Now was her opportunity to pull all the stops out. To dazzle and beguile him. He might only be here for two weeks, and he might only want her as his temporary lover—but he would see her looking her very best!
She pulled a black dress from her wardrobe, a dress she rarely wore—because it always seemed a little too ‘grownup’ for her. But tonight she wanted to feel grown-up—a real woman, in the company of a real man.
It was the simplest dress imaginable—a shift of jet linen—and the beauty was all in the cut. It had cost her a small fortune, and it showed—especially when she scraped her hair back into an almost severe chignon, which meant that her face looked all eyes, fringed with an extravagant lashing of mascara.
She wore no jewellery—the moonstones seemed all wrong, somehow, and she possessed no ‘real’ jewellery. With her long, slim legs encased in dark silk stockings, the final touch was a pair of outrageous little black shoes with kitten heels.
Giovanni sat waiting for her in the sitting room, his hair still damp from the shower. She saw that he had brought up his bags from the car, and was wearing a snowy-white shirt and some dark, amazing trousers, and the blue eyes were watching her every movement as she swayed into the room.
He pursed his lips and let out an exaggerated long, low whistle of appreciation.
‘Mmm,’ he murmured. ‘Bella.’
But if she had hoped for kisses now she was to be disappointed, for he made no move to touch her.
He didn’t dare. His swallowed down his desire. She looked absolutely breathtaking in a dress that would have looked outstanding in any company. With her hair off her face like that, she looked almost icy. Unapproachable. And again, the contrast to the woman who had straddled him in the shower minutes earlier was quite devastating. If he touched her he knew exactly what would happen—and what would be the use of removing such a beautiful garment from her body before dinner?
Something in the way he was looking at her made Kate feel suddenly unsure of herself. This really was the most bizarre situation, she thought. She had been more intimate with him than she had with any other man, and yet she didn’t have a clue what was going on in his mind. ‘You like it, then?’ she asked him unnecessarily.
A muscle flickered at his cheek. ‘You know I do.’
But still he kept his distance. She pinned a bright smile onto her mouth. ‘It’s getting late; shall we go?’
‘Sure.’
Outside, the evening sun danced golden on the river, and they began to walk towards the shops and restaurants.
‘Shall we eat first?’ he asked.
At least he had given her the choice. It seemed almost too clinical to go and stock up at the pharmacy while they walked side by side as if they were two strangers. Intimate strangers. ‘Yes, please,’ she answered gratefully.
He heard the relief in her voice. ‘And where are you going to take me?’
‘I haven’t decided yet.’
She didn’t take him to her favourite restaurant. They knew her by name there, and she had no desire for them to get to know Giovanni, too. They might jump to all kinds of the wrong conclusions and think that he was a proper boyfriend. And she wasn’t sure she could face the awkward questions which would be bound to arise when he disappeared from her life as suddenly as he had entered it.
Instead, they found a small Indian eaterie which had received rave reviews in the national Press. The place was teeming and a table looked unlikely, but the maître d’ took one glance at the imposing Sicilian and the pale-faced woman at his side and immediately summoned them in to a small table in one corner of the room.
It was, Kate realised as she sat down to face him, the first time that they had done anything ‘normal’ together—unless you counted that first, awkward lunch at his godmother’s. It didn’t help that her hands were shaking as she took the menu, but how could she not feel a trembling bag of nerves? He looked adorable. Outrageously good-looking and confident.
She couldn’t miss the side-looks which most of the other female diners gave him, followed by envious glances in her direction. I don’t want to adore him, she told herself. An emotion like that would be wasted on a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere past the bedroom.
‘I hope you like Indian food?’ she questioned conventionally.
His appetite, peculiarly, had deserted him, but he forced a bland smile. ‘I’m not familiar with it.’ The sapphire gaze captured her. ‘Perhaps you would like to order for me?’
She nodded, suspecting that he rarely let a woman take control. ‘OK.’ She scanned the menu with uninterested eyes.
She didn’t have a clue what she was ordering, even though she loved Indian food with a passion. She just jabbed her finger indiscriminately at the menu and hoped for the best.
‘We should drink beer with curry,’ she told him when she had ordered the drinks.
‘So you’ve changed your mind about champagne?’ he drawled.
She looked up from the menu, her heart thudding painfully in her chest. ‘We haven’t really got anything to celebrate, have we?’
Was it another sudden look of vulnerability that made him say it? ‘Except for the most erotic afternoon of my life,’ he answered softly.
‘Mine, too,’ she admitted helplessly.
‘So far,’ he added, and the soft blue gleam from his eyes set her pulses racing.
She stared at him, trying to see beyond the dark glamour of his looks and the lazy sophistication he exuded. ‘Listen,’ she sighed, ‘we can’t spend the whole evening talking about sex, can we?’
He laughed. ‘Well, we can…. I think what you mean to say is that it could become rather wearing.’
‘Thanks for the language lesson,’ she responded drily, taking a sip from the glass of lager which the waiter put on the table in front of her.
‘What do you want to talk about?’ he murmured. ‘You want to tell me a little something of your life?’
