Riccardo held onto her arms, forcing her to look at him, to acknowledge what had just taken place. He had invaded every pore of her body and now he wanted her to admit it. ‘You opened a door and you can’t tell me that you can shut it now!’
‘I opened a door!’ Julia spluttered.
‘OK, we both did.’
‘Things got a little out of control. I…I must have had too much to drink…’
‘And don’t blame the drink! You were as aware of what was going on as I was! And you were enjoying every minute of it!’
Julia stared at him in helpless, frustrated silence. She could feel the cold air wrapping itself around her.
‘I’m cold and it’s time to leave,’ she said unsteadily and after a few seconds he released her.
‘Not before we sort this thing out.’
‘There’s nothing to sort out. I…I don’t know how…how we happened to…’
‘Stop shying away from the bald truth. How we happened to make love.’ With every passing minute she was withdrawing from him, shutting him out, and he was not going to allow her to do that. He had come too far to admit defeat now and walk away. Riccardo Fabbrini never walked away from unfinished business, and this was unfinished business as far as he was concerned.
‘We happened to do it because we wanted each other. Still do.’
‘It was a moment of madness!’ she denied heatedly.
‘When is lust ever not a moment of madness?’ He sighed and raked his fingers through his hair. The truth was that he was still on fire and the even more gut-wrenching truth of the matter was that he would continue to be on fire until he completed the task he had set for himself, killed off the curiosity to possess her that was driving him crazy. No woman had ever sent his senses rocketing into orbit as this complex creature trembling in front of him had. ‘Have you never experienced a moment of madness?’ he asked wryly.
‘Never.’
‘Then you haven’t lived.’ Their eyes met for the briefest of seconds.
‘Maybe not in your eyes.’ Her voice sounded high-pitched and defensive. If he couldn’t hear the fear in it then she certainly could. Fear of the sweeping tide of physical attraction that had bowled her over the minute he had laid his hands on her. And the attraction hadn’t begun tonight. It had been simmering under the surface from the very first moment she had seen him. She had just flatly refused to acknowledge it.
He was so wrong in every respect. He was everything Caroline had bitterly described him to be. Cold, ruthless, arrogant, a man who got what he wanted whatever the costs and at whatever price. She should have recoiled in disgust at the feel of his hands on her back and the warm breath against her cheek as they had danced, but the opposite had happened and she could not make sense of it. And she should have fled from the touch of a man who had been her sister-in-law’s ex-husband, but Caroline had never loved him. Her brief infatuation had been a bright flicker before fading away. There was no betrayal there, but still…
Her heart was still hammering in confusion as they reentered the club and she preceded him to their table, not bothering to sit down.
‘We’re not leaving yet,’ he informed her, pulling his chair out and sprawling on it, magnificently and gut-wrenchingly masculine, his body lazily indolent as he summoned across their waitress and ordered a refill of coffee for them both. ‘So you might as well stop hovering like a startled rabbit and sit down.’
A little brown sparrow? A startled rabbit? Apt that he described her as prey, when she saw him as a predator.
Julia reluctantly perched on her chair and looked at him. ‘I don’t see the point of conducting a post-mortem on what happened,’ she said quietly. ‘It did, for reasons I can’t fathom…’
‘For reasons it suits you not to fathom,’ Riccardo corrected harshly.
‘You’re not attracted to me, Riccardo; you made that perfectly clear the very first time I met you. Remember?’ Julia sat back to allow her cup of coffee to be placed in front of her, along with the individual plunger, a jug of cream and a bowl of rough sugar cubes.
‘And the feeling was mutual, if I recall,’ he drawled mockingly. ‘Let’s just say that time alters everything.’ He leaned across the table, invading her space, and she felt her pulses quicken in automatic response. ‘If we hadn’t been so rudely interrupted we both know where it would have ended.’ He smiled wolfishly at her, cutting through her defences and silencing the denial rising to her lips. His eyes locked with hers, making her feel giddy. ‘You wanted me in you as much as I wanted to be in you. You were desperate for our foreplay to go further, darling, and I was as desperate as you were. Let’s just face the truth and deal with it.’
