‘You can do it over lunch,’ Rafaello countered in his lazy accented drawl, curving a casual arm around her spine to flip her round and urge her back in the direction of the lift again.
‘Lunch?’ Glory exclaimed, taken aback.
‘I’m hungry.’ Rafaello rested shimmering dark golden eyes on her. ‘I am so hungry.’
Glory trembled, her bemused blue eyes sinking to the level of the sensual slant of his beautiful mouth and noting the faint blue-tinged roughness of the skin on his strong jawline. She recalled that he had always had to shave twice a day. And that stray abstracted reflection somehow sent her off on the memory of how he kissed, how he had once made her feel. She had never
truly appreciated the depth of her own hunger for him until she had discovered that no other man had the ability to send her temperature rocketing as he had.
‘Intense, isn’t it, cara?’ Rafaello purred like a big jungle cat, emanating an amount of masculine satisfaction that suddenly made her want to slap him hard and snapped her free of the potent spell he cast for long enough to make her think again.
Why had she come back? Had it been a case of grabbing at any excuse just to see him again? For what good reason had she raced back to Grazzini Industries? What had happened five years ago didn’t matter any more. What he thought of her no longer mattered either. And if her reappearance had now given him entirely the wrong impression, wasn’t that her fault too?
‘I’ve decided I don’t want to give you a piece of my mind any more,’ Glory confided in a rush as he swept her inexorably into the lift with him. ‘I shouldn’t be here, but while I am here I might as well tell you that I told Sam about that box and I’m absolutely convinced that he had nothing to do with its disappearance—’
As Glory paused for the breath with which to continue, Rafaello backed her into the corner of the lift and rested his lean hands on her slight, tense shoulders. ‘You’re talking too much.’
‘But Sam’s going to pass the word round his friends, so hopefully something will come from that, and I’m going back to Birmingham,’ Glory continued at an even faster and more breathless trot. She was hugely aware of the lean, powerful length of him within inches of her own taut body and the wave of heat darting up through her no matter how hard she fought to hold it down.
‘You’re not going back to Birmingham…’ Rafaello intoned, allowing his lean fingers to glide down her slender arms and then enclosing her smaller hands in his without warning.
‘No!’ Glory cried, yanking herself free of that imprisoning hold with the abruptness of a woman suddenly waking up to the threat. ‘You’re not listening to me, are you? I’m not accepting your offer. I want nothing to do with you—’
With a roughened groan of raw impatience, Rafaello meshed one hand into the soft coils of her honey-blonde hair to hold her still and he brought his mouth crashing down with hungry intensity on hers. For a split-second, she went rigid with shock and he took advantage. He backed her up against the cool metallic wall and splayed his hands beneath her hips to lift her up to him. And then he let his tongue drive between her parted lips with erotic force, plundering the tender interior within, and every nerve-ending in her quivering body went haywire.
She wrapped her arms round his neck and clung, kissing him back with mindless fervour. A tormented moan of response was dragged from low in her throat. She couldn’t get enough of that drugging passion which she had once worked so hard to forget. The very strength and power of the hard male physique keeping her pinned back to the wall inflamed her with dangerous heat. Helpless in the grip of her own increasing excitement, she was beyond thought or objection when he splayed her thighs round him, the better to anchor her to him.
And then, without any warning whatsoever, Rafaello froze. With a ragged groan, he released her swollen mouth and gazed down at her with heavily lidded smouldering golden eyes that had a faintly dazed light. ‘Per meraviglia… We are in a lift in a public building!’
In an equally sudden movement, Rafaello settled her back down onto her own feet. In shock, Glory finally realised that the lift was still and that all the lights on the control panel were flashing but that the doors had yet to open. ‘Why isn’t it moving?’
‘I stopped it,’ Rafaello admitted curtly, stabbing a couple of buttons.
With a slight lurch the lift set off downward again, while Glory smoothed shaking hands down her rucked sweater. She could not bring herself to look at him. It was one of those moments when intense mortification and essential honesty combined to prevent her from coming up with a single face-saving excuse. Her lips burning from the heat of his, her trembling body still struggling to come down from the heights of anticipation he had contrived to fire within seconds of touching her, she felt shattered.
‘We’ll go back to my apartment,’ Rafaello breathed thickly.
Sensing that lunch would not be Rafaello’s most pressing goal, Glory reddened to the roots of her hair with shame. ‘Nothing doing. I’m going home. I told you that. This was an accident—’
‘An…accident?’ Rafaello repeated in thunderous disbelief.
‘Like when you take your eyes off the road and crash!’ Glory stressed shakily, almost being eaten alive by the strength of her own self-loathing.
The lift doors swept back with an electronic beep of warning, exposing them to all onlookers. There was a crush of bodies waiting outside but their impatient surge forward was arrested by the sight of the male within. A sea of wildly curious faces stared in at Rafaello and Glory.
Glory lurched into frantic motion. She pushed her way through the stilled crowd and then raced across the busy ground-floor foyer for the exit doors. She ran a good half of the way back to the train station and then, winded and barely able to catch her breath, was forced to halt her mad flight and walk instead.
However, the sense of panic and severe embarrassment induced by what she had allowed to happen between herself and Rafaello was in no way lessened. How could she have behaved like that? One minute telling him she had only come back to give him a piece of her mind, the next winding herself round him like the weakest of choking vines. Talk about handing out conflicting signals!
CHAPTER THREE
THE following day Glory had an early shift at the factory and then finished work early, as was the norm on a Friday afternoon.
Feeling exhausted, she trudged up the stairs to her top-floor bedsit. She had her key in the door before she actually noticed the slip of paper stuck to the scarred wood. ‘Urgent,’ ran the message in the girl next door’s handwriting. ‘Phone your dad!’
Her heart in her mouth at the thought of what those four words might mean, Glory clattered back down the stairs again to use the coinbox phone in the hall.
Her father answered her call almost immediately. ‘Is that you, Glory?’