A Dangerous Solace

by Lucy Ellis

  ‘You!’

  His sentiments exactly.

  The softer note in her voice long gone, she leapt back in horror. But he noticed at the same time that she wrapped her hand around his arm, as if anchoring herself to him. Which struck him as entirely ironic, given the last time he’d laid eyes on this girl she’d been so anxious to escape from his bed she’d left her shoes behind in her rush.

  From nowhere a resentment he hadn’t known he was carrying ricocheted like a stray bullet around his body.

  What in the hell was she doing back in Rome? Back in his life?

  His eyes narrowed on her.

  ‘Are you following me?’ she accused swiftly.

  ‘Si.’ He was not going to deny it. Why would he?

  The look on her face was priceless.

  ‘You appear to be lost, signorina,’ he observed smoothly, raking his gaze over her eyes, her mouth, the amazing clarity of her skin. ‘And as we already know one another—’

  If anything the rapt horror on her face only increased, heightening his sense of satisfaction.

  ‘Allow me to offer some more assistance.’

  She tugged self-consciously at the atrocious silk shirt and stood a little straighter, sticking out that chin.

  He was going to enjoy making her squirm, and then he would let her go.

  ‘Is this a profession for you? Following women around the city, pushing help on them whether they want it or not?’

  ‘You appear to be the exception to my rule to let a woman struggle on alone.’

  ‘Do I appear to be struggling to you?’

  ‘No, you appear to be lost.’

  She pursed her lips, staring rather pointedly at the map. She was torn—it was all over her expressive face. The indecision and—more satisfying to his ego—anxiety.

  Gianluca told himself a sensible man would walk away. Anything between them now was beneath him. He’d made the identification. He knew exactly who this woman was—or who she purported to be. Seven years ago he’d entwined all kinds of ridiculous romantic imaginings around this girl, none of them bearing scrutiny in the harsh light of day.

  Besides, on this day she was proving entirely ordinary—a little frumpy, in fact. Certainly not a woman he would glance at twice. Which didn’t explain why he’d turned the Jota around and right now was unable to take his eyes off her.

  ‘It’s too late now anyhow,’ she muttered to herself.

  Si, far too late. Although unexpectedly he was fighting a very Italian male need to assert himself with this woman.

  ‘I’ve missed the start of the tour,’ she said, as if it was somehow his fault.

  Gianluca waited.

  She stared holes in the map.

  ‘We’re supposed to be meeting at the Spanish Steps,’ she added grudgingly.

  ‘I see.’ Not that he did see.

  He decided to cut to the chase and draw down the time this was taking.

  ‘The Spanish Steps are straight down here.’ He pointed it out. ‘Make a left and then a second right.’

  She was trying to follow his directions, which meant she was forced to look at him, and at the same time she was fumbling to put on her ugly sunglasses. Seeing as the sky was overcast, it was clearly a clumsy attempt at disguise.

  Something about her hasty and long overdue attempt to hide irritated him. She clearly wasn’t very good at subterfuge, and yet she had been a true genius at escape seven years ago. Gianluca found he was tempted to confiscate the glasses.

  Safe behind the shaded lenses, she tipped up her glorious cheekbones. ‘I suppose I should thank you.’

  ‘Don’t feel obligated, signorina,’ he inserted softly.

  Those lips pursed, but nothing could destroy their luscious shape.

  Pushing aside the knowledge that this promised endless complications, he reached into his jacket and took out a card, took hold of her resistant hand and closed her fingers over it. They felt warm, smooth and surprisingly delicate.

  She snatched her hand back and glared at him as if he’d touched her inappropriately.

  A far cry from the last time he’d had his hands on her.

  ‘If you change your mind about thanking me, signorina, I’ll be at Rico’s Bar tonight around eleven,’ he said, wondering what the hell he thought he was doing. ‘It’s a private party but I’ll leave your name at the door. Enjoy your tour.’

