He liked his women sophisticated. Urbane. Sure of themselves. He liked them in silk and satin. He liked them capable of keeping up a conversation, okay, not about anything weighty but a conversation, nevertheless.
Isabella Orsini flunked all those categories. Plus, she’d wasted his afternoon and was well on the way to wasting his evening—but he wasn’t going to let that happen.
He wanted a shower and a cold beer, not necessarily in that order. Then he’d head for Easthampton, fly back to the city and never mind staying overnight here or wanting a break in the endless routine of dinner—theater—clubbing. He’d phone a woman, maybe the blonde he’d met last week at that charity thing, ask her if she was busy tonight even though he knew damned well she wouldn’t be, women never were when it came to interrupting their lives to accommodate him.
As for the lie he’d told Isabella Orsini about himself—it had been childish nonsense. Why had he done it? To get even with her? Whatever, it had been stupid.
Enough, Rio thought, and he turned and looked straight at her.
The woebegone look had been replaced by one of cool determination. Now what? he thought, and decided to not wait for the answer but, instead, to go straight to the truth.
“Ms. Orsini—”
“Izzy.”
“Ms. Orsini,” he said, with cool deliberation, “I haven’t been entirely straightforward with you.” An understatement, but what the hell? “What I said about Rio D’Aquila—”
“I know. You already said he isn’t here.”
“Right. But—”
“When will he be back?”
Aha. That explained the determined expression on her face. She was going to settle in and wait. Well, that wasn’t about to happen.
“I’m going to level with you, Ms. Orsini.”
“Izzy.”
“Izzy. The truth is—”
“He’s not coming back.”
“No. Well, that isn’t exactly what I—”
“He gave up waiting. And I can’t blame him.”
Her voice had fallen to a husky whisper. Damnit, was she going to cry? He couldn’t stand it when women cried. It was always a maneuver to try and get their own way and he was impervious to that time-worn trick.
“I can’t blame him at all.”
Dio, better tears than this low, sad tone.
“Look, Ms. Orsini. I mean, Isabella—”
“It’s Izzy. Nobody ever calls me ‘Isabella.’”
Impossible. She wasn’t an “Izzy.” “Isabella” suited her better. Maybe she wasn’t beautiful but she had a sweet voice, a pretty-enough face …
Rio acted on instinct. He reached out, cupped her chin, raised her face to his.
“Hey,” he said, and suddenly he knew he’d been all wrong, thinking her pretty.
She wasn’t. She wasn’t even beautiful.
She was something more.
How had he missed it? Had he been put off by the game? By his own anger? By her silly outfit?
For the first time, he saw her as she was. The thick, dark lashes. The high cheekbones. That lush mouth. A nose that wasn’t perfect; it had a tiny bump in the middle and, somehow, that made it perfect for her.
And, Cristo, her eyes.
Green. No, blue. Or brown. Or gold. The truth was, they were an amalgam of colors, and suddenly he was eight years old again, a half-starved kid pawing through a Dumpster behind a restaurant, coming across a chunk of strangely shaped glass.
He’d almost tossed it away. He’d had no need for useless things then. He still didn’t, all these years later.
But a ray of sun had hit the glass and the prism—he’d later learned that that was what it was—had flamed to life. The sheer brilliance of the colors had stolen his breath.
The same thing happened now.
Rio looked into Isabella Orsini’s eyes and what he saw made his heartbeat stumble.
He wanted to kiss her.
Hell, he was going to kiss her.
He was going to do something incredibly stupid and illogical and he was not a man who did things that were either stupid or illogical and, damnit, yes, he thought, dropping his hand to his side and taking a step back, he’d had too much sun.
“What you need to know,” he said briskly, “is that Rio D’Aquila and I are—”
“Trust me. I understand. He got tired of waiting and left you to deliver the message. I lost the job. Well, I never had the job but I lost my chance at it, right?”
“Right,” Rio said, “except—”
“I can’t blame him. I’m, what, two hours late?”
“Three, but—”
“What happened was that I got a late start. A client phoned. We had lots of rain overnight and I’d just planted pansies on his terrace.”
“Pansies,” Rio said.
