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But I couldn’t run, or hide. I hurt all over now—the pain in my face, and my elbow, and my ribs, no longer dull and indistinct but sharp and throbbing as the adrenaline of my scuffle with Brutus wore off. I was so weary, my bones felt as if they were anchored to the floor.
I shrank into myself, with some childish notion that if I couldn’t see him—and the pity on his face—he wouldn’t be able to see me.
‘Stop crying,’ Dante said to Jude, his voice soft but steely. ‘And call an ambulance for your sister.’
‘Already done,’ Joe, the casino manager, interrupted from above me. ‘Hey, colleen, come with me; your sister’s going to be okay. Dante will take care of her now,’ he said.
My sister’s crying became muffled and distant, the casino manager’s soft Irish brogue comforting her as their footsteps faded away.
Dante will take care of her now.
I stifled the pang of something agonising under my breastbone at the words. How pathetic, to want it to be true. I wasn’t Dante’s responsibility.
I kept my head buried in my knees and began to rock, even though each movement made the pain increase. The yearning would show on my face and I couldn’t bear for him to know how much his kindness meant to me.
‘Look at me, bella.’ The gentle demand reminded me of the night before, the moment when I’d lost everything on the final turn of the cards. Or thought I’d lost everything. Why did this feel so much worse? Perhaps beca
use, even now, I wanted to cling to the kindness he was showing me. Wanted to believe it meant something, other than the obvious thing. That he pitied the pathetic creature I had become.
I shook my head, unable to speak, still unable to look at him.
‘How badly did he hurt you?’ he asked and I heard the suppressed fury in his voice. ‘And who was he?’ he added. ‘That he dared put his hands on you like that?’
I could hear more than just fury in his voice now. The underlying thread of protectiveness, and outrage, speaking to a place deep inside me which I had kept buried for so long. I couldn’t allow those needs to consume me again, the way they had when I was a little girl, or they might very well destroy me.
‘I’m okay,’ I managed. ‘Please could you leave now?’
I heard a rough breath—halfway between a sigh and a curse—and sensed him sitting on the floor beside me.
‘Not going to happen, bella,’ he said, the gruff endearment as painful as the aching pain in my cheekbone where Brutus had struck me. ‘You owe me a million euro, remember.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
EDIE LIFTED HER HEAD. That had got her attention.
Rage fired through my body when I saw the red mark on her cheek where that bastard had attacked her. Who was he? A boyfriend? A husband? A pimp?
I dismissed the last possibility instantly, knowing it was beneath me and her. Just because her mother had enjoyed the protection of a string of rich men did not mean Edie was willing to sell herself to the highest bidder.
Dressed in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt, her face devoid of make-up and her arms clasping her knees as if she were trying to hold herself together, she looked impossibly young and vulnerable. Too vulnerable.
I stifled the renewed pang of sympathy making my chest ache. The medics arriving stopped me from questioning her further about the scene I had interrupted. It was a welcome pause. I needed a chance to get a grip on the emotions rioting through me.
But as I stepped back to let them check her for a concussion and assess her injuries, it was a major struggle to remain calm and focused.
I’d come here in anger to demand she pay the money she owed me. To punish her for cheating me. And running out on me. Instead I’d walked in on a scene that had turned my fury with her—a fury which I knew now had been about a lot more than just the money—into something a great deal more complicated.
Seeing that bastard with his hands on her had ignited not just my natural rage—against any man who would treat a woman in such a way—but something more personal. As my fist had connected with the bastard’s jaw and I’d felt the satisfying crunch of bone on bone it hadn’t been the instinct to protect a being more vulnerable than myself, but rather the spark of something dark and possessive—a spark that had been ignited the night before, the moment I had touched my lips to hers and felt her livewire response to my kiss—that had been driving me.
I was forced to acknowledge that it was that possessive instinct too which had propelled me all the way to Northern France from Monaco this afternoon in the first place.
After all, I’d never felt the need to track down a fraudster personally before.
As she answered the paramedic’s questions, I struggled to even my breathing and compose myself. The bright afternoon light flooded through dusty windows and I noticed for the first time the complete lack of furniture in the room, which must once have been some sort of library. Paint peeled from the woodwork and the faded wallpaper on the ceiling had old stains where water had leaked through from the floor above. As I studied the rundown state of the room’s décor, I recalled the generally dilapidated state of the stonework on the building’s exterior and the overgrown gardens which I had noticed when the helicopter had touched down outside.
The place was virtually derelict. The opposite of what I’d expected to find when I’d been obsessing about confronting Edie on her home turf in the helicopter ride from Monaco.
I’d convinced myself, after she’d run out on me and Joe had alerted me to the fraudulent bank draft, that she was a spoilt, indulged young woman who didn’t like to pay her dues. It was a picture she’d deliberately helped to create during our evening together. But the sorry state of her mother’s chateau told a very different story.
