Keeping Her Close: In Christofides' Keeping / The Call of the Desert / The Legend of de Marco

Chapter Two

GYPSY knew she couldn’t run. The very thought was futile—as evidenced by Rico Christofides’ clear determination to find her. Why was he so intent? All Gypsy had to do was picture the woman from last night and the contrast between them was laughable.

Today she was in her habitual uniform of too baggy jeans bought from a local charity shop, layers of threadbare jumpers to block out the January cold, sneakers, a secondhand parka and a woolly hat pulled down low over her ears and too wild hair. He, on the other hand, looked every inch the successful tycoon, in a long, black and expensive-looking coat, with the hint of a pristine suit underneath.

She saw his slaty grey eyes narrow on her as she approached. No doubt he was regretting his impetuous decision to find her. And then her skin prickled as she saw his gaze drop to the pram she pushed, with a sleeping Lola inside, obscured by the rainshield.

His daughter—oh, God—could he know?

Gypsy immediately reassured herself there was no way he could know. Why would he assume for a second that Lola was his? She just had to take advantage of the undoubted regret he’d already be feeling at seeking her out and get rid of him. As soon as possible—before he could see Lola and guess.

Even if he didn’t guess she knew that once she told him about Lola he’d move heaven and earth to prove that she wasn’t his—which was what she’d seen him do before. And then, when paternity was proved, he’d set out to control his daughter utterly. Exactly as her father had done to her once he’d had no choice but to accept her.

She knew this because Rico came from her father’s world of powerful men who thrived on being ruthless. Men who dominated those around them.

As soon as she’d heard his name she hadn’t been able to believe she hadn’t recognised him. She even recalled overhearing her father speaking bitterly of Rico Christofides on more than one occasion: ‘If you think I’m ruthless then don’t ever cross Rico Christofides. The man is a cold machine. If I could beat him I would, but the bastard wouldn’t rest until he’d resurrected himself from the dead and ruined me in the process. Some fights just aren’t worth it, but I’d give anything to see his arrogance smashed…’

Her father had been obsessive, and the memory of that almost grudging admiration had blasted away any chance that she might have contacted Rico Christofides before today.

The best that Gypsy could hope for was that that day wasn’t going to be today, and that perhaps she could escape with Lola—go somewhere new, away from London—until such time as she could get her wits about her again and decide what was best for them both.

She was glad now of her plain and dowdy appearance. Rico Christofides must already be forming some escape route of his own. She’d help him along, agree with him that he must have the wrong person, and then he’d get back into his luxury car and be off, out of her life, until such time as she invited him back in, when she was ready to deal with him. With that assurance, she steeled herself and walked forward.

Rico watched the woman come towards him. For a second he faltered. Was this her? The woman approaching slowly looked impossibly plain from a distance, bare of any make-up or artifice. Pale. And her body was all but swamped in clothes that looked as if they’d just been dragged out of a skip.

And she had a child. Something which felt suspiciously like disappointment sent his brain reeling, and he clamped down on that emotion hard. A child was a complication. She came closer, and as he lifted his gaze back to her face he was already trying to come up with some excuse for having come all this way to find her, still doubting that it might be her. Perhaps he had been completely mistaken. Perhaps the name was a freak coincidence.

But then she drew closer, and all thoughts of children and complications fled as his body reacted with a helpless lurch of desire. It was her.

Despite her appearance, he could see the intensity of those huge green eyes now, framed with long black lashes, the delicate bone structure, her lush mouth. And her hair, with its irrepressible curls trailing out from under the tatty hat over her shoulders. It reminded him of the moment he’d first set eyes on her in that club. He’d been cursing himself for having gone at all, hating that he’d given in to weak restlessness, and then she’d walked in. Dressed in snug jeans and a vest top, completely at odds with the glitter of the too coiffed women who’d thronged the place. The expression on her face had been intense, as if she was being driven by inner demons, and it had resonated within Rico.

The firm swell of her breasts had been clearly outlined against the thin material of her top, and he’d watched, entranced, as she’d walked straight to the middle of the dance floor and started to dance with completely uninhibited grace. He’d seen plenty more beautiful women in his time, clothed and unclothed, but something about her lithe little figure, with its hint of sensual plumpness, had been more enticing than any gazelle-like beauty he’d ever known. With her tawny curly hair she’d looked wild, and free, and it had called to him on a base level too urgent to ignore…

She’d been exquisite. She was exquisite. Even though he could see at a glance now that she’d lost weight. Relief flooded him in a way that made him very nervous as she came to a standstill where he blocked the path. And along with the relief came irrational anger to find her living in such an obviously dangerous area. The anger surprised him; women didn’t normally arouse feelings of protectiveness within him. He’d noted the local thugs with distaste after he’d knocked and got no answer from her door, and retreated to his car to wait. They’d tried to intimidate him, but after one quelling look they’d recognised the danger within him and maintained a respectful distance.