“And the rain soaked them, so I had to head into Manhattan to take a quick look. See, my place is in Brooklyn and the traffic … Anyway, I started a little bit late, and then the traffic on the L.I.E. was a nightmare, even worse than in the city, so—”
“The Long Island Expressway is always crowded,” Rio said, and wondered why in hell he was letting this conversation continue. Maybe it was her eyes, the way they were fixed on his.
“I should have known. Anna warned me.”
“Anna?”
“So did Joey.”
“Joey,” he repeated, in the tones of a man trying desperately to hang on to his sanity.
“The boy who does my deliveries.” Isabella took a breath. “Then I got to Southampton—and I got lost.”
“Surely my—my boss’s people sent you directions.”
“Well, yes. But I forgot to take them with me. The emergency call about those pansies—and then, of course, I was edgy about this interview.”
“Edgy about this interview,” Rio echoed. Dio, he really was turning into a parrot!
“I kept telling myself that I wasn’t excited about it. That’s even what I told Dante.”
At last, a name he recognized.
“And it’s what I told Anna.”
So much for names he recognized.
“And then there was this rabbit in the road—”
Rabbits in the road, Rio thought. Had he stumbled into Wonderland?
“But the truth is, I really, really, really would have loved this commission.” Isabella—he could not possibly think of her as “Izzy”—flung her arms wide, the gesture taking in everything that had drawn him to this place: the sea, the fields, the dunes, the privacy, the clarity of the sky that was rapidly giving up the day with the onset of dusk. “I thought it was worth going after for the money. Well, and the status of doing a job for a hotshot like Rio D’Aquila. I mean, I’m not much for status, but …”
“No,” Rio said with a little smile, “I bet you’re not.”
“But now that I’ve seen the house, the setting …” A smile lit her face. “It would have been a wonderful challenge! So beautiful! So big! I’ll bet the terrace is enormous, too, and I wouldn’t have to think about size constraints, or whether or not rain would drain properly. It would be like—like a painter getting the chance to go from miniatures to—to murals!”
Her face glowed. So did her smile. Neither would win her the job or even an interview. Still—
“Would you like to see the terrace?” he heard himself say.
Her teeth sank into her bottom lip again.
“I shouldn’t—”
Rio had started the day wearing a blue chambray shirt over the T he’d discarded. Now, he grabbed it from the table where he’d left it, slipped it on and started walking. A couple of seconds went by. Then he heard the sound of her heels tap-tapping after him.
“Maybe just a peek,” she said. “I have the dimensions, of course, your employer’s people sent them to me, but to see it, really see it—”
They reached the open terrace doors. Rio motioned her through. She moved past him—and tripped in those ridiculously sexy shoes. His hand shot out auto
matically; he caught her wrist.
Time stood still.
It was a terrible cliché, but it was precisely what happened.
He heard the catch of her breath. Saw her eyes widen as she looked up at him. The air seemed to shimmer between them.
“It’s—it’s the shoes,” she said unsteadily, “Anna’s shoes …”
Anna’s shoes, he thought, but mostly he thought, to hell with it. He was going to kiss her, just once, and damn the consequences …
Damnit, he thought, and he let go of her, moved past her and stepped outside.
“Here we are,” he said briskly.
“Oh,” Isabella Orsini whispered, “oh, my.”
He swung around. She stood just behind him, hands clasped at her breast.
“Look at the colors,” she whispered reverently. “All those endless shades of gold and green and blue.”
Rio nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s—it’s nice.”
“Nice?” She gave a soft laugh. “It’s perfect. I can see Russian olive all around here, and some rhododendron. And azalea, here and here and here.”
Her face was as bright as the sun, her smile wide and honest.
“Mistral azalea,” she said, and he nodded again as if he knew what she was talking about.
“And some weigela. For the deeper color of the blossoms.”
Slowly, speaking the names of plants and trees and flowers as easily as he’d have dropped the names of cargo ships and stocks, Isabella filled his terrace with plants and trees and flowers made so real by her voice, her words, her smile that he could almost see them.
He couldn’t take his eyes from her.
All that eagerness, that joy, that animation …