“I said, I can give you two days. That’s more than enough time for you to tour the vineyard, see the wine-making operation and meet with my father’s managerial staff.”
Nick found the control next to his seat, pushed it and eased the seat farther back. Two days had been exactly the amount of time he’d intended to be in Tuscany…but things had changed.
“Really,” he drawled. “Two days, hmm?”
“Two days,” Alessia repeated briskly. “As I said, that’s more than sufficient time to—”
“Two weeks,” he said. “I’ll need that much time to make a decision. And, of course, I’ll expect you to be available to me 24/7.”
She looked at him. The look of disbelief on her face made him want to laugh, especially considering that he’d just changed all the plans he’d so carefully made but, dammit, the woman needed to be taught a lesson in humility.
“Are you pazzo? There is no way in hell I am going to endure two weeks of—”
Nick leaned over. Put his mouth on hers. Kissed her, and when she tried to jerk away, he curved his hand around her jaw and went on kissing her until she made a little sound and when she did, he parted her lips with his, bit lightly into the exquisite softness of her bottom lip…
A horn honked impatiently behind them.
Nick let go of Alessia and sat back.
“Two weeks,” he said in a gruff voice. “If you want that money badly enough, that’s how long it’s going to take to get it.”
He folded his arms and stared straight ahead. He could feel her eyes on him. The horn behind them beeped again, this time joined by a growing chorus.
Alessia exploded, said the word that had horrified the nun at the airport but only made him laugh.
Then she stepped on the gas and the Mercedes all but flew down the highway.
CHAPTER FOUR
NICK was not a man who enjoyed letting someone else take the wheel of a car.
Life was all about control. It was a lesson all Cesare’s sons had learned.
You could count on a microphone or a camera being shoved in your face anytime your old man hit the news and the only way to deal with the idiots who thought it was okay to invade your privacy was to keep your mouth shut and maintain your self-control.
The simple practice had served him well, not just on the streets of Little Italy but in the war zones where he’d seen action as a marine and, more recently, in the plush boardrooms where he negotiated billion-dollar deals. He’d never thought much about how his reliance on self-control impacted other parts of his life but now, sitting beside Alessia Antoninni as she drove the Mercedes along a busy highway, he knew he was in trouble.
They’d been on the road for maybe twenty minutes. Twenty more, and Nick figured he was either going to put a hole through the floorboard from constantly trying to stamp on a brake pedal that didn’t exist or maybe he’d just pluck the princess from behind the steering wheel and take over.
She was, what, twenty-five? Twenty-six?
He looked at her, the stony profile, the set mouth, the fists gripping the steering wheel. It was too dark by now to see but he’d have
bet a bundle her knuckles were white.
Whatever her age, she had a long way to go before she’d qualify for all those jokes that began, “There’s this little old lady driving down a highway…”
Forget that. He had an aunt who was eighty-five. Even she didn’t drive like this. Besides, he was long past being amused. What he was rapidly working up to was being scared spitless.
Not a good thing for a man who had never come up against anything he truly feared.
Until now.
Until this.
Alessia had managed to push the speed to a dazzling twenty miles an hour when the other cars were whipping by at one hundred. Okay, so that was an exaggeration. Maybe the others were doing ninety and she was doing half that. The point was, she was a road hazard.
Either she didn’t know it or she didn’t give a damn.