  ‘You don’t even know my name,’ she called after him, and it sounded almost like an accusation.

  His gut knotted.

  Exactly. If he’d known her name seven years ago this little piece of unfinished business would have been forgotten.

  Just another girl on another night.

  But it hadn’t been just another night.

  It was a night scored on his soul, and the woman standing in the square was a major part of that. Si, it explained why his chest felt tight and his hands were clenched into fists by his sides.

  Ruthlessness was in his blood, and Gianluca never forgot he was a Benedetti. In this fabled city it was impossible to forget. His ancestors had led Roman legions, lent money to Popes and financed wars down the ages. There was enough blood flowing through the family annals to turn the Tyrrhenian Sea red.

  It enabled him to look at her with detachment.

  ‘How about Strawberries?’ he drawled. The quiet menace in his tone was usually enough to send CEOs of multinational corporations pale as milk.

  She lowered the sunglasses and those green eyes skewered him.

  A dark admiration stirred. This woman had the makings of a formidable opponent.

  He could enjoy this.

  Basta! This was no vendetta. She was, after all, a woman, and he—naturally—wasn’t that kind of man. He was a chivalrous, civilised, honourable member of Roman society. This was merely an exercise in curiosity, in putting a footnote to a certain episode in his life. The first and only time a woman had run from him.

  He slid into the Jota and gunned the engine.

  The fact his knuckles showed white on the wheel proved nothing.

  But as he merged with the chaotic traffic again he recognised it was not his Benedetti side that was in the ascendant here. It was the Sicilian blood from his mother’s people, and it responded instinctively to the knowledge that this little piece of unfinished business was at last in his sights once more.

  CHAPTER THREE

  AVA FORCED HERSELF to block the encounter out of her head as she followed his directions and caught her first glimpse in seven years of the Spanish Steps. Despite the crowd she found her tour group and fastened on, all too aware she was already hot and tired and flustered.

  He’d followed her.

  Yes, but he likes women. That’s his modus operandi. He sees a girl. He takes her.

  He saw you, he wants you.

  Ava tried to focus on what the guide was saying about Keats’s death, but all she could think about was her own small death of pride, which had her desperately wanting to go to this club tonight, to see him again...

  She shut her eyes and screwed up her resolve. She wasn’t the kind of woman who slept with random men—and that was all it ever could be with a guy like Benedetti. A night, a handful of hours—entertainment for him.

  You liked it. He saw you. He wants you.

  It wasn’t any kind of reason for offering herself up to be hurt again.

  It’s not as if you’ve got anything to lose. You’re a single woman and this is Rome.

  For a moment her resolve slipped and her surroundings rushed in. For beyond the hurried crowd and the noise of traffic was the city itself, imprinted on her mind by countless Hollywood films. Bella Italia, where magical things were supposed to happen to single girls if they threw coins in fountains. And sometimes those things did happen—but this girl had misread the signs.

  Every time she got it wrong. She wasn’t going to get it wrong again.

  Emotions welled up unexpectedly, filling her throat, making it difficult to breathe. She’d been crying
again this morning and she never cried! Not even when Bernard had rung her three days ago, at the terminal in Sydney International an hour before take-off, to tell her he wouldn’t be coming to Rome.

  Just as her realisation had begun to take shape that there would be no romantic proposal in front of the Trevi Fountain, and before she could examine the overwhelming feeling of relief that had washed over her, he’d broken the news that he had found another woman—and that with her he had passion.

  It had been a low blow, even for Bernard. He’d never been particularly sensitive to her feelings, but she had assumed up until that moment that half the blame for their lacklustre sex life was shared by him.

  Apparently not. Apparently it was all down to her.

  ‘Passion?’ she had shouted down the phone. ‘We could have had passion. In Rome!’