Right at that moment he’d completely forgotten that he’d just considered making his excuses and leaving. That was now the last thing on his mind.

Gypsy decided to pretend that she didn’t know who he was, that she hadn’t just seen him again last night. It was cowardly, she knew, but she was counting on him wanting to make his escape from someone who looked like a bag lady.

‘Excuse me—you’re blocking my way.’

He didn’t move aside. Those penetrating grey eyes were fixed on her with unnerving intensity, and Gypsy could feel a flush of response rise up through her body as it reacted with dismaying helplessness to his proximity. As it was she was battling to keep back the images that threatened to burst free. Images of sweat-slicked bodies moving in desperate tandem, straining to reach the pinnacle…

‘Why did you run last night?’

His deep voice cut through those disturbing images. Her lie fell out with an ease that would have had her horrorstruck in any normal circumstance. ‘My daughter…I had to get home to my daughter.’ And then she cursed herself. She hadn’t denied that she’d run.

At that moment the rain started to fall more heavily, scattering the local teens around them. Rico Christofides gestured to her door, which was up a few steps. ‘Let me help you with the pram.’

Panic rose. Gypsy protested, not wanting him anywhere near her place or Lola. ‘No, really, I can manage…’ But even as she spoke Rico Christofides took hold of the pram and lifted it bodily against him, as if it weighed no more than a bag of sugar. She had to let go or it would have become a tug of war. The irony that Lola could become an object of a tug of war was not lost on Gypsy at that moment.

The rain was teeming down now, flattening his black hair against his skull. Gypsy could feel drops of water falling down her back. When he gestured with his head, she had no choice but to precede him up the steps to the front door. In the manoeuvring that was done to open the door and get Lola inside, with Rico Christofides hanging onto the buggy relentlessly, he was in her tiny one-bedroomed apartment before she knew what was happening or could stop it.

He placed the buggy back down in the pitiful excuse for a sitting room with a gentleness that momentarily disarmed Gypsy. She was a little stunned. With a brusque economy of movement he shut the main front door and came back to shut her ground-floor apartment door. Now he was looking around, and asked, ‘Have you got a towel?’

‘A towel?’ Gypsy repeated stupidly, knowing on some level that she was going into shock.

‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘A towel…You’re soaked through and so am I.’

‘A towel,’ she repeated again, and then, as if jolted by a stun gun, she came out of her shocked inertia. ‘A towel—of course.’ Get the towel, let him dry off and he’ll be gone.

Gypsy walked on stiff legs to the tiny bedroom she shared with Lola and opened the cupboard to take out a towel. Coming back, she handed it to Rico Christofides, trying not to notice how huge he appeared to be in the small room.

Immediately he frowned and handed the towel back to her. ‘You first—you’re soaked. Surely you have more than one?’

Gypsy looked at it stupidly, and then gabbled, ‘Of course.’ She gestured jerkily. ‘You take that one. I’ll get another.’ She tried not to let the mounting impatience she felt be heard in her voice. Why wouldn’t he just leave?

Coming back to the sitting room, she saw him drying his hair roughly with big hands. He’d taken off his coat to drape it over a threadbare chair, and his impeccable suit was moulded to his strong frame, making her throat dry at recalling the body underneath.

He turned to face her, taking his hands down, leaving his short hair sexily dishevelled. He glowed with vitality and health, making Gypsy feel pale and wan.

He frowned down at her. ‘You should take off your coat and hat…’ He looked around. ‘Do you have a heater in here?’

Reluctantly she pulled off her hat and started to undo her coat, knowing he was right; the last thing she needed was to get ill. She shook her head when those grey eyes settled on her again, expecting an answer, and flushed when they dropped imperceptibly to take in her shabby clothes as her coat slid off. She was very aware of her hair, which now curled in wild abandon around her shoulders, and could just imagine how frizzy it would be from the rain. She wanted to pull it back and tie it up. And she hated that he was making her aware of herself like that.

‘Our heater broke this morning. The storage heating will come on in a couple of hours.’

Rico Christofides looked comically shocked. ‘You’ve no heat? But you have a child—it’s freezing outside.’

