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Justina began pulling the pins from her mussed-up hair and shaking it free. ‘Is there something particular in New York?’ she questioned. ‘Something which can’t wait?’
He curled his tie into a gleaming coil and slid it into his jacket pocket. ‘There’s a big party I don’t want to miss.’
‘Oh?’ He might as well have been talking about the stock market for all the emotion she put into her next question. ‘Something special?’
Dante looked at her. Her hair was now free of all the pins and had tumbled down around her shoulders and she was brushing it. It wasn’t as long as he remembered, but it was still thick and raven-dark. It made her look like some beautiful dark angel, he thought, and for a moment he wanted to kiss her again, to ravage her. To tumble her back down on the bed and thrust right into her all over again until he had emptied himself inside her. But he couldn’t. Or rather, he wouldn’t. Because while once had been a mistake, twice would be insanity. They were too different. They always had been.
He shrugged. ‘Just a party.’
‘Oh?’ Justina fought against the instinct which was telling her to leave it alone and instead let her finger hover over the self-destruct button. ‘Whose?’
‘A girl’s.’
Beneath her silk robe Justina felt her skin ice to goose bumps. Had he...had he done it again? Taken her to bed when he was in a relationship with someone else? Her heart felt as cold as her skin, but somehow she managed another of those light smiles—as if they’d just done nothing more daring than enjoy a cup of tea together, instead of romping wildly on the bed. Because she was not going to fall to pieces.
‘Well, drive carefully,’ she said. ‘And I hope you have a safe journey back to America.’
Dante’s mouth twisted. How dismissive she sounded. As if what they’d done had meant nothing. Because it had meant nothing, he reminded himself bitterly. They both knew that.
His mind began to play back an erotic tape of what had just happened. Justina straddling him. Justina riding him. The way he’d ridden her back until that sweet release had claimed them both. The forbidden ache of sex throbbed thickly through his veins and in that moment of renewed desire he despised himself almost as much as he despised her
for what they had done.
But not enough to stop him from pulling her into his arms and lowering his lips to a mouth which was now closed and resisting. A couple of seconds was all it took for that resistance to vanish, for her lips to part again and allow his tongue to slip inside. A couple of seconds more and she was kissing him right back, her fingers tangling in his hair the way they always did when she was turned on. If he’d given it any longer he suspected that he could have taken her again—right there on the floor on which they stood. He suspected that if he slid one finger between her legs he could make her come in seconds, the way he’d always been able to do. And wasn’t he tempted to do just that? Wasn’t he?
But Justina was pushing at his chest with two balled-up fists and tearing her mouth from his. Her eyes were dark with anger as she took a few unsteady steps away from him, and her breathing was ragged as she struggled to control it.
‘You’ve got what you came for—now get out of here,’ she snapped, because never in her life had she felt so used. ‘Go back to New York and get the hell out of my life.’
For a moment they stared at one another as rage and desire simmered in the air around them, and then Dante picked up his jacket and slung it over his shoulder.
‘Goodbye, Justina,’ he said, and the smile which curved his lips was bitter. ‘Thanks for the memory.’
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NIGHTMARE COULDN’T possibly get any worse.
It just couldn’t.
As warm, fat raindrops teemed from the sky Justina hurried into a shop on the busy Singaporean street as fast as her bulky frame would allow—but it wasn’t easy. The huge swell of her baby made movement difficult, especially in the sultry heat which characterised this vibrant city. A minute was all it had taken for her to get soaked right through, and now she stood shivering as the icy blast of the shop’s air-
conditioning blasted over her damp skin.
Trying to conceal her shape behind a rack of designer clothes, she peered out through the blur of rain. People were hastily putting up their umbrellas. Others were standing huddled beneath bus shelters as they sought to avoid the daily spectacle of the tropical storm. Nobody seemed to be looking in her direction. Nobody at all.
Justina swallowed down the sudden dryness in her throat. Was she simply going crazy—imagining that someone was following her? That another photographer planned to leap out to take a picture? She couldn’t understand why the press were so interested in the fact that she was having a baby when loads of women had babies out of wedlock these days without stigma.
Yet she couldn’t deny the media interest—especially since the Lollipops Sweetest Hits had been re-released just before Roxy’s wedding and had stormed up the charts all over the world. She still had a public profile, which had become higher as a result of those renewed sales. On days where there wasn’t a lot of news around she could still sometimes find one of those rather depressing pieces about ‘unlucky in love’ Justina Perry hidden in the back pages of the newspapers—the ones which wondered why she was still single.
Only now she had given them an even bigger story—STILL SINGLE AND NOW EXPECTING! WHO’S THE MYSTERY FATHER, JUSTINA?
After she’d gone through the first stages of dismay and denial, she had tried to conceal her pregnancy for as long as possible—and when that had become out of the question she had stayed out of the limelight as much as she could. But the press were like hungry dogs. One sniff of a juicy story and they came looking. Lately there’d been a whole spate of articles speculating about the identity of her baby’s father—she was just praying that nobody had seen her disappearing from Roxy’s wedding with Dante D’Arezzo. That was the kind of snippet which would find its way into a gossip column, forever linking her name to the Italian billionaire.
‘Can I get you a chair, ma’am?’
Justina turned round to find a shop assistant regarding her with concern. Perhaps she was worried that the tired-looking Englishwoman was about to give birth in the middle of her shop and it wasn’t really Justina’s role to reassure her that she wasn’t due for another five weeks.
‘No, thanks. I’m fine. I’ll take a cab back to my hotel. The rain looks as if it’s stopping now.’
