In the glare of a new morning she had slipped from the palace unnoticed and, Cinderella-fashion, left her shoes behind in her haste to flee what had promised to be an awkward aftermath.
Her feet bare, her frothy blue dress hiked up around her knees to allow her to run, she had been in equal measure elated and a little triste, her body pleasurably aching from all the unfamiliar clenching of muscles she hadn’t known she had.
She’d flagged down a taxi and driven away, and if she had looked back it had been only to fix the memory, because she’d known it would never happen again.
It had been a moment out of time.
She’d flown back to Sydney the next day, resumed her climb up the corporate ladder and assumed she would never see him again.
Clearly she had assumed wrongly.
Pulling herself together, Ava stepped away from the kerb and told herself she most definitely wasn’t going to allow the memory of one night with a Ducati-straddling, over-sexed soccer player to wreak havoc with her plans. She’d been handling everything so well up until this point.
Perhaps too well, niggled her conscience as she battled her way along the pavement. Wasn’t she supposed to be heartbroken?
Most women would be. Being dumped on the eve of expecting a proposal from your long-time boyfriend in a foreign city and then travelling on in that city on your own would unsettle anybody.
Fortunately she was made of sterner stuff.
Which was why she was on her way to the Spanish Steps, to join a tour of literary sites in Rome.
Ava pulled her hat down hard on top of her head. She certainly wasn’t going to allow a freak sighting of one of Italy’s natural wonders in a city street to derail her from her purpose.
So what if that puffy pale blue bridesmaid’s dress was buried deep in the back of her closet at home? So she’d kept the dress? So she was in Rome?
It had nothing to do with that long-ago night when everything she’d believed about herself had been turned on its head.
Well, not this time. Nowadays she had it all under control—when she wasn’t careering hot-headedly around the streets of Rome looking for the...what was it...? She consulted her map. The Piazza di Spagna.
She ignored the racing of her heart, told herself there was no way she was going to fumble through an Italian phone directory searching for the address of the Palazzo Benedetti. She mustn’t even think that! Rome had definitely been a mistake. The sooner she picked up that hire car tomorrow and headed north the better.
Now—Ava looked around in confusion, discovering she had walked into a square she didn’t recognise—where on earth was she?
* * *
‘This is pazzo,’ Gianluca muttered under his breath as he idled his car across from the little piazza. He’d followed her. He’d put the Jota into a screaming U-turn and cruised after that flapping hat, those flashing red shoes.
Inferno, what was he doing? He was Gianluca Benedetti. He didn’t kerb-crawl a woman. And not this kind of female—one who wore men’s trousers and a silk shirt buttoned up to her chin and seemed to have no conception of what it was to be a woman.
Many women had creamy skin, long legs, and if they did not have quite the drama of her bone structure they certainly did a lot more with it.
She wasn’t his type. Yet here he was.
He could see her pacing backwards and forwards over the cobblestones, holding something aloft. He got the impression it was a map from the way she was positioning it.
His phone vibrated. He palmed it.
‘Where are you?’ Gemma’s voice was faintly exasperated.
Stalking a turista.
‘Stuck in traffic.’
He glanced at the piece of Swiss design on his arm. He was extremely late. What in the hell was he doing?
‘What do I tell the clients?’
‘Let them cool their heels. I’m on my way.’
He pocketed the phone and made up his mind. As he strode across the piazza he wondered at the complication he was inviting into his life.
She was walking slowly backwards, clearly trying to get the name of the square from a plaque on the wall above her. He could have saved her the effort and told her she’d have no luck there. It was the name of the building.
She careened into him.
‘Oh, I do beg your pardon,’ she trotted out politely, reeling around.
The good manners, he noted, were for other people.
It was his last half-amused thought as he collided with her eyes. One part of his brain wondered if they were coloured contact lenses—except judging by the rest of her attire he doubted she’d go to the trouble.
No, the eye colour was hers, all right. An extraordinary sea-green. One of those colours that changed with the light or her mood. Eyes that shoved the rock out of the mouth of the cave inside him he’d had sealed up for many years. Eyes and a mouth, and a soft, yielding body which she had taken away from him when he had needed it most.