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“Scared? Explain.” He found that he was moving quickly now, exiting his office, only pausing to jot a few lines on some paper while his secretary looked at him in astonishment: he was leaving the office and wouldn’t be back till Monday.
“I’ve had some problems with him in the past,” Rosie confessed shakily. She knew that she was succumbing to the illusion that she was safe with Angelo. Maybe in the good old days, but not now, yet her heightened fear and her isolation in the house worked together with those remembered feelings to produce a mix which she was powerless to resist. Just hearing his dark, deep voice on the other end of the phone was strangely calming. Or maybe it was the fact that she was talking to someone. Maybe talking to anyone would have done the trick, although deep down she wasn’t convinced.
“What sort of problems? Talk to me, Rosie.”
“He broke into my house a week ago,” she said flatly. “It’s why I was so keen to leave London. Okay?”
“When you say sitting outside your house, what do you mean? Sitting on the pavement outside your house?”
Rosie laughed shortly. “Ian wouldn’t be caught dead sitting on a pavement. Especially not in the driving rain. It might ruin his suit. He’s a lawyer earning a lot of money; a good suit means a lot to him. So do appearances and lawyers earning lots of money don’t sit on pavements. No, he’s in his car. A bright red sports car which makes me think that...that...”
“That he wants to be conspicuous?” Angelo had hit the basement of his offices and was striding towards his car. Normally, he would be driven home, but his driver would not be expecting an early exit from the office and Angelo was going to do the driving himself. The address would be programmed into the sat nav although he had an excellent sense of direction and would probably have been able to find her place even after only one trip there in the dark.
“I’m probably being ridiculous.” Rosie tried to be level-headed and adult.
“Why didn’t you call the police? Were you just going to sit there until someone happened to pick the phone up and call you?” He was suddenly weirdly angry at her. She didn’t spook easily. “Forget I said that,” he gritted. “Sit tight and I’ll be with you in half an hour.”
“There’s no need...” But then why else had she chosen to confide in him? She had slipped back into old ways and she hated herself for it whilst feeling strangely relieved that he was on his way. Confused, she remained silent, clutching the phone to her ear and resisting the urge to sneak back to the window and take a little peek just to see if that red car was still there or if she had imagined the whole thing.
“You can tell me that to my face when I get there,” Angelo said drily. “Out of interest, what company does the man work for?”
She told him. It was one of the bigger practices in the city. Angelo nodded to himself; he knew a few people there. He would get the full story from her later but for the moment he knew what he was going to do. It was a bit of a shame that he would have to resist the satisfying desire to knock a little sense into the guy. His hand curled around the steering wheel as he cruised out of the car park and into the predictable chaos of the city.
“I’m going to hang up now, Rosie. Don’t be tempted to go outside to confront him, to take any calls if he has your number and phones or even to spy on the car. Just wait for me.” He knew the roads and streets of London like the back of his hand. He quickly manoeuvred the car out of the traffic and down a small street that hooked up to a series of back roads mostly used by wily taxi drivers. His body was adrenaline-charged. He could picture her cowering somewhere. He knew that she was a hell of a lot more scared than she was trying to let on because, had she not been, she would have handled the man herself. She certainly wouldn’t have confided in someone she now considered her arch-enemy.
His hand tightened on the steering wheel. He was doing nothing more or less than he would do for anyone. The fact that it was Rosie was nothing that should bother him unduly. Still, something inside him felt sick at the thought of her being terrorised. He wondered whether he should have prodded a little harder when she had been vague on the subject of running away from someone, escaping to the country. His mouth tightened. He couldn’t wait to cover the distance between himself and the loser sitting in the car outside her house.
* * *
Rosie sat and wondered what Angelo was going to do. An out-and-out brawl on the pavement? No. Angelo was a billionaire businessman. Billionaire businessmen didn’t do stuff like that. And yet, she could easily imagine him getting into a fight with someone. He was incredibly physical. The temptation to sneak to the window and peer outside was overwhelming, and for the first time that day the business of trying to work out how she was going to afford to live in the country was not sufficient a distraction.