‘But why?’ Julia cried. Why what? It was inconceivable that Riccardo Fabbrini was attracted to her. Something else was going on here, under the surface. It was easy for her to see why she had succumbed to him in a moment of passion and, whether he liked to admit it or not, under the influence of alcohol which had lowered her natural reserve. He was devilishly good-looking. There could be very few women who would not respond to his suffocating sexual magnetism. She might hate herself for her temporary weakness, might argue that it defied all logic, but she could still understand her response.
But she possessed no such irresistible qualities of attraction. So why had he seduced her? Because it had all the hallmarks of a seduction.
She was staring at him, trying to find the right words to express what was going on in her head, when a voice cut through the thick silence. Julia sat back and found that her body was rigid with tension and she was breathing rapidly, like someone slowly being deprived of oxygen.
‘Riccardo! I’ve been trying to call you for three weeks! Where have you been?’
Riccardo cursed silently to himself and looked at the platinum-blonde staring down at him with angry, hurt green eyes. There could not have been a worse moment for Helen Scott to make her appearance. She was dressed, as always, in an outfit that revealed the maximum amount of body without being indecent. Tonight, the colour was red, a bright, eye-grabbing red in the shape of a dress of minuscule proportions, and black shoes that added a further four inches to her already considerable height.
She drew up one of the two free chairs, completely ignoring Julia’s presence and fixed him with doleful, accusing eyes.
‘I’ve been busy,’ Riccardo told her coolly. ‘Have I introduced my date for the evening? Julia, this is Helen. Helen’s a model, if you hadn’t already guessed.’
‘A model and your girlfriend.’
‘Ex-girlfriend.’ He sighed impatiently, acutely aware that Julia was looking between the two of them and forming opinions. Opinions, for some reason, he did not want her to form. He had never been ashamed of the series of fabulously built, good-looking blonde women who had adorned his arm since his divorce. In fact, he knew that he was the envy of most red-blooded males whenever he went out with one of these women. But he was ashamed now. He could imagine her judgemental, clever brain ticking away, forming conclusions about the kind of relationships he conducted with women, meaningless relationships with women who had never challenged so much as a pore of him. The fact that such relationships had suited him as much as the women in question now sickened him.
Julia, sitting back and watching, felt her heart turn to lead. If she had needed reminding of why exactly a man like him could never be attracted to a woman like her then she had received a very timely reminder. She didn’t think that she had ever seen a woman as exquisite as the one sitting next to her, or rather draping her body across the table next to her. Where Caroline had been stunningly pretty, this woman was strikingly beautiful. Every feature was chiselled to perfection, from the arched slant of her eyebrows to the small, perfectly shaped nose and the wide curve of her mouth.
‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you,’ Helen said huskily, the threat of tears in her voice. ‘I love you, Riccardo, and I thought you loved me.’
‘This is neither the time nor the place…�
��
‘Then where is?’ The full mouth trembled. ‘I just want to talk with you. In private. I know we can work things out, I know it. I can’t sleep, Riccardo, I can’t eat. All I can do is think of you, of us.’
‘There is no us, Helen.’ His voice was gentle but Julia detected the thread of irritation in it and shuddered inwardly.
‘But there could be! If you’ll just give us another chance.’
‘It didn’t work out,’ he told her flatly, ‘and, if you recall, I never made you any promises. In fact, I was at pains to warn you that I was not on the lookout for commitment.’
‘But—’
‘There are no buts, Helen. You need to move on. I’ve moved on.’ His eyes involuntarily flickered across to Julia and Helen followed his gaze, registering the woman next to her for the first time since she had sat at their table.
‘Her? You’re going out with her?’ Her voice wasn’t hard with criticism or resentment. It was bewildered, and that struck Julia more forcibly than if she had been punched in the chest by someone in a jealous rage. ‘But you can’t be. Look at me. How could you choose her over me?’
