by Lynne Graham
Chilled by the sobering and humiliating recollection that Gio had not even considered her a possible candidate for a ring, Billie brought out the new garments she had prepared at home and began to price the stock. Theo was napping peacefully in his travel cot in his little cubbyhole at the back of the shop. Customers browsed, purchased and departed as she served them while she worked. Only a month earlier, she had hired her first employee, a Polish woman called Iwona, who did part-time hours when Billie couldn’t be at the shop. In fact, the business was doing well and was steadily fulfilling all Billie’s hopes. But then she had always loved the character and superior workmanship of vintage clothes and she was careful only to stock quality items. Slowly but surely she had built up a list of regular customers.
Gio climbed out of his limo while his chauffeur argued with the traffic warden and his security team were disgorged from the vehicle behind. He scanned the shop front, adorned with the name, ‘Billie’s Vintage’, and frowned, positively transfixed by the idea that Billie could have opened up her own business. Yet there was the proof in front of him. Theos! He shook his arrogant dark head, thinking that women were strange, unpredictable creatures and finally wondering if he had ever really known Billie at all because nothing that she had done or said so far had appeared on his list of her potential reactions. His frown grew even darker, lending a saturnine quality to his hard, dark features. He had important projects to manage and people to see and yet here he was still stuck after twenty-four exceedingly boring hours in a back-end-of-nowhere Yorkshire town chasing Billie! What kind of sense did that make?
Dee and Iwona arrived at the shop within minutes of each other. Dee strapped Theo into his pram and asked Billie what she fancied eating for supper while Iwona wrapped a purchase for a customer. That was when Gio strode in, utterly frying Billie’s brain cells because she stopped mid-conversation with Dee and totally forgot what she had been about to say.
Garbed in a charcoal designer pinstripe suit that sheathed his tall, muscular body like a tailor-made glove, Gio simply took her breath away. His white shirt accentuated his bronzed complexion and the very masculine black stubble already beginning to shadow his handsome jaw line. A startling sunburst of honeyed heat blossomed between Billie’s thighs and she pressed them tight together, her colour steadily climbing. She was even more painfully aware of the swelling heaviness of her breasts and the sudden tightening of her nipples. She was appalled that Gio could still have that immediate an effect on her, an effect that was markedly more intense than the day before when she had blamed her surrender to that kiss on the fact that he had caught her unprepared. What was her excuse this time?
‘Billie...’ Gio breathed in his dark, velvet drawl, poised several feet away and acting as if his appearance in her shop were the most natural thing in the world.
‘G-Gio...’ she stammered half under her breath, quickly closing the space between them, fearful of being overheard. ‘Why are you here?’
‘You’re not stupid, don’t act it,’ Gio advised, glancing around. ‘So, you left me to open a shop—’
‘You. Left. Me,’ Billie spelt out with a bitterness she could not restrain but it was the truth: he had left her to place a wedding ring on another woman’s finger.
‘We can’t talk here. We’ll catch up back at my hotel over lunch,’ Gio decreed, closing a hand round her arm.
‘If you don’t let go, I’ll slap you!’ Billie hissed, determined not to be railroaded by his overpowering personality and drive.
His dark eyes glittered like pyrite as if the prospect of a good slap was an entertaining challenge. ‘Lunch, pouli mou?’
‘We’ve got nothing to say to each other,’ Billie told him, noting that his entire hand was still wrapped round her arm, forcing her to stay by his side.
His sensual mouth quirked as he studied her full pink mouth. ‘Then you can listen—’
Butterflies danced in her tummy as she looked up at him. ‘Don’t want to talk, don’t want to listen either—’
‘Tough,’ Gio pronounced and then he did something she would never ever have dreamt he would do in public. He just bent down and scooped her up off her feet and headed for the door.
‘Put me down, Gio!’ she gasped, making a wild grab at the flouncy skirt of her dress, which had flown up to expose her thighs. ‘Have you gone crazy?’
Gio glanced at the two women standing together behind the counter. ‘I’m taking Billie out for lunch. She’ll be back in a couple of hours,’ he explained with complete cool.
‘Gio!’ Billie launched in disbelief, catching a glimpse of Dee’s laughing face before Gio shouldered open the door and hid her cousin from view.
The chauffeur swept open the passenger door as if they were royalty and Gio shoved her into the back seat with scant ceremony. ‘You should’ve known that I wouldn’t stand there arguing with an audience,’ he pointed out smoothly. ‘In any case, I’m out of patience and I’m hungry.’
In a series of angry motions, Billie smoothed down her dress, tugging it over her knees. ‘Why didn’t you go back to London yesterday?’
‘You should know by now that saying no to me only makes me try harder.’
Billie rolled her bright green eyes in mockery and said angrily, ‘Well, how would I know that when I never did say no to you?’
Disconcertingly Gio laughed, genuine amusement illuminating his darkly handsome face. ‘I’ve missed you, Billie.’
Her annoyance fell away and she turned her head in a sharp movement, both shaken and hurt by that claim and by how very empty it was. ‘You got married. How could you possibly have missed me?’
‘I don’t know but I did,’ Gio ground out truthfully. ‘You were so much a part of my life.’