  Yet ever since—on the long-haul flight, on the taxi ride from Fiumicino Airport to her historic hotel, over the two nights she’d spent staring at the walls as she listlessly ate her room-service dinner in front of the Italian melodrama she was just starting to get hooked on—Ava had nursed a suspicion that she had chosen Rome as the site of her proposal for entirely romantic reasons that clearly had nothing to do with Bernard.

  She was beginning to suspect there were unplumbed depths of longing inside of her for a different life.

  A romantic life.

  But it was no use. Romance belonged in the movies, not in real life. Certainly not in her life. She’d learned that young, from watching the break-up of her parents’ marriage, seeing her mentally ill mother struggle to support them on a pension, that the only way to survive as a woman was to become financially independent.

  So she had worked hard to get where she was, but it meant she had never had time for a social life, had never gone through the rites of passage her peers had taken for granted.

  As a consequence she had done a very silly thing seven years ago, and another silly thing when she’d convinced herself to marry a man she didn’t love.

  No, Bernard was not the right man for her. But neither was an oversexed soccer player who thought he could just pick up a woman like a coin in the gutter and put her in his pocket.

  Her fist opened to reveal the embossed card she’d been carrying around for the last half hour. She held it up and read the simply inscribed name and several contact numbers. A memory slid like a stiletto knife between her ribs. All those numbers—but she’d rung his numbers before, hadn’t she? None of them led to him.

  Giving herself a shake, Ava slipped away from the group. She was going back to the hotel.

  Everything was a mess and it was his fault.

  Not Bernard’s. What had she been thinking, being with Bernard for two long years? Going so far as to orchestrate a romantic proposal? Booking the plane fares, a luxury hotel, a driving tour of Tuscany...?

  What had possessed her to set up such a ridiculous romantic scenario with a man she didn’t love, in this city of all cities...?

  Ava’s heart began to pound, because she had the answer in her hot little hand.

  * * *

  What was she doing back in Rome?

  It was the million-dollar question and it had Gianluca entertaining scenarios that, frankly, were beneath him.

  Behind him the private party was in full swing—a welcome back to Rome for his cousin Marco and his new wife—but Gianluca found himself constantly scanning the piazza below for a certain dressed-down brunette.

  He hadn’t been able to get her out of his head all day. It wasn’t the fresh-faced girl who had lain down with him in the grass on the Palatino who was rifling through his thoughts, though, but the tense, angry woman who looked as if she hadn’t had a man between her thighs in a good many years. The sort of woman who, for whatever reason, had forgotten how to be a woman—although in this lady’s case he suspected it might be a wilful act.

  He smiled slightly, wondered how hard it would be to perform that miracle.

  Given the sexual attraction that had flared between them in the street today, not hard. Anger, he acknowledged, could be a powerful aphrodisiac.

  His smile faded. His parents had conducted that kind of relationship. Volatile, glass-breaking performances on his Sicilian mother’s side, and passive-aggressive acts of sabotage from his father as he withheld money, access to the family jewellery, use of the Benedetti palazzi dotted around the country. Yes, the married state had a great deal to recommend it.

  The irony was that he was here celebrating a wedding. The advent of a baby. The things that made up happiness in other people’s lives. Just not if you had Benedetti attached to your name.

  It was a lonely thought and he pushed it aside. Life was good. He was young, fit and obscenely successful. Women fell at his feet. Men scrambled to get out of his way. Everything he touched turned to gold these days. Forget the dragon. Forget the past. Take those lessons and apply them to what was to come now.

  He turned away from his contemplation of the famous square below and strolled across the terrace to join the party.

  * * *

  ‘Signorina, we sit here all night or I take you somewhere else? Give me something to work with!’

  Across the road Ava could see women in tiny scraps of nothing much going happily into the popular nightspot. She shoved money at the driver, took a breath and launched herself out of the cab. The cool air licked around her legs and she almost dived back in.

  She knew she was being silly. The burgundy red cocktail dress came to her knees and covered her shoulders and arms. It was perfectly acceptable. Perhaps it clung to her long thighs as she moved, and her calves in black stockings felt exposed as she made her way across the road, heels clicking on the pavement, but nobody was going to laugh at her and point.

