The Devil and Miss Jones

Just the thought of it took her breath away. It was true that was exactly what she’d done. She had felt that there was no other possible opening before her. But him?

Look at him! Did he look like someone in despair at anything? A man who had felt the need to walk, leave everything behind? A man who had lost…?

No, lost was the last thing he looked. Even with the drizzling rain misting his hair so that it hung damp around his face, the black strands whirled into crazy disarray by the wind, and the white cotton of his tee shirt plastered against the honed lines of his torso, the powerful ribcage, taut muscles, disturbed, or even dishevelled were the last words that came to mind to describe him. Strong, powerful, determined, totally in control fitted him better.

‘You can’t have!’ Disbelief rang in her voice.

‘And why not?’

It was flung at her and the flash of danger in his eyes held a warning that made her take a couple of hasty steps back and away. She had needed this sharp reminder that he was a total stranger and one she didn’t know whether she dared to trust or not.

‘But—don’t you have a job—a home—family who care for you?’

‘I have no home in Argentina now.’

It was a flat, hard statement, and it was only when it died from his eyes, leaving them bleak and opaque, that she realised there had actually been a light in the green depths, one that had made them warmer than ever before. And now she had driven it away with her foolish words.

‘No family either.’

‘I’m sorry… I didn’t mean…’ she began again, but he lifted his shoulders in a shrug that dismissed her concern. He deliberately switched on a smile but it was such a brief, on-off flash of a thing that it had no real warmth or even meaning. And that ‘now’ had had a special emphasis, one that made it plain the loss was of a recent date.

‘Perhaps we’re more alike than you’d think—both on the run, leaving our pasts behind.’

‘Is that really what you’re doing?’ She couldn’t see him running from anything.

But when she looked into those moss-coloured eyes she saw a shadow that swirled in their depths, giving them a look that she recognised. It was the expression that had been on her own face when she had looked in the mirror that morning and known that she was making a terrible mistake. That she couldn’t go through with the wedding to Gavin. It was the expression of someone who knew they had burned their boats and for whom life could never be the same again. And it was carefully masked so that only someone who had been through the same thing would see past the determined defences.

‘Everything?’

His laugh was harsh, dark, seeming to splinter in the damp-laden air like a glass that had been dropped on the stony, wet ground.

‘Take a look around you.’

The wide, vicious gesture embraced the empty, rain-swept road, the parked motorbike.

‘Right now what you see is what you get,’ he declared.

‘That’s all you have?’ she managed, on a very different note from the question she had asked before.

That dark head, the dishevelled overlong hair now soaked by the misty drizzle and clinging to the strong bones of his skull, nodded twice, hard, and undisputable.

‘That’s everything,’ he agreed. ‘A few changes of clothes, some bits and pieces in that bag, and what I stand up in. That’s it.’

‘But you… Why…?’ she began hesitantly but this time he shook his head with a touch of impatience.

‘I could ask the same of you,’ he said and she was relieved to see that at last a trace of lightness had crept into his voice, making it much less frightening, more reassuring. ‘But what would be the point? We’re just strangers, two ships passing in the night. So let’s leave the questions unasked. The whys unsaid.’

‘Not even names? If I’m supposed to head off out of here with you then you could at least give me a name to use.’

A shrug of those powerful shoulders conceded that point to her.

‘OK…’

He took a step towards her, pulling off one glove and holding out his hand to her.

‘My name is Carlos… Carlos Diablo.’

There was a strange break in the middle of the words, almost as if he had suddenly changed his mind and decided not to tell her. But he finished the sentence smoothly enough, looking her straight in the eyes as he spoke.

Diablo. The word spun round inside her thoughts. Diablo. The devil. Carlos the devil. That sounded so ominous. But it was just a name, Martha reassured herself. Nothing but a name.

‘And I’m M…’

Her tongue stumbled thickly on the realisation that she had been about to give away her real name. What if he knew who she was? About the money she had won—the millions that had been all that had attracted Gavin to her. She had no idea how long he had been in England; if he had read it in the newspapers. She didn’t want to take any chances.

