know your address, I’d ask Human Resources,’ he pointed out. ‘I’m sure I could come up with some plausible reason for needing it.’
    She was sure he could.
    She gave up, frustrated to bits but too tired to argue any longer.
    ‘All right,’ she snapped, ‘you can take me home, if your crazy Latin sense of honour demands it, but that’s it. You’re not coming in. I don’t want this, Luca.’
    His shoulders dropped, and he stabbed a hand through his hair and gave a tired sigh that pulled at her reluctant heartstrings. ‘This? What this? I just want to talk to you, Isabelle. I need to talk to you.’
    ‘Why? There’s nothing to say.’
    ‘Because I’ve been looking for you for weeks,’ he said quietly, ‘and now I’ve found you, by a miracle, I would appreciate a chance to talk to you—even if it’s only so you can tell me to go to hell. You still owe me that coffee, since you managed to avoid taking a break all day.’
    She hesitated, but he was right, she had promised, and she didn’t go back on her word. ‘OK,’ she said flatly. ‘You can take me home, if you absolutely have to, and you can have a coffee and get all this off your chest so you have closure, and then you can leave.’
    ‘I don’t want closure.’
    ‘Well, it’s all you’re going to get, so take your pick.’
    His smile was cynical. ‘You’re all heart, you know that?’
    ‘Or maybe I’ll just go home on the Tube on my own.’
    She turned and walked off, and after a second she heard his firm, solid footfall behind her. And for some crazy, stupid reason, her heart did a happy little jiggle. She squashed the smile and kept walking, then she felt his hand on her arm.
    ‘Isabelle, stop. I intend to take you home whether I drive you in my car or follow you on foot, so why don’t you just choose the car and make it easier for both of us?’
    ‘Some choice,’ she grumbled, but in truth she was exhausted, and the very thought of walking to the Tube, sitting in the smelly, busy carriage with all the revellers out for the night, then waiting for a bus and walking for another ten minutes at the other end was too depressing to contemplate.
    ‘Of course, if you come in my car, we have the heater, we won’t get wet in the rain and I don’t have to make the same ridiculous journey back. But it’s up to you.’
    Stupidly—because it was his idea to take her home andnothing at all to do with what she wanted—she felt guilty at the thought of him having to make the return journey the hard way. After all, his day had been just as long as hers. And the car did sound awfully tempting. Then a dribble off the edge of the canopy ran down the back of her neck and made up her mind.
    ‘Have it your way, then,’ she said grudgingly, and immediately felt rude and ungrateful and mean. And she hated that, because she wasn’t naturally rude or mean, and if it hadn’t been for the strings attached to it, she’d be grateful. She was grateful. She just didn’t want to encourage him or make him feel that just because they’d spent one incredible night together they could have any more than that.
    And she was still angry with him, still not entirely convinced that his turning up at her hospital was just coincidence, and still very, very vulnerable to his potent charm. Scarily so.
    But she let him lead her to his car—not his Italian sports car, she noticed, but a sensible little Alfa Romeo—and she sank down into the soft leather seat and rested her head back, and in seconds she was asleep.
     
    ‘Wake up,