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Had he woken to find her still there in his bed, he would have broken every last one of his rules and indulged himself further.
It was unthinkable and unprecedented—but that didn’t make the unfamiliar urge any less real.
He’d assured himself that the odd need in him he’d never felt before, that ravenous hunger, would fade. Give it a week’s time, he’d told himself confidently as he’d left Monaco with no plans to return, and he would forget her like all the rest.
But he didn’t.
He saw Julienne’s face everywhere. A gleaming bit of caramel-colored hair and he was instantly distracted. The turn of a particular cheek, soft and elegant, and he trailed off in the middle of a sentence—no matter what he happened to be doing. Negotiating deals, handling problems, whatever.
She would not leave him alone, and yet she was nowhere to be found.
It was a nuisance. It was madness.
And it didn’t fade with time.
Julienne’s letter of resignation had been on his desk in Milan, as promised. She had left a dutiful forwarding address—the Manhattan residence she’d used throughout her tenure at the Cassara Corporation. But when, a month or so later, Cristiano had broken and actually attempted to contact her there, it turned out she’d moved on again.
This time, with no forwarding details.
She had turned into his own, personal ghost.
When Cristiano had never believed in ghosts before.
And so he scowled at the woman there in thepiazza, wearing an overly bulky coat and an unnecessary scarf as if it was the dead of winter instead of April, because it wasn’t her. It was never her.
Except this time, the caramel-haired woman in question held his gaze. And smiled back.
The bright red ribbon inside him that he’d been callingself-loathingbrightened, then. And shifted into a new kind of fury.
He didn’t know what else to call it.
Cristiano realized he had come to a complete stop. And was now standing perfectly still, his eyes locked to hers across the coming dusk. He was vaguely aware of the usual crowds that flocked to thepiazza. Tourists and locals alike, gazing up at the ancient cathedral and taking photographs of its spires. But all he saw was Julienne.
Thatsmile.
And, as he watched, it shifted from some kind of greeting, laced with hope if he had to characterize it, into that cool weapon he recalled from the bar in Monaco.
Either way, she made his body tighten into a hard, driving greed.
She was standing still herself, her gaze on him and that puffy down coat arranged around her like a circus tent.
It suggested to him that she’d been standing out here a long while.
Cristiano was moving then, cutting through the crowd, or perhaps it was simply that they leaped out of the way of a man with that much hunger on his face.
He kept his gaze trained on Julienne, half-convinced that if he so much as blinked she might disappear like smoke.
Then he was standing before her, astonished at the new kind of greed that swelled in him. He wanted to get his hands on her again—that hadn’t changed—but it was more than that. For a moment, he was content simply to gaze at her.
Like a puppy,a cold voice inside him chimed in.
A voice he recognized, snide and sneering. Like Giacomo at his worst.
Cristiano clenched his jaw, fighting back the darker urges inside him, because that was the point, wasn’t it? It wasn’t the urges that mattered. It wasn’t the part of him that could match his father’s snideness all too easily. He knew those things existed. It was what he did with them that mattered, surely.
“Julienne,” he made himself say, by way of greeting. As if this was a business meeting that required his cold ruthlessness, and had nothing to do with thatsmile.“There must be a reason you are lurking about out here in the elements. I’m astonished you felt the urge to play tourist on such a wet, cold evening.”
“I’m an excellent tourist, actually,” she replied, and he was sure he saw some trace of emotion in her toffee-colored eyes. Here a moment, then gone. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
