The Sicilian's Innocent Mistress
She didn’t want to leave it that way! Not when leaving it meant he expected her to be waiting here for him on Tuesday when he called for her at one o’clock!
She drew in a ragged breath. ‘I really can’t—’
‘I am not taking no for an answer, Darci,’ he informed her briskly. ‘Which means it would be advisable for you to actually be here on Tuesday,’ he responded dryly.
Darci blinked. ‘Or…?’
Luc shrugged. ‘I am sure that a call to Grant will supply me with the information as to which hospital you work at, so that I might find you there when you return to work on Wednesday…’
Grant had phoned Darci earlier today, before he went off on a couple of weeks’ location shooting in Bulgaria—or Bolivia. She knew it was somewhere beginning with a B! Darci had not in the least appreciated her brother’s comment, ‘So you were impressed, after all?’ in reference to the fact that he knew she had arranged to have dinner with Luc Gambrelli the evening before!
But Grant never went anywhere without his mobile phone—not even this place beginning with B—and so would be completely reachable if Luc should need to call him….
And she didn’t like to think what the hospital staff, let alone her patients, would make of Luc Gambrelli—this golden-haired Sicilian god!—scouring the hospital looking for the normally serious and highly professional Dr Darci Wilde!
‘Lock up after I leave, hmm?’ Luc encouraged, as he walked to the door to quietly let himself out.
What was the point in locking up after he left when it was Luc himself that Darci should be barring her door against? she wondered disgruntledly, as she slowly moved to drop the catch on the door.
Because there was no doubt in her mind that Luc Gambrelli was getting to her!
Against everything she knew about him, against every warning her body screamed at her during the rare moments when she wasn’t totally befuddled by her complete physical awareness of him, Darci knew that Luc was getting well and truly under her guard.
And, after years of avoiding anything resembling a serious—or a physical—relationship, Darci knew that, even though she was twenty-eight years old, she simply didn’t have the experience to guard herself against that invasion.
CHAPTER SIX
‘WHERE are we going?’
Luc gave Darci a brief glance from behind his dark sunglasses as she sat beside him in the black sports car that he had borrowed for the day from his cousin Cesare. The soft top was down, and Darci wore her long red tresses unconfined today, so that they tumbled in the wind and gleamed like fire as the sun shone down on the two of them.
Darci had been waiting for Luc at her apartment when he’d arrived just before one o’clock, relieving him of the trouble of having to go looking for her. Something he had considered might be a definite possibility after her stubbornness before he’d left on Sunday evening.
But he should have known that Darci was made of much sterner stuff than that. That she wasn’t the sort of woman who would run away and hide from what she had to know was the inevitability of a relationship between the two of them.
At least, he hoped she realised it was inevitable….
The last thirty-six hours had been incredibly long ones as far as Luc was concerned. Most of them had been spent in his suite at the London Gambrelli Hotel as he’d considered his plan of action for taking the elusive Darci Wilde to his or her—it didn’t matter which!—bed.
That long drawn-out day and a half had at least brought him to one conclusion: whatever course of action he settled on, it could not include him staying away from Darci for long!
‘I am taking you out to lunch,’ he answered her confidently as he continued to manoeuvre the car through the suburban London traffic and out into the English countryside.
Darci frowned at him behind her sunglasses. ‘Are we going to a country pub?’
‘No.’
‘A country hotel.’
‘No.’
‘A golf club with a restaurant, then?’ They had to be going somewhere like that, because they were leaving London far behind!
Not a reassuring realisation in the circumstances….
‘Again, no,’ Luc drawled mockingly.