He continued to look at her in brooding silence as she began expertly preparing the vegetables.
“So who else do you meet at these things?” He had only arranged that one, initial catering job. It had mushroomed into lots of other catering jobs and he had no idea who those jobs were for.
“Lots of different people.” Rosie shrugged. “Do you want to help me with these vegetables?”
It didn’t occur to Angelo that chopping carrots and peeling potatoes fell into the category of domestic. He was too busy speculating on these mysterious and unknown people who now comprised her social life.
“What sort of people? You can’t be too careful.”
“I think I’m fine.”
“And yet you’re the same woman who mistakenly went on a date with a psychopath.”
“One mistake, Angelo. It’s not very fair of you to remind me of that.” Rosie began chopping some cloves of garlic very quickly.
“I’m making an obvious point.”
“Which is what? That I’m not equipped to take care of myself? That’s a far cry from the nasty gold-digger I’m supposed to be, isn’t it?”
Angelo flushed darkly. “Is it a problem for you that I’m expressing concern for your safety?”
Rosie laughed incredulously. “Angelo, this is a quiet, middle-class rural area in Cornwall. Not a war zone in the Middle East!”
Angelo didn’t like where this was going. He didn’t like his own biting curiosity. He didn’t care for the flare of jealousy he felt when he thought of her being ogled by strangers. It would be a relief when he was free of her once and for all. Despite the fact that he called the shots, he sometimes got the unnerving feeling that he really wasn’t in control at all and that was a feeling he didn’t like.
He curved his hand at the side of her neck and bent to kiss the slender column. Her hair smelled fresh and fruity and he gently raised some of the strands so that he could nibble her hairline until she squirmed with pleasure.
“You’re tickling!”
“I don’t like to think of anyone coming near you.”
“Not even the pregnant lady who gave me the lift?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I meet people. It’s a social job. Rich women who want dinner parties catered for tend to be married to rich men.”
“Rich old men?” Still kissing her neck, he wrapped his arms around her before slipping his hands under her top, moving slowly upwards until he was cupping her small, perfect breasts. With her back to him, he pressed his body against her so that she could feel the hardness of his erection.
“Ancient and wrinkled.” Rosie flattened herself against him and quivered when he circled her nipples with his fingers. In a heartbeat, she had forgotten all her negative thoughts about him and about what he was capable of doing to her. She widened her stance, and on cue he dipped his hand under the soft elastic of her jogging bottoms, wormed his fingers beneath her underwear and then idly began playing with her.
She groaned softly when his fingers found the pouting bud of her clitoris. She was wet and hot for him. How was it fair that he could do this to her? The one consoling thought was that she could also do the same to him. He was as rampant as she was, and as impatient for them to make love all over again, as though they hadn’t finished making love less than an hour ago.
He eased the jogging bottoms down and, before they could pool round her ankles, he turned her to face him.
In one easy movement, he lifted her up and set her gently down on the kitchen table. She lay flat, barely noticing the hard surface of the wood under her. When she bent her knees, her feet were half-on, half-off the edge of the kitchen table, and when he divested her of the jogging bottoms she was spread wide like a ripe peach waiting to be savoured.
“I still have to cook,” she protested weakly, but her eyelids fluttered shut and she gave herself over to the intense pleasure of his tongue exploring, licking and rasping against her sensitised clitoris until she wanted to scream out loud. She kept her hands tightly clasped behind her back and fought against the urge to buck until she climaxed.
Angelo knew just how far to take her before pulling away and this time he took her to that place over and over again until she was begging him, pleading with him, to enter her.
When he finally removed his mouth to insert himself in her, he was as desperate for release as she was. He coiled his fingers in her hair and thrust powerfully, pushing her back slightly, repeating the thrusts until she could no longer fight the irresistible need to give in to her orgasm.
“I don’t want you looking at anyone,” he rasped in harsh, uneven bursts as he thrust one final time deep into her. “And I don’t want anyone looking at you! I don’t like the thought of it. It angers me.”
Rosie bit down her words. She wanted to scream out loud that she couldn’t imagine looking at anyone but him. She remembered a time when she would have had no hesitation in telling him that, in looking at him with openly adoring eyes. She had been the tough girl from the wrong side of the tracks who had turned to mush in his hands. Now, she kept silent, but she was breathing in small, gasping moans as he withdrew from her. She felt as weak as a kitten and it was a few seconds before she could even think of raising herself up on the table to shakily grope around for the jogging bottoms. Her top was still on. They hadn’t even managed to make it to fully undressed mode.
When she fully surfaced from her languorous, pleasurable stupor, it was to find him staring out of the kitchen window with his back to her, as rigid as a plank of wood.
Like her, he hadn’t fully undressed and his jeans were back on, though as he slowly turned around the trousers were still unzipped and unbuttoned.
