“What will it take to convince you that I am not a madman who rides the streets of Manhattan in search of female victims but am rather a man who would not rest easy if he drove off and abandoned you?”
“But I am h-ha-happy to be ab-ab-ab…”
Another step brought h
im under the glow of the streetlight.
Now she could see his face, and it told her all she needed to know.
The stranger was definitely bent on something terrible.
Only the devil in disguise could be such a hunk of gorgeous, sexy, heart-stoppingly beautiful male.
CHAPTER THREE
Marco Santini looked at the woman and warned himself not to laugh again.
She was glaring at him like a cornered tigress, still clutching what was obviously a lipstick.
No, he definitely would not laugh.
Besides, the situation was not really amusing. Nothing about his day had been amusing. Why not add this to the list?
The woman was an appalling sight.
Hair plastered to her head, long strands of it obscuring much of her face. Dress pasted to her body. For reasons that made no sense she was also barefoot; her shoes lay near her feet like small, drowned creatures.
His gaze moved back to her face.
She had him pegged as a monster who snatched female victims off the streets.
As far as he was concerned, he was the more likely victim here, first of Jessalyn, who’d been whining over diamond bracelets and raffles gone wrong as the Mercedes rolled through the rain-soaked streets, and now of a situation that showed all the earmarks of deteriorating into a confrontational disaster.
Moments ago, he’d been silently counting down the minutes until Jessalyn was delivered to her door.
All he had to do, he’d told himself, was endure her company a little longer.
If only Charles drove faster…
But he had not suggested it.
Charles had been driving at a reasonable speed considering the weather. Marco knew that. They had been together for a long time and he trusted Charles’s judgment even though he knew that if he had been behind the wheel himself, driving his Ferrari…
And then he had warned himself not to think about that.
The very first thing that had gone wrong with his day was that the Ferrari, six months old and the current love of his life, had been stolen straight out of a garage filled with an endless array of high tech security gadgets. Cameras. Motion detectors. Infrared light beams.
“James Bond has nothing on us,” the garage manager had said smugly when Marco inspected the place.
Never mind.
One of life’s lessons was that you had to deal with what it handed you, and what it had handed him tonight was to find himself a passenger in his chauffeured Mercedes instead of behind the wheel of the Ferrari, with Jessalyn beside him babbling on and on about the Cartier bracelet she had not won at the charity raffle, or rather, the bracelet he had not won for her even though he’d bought fifty tickets at a thousand dollars each in a desperate hope of shutting her up.
In fact, when he’d first heard Charles mutter something very un-Charleslike under his breath, he’d half thought his driver had finally become as irritated by her complaints as he was.
Then he’d realized that Charles would never do such a thing. And that he was slowing the limo and peering into his rearview mirror.
“Is there a problem?” Marco had said.