‘How did your father react to that?’
‘As a man who had never had to learn how to so much as boil an egg, he was horrified,’ Gregorio recalled with one of those smiles that changed his face from austerely attractive to devastatingly handsome. ‘My mother loved my father enough to allow him to believe he was the patriarch of the family, when in actual fact she was the one who decided what, when, where and how.’
‘She sounds amazing.’
Gregorio heard the wistful note in her voice—a reminder that Lia had grown up without a mother. It seemed as if every subject they touched upon had the potential to blow up in his face.
‘She was,’ he dismissed briskly.
‘But you’ve never married?’
‘There has been no time for a woman in my life.’
‘That isn’t what the newspapers say!’
‘I was referring to a woman I might wish to marry.’
‘Rather than go to bed with?’
His jaw tightened. ‘Yes.’
‘What happened to the woman you were having dinner with that night at the restaurant?’
‘Happened to her...?’
Lia nodded. ‘She looked nice.’
Gregorio’s company had been in negotiations to buy Fairbanks Industries for some weeks before he had recognised Jacob Fairbanks in the restaurant that evening. Both of them had been dining with other people. David Richardson was known to him as Fairbanks’s lawyer. But he’d never before met the woman seated between the two men.
She had been exquisite.
Gregorio had seen his dining companion seated before immediately going over to Fairbanks’s table to seek an introduction to the beautiful redhead. Amelia Fairbanks—Jacob’s daughter. And the lawyer was her fiancé.
When Amelia had stood up to go to the powder room half an hour later, Gregorio hadn’t been able to resist following her. Or kissing her. Only to receive an angry slap to his cheek as soon as the kiss had ended.
The evening hadn’t gone at all as Gregorio had originally intended it should. Not only had he mainly ignored his dining companion for the rest of the evening, in favour of staring at Amelia Fairbanks, but he had also put the other woman in a taxi as soon as they’d left the restaurant, rather than accepting her invitation to go back to her apartment for the night.
He straightened. ‘I never saw her again after that evening.’ Nor had he dated any other women in the past few months.
‘Why not?’
He gave her a pointed glance. ‘Because I saw you that night and I wanted you.’
Lia turned away from the intensity of that dark gaze. ‘I can’t imagine you allowing anyone—least of all me—to disrupt a single part of your life.’
‘Can’t you?’
She was so aware of everything about this man she was finding it hard to maintain the distance necessary if she was going to continue resisting him. Even more so after those revelations about his parents and his childhood. She didn’t want to know things about Gregorio’s life, to think of him as having been a child with loving parents and two younger brothers he had no doubt argued and fought with but would likely defend to the death if one of them was in danger. Knowing those things made him more a flesh-and-blood man and less the ruthless monster, Gregorio de la Cruz. Which had no doubt been his intention all along.
She must never forget who or what he was. Nor that he had revealed himself as someone who was not averse to using manipulation and machination to get what he wanted. And there could be no doubt now that he wanted her.
She glared at him. ‘I’m not interested.’
‘No?’
‘No,’ she snapped, seeing his knowing expression. But she knew he was right; she could never remember being this aware of a man before. Ever.
She had known David for over a year before he’d as