Gypsy flushed with a mother’s guilt. ‘This is the first day it’s been broken. We’ll manage until we can get a replacement…’ She trailed off, suddenly thinking of the fact that now she was out of work her meagre savings wouldn’t be stretching to cover a new heater. As if she could explain she’d lost her job because of him. How irresponsible was she?

She looked at Rico Christofides and recognised his wide-legged stance with dismay. He wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. With extreme reluctance she finally said, ‘Can I get you tea or coffee?’

His eyes narrowed on her once again. The barest hint of a smile tipped up one corner of his wickedly sensual mouth as he recognised her capitulation. ‘I’d love a coffee, please. Black, no sugar.’

Stark, with no sweetener—just like him, Gypsy thought churlishly as she went into the kitchen to put on the kettle. All she could hope for now was that Lola wouldn’t wake up and Rico Christofides would satisfy whatever bizarre lingering curiosity he had about her and leave. Soon.

Rico looked around the bare apartment as Gypsy moved about the kitchen and he suppressed a shudder of distaste. Without her presence right in front of him his brain seemed to clear slightly. Once again he questioned his sanity in pursuing her here, especially when his eyes fell on the battered-looking buggy which sat just feet away against the wall. His sane impulse was to come up with some plausible excuse—even just ask her why she seemed to be determined to pretend she didn’t know him—but a greater overriding impulse was urging him to stay. Even if there was a child in the picture.

He could only make out the fact that her daughter was quite small, so therefore she must have had her since she’d been with him. And even though Rico knew he had no right to feel a surge of anger at that, he did.

Even just watching her pull off that damned unflattering hat and coat had scrambled his brain and made him almost forget the presence of the child. The quick movement of her small hands had reminded him of how they’d felt on him, stroking along the most sensitive part of his anatomy until he’d had to beg her to stop…He frowned. Why was she so intent on denying she knew him? And that night? Even if he had left the way he had, he knew it had been as cataclysmic for her too. The shocked look of awe on her face just after she’d exploded around him had told him that.

With no false pride he knew he was a good lover, but what he’d experienced that night with Gypsy had gone beyond anything he’d ever known before. Or since. It had shaken him out of his complacency. Was that why he needed to see her again? To recapture that moment? To see if it had been his imagination or something…more? He balked at that. He never wanted anything more with any woman. But that night with Gypsy had touched him on a level that had left him feeling an ache of dissatisfaction, and it had only grown since then, pervading everything around him and tainting the few liaisons he’d had with women in the interim.

He knew seeing her last night had thrown the fact that he’d been trying to recapture that fleeting transcendence he’d experienced with her into sharp relief. With that thought reverberating through his mind he heard Gypsy re-enter the room. He turned to face her and took the coffee she held out. She was avoiding his eyes.

Gypsy escaped Rico’s gaze and occupied herself by going to peek in at Lola who, to her relief, was still sleeping peacefully, her cheeks pink and her rosebud mouth in a little moue. Long black lashes rested against plump baby cheeks. Gypsy’s heart swelled, as it did every time she looked at her daughter, and at that moment she felt an overwhelming surge of guilt at knowing she was denying Lola’s father knowledge of her when he stood only feet away.

She quashed it down, telling herself that she was doing it for good reasons, and straightened up, crossing her arms defensively over her chest. To her surprise she saw that Rico Christofides had taken a saucepan from the kitchen and was placing it in the corner of the room where, to her dismay, she saw that he’d spotted a leak.

As he straightened up again she said, more caustically than she’d intended, ‘Look, what is it you want from me?’ The rogue thought that he could be there because after seeing her again he’d been overcome with lust set her mind spinning, before she realised how unlikely that had to be.

Rico Christofides calmly sat down on the two-seater sofa and indicated for Gypsy to sit down too. With a barely disguised huff, which was really more fear than impatience, she took the chair opposite the sofa. He took a lazy sip of coffee before putting the cup down on the chipped table.

‘I’d like to know why you seem to be so determined to pretend we’ve never met, when in fact we’re intimately acquainted.’

Gypsy blushed to the roots of her hair at the way he said intimately. Tightly, she answered, knowing it was futile to keep pretending otherwise. ‘I am well aware of the fact that we’ve met before, but I’ve no desire to become reacquainted.’

He regarded her for an uncomfortably long moment and then said, ‘You may not believe this, but I regretted leaving you the way I did that morning.’

