An Enticing Proposal. Meredith Webber

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СКАЧАТЬ she wanted at the moment. Pulling out a scrap of paper instead, she jotted down her number and pushed it across the desk.

      He was standing opposite her, staring at her with an unnerving intensity.

      ‘I already have your phone number, Miss Morgan,’ he said softly. ‘What I don’t know is Lucia’s whereabouts. Now, are you going to tell me where she is or do I call in your police force?’

      She did her straightening-up thing again, hoping to look more in control.

      ‘Lucia is an adult—able to make her own decisions. No police force in the world can compel a woman to return to a situation from which she’s fled.’

      She wasn’t absolutely certain about the truth of this statement but he wasn’t to know that. Not that he seemed to be taking much notice. In fact he was laughing at her.

      Derisively!

      ‘Fled, Miss Morgan? Aren’t you overdramatising the situation?’

      Damn her cheeks—just when she wanted to appear super-cool they were heating up again.

      ‘You said yourself she ran away,’ she countered hotly. ‘And now you’ve arrived, like some vengeful gaoler, to take her back—threatening me with the police force! No, I think if anyone’s overdramatising, it’s you, Prince Highfaluting-whatever. Sweeping in here, making demands. I’m the one who’s being reasonable about this!’

      OK, so she didn’t sound very reasonable right now, but he’d made her mad. And that superior expression on his carved-rock face made her even madder.

      He ignored her rudeness, nodded once, stepped back a pace from his position near the desk and said, ‘I will give you an hour, Miss Morgan, but that is all. For some reason you are under the impression Lucia will not wish to see me. You are wrong. She will be glad and grateful that I have arrived to take care of her.’

      ‘Oh yeah?’ Paige muttered with as much cynicism as she could muster, though why his sudden switch to politeness was aggravating her more than his anger had she didn’t know. ‘Well, we’ll let her be the judge of that. Will you phone?’

      His eyes scanned her face, as if he wanted to imprint it on his mind, and when he finally replied—saying, ‘No, I will return to this house,’—Paige felt a tremor of apprehension flutter down her spine.

      And dealing with Lucia wasn’t any easier. When Paige confessed she’d found the number in the passport and had phoned it, her guest had pouted and turned her face to the wall, prepared to sulk.

      ‘I had to let someone know you were alive,’ Paige said desperately. ‘It wasn’t fair that all your friends and family should have been worrying themselves to death—imagining the worst of fates for you. I just didn’t expect him to come.’

      The slim figure shot upright, delight and apprehension illuminating her usually pale face, giving her a radiant beauty.

      ‘He’s here? Marco’s here? Oh, why did you not tell me straight away? Where is he? Bring him to me! Now, Paige, now!’

      One of the few things she had told Paige was that she’d only been married two months before she’d left. It hadn’t taken her long to learn imperious ways!

      ‘Are you sure you want to see him?’ Paige asked, mistrusting this swift change of mood. ‘He’s here to take you home.’

      The beauty faded, leaving her visitor pale again.

      ‘Of course! He would have come for that reason. Trust him to do such a thing, thinking he would persuade me.’ She pouted again, then tossed the cloud of soft dark hair and added defiantly, ‘Well, I won’t go!’

      There was another pause, and Paige could almost read the expressions that washed across Lucia’s face—hope, longing, doubt and confusion.

      ‘But I’d like to see Marco,’ Lucia continued tremulously. ‘Will you stay with me while he visits? Not let him bully me or talk me into going home?’

      Paige sighed. The very last thing she wanted to do was play gooseberry between a man and his wife—particularly, for some reason, between the man in question and this young woman she’d come to like.

      ‘I think you should talk to him on your own,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think you owe him that?’

      Huge brown eyes gazed piteously into hers.

      ‘But he’ll talk me into going back,’ Lucia wailed. ‘Into doing whatever he wants. Marco always gets his way.’

      I can believe that, Paige thought, picturing the man who’d invaded her office, but the idea of acting as a chaperone at this forthcoming meeting was making her feel quite ill. She patted Lucia’s arm and suggested she get up and have a shower before her visitor arrived.

      ‘I don’t know about staying with you while you talk to him, but I’ll be right outside the door if you need me.’ She watched Lucia stand and saw her slender frame silhouetted against the light from the window, a neat bulge showing the eighteenth week of her pregnancy but still far too thin to be healthy, and another idea occurred to her.

      ‘If he does want to take you home and you decide you’d prefer to stay, we can use your health as an excuse. In my opinion, you’re not yet stable enough, even on the insulin, to be undertaking an arduous flight and I’m sure your obstetrician would agree with me.’

      From the new expressions on Lucia’s face, this suggestion was receiving a mixed reception. Paige came closer and put her arms around the woman’s narrow shoulders.

      ‘You’re not happy here,’ she said gently. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off at home? Perhaps not with your husband, but with family or friends? People you know and love? People who would care for you?’

      Lucia shrugged away from her.

      ‘My family would say my place is with my husband,’ she said bitterly. ‘I can hear them now. My mother especially—and my sisters. It was their idea I marry, their fault, all of this.’

      Paige hesitated. Lucia was emotional, but the words had more petulance than fear and, thinking of the handsome man with the dark blue eyes—remembering his genuine pain when he’d talked of Lucia’s flight—she pressed a little further.

      ‘Didn’t you want the marriage? Did you love someone else?’

      Lucia shook her head and began to cry, silent tears sliding down her cheeks.

      ‘Love someone else?’ She sobbed out the words. ‘How could I when he was all I knew, the man I was destined to marry? I loved him, and only him—but he…He had different ideas about love—ideas Italian men of position held many centuries ago, not now, although I know many men cheat on their wives. When I told him I would not allow it, he laughed and said he would take a mistress if he wished for who was I to stop him?’ She sniffed, then finished with a tilt of her head, ‘So I ran away!’

      Paige stared at her, unable to believe what she was hearing. Well, she could believe the arrogant man she’d met downstairs might have such antediluvian views, but that a vague and possibly teasing threat about some future indiscretion had made Lucia flee? She’d imagined assault—either physical or emotional—shuddered СКАЧАТЬ