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‘How many reasons do you need?’
‘This is very entertaining. Feel free to speak your mind.’
‘All right. One, you’re too slick for me. Two, you look filthy rich. Three, you have to be at least ten years older than me, and I can’t imagine that we’d have a single thing in common.’
‘Are you always this…sharp-tongued?’
She picked up on the deliberate hesitation, recognised the coolness that had quenched the vibrancy in his extraordinary eyes and felt herself shrivel up inside, but still she said, ‘No, you bring out the best in me.’
‘Instant loathing?’
She shivered, and then, ashamed of her disturbingly unfamiliar need to continually attack him, she decided to be honest. ‘No, I fancied you like mad the minute I laid eyes on you, but it’s not something I want to follow up,’ she admitted, suddenly finding herself alarmingly short of breath. ‘By
e. Have a nice birthday!’
The following afternoon, Gianni was waiting for her to come home from college. Having tripped over him on the landing, Lisa was bending over backwards to entertain him in Milly’s absence.
‘How on earth did you find out where I lived?’
‘Bribed the sleazebag who owns the strippergram agency. He told me your name was Lisa. Then I met Lisa and she explained who you really were.’ Gianni angled a slanting smile over her—a smile that had megawatt charisma.
‘You shouldn’t have come here—’
‘Dio mio…what did you expect? You think I’m about to walk in the opposite direction when you’re feeling the same way I feel?’
‘Tell me one thing we have in common?’ Milly invited.
‘Sex.’
‘When you think of something else, I’ll have dinner with you,’ Milly told him, hot-cheeked.
Gianni stuck a swift foot in the door she was trying to close on him. ‘Quick tempers.’
‘You are so persistent!’
‘OK.’ Strong jawline squaring, he shrugged with eye-catching elegance. ‘I’m out of here.’
She let him get as far as the floor below, and then, stabbed by the sudden realisation that she would never see him again, she darted back out to the landing and hung over the banister to call, ‘Just dinner…all right?’
‘What about breakfast?’ Gianni asked without hesitation.
‘No chance, but I appreciate you being this honest about your intentions. Honesty is very important to me, even if the truth isn’t always welcome. So I should tell you now that I’m not into casual sex and I’m very romantic.’
Gianni sighed softly. ‘One of us is set to crash into a solid brick wall.’
‘It won’t be me,’ Milly told him gently. ‘I couldn’t possibly fall in love with someone like you.’
‘Accidenti…why would I want you to fall in love with me?’ Gianni demanded incredulously. ‘My sole interest in you is—’
‘Shut up before you talk yourself out of a dinner date,’ Milly advised.
Emerging from the frighteningly fresh hold of those memories back into the present, Milly blinked and looked around herself. She was still standing on the gallery. Breathing in deep, shaken by the tremendous pull of the past, she walked slowly towards the stairs.
As she descended the sweeping staircase Gianni strode out into the wonderful Georgian hall below. Instantly she felt her tender heart quake like a stupid jelly, as if three years hadn’t passed, as if her brain was forever locked in time, incapable of moving on and healing. As she stilled two steps up from the foot of the stairs, so that for once she was at his level, her hands closed into defensive fists by her sides.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘GIANNI…’ Milly breathed, and she could hardly get his name past her dry lips.
