Lee Wilkinson - First-Class Seduction

Refusing to consider why the unmitigated relief she should have felt was somehow mingled with a kind of unreasonable depression, she wondered how long he would keep calling at her empty flat before he finally got the message that she had no intention of ever seeing him again.

Probably not long. He wasn’t the sort of man who would waste his time.

Despite the warmth of the sun she shivered, and, making an effort to banish the image of that strongboned, ruthless face from her mind, began to eat her breakfast.

As soon as she’d finished the fresh rolls and fruit pressed on her by Signora Paplucci, the plump, smiling wife of the mustachioed custode di casa, Bel tried again to ring her father but no one answered.

She’d also tried to phone him when she’d arrived at the flat the previous evening, only to find she was unable to get through because of a fault on the line.

By the time Bel was ready to go out, wearing a silky skirt and button-through camisole top with spaghetti straps, it was almost mid-morning.

Armed with camera and a map, she made her way down the cool marble steps, across the bare dimness of the entrance hall and out into the bright oven-heat of Rome.

Being Sunday, the shops on the Via Cordotti were closed, and the picturesque buildings, with their peeling shutters and flaking ochre stucco, had a deserted air.

A bus-load of camera-hung tourists, already pink and perspiring in the hot sun, strolled along the narrow pavements while pairs of local youths, riding motor scooters that sounded like enraged hornets, turned the smooth cobblestones of the roadway into a racetrack.

Bel was enjoying the colourful scene when a sudden wrench on the strap of her shoulder-bag made her stumble and fall, grazing her elbows and knees and sending her sunglasses flying.

Scrambling up, dazed and dazzled, she glimpsed a tall, dark-haired man dressed in fawn trousers and a two-tone shirt sprinting after the last pair of scooter riders, who were making off with her bag.

As he drew level he seized the man by the scruff of the neck and hauled him off the scooter, which, after one drunken swerve, kept going.

The ensuing scuffle was brief but fierce. A moment later a blow to the jaw had sent the burly youth sprawling on the pavement and the tall dark man was returning with her bag. A man who was no stranger.

‘Are you all right?’ Andrew demanded urgently.

When she merely goggled at him, he repeated the question, stooping to retrieve her sunglasses and hand them, and her bag, to her.

Somehow she found her voice and stammered, ‘Y-yes, I’m quite all right,’ just as rapidly retreating footsteps indicated that the youth was making good his escape.

The passersby who had seen what was taking place and had stopped to stare began to walk on, and the next second it was as if nothing untoward had happened.

His eyes travelling over her with the proprietorial air that was becoming only too familiar, Andrew remarked, ‘You’ve cut your knee.’

Removing a spotless white handkerchief from his trouser pocket, he crouched on his haunches to stanch the warm trickle of blood that was running down her slim tanned leg.

Staring at the top of his dark head, she wondered with a kind of stunned disbelief what he was doing in Rome, and how, in a city of over three million inhabitants, she’d been unlucky enough to run into him.

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