She clocked the expression on his face and said hesitantly, “What’s the matter?”
“I didn’t use protection,” Angelo told her bluntly. “I don’t know what the hell happened there, but I forgot to take precautions.”
“Oh.”
“More than just oh,” he gritted.
“Okay! I know you think that it would be a disaster if I fell pregnant...”
“Disaster is putting it mildly.”
“But you can stop worrying. I’m one-hundred-percent safe.” And she was, but once again she knew that the time was coming for her to deal with this situation. How could he be possessive one minute and then dismissive the next? How could lover and stranger be so close to one another? How much did he really hate her?
“And I wouldn’t want a pregnancy any more than you,” she added coldly. “When I get pregnant, it will be with someone I want to spend the rest of my life with. Someone who wants to spend the rest of his life with me. So you don’t have to tell me that it would be worse than a disaster if the person to make me pregnant were ever to be you.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“WHAT DID YOU expect?” he asked irritably. “That I would be overjoyed that we forgot to take precautions?” He retired to the kitchen table and sat on one of the chairs, turning it to face her and dragging another over so that he could use it as a foot-rest. He waited for her to tell him that chairs were for bottoms and not feet and her failure to say the obvious was proof enough of her mood.
“You don’t have to keep reminding me. You said it once. I got the message loud and clear.”
“Are you telling me that you object? That you would actually want to get pregnant?” His voice was duly appalled although for the first time he wondered what she would look like pregnant. He would bet that she would show almost immediately. She was very slender. He squashed the inappropriate thought, angry with himself for even allowing it to enter his mind in the first place.
“I told you I wouldn’t and I meant it.” Rosie slammed the Aga door and wiped her hands on her apron which she then proceeded to remove. She faced him squarely, her warm, brown eyes cla
shing with his deep sea-green ones. She was bombarded with tumultuous emotions: anger with herself for still loving him despite everything; anger with him for the conversations he refused to have; the questions he refused to broach and the implications he insisted on making.
She wanted to hit him for being so brutally, cruelly blunt with her, yet she had to stop herself from straying closer towards him, from relinquishing herself to that charmed, irresistible zone that seemed to operate around him. Without trying, he could take a sledgehammer to her defences and smash them to smithereens.
“There’s a guy somewhere out there for me and that’s the person I’m saving myself for,” she added, because if he wanted to make his messages loud and clear then why shouldn’t she? Even if the message was a complete lie, because she couldn’t imagine that there could be anyone out here worth saving herself for aside from him.
Angelo was outraged that she should even be thinking along those lines when she was sleeping with him. Once again, he found himself wondering about those people she met in the daily course of her life catering for the rich and successful. Maybe he should get her to cater for him, if only to prove that when it came to rich and successful, he was as good as it got. Add sex into the equation and she wouldn’t be standing there in front of him, hands on her hips, yammering on about the perfect guy waiting out there for her.
“If I remember correctly,” he inserted smoothly, “I was that guy not a hundred years ago.”
“That was before you dumped me without hearing what I had to say and made off with my best friend.”
Angelo shrugged. “I’m not going to be drawn into a pointless discussion of the past.”
“Because of your stupid ground rules for this so-called relationship of ours? If you would just let me explain...” So the whole episode with the wretched pawn tickets might not show her up in the best possible light but she was beyond caring. She should have explained the situation from the start. But what was the good of beating herself up over things that should or shouldn’t have been done?
“I told you. Not interested.”
“Why not?”
“It wasn’t just about you selling the things I was stupid enough to give you, Rosie.”
Rosie went perfectly still. For three years she had thought that her silly mistake, her wretched stupidity in not coming clean with Angelo, had been the only ammunition Amanda had used against her. What else could there possibly have been? She could hear her heart beating like a drum inside her as she frantically tried to work out what he was trying to say.
“And we’re not going there,” Angelo informed her, his expression cool and remote.
“How can you tell me something like that and then refuse to elaborate?”
“It’s easier than you think.”
“It’s not easy for me!” Rosie cried. “You’ve opened up a whole new can of worms.”
“I didn’t open anything. I merely had the lot dumped in my lap, and I’m telling you that pawning my presents wasn’t the complete story.” He strolled towards her, unsmiling. “If you really want to pursue this,” he told her softly, “then I’m out of here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told you from the start that this isn’t about us rehashing the past. What happened, happened and there’s no going back to that place. This is about sex. Nothing more. If you can’t live with that, then I’m going to walk out of that door and you’ll never set eyes on me again.”
Angelo knew that this was precisely what he should be doing—taking control. Holding on to the reins of this situation. At odds with that certainty, was the sudden sickening, swooping feeling inside him at the prospect of her taking him at his word and showing him the door. Of course, this was no sign of vulnerability. He didn’t do vulnerable!
“Is that what you want?” he pressed, in the same low, soft voice, barely a murmur. “When the sex is still so good between us?”