‘I’m Miss Jones,’ she said, and winced at just how prim and restrained it sounded. But it would do for now. After all, she had no way of knowing if he had even given her his real name.

‘I am pleased to meet you—Miss Jones…’

He gave the carefully formal name an ironic intonation as if he was only too well aware of the way that she was concealing the truth from him, but quite clearly he didn’t care a bit.

The devil and Miss Jones. It sounded like a gothic romance. Or some blues song.

That hand was still between them, long and brown and strong and totally steady, totally dependable. Surprisingly it put Martha’s mind at ease and had her moving to put her fingers into his, feel them swallowed up in the heat and hardness, the strength and—yes and the comfort of it.

She was totally unprepared for the effect that just that simple gesture had on her. Her hand touched his, warm skin against warm skin, and suddenly it was as if she were in the middle of an electrical storm as sensation fizzed along every nerve. It was more than warmth, more than contact, and heaven knew she needed both of those. It was something deep and primitive, wild and dangerous and yet somehow essential to life. It swept away the chill that had pervaded her body as she’d stood, miserable and lost, at the side of the road and it threatened to splinter her mind into tiny pieces as she fought to get her much-needed control back again.

Suddenly Martha knew a crazy, irrational need to go somewhere—anywhere—with this man—this Diablo. And not just because she wanted to escape from all she had left behind her, but because she wanted to go forward into something new and different—and startlingly exciting.

When she looked up into his face she saw something change there too. A whole new expression suddenly came over his features, softening them, changing them in the most dramatic way. His eyes warmed so that their shadowed green now looked like the colour of the fields where the rainclouds had parted and let the rays of the sun shine through, illuminating them. And his mouth—dear heaven, how sensual was that mouth? It was firm and strong but the fullness of the lower lip gave it a sexy curve that made something tingle right through her body, particularly when he let a tiny hint of a smile curl at the corners just for a moment. His grip on her hand tightened, briefly, conveying a message of support and encouragement that she was anxious enough to welcome hungrily. She even let herself wonder just for one brief heady moment just what it might feel to have that mouth on hers, feel it caress her skin.

‘So now can we get on?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know about you but I’m getting tired of standing here in this wind, getting soaked.’

‘Of course!’ Guilt at the way she had kept him hanging around, the rain soaking into his hair and shirt, made her sound over-enthusiastic. ‘But how do I get on that—in this?’

Her gesture took in the long white silk skirt, sleek and clinging at the waist, hips, around her legs, with just the tiniest flare of material at her ankles. Her delicate veil, soft and flowing when she had put it on an hour or so before, now hung limp and weighted with rain around her face and head.

‘I’m not sure I can manage it.’

Why did women wear those skin-tight skirts? Carlos wondered. He was surprised that she could even walk in that dress, let alone do anything else. It was sexy as hell though, in the way that it shaped her breasts, exposing just a hint of creamy cleavage, the suggestion of seduction so much more enticing than a full-on plunging neckline. The silk then clung to the swell of her hips, taking the eye down the length of her body to the point where the flounces of material kicked out around the knees. Was there anything more calculated to emphasise the womanly shape, the curves that some—mostly other women, he suspected—might consider to be rather fuller and more lush than current fashion demanded?

Not him. He liked a woman to be a woman and that meant that she had to have a female shape. And this Miss Jones certainly was all woman.

‘We’re going to have to do something about that.’

She hadn’t expected to walk very far in the designer dress, he reminded himself. Only down the aisle… Just what the hell had happened to make her run out on her wedding? The need to know was like an itch in his mind though he didn’t feel that she would be prepared to answer if he questioned her about it. Not the woman who only gave her name as ‘Miss Jones’. So what was she so determined to hold back on? What did she have to hide?

And what sort of a groom would be fool enough to let a beautiful woman like this slip through his fingers when she had already agreed to marry him?