Again she tried to pretend that this was a normal first date, but her words came out in a stilted list of facts. ‘My parents live on the outskirts of London. One older sister. Her name is Lucy.’
‘And where is she?’
‘She lives in the flat below mine.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘So, two successful, affluent sisters living close to one another—how pleased your parents must be.’
‘Yes. They are.’ But she didn’t want to talk about herself—she wanted to learn about this man to whom she had given herself so freely. She looked at him curiously. ‘Your English is absolutely brilliant.’
‘There you go again,’ he murmured, recognising a deliberate attempt to change the subject. ‘Stereotyping me.’
‘I wasn’t!’ she protested.
‘Yes, you were!’ His faint accent became suddenly exaggerated and pronounced, like a caricature of a foreign accent. ‘You want me to talk like theese, cara?’
She laughed, but the stupid thing was that his voice sent shivers up and down her spine, no matter which way he talked.
She shook her head. ‘Tell me where you learnt to speak it so well.’
‘In America.’
So that explained the accent. And the fluency.
‘I lived there—for a year in between leaving college and starting work in the company,’ he explained, shrugging his shoulders in answer to the question in her eyes. ‘My father thought it wise to become completely fluent before I did so. It can be such a disadvantage to have to negotiate in a foreign language unless you are completely familiar with it. People can try to take you for a fool,’ he finished, on an odd kind of note.
‘I can’t imagine anyone trying to take you for a fool,’ she said slowly.
His eyes glittered. He wondered if she had any idea just how irresistible her mouth was. ‘If that was a compliment, then I thank you.’
‘Just an observation,’ she returned lightly and put her glass of lager down. ‘So what was life like in America?’
He sighed. He had worked hard and par
tied hard, and during the process had come into contact with many beautiful women who had made no secret of their attraction for the tall, lean Sicilian with the disconcerting blue gaze. But despite the attractions not once had he succumbed to any of their undoubted charms.
He had been dating Anna since his third year in college, and had recognised that in her he had found a woman who would make him the perfect wife. Through the many years which had followed, that certainty had never wavered. And yet he had thrown it all away for Kate Connors.
‘It was exactly as you would expect,’ he said coolly. ‘Very vast and very different to the land I had grown up in.’
She heard the edge to his tone and wondered wildly whether a getting-to-know-you dinner had been such a good idea after all. Were they destined only to be compatible when they were horizontal? How about the easy conversation she usually managed to achieve when she was in the company of an intelligent, attractive man? She struggled for the right, light touch, even as she despised her own eagerness to please him. ‘But you liked it?’
He shrugged. ‘It was a new experience—and experience is always useful.’
She gave him a frozen smile. ‘And is that how you categorise me, Giovanni? As a useful experience?’
He gave her question a moment’s consideration. ‘Not just as a useful experience, no.’ His eyes mocked her as he lifted his glass in a toast. ‘More as a rather beautiful and enjoyable one. Wouldn’t you agree?’
But it sounded more of a boast than a tribute, and Kate was glad that their food arrived at that precise moment, and that the ladling out of rice and chicken and lentils occupied their hands as well as meaning that she could drop her eyes from that unsettling gaze.
She wanted to ask him more about his life in order to find out more about the man, but she was scared of what it might reveal. His history would inevitably include details of his engagement, now broken—which instinct told her he bitterly regretted and blamed her for, at least in part. Because, despite his outwardly relaxed air, there was an unmistakable tension about him, a repressed kind of anger which he was only just managing to conceal.
She forced herself to eat a mouthful of curry, while he seemed to have no such reservations, eating his food with a sensual enjoyment, which was a pleasure to watch. And she found herself wishing that she had not been so compliant from the outset, wondering if she had applied her usual brakes something more enduring than a two-week affair might have come of it.
He glanced up to find her looking at him. She had barely touched a thing. ‘You’re not hungry?’
She made a play of eating a piece of chicken, then put her fork down. ‘Not really.’
‘You want to leave?’
‘When you’ve finished.’
He ate a last mouthful of rice, his blue eyes fixed thoughtfully on hers. Then he put his own fork down and reached his hand across the table to take hers. ‘You’re not having second thoughts, are you, Kate?’ he questioned softly, unprepared for the sudden jolt of disappointment as he imagined her saying yes.
Of course she was. But even third or fourth thoughts wouldn’t make her change her mind. Not now. She gave her head a little shake, even managing a little smile. ‘Of course not,’ she told him serenely as he raised his hand to call for the bill. It was a little late for that!
Outside, he took her hand as they walked slowly back to the flat, stopping off at the pharmacy on the way.
And Giovanni looked at her with an expression of bemusement lighting his blue eyes when he had seen her rise in colour as he had taken his wallet out to pay for his purchase.
‘Why, Kate,’ he observed softly, running a fingertip across her hot cheek, ‘you’re blushing.’
She wanted to tell him that this wasn’t the kind of thing she normally did—but what was normal any more? He probably wouldn’t believe a word of it, and why should he? ‘They know me in this shop,’ she said drily, by way of explanation.