A spasm of emotion made Gypsy clamp her lips together. She didn’t doubt this was just a smooth move—he most likely hadn’t given her a second thought. Perhaps he’d seen her last night and assumed she might be as easy to seduce again. ‘Well, I don’t. And you’re forgetting that you left your kindly informative note.’

His face tightened. ‘Contrary to what you might have thought after that night, I’m not in the habit of picking women up in clubs and booking into the nearest hotel for a night of anonymous sex.’

Gypsy burned inside, but shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Look, what do I know or care? It’s not something I gave much thought to.’

He sent a pointed look towards Lola’s pram, and said ascerbically, ‘Clearly I can see that perhaps one-night stands are a habit for you.’

Gypsy gasped in affront and sat up straight, hands clenched on her lap, ‘How dare you? I’d never had a one-night stand in my life before I met you.’

He arched a brow. ‘And yet,’ he drawled easily, ‘you were remarkably eager to throw yourself into the experience that night, Gypsy Butler.’

Gypsy’s heart stopped. He knew her full name—of course he did; he’d found her. He’d be able to track her down no matter where she went now. They must have given it to him at the restaurant.

He asked now, ‘So, that really is your name?’

Gypsy nodded, wanting him gone more than ever now, not liking the way he was making her feel so trapped, and said distractedly, ‘My mother had an obsession with Gypsy Rose Lee, hence the name.’ She left out the fact that for a good portion of her life she hadn’t been called by her birth name at all. As far as she was concerned that part of her life had ended when her father had died.

Forcing her mind away from those memories she said, harshly but quietly, mindful of Lola, ‘Look, what is it you want? I’m busy.’

He cast her a scathing glance. ‘Busy trying to get away from me, for some reason.’ His eyes narrowed on her, and she felt like a tiny piece of prey in front of a predator, with no escape in sight. ‘And at high cost—especially when I happen to know that your disappearing act last night lost you your job…’

Gypsy held in a gasp but said shakily, ‘How do you know that?’

His shoulder moved minutely, ‘The waiters were remarkably indiscreet and loud.’ Taking her by surprise, Rico Christofides asked then, as if it had just occurred to him, ‘Where is your child’s father?’

Sitting in front of me, she thought hysterically, and schooled her features, hitching up her chin in an unconscious gesture of defiance. ‘We’re alone.’

‘You have no other family?’

Gypsy shook her head, and tried to ignore the feeling of vulnerability his words provoked. Rico Christofides was grim. ‘Which proves my point, don’t you think? You slept with me and at least one other man soon after—for I can’t imagine that you had left a small baby in the care of a stranger while you were with me that night.’

Gypsy shook her head, aghast at the thought of leaving Lola like that while she went off to spend the night with someone. ‘Of course I didn’t. I would never have done something like that.’

Rico Christofides looked almost smug. She’d proved his point for him, albeit erroneously, because of course she hadn’t slept with anyone else since him. With panic galvanising her movements, making them jerky, Gypsy stood up with clenched fists at her sides. ‘Look, Mr Christofides, you’re really not welcome here. I’d like you to leave.’

It was only at his sharply drawn together brows and the way his head snapped up that Gypsy ran over what she’d just said and realised with sick horror its import.

He rose slowly and looked down at her, frowning, and Gypsy felt the horror spread through her when he said, ‘You know who I am. So you did know who I was that night?’

She shook her head, feeling sick, the possible future implications of her knowledge too much to consider right now. ‘No…no, I didn’t. It was only the next morning…when I saw you on the news…’

It had been just after she’d read his note and realised he’d gone. She’d seen the TV in the corner of the room, on a news channel and on mute. He’d obviously been watching it before he’d left that morning. To her utter surprise she’d seen him, clean-shaven and pristine in a suit, looking almost like a different person, walking down the steps of an official building surrounded by photographers and an important-looking entourage. Gypsy had raised the sound and watched with mounting horror as she’d discovered exactly who Rico was.

‘And yet you never contacted me once you knew…you still left…’ He said this almost musingly, as if trying to work her out. Gypsy knew that in his world women who wouldn’t take advantage of a one-night stand with a man like him would be few and far between.

She nodded her head vigorously. ‘Yes, I left.’ And then, far more defensively than she liked, ‘I got the hint that morning when I woke and you were long gone, leaving a note which made me feel like a call girl, and to be perfectly honest I have no interest in discussing this any further. I’d like you to leave now. Please.’

At that moment, to Gypsy’s utter horror and a spiking of panic, a cry came from the pram—which turned into a familiar wail as Lola woke from her nap and demanded attention.