One and a half cups of coffee had been consumed before she heard the buzz of the doorbell, and when she glanced at the clock it was to discover that almost forty-five minutes had gone by. Where? Thinking of Angelo? It had always been so easy to waste time thinking about Angelo. Was she falling right back into that habit? No. Special circumstances. But she leapt to her feet and was at the front door within seconds, yanking it open to an Angelo who looked as cool as a cucumber as he lounged indolently against the doorframe.
“What happened to the chain lock?” He straightened and stood back as she pulled open the door to let him in. When she poked her head past him to where there was no longer a red car parked on the opposite side of the road, he said casually, “What possessed you to hook up with a loser like that? At any rate, he’s gone and he won’t be back.”
Rosie didn’t know which of those statements to respond to first. “What did you do?”
Angelo looked down at her questioning, relieved expression and felt a surge of extreme satisfaction. The knight in shining armour. What man wouldn’t feel on top of the world at such an uplifting sensation? Helping a little old woman cross the road would have induced a similar high. Possibly. Of course, this was not a woman for whom he should be doing favours, and yet...
As he strolled into the house, already feeling claustrophobic at its size and shabbiness, he still couldn’t shift the feeling of pleasant satisfaction that had settled in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t remember having felt so good in a long time. It certainly made a change from the uniformly grim bitterness that had been coursing through his system for the past three years. Would he have obtained some release from that darkness if he had just done one or two little favours for passing strangers?
“I’m sorry I dragged you out here,” Rosie mumbled, following him through into the kitchen where he proceeded to sit at the poky table on a chair that appeared to be a couple of sizes too miniature for his big, powerful body. “You’ve come straight from work. There was really no need. Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Coffee? It’s just that you called only a few seconds after I’d spotted Ian’s car...”
She was babbling. She couldn’t seem to help herself. Now that he was here, the feelings of relief were replaced by that uncomfortable scary awareness of him, the same scary awareness that had led to her crazily reaching out to touch him. She stuck her hands behind her back and pressed herself against the kitchen sink, but she was all too conscious of those sexy, lazy eyes on her. It made her pulse race, her heart jump and scrambled her brains.
“You’ve already mentioned that there was no need for me to come,” Angelo pointed out. “I’ll have a glass of wine, if you’ve got some. Red.”
Relieved to be able to busy herself, Rosie bustled about, fetching them both a glass of red wine. When she thought about what the outcome might have been had Angelo not called at that precise moment in time, she felt tearful, shaky and quite unlike herself. With her back to him, she took a few deep breaths to steady her nerves, before turning round to hand him his glass of wine and then dropping into the chair facing him.
“Are you all right?” Angelo asked gruffly. “I promise you, he’s gone for good. How did you manage to get involved with that creep?”
In automatic defence-mode, Rosie opened her mouth to argue the point, but how could she? “A friend of a friend.” She sighed, staring at the glass and fiddling with the stem. “Amy thought that it was time I got a boyfriend. All work and no play and all that, and I guess I agreed with her. I needed to get out a little more, so I agreed to meet her friend’s work colleague.”
Angelo frowned. He wanted to tell her that she could have any man she wanted at the snap of her fingers. Why the hell go on a blind date? Didn’t she read of all those times when women got into trouble meeting men they didn’t know in places they weren’t familiar with? He recalled that that was the way she had met him, and maintained a steady silence on the subject.
“And?” he prompted, when she looked as though she had come to a grinding halt.
“And I met Ian. At first...at first, he seemed okay—chatty, you know? Interested. But halfway through the evening I began to feel a little pressured. I could see that he was pretty intense. Very intense, in fact. It wasn’t going to work but he didn’t share that opinion.” Rosie looked up quickly at Angelo’s closed expression. Like it or not, he was due an explanation. Like it or not, she remembered what it once felt like to talk to him, to be the focus of his undivided attention.
