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What right did he have to look so angry?
‘What are you doing here, Riccardo?’ she questioned coolly.
Her insouciance made him want to haul her into his arms and crush her unreasonable lips beneath his. ‘What do you think I’m doing here?’ he demanded hotly. ‘And why the hell did you do the big, melodramatic exit—leaving the damned country without a word about where you were going?’
What an arrogant nerve he had. ‘Why do you think? Because Paula rang—you remember Paula, the stunning Californian actress you dated for nearly a year—asking could she please have her red dress back. Her dress! The dress I stupidly thought was mine because you gave it to me for Christmas!’
His black brows knitted together. ‘Is that what this is about, Angie—a damned dress?’
‘Yes!’ She shook her head. ‘No!’
‘Let me tell you about the dress.’
She wanted to put her hands over her ears. ‘I don’t care about the dress!’
‘Well, I do—so you’d better damned well listen!’ He took a deep breath. ‘Paula ordered it from some fancy designer and put it on my account—without bothering to tell me. She used to do that kind of thing a lot. She wanted marriage, I didn’t—so we split. Some time later—much later, as it happens—the dress was delivered to my hotel in New York. I didn’t particularly want to renew any kind of communication with Paula and so I just brought it back to England with me. I was planning to give it to charity, to be auctioned off. And then something that day made me give it to you, instead.’
She knew exactly what that ‘something’ was. Deciding that her general frumpiness could do with a bit of a facelift, he had given the dress to his hapless secretary—without ever realising the knock-on effect if would have. Helplessly, Angie shook her head, trying to dispel the telltale prickle of tears which would make her dissolve like a fool in front of him. ‘It doesn’t matter how I got it, or why you gave it to me—although if you’d been honest about it from the start, it might have helped.’
‘What, give a woman a dress and tell her that it was really meant for someone else?’ he drawled. ‘Even I know enough about the psychological processes of the female to know that’s a non-starter.’
‘You, of course, have had plenty of research opportunities into the psychology of the female!’ she snapped.
Black eyes blazed into her. ‘Maybe I have—but not one of them has been as stubborn and as infuriating as you’re being right now, Angie Patterson.’
Tiredly, she shook her head—knowing that she’d read far too much into the dress; she could see that now. She couldn’t keep blaming Riccardo. A casual gift from boss to secretary and she had reacted to it with the excitement of a woman who had just been presented with a large diamond ring. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter,’ she whispered. ‘The dress is just a symptom of the whole malaise. It made me realise how stupid I’d been. I should be grateful to the dress, really.’
Riccardo frowned. Now she sounded as delirious as she had been when she’d had the fever. When he’d seen her so helpless and vulnerable and he had bathed her body and fed her little sips of water, as tenderly as if she’d been a tiny kitten. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
She would never make him understand unless she told him, no matter how painful that was. ‘The dress made me into…into someone I’m not,’ she stumbled. ‘Someone who could hold my own in your world. But I’m not from your world, Riccardo, and I can’t ever be. We should never have made the jump from colleagues to lovers. We just shouldn’t.’
‘You know you don’t mean that, Angie.’
‘Oh, but I do. Really, I do.’Yet wasn’t that the hardest thing in the world to say—especially when he was standing there in jeans and T-shirt, his handsome face looking stubborn and unyielding? The man she had loved for so long that doing so seemed as natural to her as the sun rising in the sky each morning. Her heart full of heaviness, she realised that she hadn’t asked the most fundamental question of all. ‘Anyway, why are you here—and how did you find out where I was?’
‘I asked your mother,’ came the grim rejoinder as he held up his hand to halt this particular line of questioning. ‘And I’m here because I want you back.’
Pain sliced through her and tears began to hover at the periphery of her vision. ‘But I can’t come back,’ she whispered. ‘No matter what you say. I can’t work for you any more, Riccardo—don’t you see?’
Impatiently, he shook his head. ‘I don’t want you to work for me.’
Angie stared at him in confusion. ‘You don’t?’
‘No way—I’ve already given your job to Alicia.’
‘To Alicia?’
‘Sì. She’s very good—you told me that some time back. Promising material for a secretarial post—and, of course, she doesn’t answer back the way you do.’ But then, no woman ever had. And no woman had ever communicated with him on such a fundamental level as Angie had. On every level, really. His rich voice hadn’t once faltered, but now—for the first time in his life—it did as he met the wary shimmer in her eyes. And discovered for the first time in his life that something wasn’t necessarily his for the taking, simply because he wanted it.
Once, he could have snapped his fingers and Angie would have come running—but she had changed, he realized, just as he had. She had put in place barriers to protect herself—which he must now tear down with his bare hands. And yet didn’t her fierce pride and her dignity only reinforce his desire for her?
‘I want you to come back to be with me, cara mia—as my partner, not my secretary. Mia donna. Because sometimes you have to have something taken away from you to realise just how much it means to you. Only it took me a little while to realise why every day seems grey—and maybe a little longer to realise what had been staring me in the face for so long.’
Love. Something he had schooled himself not to believe in—bound up in his own supposedly fail-safe recipe for a marriage. But events had demonstrated that his ideas were illusory. And his heart had made him as helpless as the next man. When he had come back from America and found Angie gone a pain incomparable to any other had ripped through him.
Catching her hand, he brought it to his lips while his black eyes blazed the intensity of their message. ‘I say to you now words I have never spoken to another woman, piccola,’ he said softly. ‘And that is, I love you with all my heart.’
