Page 21 of His Wedding Day Revenge

A look of self-conscious unease drifted across his face before his jaw tightened. ‘My temper got the better of me.’ The concession appeared to be dragged out of him against his will. ‘But that is hardly surprising!’

He had spent the last hour plagued by images of smashed cars at the bottom of cliffs, broken bodies, the lick of flames. No wonder he had lost it, but at least she hadn’t understood what he had said.

‘If you thought I was going to run you over, I thought I was going to run you over, which was much worse.’

‘You think this is about you driving like a lunatic?’ He dismissed the idea with an expressive Latin gesture.

‘I do not drive like a lunatic. I happen to be a very good driver! If I wasn’t a very good driver I would have hit you. Also, I was driving at a snail’s pace. But I get,’ she conceded, ‘that it must have been scary for you.’

He looked at her in utter astonishment. ‘You really think I yelled at you because of that!’

She shrugged. ‘I haven’t been here long enough to make you mad about anything else.’

‘You disregarded my instructions for your transfer.’

Instructions. Now that really grated. ‘Oh, my God, you really are a control freak. Your office sends out a memo and if it’s not followed to the letter you freak out!’

The provocative sound of her mocking laughter set his teeth on edge. ‘I presume you were trying to prove a point, though what point I can’t begin to imagine.’

‘I was not!’ She just resisted the impulse to stamp her foot because that would not help the mature and adult high ground she was determined to inhabit.

‘So you flouted my wishes, the arrangement I put in place for your and the baby’s comfort—’

‘You put it in place... Seriously, Draco, you expect me to believe that you even knew what arrangements had been put in place?’

He ignored the sarcastic intervention. To respond would have involved addressing the fact he had been personally involved in all the details of the arrangements for today.

‘It is three and a half hours since I received the information that you and the baby were not in the limo sent for your safe transfer,’ he said, emphasising the safe. ‘I was informed that you were driving yourself in a cut-price hire car!’

‘That’s just like you, to judge everything on its value.’

‘I’m judging it on its brakes, which does not seem unreasonable. Your actions seem at best childish. I have no experience of what travelling with an infant involves but I am pretty sure that it is not relaxing. Your behaviour would have been mildly irritating had this happened in England on roads you are familiar with, but this is very much not England. The more secure route here would have taken you three hours, the shortcut offered by your satnav two and a half.’

Her guilty expression said it all.

‘Have you any idea how many accidents have occurred on that road, how many foolish tourists have come to harm?’

She flinched but maintained a defiant attitude as he hammered the point home.

‘All right, it was not a good road.’

The concession didn’t cut any ice with Draco, who had spent the last two hours thinking of those blind corners and hairpin bends, his imagination going into overdrive.

He had been first at the scene of a crash the previous month when luckily no one had been seriously injured, and the guy at the wheel of the horsebox should have known better.

Draco knew every twist and turn, every blind corner like the back of his hand; he had cut his teeth and honed his driving skills in this terrain, but even he only used the shortcut in daylight hours, and then in a four-wheel drive.

‘You could have been caught out there in the dark.’ A fact that had lain heavy with him as he’d waited, feeling totally impotent, and as he’d watched the sun begin to sink, his anxiety had turned to cold fury.

He never second-guessed his decisions but he had regretted his decision not to drive out and intercept her. She could have taken the sensible longer road and there were several points on both routes where the driver had an option—the chances of him missing her were high. For all he knew she could have recently passed her driving test. He didn’t have a clue as he had never asked her.

What had he asked her?

You were never that interested in her life story, were you, Draco?

He pushed the tickle of guilt away. He had remembered that she was brought up in care, and he could recall thinking it meant that there would be no embarrassing relatives coming out of the woodwork.

His anger didn’t dissipate but it was now diluted by a guilty awareness he was reluctant to acknowledge.

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