He remembered waking and reaching for something—someone—who was no longer there. When he’d realised she was gone, leaving nothing—no note, no contact, no name, just shoes—instead of the relief which had been his usual reaction at that age, when a girl from the night before vanished back into the ether from which she came, possessive instincts he hadn’t known he harboured had ramped up and he’d been out of that bed, pulling on his clothes, determined to track her down.
Then the phone call had come...
His father’s body had been discovered and taken to the hospital. He had driven there instead, and by the time he’d got around to looking there had been no trace of Cinderella...
Just the shoes she’d left behind.
Those shoes.
Red, with complicated straps.
Si. His expression grew taut and some of the volatility he worked hard to contain tightened his hands on the window frame. It was the shoes he had recognised yesterday on some subliminal level. Not the girl. She had been hidden under layers no self-respecting Roman woman would venture outside in. So completely without style, without manners, and with her femininity clearly of no interest to her. No man would have looked twice at her.
Yet he had.
Which made him suspect something else was at work here.
The cold, rational diagnostics he’d relied on to build one of the most successful trading firms in the world were clearly not standing up to the bone-deep traditions he’d been raised with.
Benedettis didn’t show emotion. They put duty above personal desire, gave service to the state. But the customs and currency of his mother’s volatile Sicilian family—peasants from the mountains, bandits and priests—meant that when you took a woman’s virginity it meant something. Deep down at some primal male level where it was probably best to keep it buried, it had created a bond. In former days he would probably have married her.
Gianluca cleared his throat. Fortunately they were not living in former days. Besides, he was Rome’s pre-eminent bachelor. He’d once made the throwaway comment that he’d marry when George Clooney cashed in his single days and it had appeared in print a few days later, out of context, cementing his desirability for a certain ambitious class of woman.
Although Ava seemed not to realise he was a catch. She seemed to find it imperative to run away from him whenever the opportunity afforded itself. He found a growl had risen in the back of his throat as he watched her taxi drive away.
There was no other woman who had left his bed so fast or so anonymously.
Run from him.
Even now something almost primitive drummed inside his skull. She would leave when he told her she could leave. It was a feudal notion, but he wasn’t going to step away from his very strong masculine instinct to hold what was his.
* * *
In the back of the taxi cab Ava stopped fuming and began rummaging in her bag for her phone.
It was just a bit of harmless research, she told herself, as she tapped his name into a search engine. She wasn’t exactly being nosy—just protecting her interests.
She scanned his many entries, wondering where the football-playing career had gone. It seemed to have been swallowed up by venture capital projects, leveraged buyouts, takeovers, private equity deals. All of it involving the kind of financial acumen and strategic planning she hadn’t factored in to her admittedly somewhat dated picture of this man.
The family business, she told herself sternly. That was all. He was a Benedetti. Finance was in his blood. The family had always owned banks. Benedetti International, however, was a relatively new entity, and it already dominated the markets. Which meant he must be doing something right.
A little thrown by her discoveries, she pressed on images and the small screen flickered to life with pictures. Her thumb only trembling slightly, she clicked her way through Gianluca Benedetti at film premieres, parties, the FIFA World Cup, a polo match in Bahrain, as a guest at a royal wedding. In nearly every single photo a beautiful girl in a slinky dress was glued to his side.
He certainly didn’t seem to have a type. Tall, short, reed-slim, curvy... Her mouth tightened. True to form, female seemed to cover it for him. And in numbers.
True, he didn’t seem to be serious about any of them—not that it mattered. She would guess that when he finally got around to it, Gianluca Benedetti would do the whole romantic proposal/engagement thing properly—if only because he liked to be the best at everything.
The woman would get the full package. He wouldn’t need pointers. He’d probably fly one of those leggy heiresses to the Bahamas, whip out a diamond the size of a rock and serenade her with a string orchestra.
Whatever...
Ava snapped her phone shut. What a woman wouldn’t get from him was an assurance that he wouldn’t follow the next fast-moving skirt in the other direction...