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Had she gone back on the Internet in the space of a handful of days?
Was she meeting some hunk in her house and cooking him dinner?
He stabbed the fish and scowled.
‘I know a very good way of taking your mind off whatever’s bothering you,’ Flavia cooed, reaching out and covering his hand with hers and turning her baby blues on him with smoky, sultry invitation.
‘So do I,’ Nico murmured, sliding his plate to one side and feeling a sense of purpose for the first time since he’d magnanimously dispatched his secretary from his life.
He watched the blonde preen coquettishly with triumph and felt a little bad because she was in for a rude awakening.
‘You’re a nice girl, Flavia, and I’m sure that under other circumstances it would have been nice to get to know you...more intimately...’
But my days of getting to know you or anyone else intimately are at an end because the only woman I’m interested in knowing intimately is doing God only knows what right now with someone else.
Sudden panic swept through Nico. He’d never thought himself a fanciful person but suddenly he was bombarded by very graphic and very unwelcome images of Grace in the arms of another man.
She wouldn’t be.
She wasn’t like that.
He knew her.He knew her as well as he’d known anyone in his life before, as well as he knew himself.
Maybe she was doing right now just what he was doing. Seeing someone because she needed distracting from an attraction that wasn’t going anywhere. Inconvenient it might be, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t urgent and demanding, an attraction that no one else could erase.
And maybe that attraction was more than just annoying. Could it be that she felt the same way he did? Under that controlled exterior, was she hiding feelings for him? Because wasn’t that whathehad been doing? Hiding feelings he hadn’t expected? Pretending that what he felt was something he could control? Something that hadn’t got to the very core of him until it was so embedded that life without those feelings was unthinkable?
He had been so sure that he could plan the outcome of his life that he had had no defences in place to prevent the slow intrusion of a woman who had gradually become indispensable.
He had slept with her and not for a moment had he paid heed to the dangers right in front of him. The klaxons and alarm bells had been shrieking and yet he had gaily sallied forth, utterly oblivious.
Why would he have paid them a scrap of attention?
In his well-ordered world, Nico had set himself the goal of marrying for convenience.
Once, he had tried his luck elsewhere. Once, he had opened the door to a gloriously impulsive woman who’d wanted everything. He had looked at his father’s arranged marriage and figured he could do things differently. He’d fallen for a woman who had demanded more than he could give. What had started with the heat and urgency of courtship had crashed and burned in a welter of accusation and anger. She’d needed him there by her side twenty-four-seven. She’d wanted one hundred per cent attention and had complained bitterly when work demands had called him away. He’d tried, but his father’s mantra about the importance of responsibility had come back to haunt him. If that was love, then love wasn’t for him.
After nine months, he had retreated from the fray and accepted that the lessons he had grown up with had been right all along.
Love and emotions were chaos, and he just wasn’t built to deal with chaos.
Chaos had been his uncle. Order had been his father. Experience had taught him that it was pointless to look for the middle road.
Nico had locked his heart away and thrown out the key.
He might enjoy life to the full, but he would never be a fool. He would always be in control of his responses and no one would ever cross the lines he had laid down. He might be less constrained than his father, who had married the right woman when he had been very young and had never strayed from the straight and narrow, but he would never be his uncle.
Nico had quietly believed himself immune to surprises when it came to matters of the heart.
Was it any wonder he had glibly glazed over at all the warning signs that had been posted along the way until he was here now with a growing sense of panic inside him that he might have left things too late?
He focused. Flavia’s expression was changing from self-satisfied triumph to growing alarm. Very shortly the alarm would tip over into fury and Nico didn’t think he had it in him to face the wrath of a rejected date.
‘I should go,’ he said quietly. He scrunched the linen napkin on the table and signalled to the waiter without taking his eyes off Flavia. ‘My apologies for leaving, Flavia. This isn’t your fault. I should not have contacted you.’
‘You can’t justwalk offand leave me sitting here,’ the blonde hissed, glancing around her at the well-manicured, expensive clientele. ‘What are people going to think?’
‘That I’m a bastard and a blind one at that for walking out on a beautiful woman.’ Nico paused and glanced at his watch. Time was suddenly of the essence. His imagination was fired up with all kinds of scenarios and he didn’t like any of them. ‘You like Destra?’ He named an exclusive club of which he was a member and she nodded, although the pout was still in place. ‘You can gather up your friends and go there. Ask for Ronnie and tell him you and your friends are to be treated like royalty. Champagne and caviar until midnight.’