‘Then they will know that you choose your lovers wisely,’ he returned with an irresistible glitter of his eyes.
And all her doubts were driven away at the first hungry touch of his lips once the door of her flat had closed behind them.
‘I want you,’ he told her unsteadily.
‘I’m right here,’ she whispered back.
The next morning Kate rang downstairs and had Lucy clear her diary for the next two weeks, and launched wholeheartedly into a fairy-tale, unreal romance.
It was her first experience of living with a man—though the term ‘living’ had a sort of permanence about it which didn’t quite ring true in this case.
She set aside a shelf in the bathroom for him, and cleared a space in her wardrobe for his suits. She learned that he liked nothing more than black coffee for breakfast, that opera pleased him more than any other kind of music and that whatever emotions he had—and sometimes she wondered—he kept them firmly locked away on the inside. For Kate had only ever seen him angry—or passionate when he took her in his arms. The cool Giovanni who accompanied her to restaurants and art galleries—he gave nothing away.
Two days after he had first moved in, he met Lucy.
Kate had been dreading the meeting, without really knowing why, but one look at the disapproval which Lucy iced at him was enough to tell her that her fears had been justified.
‘Your sister doesn’t like me,’ he observed after Lucy had said a stilted hello and refused coffee.
‘She doesn’t know you,’ answered Kate brightly.
‘OK, she doesn’t approve of me, then.’ He paused and looked at her. ‘And why should that be, Kate?’
She supposed that there was no point in lying. She sighed. ‘She knows about you, and the fact that you were engaged when we first met,’ she added, in answer to the questioning look in his eyes.
‘And your sister, being such a paragon of virtue, naturally disapproved, did she? What does she do for a living, just out of interest—other than glare at your houseguests?’
Kate suppressed a shudder at his choice of word. Houseguest. You couldn’t get any more coldly unemotional than that, could you? ‘She works for me. She takes and makes bookings, does my accounts, answers the phone—that kind of thing. And there’s no need to make it sound as though I have houseguests like you all the time!’
‘And do you?’ he drawled insolently, but the knife-edge of jealousy twisted itself sharply in his gut.
Bitter reproach sparked green fire from her eyes. ‘What do you think?’
He drove the jealousy away and forced himself to stay calm. ‘I’d like to think that this was a one-off situation,’ he told her steadily. ‘For you as much as for me.’
‘For your ego’s sake, I suppose?’ she questioned heatedly.
He shook his dark head. ‘No, Kate, more for my pride’s sake.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘And yours too, of course.’
‘Oh, you’re…you’re…’
He gave a soft laugh as he acknowledged her fire. ‘What am I, cara?’
‘Impossible!’ she declared, without really knowing why. Or maybe she did. Maybe her rage was directed more at the fact that he would never really be hers to have—other than in a particularly satisfying, but curiously empty, sexual sense. Angrily she turned away from him, but he reached a lazy hand out and stopped her, pulling her, still resisting, into his arms. She struggled a little. ‘Go away!’ she stormed as he bent to brush his lips against hers.
‘You know you don’t mean that,’ he murmured, feeling their velvet surface begin to tremble at that first contact.
‘Yes, I do…. Oh!’
He kissed her in earnest then, and she went under, only to gaze up at him dazedly when eventually he stopped the kiss. ‘That wasn’t fair,’ she whispered as she met the question in his eyes.
‘What wasn’t?’
‘You say outrageous things to me and then think you can just kiss them better!’
‘So what do you want me to stop doing, cara—saying the outra
geous things, or kissing them better?’
His cajoling tone coaxed her lips into an unwilling smile. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, and he tipped her face up to trap her in a blinding blue stare, a different kind of question in his eyes this time.
‘I think we’d better go back to bed and make up properly, don’t you?’ he questioned unsteadily.
‘But we’ve only been up an hour!’ Her protest sounded feeble even to her own ears, and the look of hungry intent on his face had her babbling at him like a tour-guide, watching in reluctant fascination as he smiled the smile of a man who knew he had won the battle. ‘And we were going to go to visit the Tower of London today, remember?’
‘It’s been standing there for centuries; it’ll wait for a few more hours,’ he told her arrogantly, and led her back towards the bedroom.
CHAPTER NINE
‘I THINK that’s everything.’ Giovanni clicked shut his suitcase, and turned to look at where she stood, silently surveying him, her face impassive, and he wondered what thoughts were going through that beautiful head of hers.
So far, at least, there had been no word or demonstration that Kate was going to miss him, after a fortnight spent almost exclusively together—save when she had made an excuse to go downstairs to see her sister to discuss work.
And Kate watched him with a dull ache in her heart. Intellectually she had known that this moment would come, and emotionally she had prepared herself for the inevitable pain it would bring. But the reality was far worse than even her worst imaginings.
‘What time does your plane leave?’
He flicked a glance at his watch, and then again at her. ‘In two hours.’ If it had been at any other time during the past two weeks then he might have tried to make love to her one more time. But this goodbye was turning into something he hadn’t quite anticipated, and to take her into his arms to lose himself in that mindless pleasure would, he knew, somehow devalue what they had shared together.
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