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Then he let her go.
She blinked her eyes open.
His face was taut with tension, the bones visible beneath his tanned skin.
“This isn’t going to work,” she whispered.
“No,” he said thickly, “it isn’t.”
He reached for her. She went into his arms. Their mouths fused. The kiss was deep and hot and she had never experienced anything remotely like it.
His phone rang. And rang.
She flattened her hands against his chest.
The phone went on ringing.
Finally, eons later, Marco raised his head. Emily stepped back.
He took a long, shuddering breath. Concentrated on snow. Ice. Glaciers. Why wouldn’t his damned body cooperate? At last, it did. He was safe to be seen in public.
“Time to go,” he said.
Then he took her elbow, as impersonal a gesture as a gesture could be, and led her to the elevator.
******
They were seven for dinner.
The CEO of the French company Marco was interested in buying. His wife. An accountant from that company. An accountant from Marco’s Milan office. A middle aged woman the CEO introduced as his assistante de direction.
My counterpart, Emily thought, smiling as she and the woman shook hands.
The CEO’s PA wore a probably expensive but dull-looking black silk evening suit. It had a mannish jacket that topped a long, straight skirt. Sturdy black shoes peeked out from under the hem.
Emily’s peacock-blue silk gown was, she knew, spectacular. Her shoes had all the substance of a spider’s web, the slender heels five inches high.
One of them, she thought wryly, was not suitably dressed.
The restaurant where Marco had booked a private room had three Michelin stars and was rumored to be on the verge of getting an all but unprecedented fourth.
It was world famous and elegant.
Emily had been here during that decade-old visit she, Jaimie and Lissa had paid to their father.
“The obligatory paternal visit,” Jaimie had called it, and she was right.
They all hated those pilgrimages. To be fair, now that Emily was older, she knew their father really had wanted to spend time with his daughters. The trouble was, he didn’t know how to do that without making them feel as if they were on display and as if everything they did was a reflection on him.
The meal here, a luncheon, had not gone well.
Their father had ordered for them. Poached quail eggs. Lissa had rolled her eyes. Bretagne oysters. Jaimie had turned a gag into a cough. Frogs’ legs. Emily had shuddered.
In fact, their palates were sophisticated.
It was their behavior that wasn’t.
They were hormonal as thirteen-fourteen-and fifteen-year-old girls can be, filled with the need to assert themselves to a father who did not believe that children could or should be assertive.
