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'Me?'
'I discussed it with your father and assured him that you would be quite safe.' He grimaced slightly. 'What I hadn't bargained for was that...'
'I would be stupid enough to fall in love with you?' Saffron supplied bitterly.
He turned to face her, his expression unreadable. 'Did you? I thought the name of the game was a little sexual experimentation; a little living before the cup of life was snatched away. No, what I hadn't bargained for was that you weren't the sophisticated woman I'd been led to expect from the press, but a half-baked innocent who didn't know the first thing about protecting herself.'
'So you did it for me?' Bitterness and disillusionment mingled in the words. 'By deceiving me, terrifying me and seducing me?'
'Acquit me of the last one,' he told her cruelly. 'You were with me all the way, however you try to disguise your motives now. Anyway,' he went on, 'I protected you as best I could without alerting the others.'
'All those trips into the town?' Saffron queried. 'They were to ...'
'Report back to your father, and pass information on to my back-up team.'
'Fellow members of the S.A.S.?' Saffron suggested, the whole thing becoming clearer by the minute.
'Yes, acting in an unofficial capacity and with the agreement of the Italian authorities.
'How did you manage to infiltrate
the gang in the first place?' Saffron asked. 'By becoming Olivia's lover?'
'No?' A muscle jerked in his jaw. 'But if I had done, would I have been any worse than you?' he asked roughly. 'And don't tell me you weren't hoping to persuade me to set you free, or that it didn't ever cross your mind.'
Suddenly they were two strangers facing one another across a deep chasm of mutual bitterness. Saffron knew why she was bitter and resentful, but why was he? Because her father had insisted on him coming to see her; because he simply didn't want any further involvement with her and feared it might be forced on him?
'What I can't understand is my father,' she began unsteadily, but Dominic cut across her words.
'I asked him to say nothing; and besides, like me, he believed you were "in love" with the idea of being in love; I told you, the enforced intimacy of such a situation causes strange things. What neither he or I bargained for was . ..'
'That Guido would try to rape me and I would fling myself at you because of it?' Saffron said quietly. 'Well, neither your nor Daddy need feel embarrassed about the possibility of a repeat performance.'
It hurt her more than she wanted to admit to know that everything that had happened had been calculated and planned for; that all he had wanted was to be avenged on his godfather's murderers, that she had simply been a helpless pawn.
'You do realise that your father thought you'd killed yourself when he saw the car, don't you?' he said flatly. 'To say nothing of what I felt.'
'Delight, I expect,' Saffron said bitterly. 'How embarrassing for you to be landed with my unwanted feelings! What's the matter, is Daddy putting pressure on you to make an honest woman out of me? Well, don't worry about it—I wouldn't want you now if you were the last man on earth!'
She turned her back on him, flinching in shock as he crossed the floor silently, grasping her arms and forcing her round to face him.
'Want to bet on that one?' he asked her cynically. The colour rose and fell in her face, her breathing suddenly constricted as he lowered his head and touched her lips with his. It took every ounce of willpower she possessed to resist the mad impulse to fling her arms round his neck, to hold him and beg him to make love to her, to love her as she loved him. Still loved him, she acknowledged—nothing had changed that, not knowing how he had deceived, not learning that he didn't give a damn for her, not anything, but at least she had enough pride left to keep her lips hard and unresponsive beneath the angry scorch of his, although God alone knew why he was doing this to her, unless it was some crazy form of punishment.
When at last Dominic raised his head his eyes were almost black and undecipherable. Saffron's nails had left tiny crescents of pain where she had pressed them into her palms, her whole body tense with the effort of maintaining an outward show of indifference.
'Are you going now?' she asked unpleasantly, marvelling at her ability to appear unmoved when inside her she was crying with pain and hurt.
'Not just yet.' There was silky menace in the words, something about the determination in his eyes that sent danger signals flooding through her body. She looked wildly at the door, but to reach it she would have to brush past him, and there was no way she was going to allow her body to come into contact with his voluntarily.
'You've still got something that belongs to me, I believe.' He looked pointedly down at the shirt she was wearing.
'This? You want this?'
'Not only want but am going to have,' he promised softly, and bent towards her. Saffron thought he was going to start unfastening the buttons and clutched the lapels protectively, eyes huge in her fragile face, but to her shock he simply grasped the edges and pulled roughly, buttons flying in one direction while the shirt gaped open, exposing her body to his gaze.
'You want it?' Her voice was shrill with temper and fear, as she slid the shirt off her body, driven beyond anger or embarrassment, to a pitch of fury she had never experienced before. Not caring that she was completely naked apart from the tiny lace briefs she was wearing, she rolled the torn shirt into a ball and flung it at him. 'Then take it ... Take it and get out, and don't ever come back!'
He fielded the shirt almost absently, his eyes fastened on her body, a look in them that made her heart begin a hurried drumbeat of spiralling panic.
