‘Good evening,’ Vivi breathed a tad shakily, because Raffaele staring at her as he was had always disconcerted her. ‘I thought I’d give you a treat.’
But then there had never been a man who disturbed her as much as Raffaele did without even trying. He could lift a well-bred brow or angle up his chin or even widen his eyes slightly as he looked at her and immediately plunge her into discomfiture and the fear that she had done something wrong. She could feel her face colouring up in a horrible blush, because all of a sudden she was feeling horribly self-conscious and underdressed. What had seemed funny and apt back in her bedroom now felt more like self-inflicted humiliation.
‘A treat?’ Raffaele repeated, brilliant dark eyes still locked to her, roving over the magnificent fall of her copper curls, the even more striking contrast of her hair against her translucent skin and the bright blue eyes below her winged auburn brows.
‘Yes. I thought you deserved to get the woman you believe me to be,’ she confided. ‘Only I expected us to be dining out somewhere and I hoped to embarrass you with this get-up.’
‘I’m not embarrassed,’ Raffaele murmured, dry-mouthed. On fire with lust, intrigued by her nerve but decidedly not embarrassed.
Vivi shrugged a slim shoulder. ‘Why would you be in your own home?’ she countered ruefully, her disappointment at that truth so obvious to him that he almost laughed.
‘It’s a shame I don’t have a stripper pole,’ Raffaele breathed tautly, struggling to keep his wholly inappropriate amusement concealed.
Vivi tossed her head, a string of coiling curls cascading against her cheeks before rearranging themselves across her slight shoulders. He remembered running his fingers through that hair when it was smooth and straight without a hint of curl and the pulse tingling at his groin went even crazier.
‘I wouldn’t know what to do with a stripper pole,’ Vivi admitted regretfully.
‘We’ll have champagne...’ Raffaele informed his butler.
‘Champagne? Are we celebrating something?’ Vivi queried.
Raffaele rested eyes that were the colour of burnt toffee on her piquant face. ‘Our upcoming wedding?’ he challenged.
Vivi flung herself down in the corner of a sofa, trying to make herself at home and force herself to relax a little. ‘No can do. I can’t agree to it. I hate you. I can’t possibly do you a favour. It would kill me,’ she told him truthfully as a foaming goblet of champagne was presented to her on an actual silver salver. The whole formal process struck her as surreal because it had not occurred to her that in this day and age anyone outside the royal family lived with such traditional regality.
‘I will change your mind on that score,’ Raffaele assured her confidently.
‘One would have to wonder just how you’re planning to do that,’ Vivi remarked, sipping her champagne, bubbles bursting against her upper lip. ‘I am not a woman who is easily swayed.’
Although, admittedly if she had been the easily swayed type, Raffaele posed mere feet away in a very sharp designer suit, Vivi ruminated, could probably have achieved the feat. It wasn’t fair that he was still downright eye-catching, that his looks hadn’t begun to degrade a little with the hint of a paunch or a receding hairline. No, there he was in all his magnificence, drop-dead, gloriously beautiful and lethal as a toxin to her peace of mind. She crossed her legs in haste, innately aware of the hum starting up between them, a fiercely disconcerting reminder of what proximity to Raffaele did to her. She gulped down her champagne in the hope of cooling the heat flooding her and almost winced as she recognised the tingling of her tightening nipples.
That was what Raffaele did to her and mercifully he was the only man who affected her that way, because she loathed the feeling that she was out of control of her own body. It was unnerving and rather humiliating to be physically crushing on him like a schoolgirl. She smiled stiffly as he refilled her glass, determined not to show her inner turmoil.
‘You have a beautiful body,’ Raffaele said almost prosaically as he straightened again.
‘What on earth are you saying that to me for?’ Vivi demanded defensively.
‘Presumably you wanted me to notice your body or you wouldn’t be showing off so much of it,’ Raffaele countered drily.
‘That wasn’t meant to be personal!’ Vivi almost spat back at him in rebuke. ‘I planned to embarrass you, not show off anything to you!’
‘Relax... I’m enjoying the view,’ Raffaele murmured silkily. ‘It’s time for us to move into the dining room and eat.’
Vivi plunged upright with relief and almost toppled back down again as she rocked inelegantly in the very high Perspex wedges she sported.
To her annoyance, Raffaele stretched out a hand to clasp her elbow and steady her. She felt the heat and strength of those long brown fingers right down to the marrow in her bones, she thought fancifully, while an alarming arrow of awareness sliced through her body and coiled into a ball of heat in her pelvis. She glanced up at him on the way out into the hall and encountered stunning dark eyes that glittered as though shot through with diamonds. He had the most amazingly long, thick lashes, she noted abstractedly, her chest tightening as her breathing shorted out. For a split second, meeting those eyes, she wasn’t even aware of where she was. A terrifying kind of blankness invaded her brain and she drank deep of her champagne again, desperate to do something with her restless hands.
The dining room, as stately as the drawing room, was splendid enough to command her attention. The room exuded discreet Georgian elegance from the marble fireplace to the opulent drapes at the windows and the beautifully set table, gleaming with crystal and silver and ornamented with fresh flowers.
‘This is very formal just for the two of us,’ she muttered, even more ill at ease in her clothing against such a backdrop.
‘I didn’t want to disappoint Willard.’
‘Willard?’
‘My butler here, inherited from my father and nothing will persuade him to retire,’ Raffaele murmured in a rueful undertone. ‘He has no family of his own. Over the years, my sister and I have become his family.’
‘It’s rather sweet that you haven’t forced him into retirement,’ Vivi commented helplessly, betraying her surprise as she looked across the table at him.
‘He was very good to me when I was a child,’ Raffaele admitted grudgingly. ‘But he does enjoy the ceremony of doing things the same way he did them for my father. He doesn’t realise that the world has moved on.’
As Vivi savoured a mouthful of food, she tilted her head back. ‘So, you can be kind. What a shame you weren’t kind to me!’
Raffaele set his teeth together hard. ‘But I am not guilty of having
labelled you a prostitute in the press. That was a tabloid invention for a headline, nothing whatsoever to do with me.’
Vivi shrugged. ‘But you still believed that of me,’ she condemned. ‘Even though you had got to know me as Arianna’s friend.’
‘I thought I had got to know you,’ Raffaele conceded in scathing interruption.
‘You had got to know me,’ Vivi said again steadily as the second course slid before her. ‘You just wanted a scapegoat.’
‘I’m not like that,’ Raffaele said icily.
Vivi rolled her eyes in expressive disagreement and tucked into her food with surprising appetite. When she had agreed to dine with him, she had had a plan in place. For the sake of her self-esteem, she had to clear her own name with him and force him to see that he had got everything wrong. ‘You are exactly like that,’ she disagreed. ‘You make up your mind about something or someone and you don’t revisit the decision.’
‘I have a logical mind,’ Raffaele countered coolly, noting the way her eyes darkened, her colour lifted and her breathing quickened when she began to get angry.
Vivi sucked in a deep breath and riveted his attention to the natural shift of her small unbound breasts beneath her stretchy top. ‘I had only been in that receptionist job for two weeks. It was my very first paid employment and I only took it because I couldn’t get anything better in the short term and I needed to work to pay my rent,’ Vivi told him resolutely.
A sardonic quirk curling his wide sensual mouth, Raffaele struggled to regain his concentration with the taut peaks of her breasts creating indents in the fabric of her top. He wondered if that was the true intention behind her revealing clothing. An aid to distract him rather than an intended embarrassment? It was very basic, he reasoned with clenched teeth, striving not to linger on the view across the table. He was a red-blooded man and she turned him on hard and fast.