A Dangerous Solace

But it hadn’t been just another night.

It was a night scored on his soul, and the woman standing in the square was a major part of that. Si, it explained why his chest felt tight and his hands were clenched into fists by his sides.

Ruthlessness was in his blood, and Gianluca never forgot he was a Benedetti. In this fabled city it was impossible to forget. His ancestors had led Roman legions, lent money to Popes and financed wars down the ages. There was enough blood flowing through the family annals to turn the Tyrrhenian Sea red.

It enabled him to look at her with detachment.

‘How about Strawberries?’ he drawled. The quiet menace in his tone was usually enough to send CEOs of multinational corporations pale as milk.

She lowered the sunglasses and those green eyes skewered him.

A dark admiration stirred. This woman had the makings of a formidable opponent.

He could enjoy this.

Basta! This was no vendetta. She was, after all, a woman, and he—naturally—wasn’t that kind of man. He was a chivalrous, civilised, honourable member of Roman society. This was merely an exercise in curiosity, in putting a footnote to a certain episode in his life. The first and only time a woman had run from him.

He slid into the Jota and gunned the engine.

The fact his knuckles showed white on the wheel proved nothing.

But as he merged with the chaotic traffic again he recognised it was not his Benedetti side that was in the ascendant here. It was the Sicilian blood from his mother’s people, and it responded instinctively to the knowledge that this little piece of unfinished business was at last in his sights once more.

CHAPTER THREE

AVA FORCED HERSELF to block the encounter out of her head as she followed his directions and caught her first glimpse in seven years of the Spanish Steps. Despite the crowd she found her tour group and fastened on, all too aware she was already hot and tired and flustered.

He’d followed her.

Yes, but he likes women. That’s his modus operandi. He sees a girl. He takes her.

He saw you, he wants you.

Ava tried to focus on what the guide was saying about Keats’s death, but all she could think about was her own small death of pride, which had her desperately wanting to go to this club tonight, to see him again...

She shut her eyes and screwed up her resolve. She wasn’t the kind of woman who slept with random men—and that was all it ever could be with a guy like Benedetti. A night, a handful of hours—entertainment for him.

You liked it. He saw you. He wants you.

It wasn’t any kind of reason for offering herself up to be hurt again.

It’s not as if you’ve got anything to lose. You’re a single woman and this is Rome.

For a moment her resolve slipped and her surroundings rushed in. For beyond the hurried crowd and the noise of traffic was the city itself, imprinted on her mind by countless Hollywood films. Bella Italia, where magical things were supposed to happen to single girls if they threw coins in fountains. And sometimes those things did happen—but this girl had misread the signs.

Every time she got it wrong. She wasn’t going to get it wrong again.

Emotions welled up unexpectedly, filling her throat, making it difficult to breathe. She’d been crying again this morning and she never cried! Not even when Bernard had rung her three days ago, at the terminal in Sydney International an hour before take-off, to tell her he wouldn’t be coming to Rome.

Just as her realisation had begun to take shape that there would be no romantic proposal in front of the Trevi Fountain, and before she could examine the overwhelming feeling of relief that had washed over her, he’d broken the news that he had found another woman—and that with her he had passion.

It had been a low blow, even for Bernard. He’d never been particularly sensitive to her feelings, but she had assumed up until that moment that half the blame for their lacklustre sex life was shared by him.

Apparently not. Apparently it was all down to her.

‘Passion?’ she had shouted down the phone. ‘We could have had passion. In Rome!’

Yet ever since—on the long-haul flight, on the taxi ride from Fiumicino Airport to her historic hotel, over the two nights she’d spent staring at the walls as she listlessly ate her room-service dinner in front of the Italian melodrama she was just starting to get hooked on—Ava had nursed a suspicion that she had chosen Rome as the site of her proposal for entirely romantic reasons that clearly had nothing to do with Bernard.

She was beginning to suspect there were unplumbed depths of longing inside of her for a different life.

A romantic life.

But it was no use. Romance belonged in the movies, not in real life. Certainly not in her life. She’d learned that young, from watching the break-up of her parents’ marriage, seeing her mentally ill mother struggle to support them on a pension, that the only way to survive as a woman was to become financially independent.