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‘Me,’ he agreed sardonically.
Her mouth had difficulty forming the words. ‘Wh-what are you doing here?’
His mouth thinned. What did she think he was doing here? His gaze moved slowly from her face to her body, and the lush swell of her breasts straining against silver-grey satin drove the dull ache of suppressed desire into a heated beat against his temple. He chose his words carefully. ‘I had business to see to in England.’ His eyes mocked her. ‘And I thought I might drop by, as I was passing.’
She knew exactly what he was implying. Oh, the arrogance! The unmistakable predatory assumption of the man! Kate leaned on the door and composed her face into a calm, unperturbed mask made false by the sustained thundering of her heart. ‘So here you are,’ she observed coolly.
Her haughty demeanour stirred his senses more than it had any right to. Had he expected that she would simply fall into his arms? ‘Here I am,’ he agreed levelly. He paused deliberately, and his voice deepened into a silky question. ‘Are you not going to invite me in, cara?’
She supposed that some women might have shouted a few home truths before slamming the door in his face, but her curiosity was aroused. And not just your curiosity, taunted the remorseless voice of her conscience with chilling accuracy. Despairing of the fact that the last thing she wanted was for him to simply walk away, she shrugged nonchalantly.
‘Why not?’ She opened the door wider, telling herself that it was necessary to see him. To talk to him. What did they call the kind of conversation they needed to have together? Closure, that was it. Common sense told her that she would never completely be free of his memory unless they achieved some kind of closure. That was all it was. She gestured for him to come inside.
Silently he expelled the breath which he hadn’t even realised he had been holding, and followed her into the sitting room, his eyes mesmerised by the swaying thrust of each buttock as it moved provocatively against the satin while she walked.
Her heart was beating fast. His presence was like a light, filling the room with some unbearable, shimmering promise. And that was an illusion, she told herself fiercely as she turned to face him, wondering whether her face betrayed the fact that she wanted him.
He was wearing some unspeakably elegant suit in a soft dove-grey. And a thin white shirt through which she could just discern the faint shadowing of the hair which she had scraped her fingernails against at the moment of orgasm. A tie of sapphire almost as blue as his eyes had been loosened, and it exposed a gleaming little triangle of olive flesh. There was nowhere to look but at him, and she forced herself to swallow down desire, and to remind herself instead of the true situation.
But the words still hurt to say. ‘So what about your fiancée, Giovanni?’ she enquired deliberately. ‘Does she know you’re here? With me?’
The memory of Anna, and the hurt he had caused her, filled Giovanni with heated regret. But something else heated him too—the same accursed reason which had brought him to her bed in the first place.
‘Ex-fiancée,’ he corrected icily.
‘Oh, dear—I’m so sorry! Still, I guess it’s better she found out about you sooner rather than later.’
He stilled, then raised dark brows, and the insult freed him, made what he was about to do seem ridiculously simple. ‘Found out about me?’ he echoed silkily. ‘And just what is that supposed to mean, cara?’
He made the word cara sound like a profanity. ‘What do you think it means?’ she demanded, remembering how he had whispered that word to her over and over. ‘I’m not flattering myself to think that I was the first little dalliance you’d had on the side!’
Tension tightened his tall, dark frame. His voice was velvet, edged with steel. ‘You think that I am the kind of man to regularly commit infidelity, do you, Kate?’
‘How should I know? I hardly know a thing about you!’ But as soon as the words were out of her mouth she realised that she had dug her own grave of shame.
‘No, you don’t,’ he agreed, and his eyes gave an insolent glitter. ‘But that didn’t stop you being as intimate with me as it is possible for any woman to be!’
Kate flinched as if he had struck her. But how right he was. She recalled the way she had touched him. Licked him. Sucked him in a place where she had sucked no other man. She felt the colour rush to her cheeks as pride made her construct her own defence against the accusation.
‘Do you really think I would have…would have…’ she struggled to find the least offensive way to describe what had happened ‘…would have slept with you if I’d known that you were engaged to be married?’
Her question brought the night back into sharp focus with exquisitely arousing clarity. ‘We had very little sleep that night, as I remember, bella—you were delightfully eager to repeat the experience over and over again.’
‘So were you!’
‘Who would refuse such an offer when it was so enticingly offered?’ He shrugged. ‘But how could I possibly make a judgement about your morality? This bizarre situation is entirely mutual—and, as you just so sweetly pointed out, we barely know each other. At least, not in the conventional sense.’
But the assumption was crystal-clear. Kate flicked angry fingers through the red fall of her hair, only succeeding in making it even more dishevelled than it already was. ‘You think I’m some sort of tramp who gives her body to any man who comes along?’
‘Not any man,’ he corrected, with a shake of his dark head. ‘I recognised that you had exquisite taste, right from the beginning. I cannot condemn you for your choice of partner, Kate.’
It took a moment for his words to sink in. ‘You’re very arrogant.’
He shook his head. ‘No. Just honest.’
‘But not honest enough to tell me at the time that you were engaged?’
‘I wasn’t thinking very straight at the time.’
