A Tainted Beauty

Their barely touched plates were replaced with fish and vegetables and Lily forced herself to eat some more, looking up to find his dark eyes fixed intently on her as s

he finished a mouthful.

‘I have spinach in my teeth?’ she said.

He shook his head, envying any vegetable which had been given such intimate access. ‘Your teeth are perfect. I’m just curious about you, that’s all.’

She pushed her plate away and picked up her wine glass. ‘In what way?’

‘I want to know why you’re leaving the Grange to share a flat above a tearoom with your brother.’

‘Because my father didn’t make a will.’

‘Why not?’

Lily’s fingers tightened around the stem of her wine glass, his words reminding her of all the upheaval which lay ahead. ‘Because he remarried after my mother died—to a woman much younger than him. And presumably he was too… well, too preoccupied to remember to keep his affairs up to date. Not that there was much time for that.’ She worried her teeth along the surface of her lip, almost glad of that brief moment of discomfort. ‘They’d only been married ten months when he dropped dead from a heart attack.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply.

The sympathy in his voice took Lily back to a memory she’d tried her best to erase—but some memories were too big and dramatic to ever forget. The image of her father clutching at his chest—his face waxy and beaded with sweat. The piercing sound of her stepmother’s hysterical screams echoing around the dining room. After shouting at Suzy to call the ambulance, Lily had done what she could—but it had been in vain. A first-aid certificate was pretty useless when it came to single-handedly trying to resuscitate a middle-aged man who was considerably overweight—and Tony Scott had been pronounced dead at the scene.

Quickly, Lily raised her champagne glass to her lips and took a deep mouthful, the sharp bubbles making her blink. ‘Stuff happens,’ she said, in a flat voice. ‘You can’t change it. Suzy got everything and I had to accept that.’

Ciro’s eyes narrowed. She showed a remarkable lack of resentment about her fate, he thought—especially as her stepmother seemed to have no qualms about sending her out penniless into the world.

‘So you don’t have an income?’

‘Actually, I do,’ she said defensively. ‘It might not be quite in your league, but I make money from my cake-making and my waitressing, just in case you’d forgotten.’

Ciro bit back his instinctive response—that what she earned was little more than pocket money. ‘It’s admirable to find a woman who works so hard,’ he said truthfully.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, brushing aside his unexpected compliment with the air of someone determined to change the subject, ‘that’s enough about me. You’re the man of mystery—and so far I know very little about you.’

‘I’m surprised you haven’t looked me up.’

‘And where would I do that?’

‘On the Net.’

She stared at him curiously. ‘Is that what people usually do?’

‘It happens all the time.’ He shrugged. ‘Information is so easy to obtain these days—the only trouble is that not all of it is accurate.’

She heard the cynicism in his voice and thought that must be one of the drawbacks to being powerful—that people would always be interested in you. That they’d always know more about you than you did about them. Always have an agenda, too, she guessed. ‘Anyway, I don’t even have a computer.’

‘Now that,’ he said, a smile curving the edges of his lips, ‘I do not believe.’

‘It’s true! I’ve always been more of a doer, than a reader. And why would I want to waste my time looking at a screen and spending hours on all that social media stuff, when there are so many lovely things I could be looking at in the real world?’

He started laughing, the sound causing a silent couple at a nearby table to glance over at them with unconcealed envy. ‘Are you for real, Lily Scott?’ he questioned softly.

Lily felt disorientated. That soft, dark look he was giving her was making her feel weak. More than weak. It was making her feel vulnerable. And tense. Beneath the soft material of her blue dress she could feel the insistent tug of her nipples and the soft pooling of desire deep in her belly. This is dangerous, she thought.

‘Yes, I’m real enough,’ she said. ‘But so far, you’re not. What should I know about you before you bring in your fleet of bulldozers?’

‘There seems to be a misconception about developers,’ he countered. ‘That they do nothing but destroy.’

‘What, when really they’re just sweet environmentalists who are planning to encourage swarms of butterflies into the area?’