  As she approached the glass front of the upmarket nightclub she began to feel a little differently. The pulsing blue and gold neon lights gave a dreamlike quality to the atmosphere, and far from feeling on show she realised for once that with her hair and her dress and her heels she fitted right in. There was nothing show-offish about her appearance.

  She had a very real fear of making a spectacle of herself in public. Growing up, she had seen her mum’s illness provide far too many opportunities for that to happen. She had set up her life to avoid social situations as much as possible, but tonight she didn’t have much choice.

  The doorman said something pleasant to her in Italian and Ava found herself inside, waiting behind the other patrons, relieved she had dressed up. For the umpteenth time her fingers went to the ends of her hair.

  This afternoon she’d taken her long brown plait to the hairdresser, and after a process of a great deal of pointing and gesturing her hair was now swinging with more bounce and life than it had ever had around her shoulders. She’d left that hairdresser feeling as chic as any Roman woman, very modern, and in control of her own destiny once more.

  As with cutting several inches off her hair, it had been her choice to wear a cocktail dress. That it was brand-new, bought today, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn a frock had absolutely nothing to do with a man this morning telling her she had forgotten how to be a woman.

  She couldn’t see him anyhow as she came down the steps and made her way slowly through the crowded bar. Confusion assailed her. Should she wait? Should she ask for his table? Worryingly, the place seemed to be full of beautiful women not wearing very much clothing. She couldn’t possibly compete.

  As if to hammer this home a glamorous blonde slunk past her on stab-your-heart-out heels, scantily clad in a dress that looked sewn on. Ava followed her progress, along with every man in the vicinity, although her thoughts—She must be cold—probably didn’t align with theirs.

  Perhaps she’d over-estimated the transformative powers of a new hairstyle?

  Feeling her confidence slipping away, Ava scanned the room, spotted the winding stairs at either end. There was another level. She caught sight of the blonde making her wiggly way up and up. Should
she go upstairs? Should she ask for his table?

  For the first time it occurred to Ava with a stab of unease that the invitation had been general, more along the lines of come along—enjoy yourself. Not specific—not I find you attractive, perhaps even on some subliminal level remember you, and I want to spend some time with you. It was entirely possible she had misinterpreted him.

  Yes, Ava, you’ve got it wrong again...

  But in that moment she caught sight of a dark-haired woman in a burgundy dress staring back at her across the room. Her eyes were made up with kohl and lashings of mascara, dark and mysterious, her mouth was a vivid splash of red colour like a full-blown rose, explosive and passionate. She was something other than beautiful. She was dramatic.

  It wasn’t until she lifted her fingertips once more to her hair that Ava experienced the little shock of recognition. It was a mirrored wall. The woman staring back at her was—well, her.

  She ignored the thundering voices that told her she was lining herself up for a fall and made her way upstairs.

  * * *

  Marco handed him a fresh beer. ‘To the future.’

  This was the first time Gianluca had been able to catch up with his cousin since the massive wedding back in Ragusa. They’d played professional football together in their early twenties. Marco had been dropped due to injury; Gianluca had cut his contract at the height of his career and fame to perform the military service expected of a Benedetti male.

  He was still feeling the reverberations of that early shot at sporting immortality. Soccer was his country’s religion, and for two short years he had been its idol—Rome’s favourite son—and nobody let him forget it.

  ‘Your future,’ he amended, and scanned the room for the bride. Sure enough she was nearby, deep in a huddle with her girlfriends. She was also noticeably pregnant. She saw them and made her way over.

  ‘We were just toasting the Benedetti heir,’ Gianluca informed her, kissing each warm cheek she proffered gently.

  ‘That’s your son, not mine,’ Marco reminded him.

  ‘There aren’t going to be any, my friend. So drink up.’

  ‘According to Valentina there will be.’