‘No, I was like one tiny little drawer in a big busy cabinet of drawers,’ Billie countered. ‘I was never part of the rest of your life.’
Gio was sincerely astonished by that statement. He had phoned her twice a day every day no matter where he was in the world and no matter how busy he was. Her soothing happy-go-lucky chatter had provided him with necessary downtime from a hectic schedule. In truth he had never had so close a relationship with any woman either before or after her. He had trusted her and he had been honest with her, which was a very rare thing between a single man and a single woman in Gio’s world. But it was steadily sinking in on him that none of that mattered because he had married Calisto. Billie, who had never shown a jealous, distrustful streak in her life, had clearly been jealous and distressed by that development. He didn’t like that idea, he didn’t like it at all, and he kicked out that thought so fast it might never have existed.
Gio had constructed a protective shell while he was still a child to ensure that he could remain untouched by emotional reactions. Emotion didn’t need to get involved. Emotion complicated and only exacerbated an already difficult situation. Calm, common sense and control had always worked far more efficiently for Gio in every field of his life, only not with Billie, he acknowledged grudgingly. But the past was the past and he couldn’t change it, while life had taught him that with enough money, energy and purpose he could form the future into any shape he wanted.
Billie, however, was not practical; she was all about emotion and perhaps that essential difference between them had been one of the things that attracted him to her and which was now sending her in the wrong direction. His shrewd, dark eyes rested on her angry, flushed face and suddenly he wanted to flatten her to the seat of the limo and teach her that there were far more satisfying responses. Inky spiky lashes lowering, he scanned her from her bright eyes to her lush mouth right down over the glorious breasts he had loved to play with and the long shapely legs he had loved to slide between. Sex with Billie was amazing. Just thinking about her made heaviness stir at his groin. Being with her without being able to reach out and take what he wanted, what he had once taken for granted, not only felt weird, but also struck him as a form of refined torture.
‘I want you back,’ Gi
o declared with stubborn force. ‘I’ve been looking for you ever since you disappeared.’
‘Your wife must’ve liked that.’
‘Leave Calisto out of this...’
Even the sound of her name on Gio’s lips stung Billie like a whip across tender skin. She knew she was being too sensitive. He had married another woman two years ago and she needed to move on. Even if he hadn’t moved on? That was too complex for her, shouted too loudly of wishful thinking. And, my goodness, she had done enough of that while she was still with him and what had those optimistic hopes got her? A broken heart and, right now, the pieces of that foolish heart were rattling like funeral bells. This was the guy she had loved as she had never dreamt she could ever love anyone and he had damaged her beyond forgiveness. Even walking away as she had known she must had almost destroyed her, but not even for him would she have sunk low enough to sleep with another woman’s husband.
‘I can’t believe you’re wasting your time with this,’ Billie admitted abruptly, her soft full mouth compressed to a flat, tense line. ‘I mean, what are you doing here? Why do you even want to see me again? It makes no sense for either of us!’
Gio searched her animated face and wondered what made her seem so beautiful to him. In some corner of his brain, he knew that from a purist’s point of view she never had met and never would meet the standard tenets of beauty because her nose turned up at the end and her eyes and her mouth were too big for her face and in a sudden shower of rain her hair turned into an unbelievably frizzy mess. But dry it fell in a silky tangle of curls the colour of toffee halfway to her waist and that hair had cloaked his body many, many times on occasions so intimate it hurt to remember them and still be deprived of the right to repeat them.
‘Stop looking at me like that,’ Billie told him thinly, the colour of awareness mantling her cheeks, a warm glow unfurling low in her body to remind her of how much time had passed since she had last been touched. She had got pregnant, become a new mother, set up a new home and business and kept so busy-busy-busy for months on end that she fell into bed exhausted every night. It took Gio’s reappearance to remind her that life could offer more self-indulgent pastimes.
‘Like what?’
‘Like we’re still...you know,’ she completed, eyelashes lowering.
‘Like I still want to be inside you?’ Gio queried thickly. ‘But I do and right at this very minute I’m aching for you...’
A tiny clenching sensation in a place she refused to think about forced Billie to shift uneasily on the seat. ‘I really didn’t need to know that, Gio. That was a very inappropriate comment to make—’
Gio skated a long forefinger down over the back of the hand she had tautly braced to the leather seat. ‘At least it was honest and you’re not being honest—’
‘I’m not coming back to you!’ Billie interrupted loudly. ‘I’ve got another life now—’
‘Another man?’ Gio slotted in, deep accented voice raw with unspoken vibrations.
And Billie seized on that convenient excuse like a drowning swimmer thrown a lifebelt. ‘Yes. There’s someone else.’
Every lean, long line of Gio’s big body tensed. ‘Tell me about him.’
Billie was thinking about her son. ‘He’s extremely important to me and I would never do anything to hurt or upset him.’
‘There’s nothing I won’t do to get you back,’ Gio warned as the limousine drew up outside his country-house hotel and the chauffeur leapt out to open the door. He also grasped at that same moment that he was not as law-abiding as he had always assumed because he knew that he was willing to break rules in order to get Billie back.
