Bittersweet Passion

‘Lost much?’ one of them asked conversationally.

She rammed down a shuddering sob. ‘Everything,’ she muttered, and it was true. All of Max’s letters and every penny she had religiously saved over the past year had been in that bag.

At the station she was pressed into giving Dane’s name as next of kin. Making a statement took very little time, for she hadn’t seen their faces, but she was amazed by the number of items she recalled being in her handbag.

‘Is someone collecting you, Miss Fletcher?’ the young policewoman asked at the end of it all. ‘You’ll be taken back to your hotel if there isn’t.’

While she was under the impression that she was waiting for a lift, Dane strode into the room like the wrath of God. And yet she was instantly cheered by the sight of him. He stood there for a split second, magnificent blue, blue eyes smouldering over her crumpled and filthy appearance in disbelief. A muscle jerked tight at the edge of his hardset mouth. ‘God, you’re not fit to be let out!’ he grated, extending an imperious hand. ‘You are finished with her? Good.’

‘But … but I don’t understand … how did you find …?’

‘They called me.’ He trailed her out of the police station as though she had been in there for committing a crime, and practically lifted her into the car. ‘Were you raped?’ he gritted.

She blinked dazedly.

Dane flicked the ripped shoulder of her jacket and searched her huge, darkened eyes. ‘I’m asking you …’ he began harshly.

She bent her head. ‘No … no, I wasn’t. They just took my bag,’ she whispered.

Dane thrust a glass into her shaking hand. ‘Drink it,’ he advised angrily. ‘I could kill you! I go to all that trouble to put you into Hannah’s capable hands, and what do you do? The minute her back’s turned you go sneaking off to one of the toughest areas in this city and get yourself mugged!’

‘I don’t think I want that.’ She pushed the glass blindly back at him. ‘I got thumped at the back of the head,’ she confided gingerly. ‘I doubt if alcohol would make me feel any better.’

Dane swore venomously. ‘I’ll get a doctor when I get you home.’

His fury wasn’t bothering her. She understood that it was a release for the anxiety he must have been under since the police contacted him, and ironically his arrival had had the most remarkably soothing effect upon her. She felt safe and secure. Max would have been highly embarrassed by the necessity of collecting her in such a state from a police station. Dane took everything in his stride.

‘I don’t need a doctor.’

‘I’ll decide that,’ Dane contradicted with rough emphasis. ‘You might have been badly hurt.’

Her head was pounding unmercifully and she gave way to the tears she had managed to wall back earlier. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed.

‘So you should be. When I lifted that phone and heard you’d been attacked …’ He slowly breathed out. ‘I thought you might have been sexually assaulted.’

He sighed and abruptly folded an arm round her. Claire tried to gulp back her tears. ‘I’ll get mud all over you.’

He pulled her against him regardless and her cheek was buried against his silk shirt-front, next to the solid, reassuring beat of his heart. Enveloped in the husky, familiar scent of him, several stray and quite inexplicable sensations assailed her. Her nipples tightened uncomfortably beneath her clothing and her hands curled inwards on themselves on a very powerful urge to cling to him. She stiffened defensively and immediately he withdrew his arm, tucking a hanky into her fingers and pushing her hair back off her forehead. ‘You’ll feel better once you lie down. I’m taking you back to the apartment. You don’t want to be alone in a hotel tonight,’ he told her. ‘But first I want to know what the hell you were doing in that locality. Did you get lost? It’s a ghetto, haunted by the type that hit on easy victims.’

Ruefully she pictured the likely reception she would receive if she told him that Max lived on that estate. It would give him a totally wrong impression of Max. Plenty of respectable people would be living there, but she doubted if Dane would see it that way. Cocooned as he was by wealth and biased as she already knew him to be against Max, Dane would only downgrade the man she loved further.

‘Well, Claire?’

She studied the dirty smears on his once pristine handkerchief. ‘I was trying to look up an old schoolfriend but I must have got the address wrong.’

‘You should have asked for the car.’

‘It would probably have been stripped to the chassis,’ she joked bravely. ‘Are you sure it isn’t inconvenient for me to come home with you? Did I interrupt a business meeting or anything? Hannah said you often worked until late.’

He met her troubled gaze wryly. ‘No and no, it’s not inconvenient.’

The limousine eventually rolled into an underground car park and Dane helped her out. For some reason that had her eyes swimming with tears again. He was treating her like Dresden china when she had made a thorough nuisance of herself, and she was well aware he had put her into a hotel to keep her out from beneath his feet.

‘You’re in shock,’ he drawled in the lift. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ In the bright, artificial light he bent down and touched her throat, his dark brows drawing together. ‘You’ve got a tiny cut there. What happened?’

She relived the cold nip of the knife against her shrinking flesh and shuddered. ‘He had a knife.’

His eyes blazed down at her. ‘I ought to shake you to bits, Claire. And where are your glasses? I believe vanity made you leave them off this morning but surely you wore them going out alone,’ he emphasise