A Dangerous Solace

He knew they’d been seen. So he bent his head close to hers. From any sort of distance it was an intimate gesture.

Her green eyes flew to his. Astonishment had given way to fury. It wasn’t just in her expression, it was in the aggressive tilt of her body. She was literally seething, and the female pheromones hit him hard and fast, tightening his body into the kind of surging lust he had been careful to keep in check on that long-ago night.

She had been so uncertain. He hadn’t wanted to overwhelm her...

But she wasn’t that girl any more. She was the woman who had run out on him... And he wanted her any way he could get her right now. Down a dark alley, working up her skirt, tearing her tights, teaching her who was in charge. She didn’t run from him. Ever.

Gianluca could hear his own harsh breathing.

Why was she pretending not to know him? What had she been doing, walking into the bar dressed like this? What kind of woman was she? The kind who indulged in anonymous couplings with strangers and never looked back? Why in the hell was she back in his life now? What exactly had he walked into?

He glanced in the direction of the paparazzi.

Lust and anger mingled in a disturbing cocktail. What had happened to the cool pragmatic man of his reputation?

He looked down at her, reclaimed the higher ground.

‘Scusi, signorina.’ The irony in his scraped-down voice was clear, but his code of honour meant he must say it. ‘Mi volevi dire nulla di male.’

He meant her no harm.

No, no harm. He wanted to kill her.

* * *

Overwhelmed, shocked by the sudden proximity of a big, immeasurably strong male bearing down on her, Ava struggled to make sense of what had just happened even as she instinctively cleaved her body to his.

She should back away now. This was highly imprudent and anything between them couldn’t possibly end well. Now was her chance. He wouldn’t ask any questions. She was still a stranger to him.

But she hadn’t over-exaggerated the memory of the effect of this man on her senses. There had to have been something on that night so long ago that had made her throw all caution to the wind, and now she knew.

She suspected it had something to do with his dark adamantine voice, with that sexy, drawling Italian accent running so softly through everything he said, making her a little bit wild. If she closed her eyes she could feel his mouth trailing the softest butterfly kisses down the centre of her body as if anointing her. Nobody had ever touched her that way before or since.

‘Signora?’

Her eyes fluttered open. He was looking down at her with a hot intensity that liquefied her very bones and with something else—something dark and terrifying.

‘Signorina,’ she answered in a strangled voice. ‘Remember, I’m not married.’

He actually reared back slightly, before his eyes narrowed thoughtfully on her.

For a moment neither spoke, and then his half-lidded golden gaze flared out of the darkness at her.

‘Can you run in those shoes?’

‘S-sorry?’ That wasn’t what she had expected to hear.

‘Those men over there are paparazzo. If they recognise me your photograph will be in all kinds of places you don’t want it to be. Can you run in those shoes?’

He didn’t wait for her response. He pulled her in against him, one hand on the small of her back, and began walking her fast across the square, back the way they’d come.

Ava knew she should be protesting, or at least asking more questions, but she felt oddly buoyant—furious with him one moment, swept up in excitement the next. And, really, what was she supposed to do when he was just whisking her along with him?

She thought fleetingly of the nearby Trevi Fountain and how in another life she should be there with Bernard right now, pretending to be in an old Hollywood film as he slid the ring she had chosen onto her finger. The thought of how wrong that scenario was on every level floored her. What had she been thinking?

Ava glanced up at this man’s profile, at the hard lines speaking of an aggressive masculinity that took what it wanted.

Something fierce ripped through her in response and she quickened her pace.

He turned that hard gaze on her. ‘You came.’

Ava pushed aside the shiver of premonition, the suspicion he was not just talking about this evening, because all of a sudden he had her hand and they were running.

Too soon they turned a corner and a shiny black limousine glided across the road towards them.

‘This is my ride,’ he said. ‘I prefer to walk on a fine night, but it looks as if we’re not in luck, signorina.’

He let go of her hand to get the door.

She hung back, hugging herself in the cool spring evening.

‘Let me take you where you want to go,’ he offered, with an expressive turn of a well-shaped hand, holding the door for her.