“Usually I have an assistant …” Annabelle stopped, thinking of Marie who was now in Cornwall with her husband and newborn baby. She took a deep breath. “But I’ll be fine. Don’t worry. My photos of your ranch will be fine. The project will be fine. I work best alone,” she repeated.
“So you said.” Stefano looked down at her, and she felt a bead of sweat break out between her breasts.
“Why do you keep looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you.” Her voice trailed off as she struggled to think of words that wouldn’t sound ridiculous. Like you want to rip off my clothes. Like you want to drink me for tea. Like you want to fling me over your shoulder, throw me into your bed and lick every inch of me. She finished awkwardly, “Like you’ve never seen a woman before.”
He barked a laugh. “I’ve seen many, as you know. And yet …” He paused. “I cannot stop looking at you.”
“Why?”
“Because you are more beautiful than I even imagined.”
She swallowed. “I … I am?”
He gave a single nod. “The photos I’ve seen of you hardly did you justice.”
A chill went down Annabelle’s spine.
The photos I’ve seen of you.
Which photos did he mean? Recent pictures of Annabelle at her brother’s society wedding in London? Pictures of her sunburned face as she’d traveled on assignment through the Sahara and the plains of Mongolia earlier that winter?
Or … images from nearly twenty years ago, when her drunken father had tried to kill her as a teenager?
Had Stefano Cortez stumbled upon the before-and-after images that had once been in every British newspaper—the first showing Annabelle as a blonde, smiling fourteen-year-old with rosy cheeks, the second showing her with a monster’s swollen face, her eyes like slits, a savage red whip slash peeling back her skin?
Annabelle searched Stefano’s expression with hard eyes. But only a smile curved his sensual mouth as he looked back at her.
She exhaled with a flare of her nostrils. Good. He didn’t know about her past. As juicy and notorious as the Wolfe family scandal had once been, the world had moved on. People had forgotten.
But not Annabelle. She would never forget. She still had scars to prove it. On her body. On her face. Beneath her carefully applied makeup and long blond bangs, the vestige of the violent red scar from her father’s whip would always remain.
Tilting his head, Stefano frowned down at her. “You do not care for compliments.”
“Why do you say that?” she evaded.
“You look almost … angry.”
“It’s fine.” He was far too observant. Annabelle smoothed imaginary crumbs off her light-gray suit, then looked up. “But you should know I am well aware of your reputation. I do not intend to be another notch in your bedpost. You are wasting your compliments on me.”
His dark eyes gleamed. “No compliment on a pretty woman is ever wasted. And you are more than pretty. You are. belleza.”
“You’re wasting your time, Casanova,” she said sharply. “I am quite impossible to seduce.”
His gaze deepened with interest, as if she’d just offered him an irresistible challenge. A few strands of his chin-length black hair escaped the leather tie at the nape of his neck, falling forward to frame the brilliance of his dark eyes. “So I have heard.”
Pulling the heavy camera bag up higher on her shoulder, she muttered, “Afonso Moreira told me you’d be like this.”
“Ah. My Portuguese rival.” He lifted a sardonic eyebrow. “What else did he say?”
“He said you’re a playboy who steals women’s hearts, along with their virtue. He said I should lock my door.”
As she looked up at him, white sunlight lit his black hair like a halo. He looked like a dark angel as his eyes became like endless pools of night.
“Moreira is right,” he said quietly.