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‘With cynicism like yours, Mr Cardinale,’ she countered, ‘I am not surprised that you hold that opinion.’
‘Giancarlo,’ he said, making those amazing eyes blink. ‘My close friends call me Giancarlo…’
He sat back to watch lazily the way her spine began to straighten and the glass came carefully down upon the table—most effective body language, he determined.
‘I’m an employee, not a friend,’ she asserted, glancing pointedly at her gold wrist-watch as she did so.
She was preparing to back off again. He took his chance and snaked his hand out to capture one of hers as it began to slide away from the glass. Like a butterfly struggling in his palm, he felt her fingers flutter, then go perfectly still.
‘You will call me Giancarlo from now on,’ he repeated. ‘And I will call you Natalia—you understand me?’
Yes, he saw that she understood very well what he was saying, but he also saw by the guard she’d placed on her eyes that she was never going to admit that. So he explained it more fully. ‘I don’t mind doing all the running when I am interested. In fact I rather enjoy it,’ he admitted. ‘But I mean to catch. So be prepared, mia cara,’ he warned with smooth, sensual emphasis, ‘for the time when I drink champagne with you. For it will not be to drown out my desires, but to inflame them. And you will drink and be inflamed also.’
Her cheeks were growing warm, her eyes darker. He watched her lean towards him over the table, and waited to see what she was going to come back with.
‘It is not going to happen, signor, so forget it,’ she said in hot rejection. Then she snatched her hand away and rose to her feet and, without another word, simply walked away from him.
He let her do it too! Natalia could feel him sitting there, burning mocking darts into her back as she wove her taut body between the restaurant tables on her way to the door.
Outside she paused for a moment to suck in some deep breaths of cold February air. Her cheeks were burning but her flesh felt like ice. And why not when she hadn’t even got a coat on? The way she was shivering had nothing to do with him and what he’d dared to say to her! she told herself crossly.
But she had to get away from here, she decided, taking a few jerky steps before she pulled to a stop again. No coat, she repeated. No purse either. When he’d hurried her out into the taxi to come here, she hadn’t given a thought to her personal items all still waiting where she had left them, in her fifth-floor office, which had been such a haven to her for the last six months—until Giancarlo Cardinale had decided to invade it!
Or invade her, she then amended with a squeezing sensation deep down in her body. An arm looped around her waist. She almost groaned in frustration. He stood at least six inches above her and was crowding her like a great grizzly bear!
Only he was no bear—grizzly or otherwise. He was smooth and sleek and tormentingly masculine. ‘I don’t want you to want me,’ she told him in a thin, tight little voice.
‘Too late,’ he said. ‘I already want you. All we need to do now is get you to admit that you want what I want, then we can place this affair on an even footing.’
‘I don’t have affairs,’ she threw back. And affair just about said it for Natalia. Not relationship or even emotional involvement, but an affair of the body. Physical, basic.
She thought she heard him huff out a sound of scorn, though she could have been mistaken because he was hailing down a passing black cab at the time. But even the suggestion that he was scorning her statement was enough to keep her tense and distant as he hustled her into the taxi.
Long, lean, and as lithe as hell, he sat down beside her, then proceeded to stretch his body so he could fish in his pocket for something while her body went into tension overload as she watched him, and the cabby waited for him to say where they were heading for next.
A piece of paper appeared. She recognised it as the same one he had been scrawling something down upon after his girlfriend had telephoned this morning.
If he’s intending to take me to meet her, she thought hysterically, then he really is as crazy as I’m beginning to suspect!
He relayed an address on the other side of the City, then settled back beside her while the driver began feeding the cab into the traffic.
‘I would prefer to go straight back to the office,’ she told him frostily.
‘We will, later,’ he replied. ‘We have things to do first…’
Which instantly shot her to pieces. ‘I don’t want to do anything with you!’
He looked at her, she looked at him, lightning flashed—and they fell on each other. It was that quick, that hot, and that torrid. Mouth straining against mouth, breathing fast and fevered. It was shocking, a terrible dive into absolute abandonment…
Giancarlo couldn’t believe this was actually him! But he wanted her—badly—and he wanted her now! And it had to happen in the back of a London black cab, of all places, with no privacy and no hope of taking it where he desperately needed it to go!
But her mouth really did taste of heaven, as his senses had been telling him it would from the first moment he’d set eyes on her. The sheer exquisite I-can’t-get-enough-of-this pleasure of it was completely taking him over. And while he devoured she let herself be eaten, denying him nothing—nothing.
She was his for the taking…
This shouldn’t be happening, Natalia was telling herself over and over. It made no difference. She loved the taste of him too much, the tight masculine domination with which the kiss was being sold.
He tasted of wine, and hot desire. She was dizzy on one and burning up on the other.
