Being alone with Lilley, mere minutes before he planned to propose to Olivia, was a bad idea. A very bad idea. He opened his mouth to tell Lilley firmly that she must go. Instead, his body twisted and he heard himself saying in Italian, “Will you please excuse us?”
Olivia drew back with a hiss between her teeth, visibly furious. “Certainly,” she said coldly. “I’ll go greet the mayor and my good friend Bill Hocking,” she said, referring to a well-known Silicon Valley billionaire. Her warning couldn’t have been clearer. But suddenly he didn’t give a damn.
“Grazie,” he answered mildly, as if utterly oblivious of her affronted fury.
With a scowl, Olivia turned on her heel and stomped away, her bare back looking almost skeletal in the black one-shouldered gown.
Alessandro looked back down at Lilley, who, with her soft body and simple cotton clothes seemed even more impossibly alluring than he remembered.
Amidst all the noise around them, the jazz music, the soft clink of wineglasses and laughter of guests, he felt as if they were alone. “I never expected to see you again,” he murmured. “I can’t believe you crashed my party.”
She smiled. “Really brave of me, right? Or really stupid.”
“Brave and stupid are often the same thing.”
Lilley shook her head, and he saw unshed tears in her eyes as she laughed. “I’m glad to see you, Alessandro. I’ve missed you.”
Hearing her leave herself so vulnerable, he felt it again—that odd twisting in the vicinity of his heart. “But you shouldn’t have come here tonight.”
Her eyes met his. “Because this is an engagement party.”
Alessandro tried to keep his face blank. “You read gossip magazines.”
“Unfortunately.”
Bracing himself, he waited for the inevitable scene, for her tears and recriminations. Instead, she just gave him a wistful smile.
“I want you to be happy.” She lifted her chin. “If Olivia is truly the one, I wish you all the happiness in the world.”
Alessandro’s jaw fell open. It was the last thing he’d expected her to say. He took a deep breath, suddenly uncertain how to proceed.
“You—aren’t upset?” he said finally. His cheeks became hot as he heard how foolish the words sounded to his own ears.
“There’s no point to being upset over something I cannot change.” She stared down at the marble floor. “And I truly didn’t come to cause a scene.”
“Then why did you?”
She looked up, her eyes luminous and wide. Beneath the darkening light of the upper windows, her eyes were the color of a mountain stream. Not just brown, he realized. Her eyes were a thousand shades, depths of green and blue and amber like a deep, ancient river.
“I have something to tell you before I can leave San Francisco.”
Leave? Why on earth would she leave? Then Alessandro remembered he’d convinced a friend to offer her a job in New York. When he’d been in Mexico City, enduring night after night of hot dreams, he’d thought sending her three thousand miles away from San Francisco was the only sane thing to do. Now, he thought it the stupidest idea he’d ever conceived. His shoulders tightened. “Lilley—”
The doorbell rang, and as Bronson hesitantly came towards the door Alessandro grabbed Lilley’s hand. He pulled her out of the foyer, away from the hubbub of the party, leading her down a side hall.
“Where are we going?” she asked, not resisting him.
His hand tightened around hers. “Where we can be alone.”
Turning down a second hallway towards a quiet wing, Alessandro tried to ignore how right her hand felt in his own, tried not to feel the enticing warmth of her soft skin. But as he pulled her into the music room where he often hosted concerts and parties, the large room suddenly felt small, the temperature hot and stifling. As he walked around the grand piano and past the Picasso on the wall, his tie felt tight around his neck. He just kept walking through the music room. Opening the sliding glass doors, he pulled her into a small private garden.
Outside, the air was cool. The garden was green and stark, just a lawn, really, surrounded on three sides by a ten-foot privet hedge that separated them from the poolside terrace. On the other side of the hedge, he could hear muffled conversation and the clink of wineglasses as guests milled around the Olympic-size pool and terrace.
Alessandro realized he was still holding Lilley’s hand. He looked down at their intertwined fingers. She followed his gaze and he heard her intake of breath, felt her tremble.
Their eyes met in the rapidly deepening twilight. The sky above the villa was dark with threatening clouds, and he heard a distant rumble of thunder. He heard the wind howl through the trees. Lilley’s full cotton skirt swirled around her legs.
Electricity filled the air as the temperature seemed to drop five degrees around them. But Alessandro still felt hot, burning from the storm inside him. Desire arced though him, and with an intake of breath, he dropp