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Why couldn’t he get her out of his head? It had been a full week since that night. The woman was an operator, had investigated him and his origins and then had the gall to sleep with him without telling him the truth about who she was. That should have been more than enough to end his fascination.
He swore softly, slung a hand into the pocket of the sweatpants he wore when writing. How had she got her hooks into him so deep?
He squinted against the afternoon sun shining through the study window and pictured her face the last time he’d seen it. The pallor of her skin, her lips trembling and those wide translucent blue eyes, the pupils dilated with shock.
Instead of the resentment, the cleansing anger that had sustained him for the last seven days, he finally acknowledged the trickle of guilt.
‘Hell!’ The expletive cut the quiet like a knife.
Eva Redmond might not have been one hundred per cent forthcoming about who she was, but there was no getting around the fact that he had seduced her. Not the other way around.
As soon as he’d spotted her in the Union Square gallery, her glorious curves displayed to perfection in red velvet, her shy but direct gaze locked with his, he’d wanted her. And while he’d become a lot more cautious in the last decade or so, a lot more discerning about who he pursued, one thing hadn’t changed. When he saw a woman he wanted, he went after her.
The only difference with Eva was that he had been more relentless, more eager and more determined in his pursuit. There had been numerous signs of how innocent, how out-of-her-depth she was, long before he’d taken her virginity, and he’d chosen to ignore every one of them to have her. So whose fault was it really that he’d ended up getting burned? Plus when he replayed all the conversations they’d had during their evening together—something he’d done with alarming regularity in the last seven days—he could see she’d tried to tell him who she was. And he’d stopped her elaborating, because he hadn’t wanted to hear anything that might stop him getting her into bed.
He braced his hand on the window sill, forced himself to confront the truth. He’d done a lot of crummy things in his life. None of which he was proud of. But some of them had been necessary to survive. When you ran away from home at sixteen with just the clothes on your back and a belly full of anger, you ended up doing a lot of things that you would later regret. And he’d done more than his fair share.
He was enough of a pragmatist, though, to realise that he couldn’t go back and undo those things now. And in many ways, he wouldn’t want to. He wasn’t a hypocrite and he knew that what he’d managed to make of his life had been largely due to that feral survival instinct—and the burning anger that had kept him strong and resilient in the face of often impossible odds. You couldn’t go back, you had to go forward. But that didn’t mean he could keep repeating those mistakes over and over again.
The only way he was going to be able to put this episode behind him was to see Eva Redmond again—and wipe that vision of her eyes bright with unshed tears out of his head.
Unfortunately, seeing Eva had the potential to open up a whole other can of worms.
He huffed out a harsh laugh, felt the hum of heat pulse through his system as he recalled the sight of Eva reflected in the glass, her nipples large and distended, and her soft sighs of pleasure spurring him on. He’d woken in a hot sweat every night since that night. His sex hard and erect, and throbbing with the urge to bury himself deep inside the tight clasp of her body. He’d got so damn wound up by the erotic memories he hadn’t been sleeping properly, had barely been able to write—and everything he had written was terrible.
So the urge to see Eva again wasn’t entirely altruistic. Given the shoddy way he’d treated her the morning after, he doubted she was going to be all that amenable to jumping back into bed with him—but that didn’t seem to bother his libido.
The bright trill of his phone had him jerking upright. He turned to stare at it flashing on his desk. Probably his agent Jim wanting to know how the script was going. Not a conversation he really wanted to be having, seeing as the damn thing was going nowhere fast. But even so, he picked up the handset. Better to be lying to Jim than wrestling pointlessly with the apparently insolvable problem of Eva Redmond.
‘Hi,’ he said, struggling to inject some enthusiasm into the greeting.
‘Hello, may I speak to Niccolo Delisantro?’ replied a male voice with crisp and efficient British diction.
‘Speaking, although the name’s Nick,’ he corrected, curious even though he didn’t want to be. The only people who had called him Niccolo in recent memory were Eva and her friend Tess.
‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Delisantro. Nick,’ came the effusive and fawning reply.
‘Who is this?’ Nick said, feeling less curious and more annoyed by the second.
‘My name is Henry Crenshawe, I’m the managing director of Roots Registry. We’re based in the UK. We do genealogical research for high-profile clients who wish to discover the—’
‘Cut to the chase, Henry,’ Nick interrupted the flow of unnecessary information as the short hairs on the back of his neck tingled. Roots Registry? Wasn’t that the name of Eva’s employer?
He heard a slight pause on the other end of the line, then Crenshawe’s voice came back, the tone oily and obsequious. ‘This is a very delicate situation, Mr Delisantro. I’m calling to offer my sincere apologies for the reprehensible conduct of our former employee Miss Eva Redmond. I can’t stress enough our absolute—’
‘What do you mean your former employee?’ Nick asked as his heartbeat kicked up a notch.
‘We fired her, of course,’ the man replied, in an officious voice, and the trickle of guilt turned into a torrent.
‘As soon as we discovered her grossly inappropriate behaviour during her visit to San Francisco,’ Crenshawe continued in the same pompous tone. But Nick couldn’t really hear what the guy was pontificating about.
Ev
a had lost her job over their night together.
‘And I’d like to assure you she will never get another job in the genealogical research industry again after this incident—’
‘Wait a minute,’ Nick cut in, his temper finally putting in an appearance. ‘How did you find out we slept together?’ Was he being watched by these people?
