He’d been relaxed back in the deep leather chair. Now Luca leant forward and every nerve and muscle in his body slowly stretched to breaking point. The woman was, naturally, registering in some part of his brain but even so his eyes were telling him that he couldn’t possibly be seeing the leggy blonde with whom he had spent three weeks of unadulterated carefree pleasure.
It wasn’t possible. For once in his life, Luca was rendered speechless and, in that brief period, Roberto pushed an obviously reluctant Cordelia into the room.
‘Will tea or coffee be taken, sir?’ he queried without a hint of irony, even though he had been banned from fetching and carrying three years previously after he had managed to drop an eye-wateringly expensive vase, which he had been lifting from its podium to dust. ‘Some wine, perhaps?’ His watery eyes glinted.
‘Just close the door behind you, Roberto,’ Luca managed to say. ‘And no tea or coffee and certainly no wine at four in the afternoon. Thank you.’
He couldn’t tear his eyes off the woman who was now pressed against the closed door. He was barely aware of drawing breath. His thought processes had been temporarily suspended and the most he could do was take in the rangy body that had been his undoing for three sensational weeks.
She was dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a loose red and white checked shirt. Her long hair was pulled back into a plait.
Luca’s nostrils flared at the memory of that vibrant hair spilling over her shoulders, a tumble of gold and vanilla and every other shade of blonde imaginable. He recalled the electric charge that had raced through his body every time he had curled his fingers in its length, held her heavy breasts in his hands, nuzzled the soft down between her thighs and felt her writhe with passion under his touch.
‘Well,’ he drawled, lazing back in the chair, ‘this is certainly a surprise.’ And, he thought, an unwelcome one, never mind the trip down memory lane, which had the annoying effect of reminding him that he had a libido.
Luca was a pragmatist. He had known from the very first time he had touched her that what they had was not destined to go anywhere. Those three weeks had been enjoyable—no, that didn’t come close to describing it, but it had been life lived in a bubble. He’d been completely free for the first time in his life and freedom had tasted sweet.
But this was his real life and never the twain should have met.
Displeasure flared inside him, partly because she had shown up here unannounced and now he would have to firmly but politely turn her away, and partly because there was a treacherous side of him that was pleased at her unexpected appearance. He realised that he’d been thinking about her, in a dark, subconscious sort of way, his thoughts titillating and illicit.
‘How can I help you?’ he pursued into the lengthening silence as she continued to hover.
Of course he knew why she was here and he wondered how she would broach the inevitable conversation. It was disappointing that it had come to this but not really that surprising. People were lamentably predictable in the ways they reacted to money.
Even her, and if it made his gut twist to wise up to the fact that she was no different from the next person, then that was his deal.
‘Is it all right if I sit?’ There was an empty chair in front of the desk and her legs were like jelly. If she didn’t sit soon, she would end up crumpled in an undignified heap on the floor and she could tell from the lack of warmth on his face that he wouldn’t be offering her tea and sympathy should that be the case.
Indeed, from the expression on his face, the last person he wanted to see at all was her.
The man staring at her with cool, assessing eyes was a stranger. He bore no resemblance to the guy who had swept her off her feet and taken her to places she had never dreamed possible with his fingers, his hands, his mouth.
But then this guy bore no resemblance to the man she’d thought she’d find when she’d set off. He worked in a vineyard. He picked grapes. Then when the season was over, he travelled. He wasn’t an itinerant, but neither was he...this.
She’d known where he worked and lived because he’d told her. She’d expected a modest dwelling, maybe shared with his father. Something modest but pretty. One of those whitewashed Mediterranean houses she’d seen in pictures over the years.
But when she’d asked after him, she’d been directed to this mansion. A lovely old woman with a crinkled face and black eyes as lively as a sparrow’s had walked with her up the hill, with carefully tended vines falling away from them in rows down towards fields and trees. There had been no conversation. Cordelia didn’t speak a word of Italian and the old lady, smiling and friendly as she was, spoke no English, so there had been no opportunity to ask what the heck was going on and why was she being taken to a vast stone fortress complete with turrets and surrounded by cypress trees.
The heat had been sapping and the pull-along had felt as heavy as lead by the time they had trudged in silence up the hill to stand in front of the fortress, which, on closer inspection, wasn’t quite as coldly unwelcoming as she’d first thought.
There were shutters in the windows and colourful flowers spilling out in borders at the front.
And now here she was and if she didn’t sit soon...
She didn’t wait for him to signal the seat in front of him. She walked towards it, her troubled blue eyes skittering away from his closed, unwelcoming face.
He didn’t want her here and it was beginning to dawn on her why that was the case.
Luca Baresi wasn’t an
