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Deactivating its state-of-the-art security, he walked round to the passenger door and opened it for her. She didn’t say a single word but just folded herself into the plush leather seat and waited for him to close the door.
She was staring directly ahead when he climbed in beside her. He adjusted the seat to accommodate his long legs, clipped home his seat belt, and then fired the engine. The car had been parked front end out so all he had to do was put it in gear and they were moving with a low purring growl that made his teeth clench with pleasure because, no matter what Natalia felt about this car, he was Italian, and his Italian blood revelled in that sound like no other.
Except the purr of a woman, he ruefully considered. Then he shut down that line of thinking before it took him places he couldn’t afford to go right now…
Outside in the street it had started raining. Natalia sat watching heavy sheets of the stuff slating down from a leaden sky, and knew she would have been soaked through to the skin before she’d walked ten feet in this kind of downpour.
Which made rather a mockery out of her stiff-faced bid for independence earlier, she acknowledged. Doing it her own way, she would have arrived home looking like a drowned rat and feeling more miserable than she already did!
‘Where to?’ he asked.
‘Chelsea,’ she told him shortly. Then, because she was beginning to feel the unfair sting of her own churlish manner, especially when she remembered that he had arrived at his apartment looking tired, yet here he was, driving her home in weather not fit for dogs, she lightened her tone to add, ‘It’s on the other side of the river. If you—’
‘I know where Chelsea is,’ he cut in levelly.
She floundered into silence again, realising she should have remembered that he was quite familiar with London. Edward had told her once that Giancarlo had worked here in the City for a few years when he’d been just beginning to strike out on his own ‘playing the hot-shot City broker and cutting quite a dash with the ladies,’ Edward had fondly described the Giancarlo of those days. But then, Edward was deeply fond of his wife’s younger brother, she recalled heavily. Which made this other situation that was so quickly developing all the more impossible.
Oh, Edward, she thought sighingly. What am I going to do? What am I going to do—?
No answer came back because Edward wasn’t here, but she was and so was Giancarlo, driving together, through a rainy London evening in a car that turned heads even in this kind of weather—and with an atmosphere inside the car that sang with sexual tension, even though they were both trying to pretend it wasn’t there.
She began feeding him directions once they were nearing their destination, her voice sounding huskily intimate, even to her. The rain stopped quite suddenly as they turned into her street. She directed him to a parking spot by the kerb outside her house and inside she was beginning to tremble slightly as the car stopped and the engine died.
For it was, she realised, the beginning of yet another dangerous situation: the point where she said a polite thank-you and goodnight—or invited him inside.
‘Nice house,’ he commented, pre-empting her need to say anything. He was peering out of the car at the row of tiny cottages. ‘It must cost you something to live here,’ opined the astute banker in him. ‘How many of you share, to rent a place like this?’
Casually said, merely curious more than anything, but still Natalia felt herself stiffening as a hint of warning went chasing down her spine. ‘I don’t rent,’ she answered warily. ‘And I don’t share…’
She doesn’t rent, and she doesn’t share, Giancarlo was slowly repeating to himself, and suddenly felt himself going cold. He wasn’t a fool, he knew the price of property in London, especially in a fashionable area like this. So how did a young woman trained as nothing more than a secretary, earning the salary he knew Natalia Deyton earned, afford to live here?
The answer came back like a stab in the chest. She couldn’t afford it—but Edward could.
He was sitting here with another man’s mistress, staring at another man’s love-nest! And for a terrible moment he thought he was going to be sick!
Edward in there, with Natalia. Edward in there, cheating on his wife—cheating on Giancarlo’s sister—with Natalia! His eyes began to burn into the brick frontage as if he could see every salacious thing they did in there.
‘M-my mother passed away about fourteen months ago, if you recall,’ Natalia was telling him huskily.
His black eyes flashed to her profile on a flare of hope. ‘And you lived here together before she died?’
She went pale. ‘I…n-no.’
The answer gutted him.
‘Sh-she left me well provided for,’ the little liar embroidered her tale of deceit. ‘I just prefer to live alone. W-would you like to come in, h-have some coffee be-before you start back?’ she offered—as a diversion tactic perhaps, to stop him probing any deeper into her financial arrangements?
Well, no, he would not like to come in! They would not carry him dead over the threshold of that—den of sin! he thought through the roaring in his ears. ‘It is late,’ he refused, amazed at how even his voice sounded. ‘And it has been a long day. I think we are both tired…’
She looked so relieved that he had to presume she’d been terrified of him walking in there and discovering some little piece of evidence that would lead him to Edward.
‘Then I’ll say thank you, for bringing me home.’ She didn’t push the issue, found a brief smile—and was reaching for the door catch when he stopped her.
‘Have dinner with me,’ he said gruffly. ‘Tomorrow night.’
She turned a puzzled frown on him. He didn’t blame her—he was confused himself! All he knew was that things had changed. He wanted her out of that house and in his bed in his apartment before another day went by!
‘I will be out all day tomorrow,’ he went on, thinking on his feet again. ‘I have meetings to attend in the City, so I won’t see you unless you wait for me to get in tomorrow. So I am asking you to have dinner with me,’ he repeated.