“How can you be so...so...disconnected?”
“I deal with facts. The fact is that what we have here, the chemistry that’s still between us, is good and I want to carry on exploring it but without complications. If you can’t see your way past the complications, then there’s only one option left for us.”
The protests rose up in Rosie’s throat. There were so many questions she wanted to ask. But how would life be if he walked out the door? He would. There was no question about that. He might want her, but he wasn’t emotionally invested, and if he weighed up the pros and cons and the scales weren’t to his liking then he wouldn’t hesitate to leave her all over again.
She recognised her own weakness and hated it, but how could those questions ever be answered if he disappeared? If he walked away, she would forever wonder what else had turned him off her. What else Amanda might have said to push the destruct button on their relationship. Not to mention the glaringly obvious truth, which was that she physically couldn’t get enough of him. She had given up trying to kid herself that by sleeping with him she would somehow, magically, work him out of her system. That trick would work for him but not for her. Instead, she would be left with a gaping hole in her life. What was wrong with being greedy and just taking what was on offer for as long as it was on offer? What was wrong in not being a martyr?
And, besides, things changed. One day he might just break his self-imposed silence and provide her with the answer to yet one more question plaguing her. Wasn’t it worth it to keep this going, to hope that he might just open up and talk to her, give her the opportunity to defend herself? It might be his last parting shot but it would be worth it. For him, unfinished business would be done and dusted when he was sick of sleeping with her, tired and bored of bedding the one woman he had been prematurely forced to jettison. For her, unfinished business could only ever be finished when she had heard what else had been said about her, when she had had the chance to air her point of view.
“I need to check the vegetables in the Aga,” she said stiffly, lowering her eyes so that she couldn’t witness the flare of triumph on his face. When she sneakily glanced up at him, there was no triumph there and he was right behind her. Instead, he gently ran his finger along the side of her face. The gesture was so tender that she had to gulp back tears.
Angelo knew that he had won. The relief nearly knocked him off his feet. She was his. Could that be called sweet revenge? Strangely, the concept of revenge couldn’t have been further from his mind.
“Okay. So tell me all about these people you cater for. Do they pay the bills?”
“I’m doing okay.” Rosie moved away. With her back to him, she chatted about her days, about the meals she had cooked, about some of her quirky customers, about all the stuff she knew he wanted to hear. Inconsequential stuff that papered over the big issues at the heart of their relationship which he had no intention of dealing with.
“And you don’t miss the bright lights at all?” He hadn’t realised how much he enjoyed the way she talked to him, without any of the ingratiating subservience he encountered pretty much every day from everyone in his life.
“I yearn for night clubs and bars,” she said, reluctantly laughing at the outright lie.
“You’re welcome to dip your feet there if you want. Say the word and you can always come down to London for a night. I have a range of apartments you could use.”
Just so long as she didn’t get it into her head that sharing his apartment was an option, Rosie thought, reading between the lines.
“Of course,” he added casually, “you’ll have to take me along for the ride.” He began helping her set the table. He no longer had to think where to find things. He knew where everything was, from the mismatched plates which she had brought with her, to the impractical silver cutlery she had bought three weeks ago at the boot sale she had dragged him to. Who wanted to waste valuable time polishing cutlery? he had asked her. Wasn’t th
at an outdated practice that had rightly died a death a few decades back? She had ignored him.
“That might be awkward.” Rosie kept it light as she dug into the chicken and vegetables on her plate. Perfect; definitely to be tried out on her next customer in a week’s time. “What if I come across my ideal guy and you’re there lurking in the corner to spoil my party?”
Angelo grinned, although the effort hurt his jaw. “The same might be said for me.”
“Do you have an ideal woman?”
“I could think of a few winning traits.”
Rosie didn’t want to pursue this. She imagined that one of those winning traits would be resisting the temptation to pawn the gifts he bought her, whatever the driving necessity to do so. Along with not doing whatever she was supposed to have done in addition.
Angelo said lazily, changing the subject, “I’m considering hiring you to do some catering for me.”
“Because you think that I mightn’t be making sufficient money?”
“Because your vegetables are the best I’ve ever eaten.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Why so shocked?”
“I don’t need a helping hand.”
Angelo wondered how she would react if he informed her that she had already had one of those. “Roughly a hundred people. Can you rise to the occasion?”
“A hundred?”
“Too many? Some locals. Some important clients. Quite a few from my head office who deserve to be royally rewarded for the past six months of gruelling workload.”
Rosie’s eyes lit up. She began planning menus in her head. This vote of confidence was really significant because Angelo would never have thought of using her if he didn’t rate her food. He might enjoy sleeping with her but he was no pushover when it came to good value for his money. Ever since he had casually told her about where he came from, she could see that money was not something he ever took for granted.
A Deal with Di Capua Page 13