Billie stole a reluctant glance at his lean, hard face, clashing with the golden glitter of his stunning eyes. She froze in consternation at that expression of menace she had never seen there before. ‘Is there some reason you can’t let me be happy without you?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I think I’ve paid my dues, Gio.’
Gio’s nostrils flared at that declaration, exasperation roughening the edges of an anger he knew he had no right to express. If she had another man, she would naturally get rid of him because he refused to credit that any other man could set her on fire the way he did. But nothing could assuage his bone-deep ferocious reaction to being forced to imagine Billie in bed with someone else. Billie had always been his alone, indisputably his.
As they crossed the foyer of the opulent hotel a familiar voice hailed Billie and she stopped dead and flipped round with a smile as a tall blond man in expensive country casuals moved towards her eagerly to greet her.
‘Simon, how are you?’ she said warmly.
‘I’ve got an address for you.’ Simon dug into his wallet to produce a piece of paper. ‘Got a pen?’
Billie realised her bag had been left behind at the shop and looked expectantly at Gio. ‘Pen?’ she pressed.
Totally unaccustomed to being ignored while others went about their business around him, Gio withdrew a gold pen from his pocket with pronounced reluctance, his beautiful obstinate mouth sardonic.
Simon borrowed the pen and wrote the address on the back of a business card. ‘There’s a heap of stuff there you’ll like and it won’t cost you much either. The seller just wants the house cleared.’
Impervious to the reality that Gio was standing by her side like a towering and forbidding pillar of black ice, Billie beamed at the taller man. ‘Thanks, Simon. I really appreciate this.’
Simon studied her with the same appreciation Gio had often seen on male faces around Billie and his perfect white teeth gritted. ‘Maybe you’ll let me treat you to lunch here some day soon?’
Gio shot an arm like a statement round Billie’s slender spine. ‘Regrettably she’s already taken.’
Ignoring that intercession, Billie reddened but kept on valiantly smiling. ‘I’d like that, Simon. Call me,’ she suggested while knowing that she was only encouraging the other man to make a point for Gio’s benefit and feeling guilty about that because Gio was making her behave badly as well.
‘What was that all about?’ Gio demanded grittily as he urged her into the lift.
‘Simon’s an antique dealer. He tips me off about house clearances. I know a lot of dealers. That’s how I built up my business,’ Billie advanced with pride.
‘You can open a shop in London. I’ll pay for it,’ Gio told her grimly.
Unimpressed, Billie glanced wryly at him. ‘Well, in a roundabout way you paid for this one and my house, so I don’t think it would be right for you to pay anything more.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I sold a piece of jewellery for cash. It was something you gave me.’
Gio frowned. ‘You left everything I ever gave you behind.’
‘No, I took one piece. Your very first gift,’ Billie extended. ‘I had no idea how much it was worth. That was a surprise, I can tell you.’
‘Was it?’ Gio couldn’t even remember his first gift to her and he would have been prepared to swear, having checked the jewellery she left behind, that she had taken nothing with her when she walked out.
‘Yes, you’re so extravagant it’s a wonder you’re not broke. You hardly knew me and yet you spent an absolute fortune on that diamond pendant,’ Billie told him critically. ‘It paid for my house and setting up the shop. I couldn’t believe how valuable it was!’
Gio thrust open the door of his suite. And just like that, the memory of the gift returned to him. He had bought the pendant after their first night together and he was furious that she had just sold it as if it meant nothing to her. ‘I don’t believe that there’s another man in your life.’
‘I’m not coming back to you,’ Billie told him in the most ludicrously apologetic tone. ‘Why would I want a shop in London? Why would I want to move? I’m happy here. And believe it or not there are men out there who would take me out with them into a public restaurant instead of hiding me inside their suite!’
Billie had served a direct hit. Gio paled b
eneath his Mediterranean tan. ‘We’re in my suite only because we need a private setting in which to talk.’
Billie gave him a wry smile. ‘Maybe that’s true this one time, Gio, but when it went on for almost two years, even I got the message. You might as well have been married from the moment I met you. I was like a guilty, dirty secret in your life.’
‘That is not true.’
‘No point arguing about the past now,’ Billie parried with determination. ‘It’s not worth it.’
‘Of course it is...I want you back.’ A spasm of open exasperation crossed Gio’s lean dark face when a knock sounded on the door, announcing the arrival of two waiters pushing a rattling trolley: lunch had arrived.
Billie folded her arms, thinking of her grandpa’s favourite winning racehorse, Canaletto, and the reality that just four years ago she had never heard of the artist called Canaletto before. Recalling that blunder still made Billie cringe and die inside herself, for the moment she had entered the conversation she had known her mistake but it had been far too late to cover it up. Unhappily for her, the one and only time Gio had taken her out to mix with his friends she had made an outsize fool of herself...and him.
Although he had reacted with neither anger nor criticism, he had dismissed her attempts to talk about the incident and explain that she had grown up more at home in betting shops than museums. But she had known that she had seriously embarrassed him in public in a way that would not be forgotten and, even worse, in a manner that had literally signposted the reality that she and Gio came from worlds and educational backgrounds that were light years apart.