‘Leave this table immediately.’ He did not raise his voice by so much as a decibel. He didn’t have to. Its very softness was the equivalent of a whiplash, and Helen blanched visibly. When she stood up she turned fully to Julia and spoke in a wavering voice.
‘I don’t believe Riccardo is going out with you,’ she said with tears in her eyes. ‘He’s always dated good-looking blondes. We used to joke about it, about the way he was always attracted to the same type.’ She gave a stifled sob and raised her hand to her mouth, as if pressing down the emotion. ‘I don’t understand.’ She turned away and blindly made her way, head bent, weaving through the tables until she had disappeared towards the other side of the room.
‘I apologise for that,’ he said roughly. ‘Helen and I broke up before I met you. She obviously thought I was joking when I told her it was over.’
Julia didn’t say anything. She understood everything and it made her blood run cold.
‘I just didn’t understand how you could actually be attracted to a little brown sparrow like me.’ Her voice was mocking. It was easy to use derision to conceal her hurt, her hurt and her anger at herself, because she knew that somewhere deep inside she had half hoped that he really had been attracted to her. ‘Now I understand that you weren’t.’
‘You understand nothing!’ he bit out savagely and she smiled, distancing herself from the powerful, potently masculine man leaning towards her, his black eyes burning with intent.
‘Oh, no, that’s where you’re wrong, Riccardo. They say that men go for certain models and very rarely deviate from form. You go for good-looking blondes. Helen said as much herself.’ An icy calm had replaced the rampant chaos in her mind. ‘You would never in a month of Sundays be seriously attracted to a brown-haired, bespectacled teacher like me. But you were willing to seduce me, weren’t you, Riccardo? Because what you wanted wasn’t me. You wanted to pay me back for what I did, for disrupting your life, for exploding a bomb in your highly organised, perfectly fine-tuned existence. I was the messenger who brought the bad news, and they say we always want to shoot the messenger. That’s it, isn’t it, Riccardo Fabbrini? You were prepared to set aside your high standards in the opposite sex because it suited you to use your charm on me, to what…make me fall in love with you? So that you could then walk away and teach me a lesson? Was that it?’
She waited for him to at least deny it, hoped desperately that he would, but the hesitation that greeted her accusation was answer in itself, and Julia stood up abruptly, sick to the stomach.
She should have listened to the warning bells in her head, should have kept her distance. She knew better now.
CHAPTER SIX
JULIA could feel the sting of tears at the backs of her eyes as she sat, stony-faced, in the car, her jaw clenched, staring straight ahead. Tears of mortification and hurt.
Riccardo slammed the driver’s door behind him but instead of starting the engine he turned to her, leaning against the door.
‘Look at me.’
‘Take me home, please. Or I shall have to get out of the car and order a taxi.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You would have to wait hours if you ordered a taxi. They’re not exactly lining the streets outside.’
‘I am not being ridiculous! I just want to go home.’ Ridiculous, though, was how she felt. Ridiculous in her prim grey outfit, dusted down especially for the occasion, sad and ridiculous.
Riccardo’s jaw clenched and he took a few deep breaths. ‘I’m sorry about what happened in there. I had no idea Helen would be there or else, naturally, we would have gone somewhere else.’
‘Oh, yes, I’m sure you’re sorry,’ Julia’s head snapped round and she glared angrily at him. They had parked at a fair distance from the front of the nightclub, but there was still enough light to throw his handsome face into angled relief. How she could ever have believed, even in the remotest corner of her heart, that this dark, breathtakingly sexy man could ever have touched her body with desire made her shudder with humiliation. ‘Sorry because I exposed you for what you are! A man who feels that he can dominate everything and everyone in his life, do exactly what he pleases without thought for anyone else. No wonder Caroline cringed from you!’
