The Threat of Love

'Don't you manhandle me!' Caro yelled, pushing him away. 'This man has knocked me about, dragged me through your shop, thrown me into this room...' She was so angry she couldn't get another word out, breathing roughly.

'Holt, what the hell have you been up to?' Gilham Martell demanded, frowning.

The detective was scowling at her. 'She's exaggerating, sir! I did it by the book. I asked her to accompany me, and when she resisted I merely held her by the arm! At no time did I knock her about—she's lying.'

'You had no right to force me to come with you!' Caro threw at him. 'You made a mistake. I am not a shoplifter, and I can prove it.'

'Do so, then,' said Gilham Martell, watching her, his brows knitted.

'I'm Caroline Ramsgate,' she said, staring back at him and waiting for that to register. She saw no change in Gil Martel's face; he just waited for her to go on, and after a pause she did.

'I am Fred Ramsgate's daughter.'

His face changed then, dramatically. The dark eyes narrowed and hardened, the mouth became tight and straight, his colour darkened. After a moment he repeated, 'You're Fred Ramsgate's daughter,' in a flat voice.

'Yes,' she snapped. 'And he's going to make you wish you'd never been born.'

There was a long silence, then Gilham Martell said to the detective, 'You can go. I'll deal with this.'

The man quietly left the room. The door closed and Gil pushed her firmly down into a chair and sat down on the edge of his desk, his arms folded.

'Show me some proof of your identity,' he said in a clipped, hard tone, and Caro opened her handbag and produced her driving licence, her wallet, a handful of snapshots of herself with her father in Rome at a recent conference. Gilham Martell only needed to take a brief glance then he handed them all back to her, frowning blackly.

'The minute I set eyes on you coming through that door, I knew I was going to have trouble from you,' he said, almost to himself.

CHAPTER TWO

It had been a fraught day for Gil Martell. His grandmother had visited him that morning, breathing fire and thunder, and making threats he didn't take seriously but which had left him edgy and irritable. He und

erstood why she wanted him to get married and start a family. Occasionally he wanted that himself—but he had never met a woman he couldn't live without, and he wasn't going to settle for less. Nor was he about to pick the first girl he saw. One day he would probably marry, but she had to be right; he was looking for a special woman, a very special woman, and he hadn't found her yet. When he'd said that to his grandmother, though, she had become even angrier and shouted that if he hadn't found a girl and married her by the end of the year, she was selling the store and leaving all her money to charity.

'Do that!' he had yelled back, resenting the blackmail, and she had walked out without looking back, leaving Gil in a raging temper.

Which was why he was in no mood to be gentle with shoplifters. The store lost thousands of pounds of stock to shoplifters every year, and, added to that, it cost a fortune to employ store detectives and electronic surveillance systems. If there was anything Gil really hated, it was a shoplifter, and he didn't mean some sick woman who was having a temporary problem which came out as kleptomania, he meant criminals who made a full-time business of stealing from stores.

Every year the problem seemed to get worse; they were losing so much money that it was a nightmare and something had to be done about it.

He had stared down angrily at the girl when she first fell on the floor at his feet. She was no beauty: straight brown hair, a very ordinary face, except for those eyes he could see through the fine strands of hair which had fallen over her temples—bright, angry grey eyes which glittered at him and were far from ordinary. He had absently noted their beauty, then told himself to stop wasting his time. The girl was a thief!

And then she had dropped her bombshell, and Gil found it hard to cope with the realisation of what had happened. His store detective had accused Fred Ramsgate's daughter of being a shoplifter!

'I'll deal with this,' he had wearily told Holt, and the store detective had stared, puzzled, then slowly left the room, no doubt quite unaware what he had done. He should read the financial pages of his newspaper, thought Gil grimly.

'This is rapidly turning into one of the worst days of my life,' he said aloud.

'And it isn't over yet,' Caro said. 'May I use your phone? I want to ring my father.'

She was still holding her documents and photographs in one hand; she laid them on the desk to pick up the telephone, but before she had begun to dial the number, Gil leaned right over to stare hard at one of the snapshots and she felt colour rise in her cheeks as she glanced at it, too, and saw that it was one taken on a beach in Florida last year, showing her in a brief bikini which left nothing to the imagination. Caro knew she didn't have to be ashamed of her figure—she might not have a pretty face, but the rest of her was OK—yet for some reason it made her edgy to have Gil Martell's cold eyes assessing her half-naked body, especially when he looked up from the photo to skim a glance from her head to her feet.

'What a difference clothes make!' he drawled, his brows lifting in derision.

She didn't bother to reply, just scooped up the photo, and all the other things, and put them away, her hands not quite steady and her face hot. Damn him! What was he thinking, giving her that mocking little smile? He had the eyes of a poker player, dark wells you could drown in without ever discovering what lay behind them. She stared into those eyes, then shook herself impatiently.

'May I make my phone call now?' she asked with ice in her voice.

'There's still something I'd like explained,' Gil said, quite unaffected by her coldness. 'What were you doing, loitering about in the store? They had monitored you for quite a while before you were detained, and you were acting suspiciously, there's no doubt about that. They didn't imagine it. You weren't shopping. You didn't buy anything. You hung about on various floors, watching the staff, watching customers. What were you up to? And don't tell me you weren't up to anything because I wouldn't believe it. You were in the store for a purpose— what was it?'

'I was checking you out,' she coolly admitted.