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'That depends.' He gave her a stunningly comprehensive oblique glance that sent her pulses racing. 'Personally, I wouldn't have minded at all arriving a little too early, and discovering you like Sleeping Beauty still slumbering, awaiting the Prince's kiss.'
It was ridiculous to be so affected by his verbal lovemaking. She had experienced it often enough in the past without response, why should Nico be so different? She didn't know. All she did know was that the thought of him in her bedroom was creating the most erotic pictures in her mind, and she hurriedly tried to dispel them as she led him through the villa and out on to the terrace.
She was glad she had taken such trouble with the breakfast table when she saw him glance at it.
The newly warmed rolls lay in a golden heap in the basket; the small dish of apricot jam in the pretty green dish she had bought to match the pale green cabbage rose pottery they used in the villa making an attractive splash of colour against the buttercup yellow tablecloth.
They might almost have been a placidly married couple of longstanding, Saffron reflected half an hour later as she poured Nico a second cup of coffee. He was leaning back, relaxing in his chair as he studied the view from the terrace.
'What exactly are your plans for the day?' Saffron questioned, colouring faintly as she saw the way he studied her. 'I mean, should I make up some lunch for us or ...'
'By all means, if it isn't too much trouble, although I must confess that right now, food is the last thing on my mind.'
Excusing her
self to clear away their breakfast things and stack them in the dishwasher, Saffron left him alone in the main sala.
'Saffron.'
She hadn't heard him come into the kitchen and she nearly dropped the knife she was using to slice through rolls before she buttered them.
When she glanced up the expression in his eyes puzzled her. He looked preoccupied, as though he had far more on his mind than a day out.
'Perhaps this isn't such a good idea.'
He had his back to her, for which she was grateful, because it meant that he couldn't see the humiliated pain in her eyes. What did he mean? Was he having second thoughts about wanting to spend the day with her? Had he discovered that she wasn't after all the girl he had thought her in Rome?
'If you say so.' She managed to make her voice sound calm and indifferent. 'Although somehow I wouldn't have thought last-minute doubts were your style.'
Suddenly they were strangers and her last few words were designed to taunt and hurt. She saw his face change and knew with a shock that they were on the verge of a quarrel; a sudden black cloud in a hitherto blue sky.
'Obviously they aren't yours.' There was a hardness about the words that chilled her. 'Do you always make up your mind so impulsively about people—or is it only men?'
He had hit to hurt and had succeeded. How could she tell him now that she had never responded to anyone as instinctively as she had to him?
He walked back into the sala and Saffron followed him, knowing that the day was spoiled.
'I think we'd better call today off,' Nico began, suddenly pausing in front of a framed photograph on one of the tables. It depicted Saffron with her father, and one of her father's oldest friends. Nico was staring at it with a fixity that puzzled her, his eyes and mouth tautly bleak.
'An old friend of my father's,' Saffron told him. 'He ... he died last year.' Her voice faltered and she bit hard on her lip. She hadn't known John Hunter all that well, although he and her father had been friends for many years, but she still found it painful to talk about his death. He had been a kidnap victim, and his subsequent death at the hands of his kidnappers had made headline news. Even now Saffron found it hard to shake off the sick horror that crawled through her veins as she dwelt on his ordeal. She had never even told her father about her own almost pathological fear of being kidnapped. Some people were terrified by spiders, she told herself flippantly; her phobia was kidnappers.
She suspected it stemmed from her mother's death. She had been at boarding school when it had happened and had known nothing. The arrival of two strangers, who she later discovered were her father's secretary and personal assistant, who whisked her away from school without explanation and then proceeded to tell her of her mother's death, had left a scar that had never completely healed.
'He was kidnapped by terrorists,' she forced herself to say, as though by speaking the dread word she could overcome her fear.
'Tragic.' Nico sounded as though he meant it, and for a split second Saffron found herself reliving her father's grief and the sharp resurrection of her own phobia, but she quelled it swiftly with a flippant, 'Oh, I don't know—isn't it everyone's private sexual fantasy?'
It was the sort of flip statement expected among her crowd and Saffron had often used them defensively in the past, not caring about the conclusions her companions would draw, but now she did care, and she bitterly wished the seemingly callous statement unuttered when she saw the look in Nico's eyes.
'Nico?' Her voice and eyes pleaded with her to understand, begged for the forgiveness her pride would not allow her to ask for, and miraculously his expression changed, a smile soothing away the frown and with it the harsh bitterness that had seemed so alien to his character.
'I think I must have got out of my bed on the wrong side this morning.' His mouth twisted wryly. 'Or perhaps the problem is that it wasn't the right bed.' He glanced at his watch. 'How long will it take you to finish getting ready?'
No reference to the fact that ten minutes ago he had been on the point of cancelling their outing, but Saffron was too delirious with joy to mention it.
'Ten minutes,' she promised, and was as good as her word, watching with steadily escalating excitement as Nico stowed the picnic basket away in the boot of the Mercedes, and opened the passenger door for her to climb in.
They had the road almost entirely to themselves. Saffron relaxed back into her seat, enjoying the teasing caress of the breeze as it tangled her curls, breathing the hot, sensual scent of the countryside drowsing in the midsummer heat. They passed olive groves with trees so gnarled and ancient it wasn't hard to believe that they had probably been old when the Roman legions tramped these roads.