‘Don’t you dare bring my ex-wife into this equation! You’ve jumped to conclusions and arrived at your own twisted explanations because of your own insecurities.’ He was guiltily aware that there was an element of truth in her accusations, but instead of calming him down that only served to stoke his anger further. The minute he had touched her he had been consumed by a need far greater than anything he had experienced before and now…now he realised that his need had been controlling him all along. He had tagged on a few handy reasons to justify his burning desire to touch her, but the brutal truth was that he was attracted to this woman, deeply attracted to the woman who had purposefully wrought havoc with his life. The fact that it made no sense had pushed him into dealing with the unfamiliar sensation of being out of control in the only way he knew how. By trying to take over the reins, by trying to control his inexplicable feelings.
‘Don’t you dare talk to me about my insecurities,’ Julia bit out harshly. ‘You don’t know a damn thing about me or my insecurities! You pigeonholed me into the enemy from day one and you never bothered to try and understand me or what motivates me! You think you know me because you think you know everything!’
The car was alive with tension; it crackled around them and crawled along her skin and into her bones.
‘And you haven’t pigeonholed me?’ He laughed, a dry, unpleasant sound. ‘I am Caroline’s nasty ex-husband—have you forgotten? I’m the bastard who drove her into the arms of another man. Did you ever stop to think that the beast my ex-wife described to you could have felt pain? I might have stopped loving her…maybe I never really did love her. The illusion of love can be powerful but betrayal hurts. Did you ever consider that? Oh, no, you just assumed that I was a bastard and so it was all right to deny me my own daughter because I couldn’t possibly have any redeeming features.’
Julia went white as he plucked the unarticulated thoughts from her head and laid them out in front of her in merciless detail.
‘You took one look at Helen and decided that she represented the only type of woman I could possibly look at twice. But, as I said, you’re looking in the wrong direction for your conclusions. Instead of throwing it at me, try throwing it at yourself. The fact is, you measured yourself against her and found yourself wanting.’
‘That’s not true! Now drive me home immediately.’
‘And cut short this revealing conversation? I think not.’ It shocked him to realise that the only thing he wanted to do, really wanted to do, was to finish what had been started in the gardens of the nightclub an hour ago. She sat there, spitting rage at him, as if he had struck a match and tossed it at her, and he
wanted to touch her. It made such little sense that he almost shook his head in bewilderment. But he wasn’t going to let her squirm away from this. He wasn’t going to allow her to throw her frank observations in his face and then turn her back on him before he had a chance to throw a few of his own back at her.
‘You have hang-ups about how you look, and your mother probably doesn’t help matters by rattling on about marriage and settling down. Underneath that controlled exterior you’re burning up with your own insecurities, which is why you think that a man who could bed a woman like Helen would never choose to bed you.’
‘Do you have to use such coarse language?’
‘Sometimes I’m a coarse man. I don’t go around ducking behind civilised phrases when a few blunt words would do much better instead. But do you know what I think?’ He leaned forward, crowding her, and Julia felt her heart begin to accelerate. Even though her mind was shrieking disdain, her whole body was reacting to his proximity. Her breasts were hardening and her eyes were compulsively drifting to the narrow line of his sensuous mouth. God, she wanted to touch it, wanted it to devour her, every part of her. It made her sick to think about it.
‘I don’t care what you think.’
‘But you’ll listen anyway,’ he ground out. ‘I think coarse men like me turn you on. I’ll bet my house that you’ve spent your life going out with namby-pamby sissies in touch with their feminine sides.’ He made a derogatory sound under his breath and Julia inclined her body towards him, so that their faces were almost touching.
She was so mad that she had to keep her hands clenched on her lap or risk slapping that knowing smirk off his face.
‘It may not occur to you that some women happen to like men who are sensitive and kind and considerate and thoughtful! Men who don’t act as though the entire universe is their own private playground to do with as they want!’
‘Some women, but not you.’ He knew that she was itching to hit him. Quite honestly, he could understand why, but God, he wanted her to admit that she had been powerless against him when he had touched her. ‘You don’t want a man you can order about like one of your school-children. You want a man who will take you, and when he’s finished you’ll want to beg for him to take you again. Me.’
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