by Heidi Rice
‘You played your ace for nothing,’ he whispered against her ear, his lips brushing the pulse point hammering her throat.
She braced her arms, horrified by the sizzle of response shimmering down to her core, the moisture flooding from her thighs. The man thought she was some kind of con artist. How could she still be so susceptible to him?
He nipped at her ear lobe. ‘What a shame you didn’t do a better job with your research. If you had you’d know I’m not the noble type.’ His hand cupped her breast. And she gasped, the nipple puckering through the velvet as he rubbed his thumb across the tip. He chuckled, the sound hollow and smug. ‘You were saving it up for nothing, sweetheart. But let’s not let it go to waste. Right?’
‘Please don’t do this.’ The tears stinging her eyes only added to her humiliation. She bit into her lip, desperate to get out, to get away, before he saw her cry.
He lifted his head at the blare of a car horn from outside. ‘Well, what do you know? Saved by your cab bell.’
He let her go, and she scrambled back.
‘Go on, get lost,’ he said, the mocking twist of his lips brutal in its contempt. He swept a hand towards her stuff. ‘And take your research with you.’
She lifted her bag from the counter, shoved the contents back into it, her hands shaking but her back ramrod straight. The tears scoured her throat as she gulped them back.
You have to hold it together, long enough to get out of here.
She slung the bag over her shoulder, made herself face him. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you knew who I was. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,’ she said, politeness the only shield she had.
‘Then I guess we’re both sorry. Aren’t we?’ he said, his voice as flat and expressionless as his eyes.
Somehow even his anger was better than his contempt. She rushed through the terrace doors. Her bare feet slapped against the wooden decking as she fled, not just from him, but from her own stupidity and inadequacy.
She clenched her teeth, pressed the heel of her palm against her breastbone as the cab whisked away from the kerb. The pain and confusion felt fresh and raw and jagged as the romance of her one wild night shattered inside her like the fragile illusion it was.
How could she ever have believed, even for one night, that she could be anything other than what she was? A cowardly academic who’d spent her whole life day-dreaming about being reckless and adventurous and then doing exactly what she was told.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘WHAT is going on, Eva? Bob informs me he finally got a reply from Delisantro’s agent and the guy told him Delisantro not only wants nothing to do with this company, but he specifically doesn’t want anything to do with you.’
‘I’m so sorry, Mr Crenshawe.’ Eva gripped the polyester weave of the seat cushion and hunched into the seat, the pain as fresh and raw as it had been a week ago. Sweat pooled under the armpits of her tailored suit. ‘I had hoped Mr Delisantro would be more willing to cooperate with Bob,’ she mumbled, the jagged little shards of agony piercing her chest at this renewed evidence of Nick’s contempt.
Hadn’t she suffered enough for her foolishly reckless and fanciful behaviour a week ago?
She’d confessed to her boss, Henry Crenshawe, that her trip had been a failure as soon as she’d got back from San Francisco. Mr Crenshawe had subjected her to a ten-minute lecture on her appalling lack of people skills, and then taken her off the account, which she’d been pathetically grateful for. She didn’t want to have to contact Nick again.
But she’d been far too humiliated by her gross lack of judgement and professionalism—not to mention the presence of those jagged little shards that came back every time she thought of Nick—to admit the whole truth to her boss or anyone else. That she’d got carried away by some ridiculous flight of fancy and the nuclear blip to her usually tame libido as soon as she’d set eyes on Nick Delisantro—and lost sight of everything that was important in her life in the space of one night. Her responsibilities to Roots Registry and to her job hadn’t even entered her head. And for that she felt not just guilty and embarrassed but so angry with herself she wanted to scream. She’d put a job she adored in jeopardy. But what upset her more was the knowledge that Nick’s contempt still hurt so much, a week after he’d kicked her out of his apartment.
How foolish was she to have believed that he might have reconsidered? And decided that she wasn’t such a terrible person after all? And why should it even matter? She was never going to see him again.
‘Yeah, well he isn’t cooperating.’ The irritation on Henry Crenshawe’s face made it quite clear she wasn’t going to be given any slack. ‘What exactly is it that Delisantro has against you? Because if we knew that, we might be able to fix it. Get back in his good graces. The company needs this commission—it’s prestigious as hell. The publicity is priceless. Alegria has three other heir-hunting companies that I know of looking for his heir. And we’ve got the jump on them. Because we’ve already located the guy.’ Crenshawe yanked at his collar, his pudgy face going a mottled red. Eva’s heart, the jagged little shards still prickling, sank to her toes.
She would have to tell her boss the truth. ‘It’s a private issue, between myself and Mr Delisantro,’ she mumbled, desperate to stave off the inevitable.
‘Private how?’ Crenshawe demanded. ‘You were only in San Francisco for one night. I know your people skills are non-existent,’ he said, his voice rising. ‘But even you couldn’t have annoyed him that much in one night.’
She could hear the incredulity in Crenshawe’s voice, and knew what he was thinking. How could his quiet, timid and inconspicuous researcher even have been noticed by a man as dynamic as Nick Delisantro, let alone have made enough of an impression on him to annoy him to this extent?
The realisation triggered something inside her—and the jagged little shards of misery were obliterated by a surge of anger.
Eva straightened in her chair, and her gaze lifted to the man who had always regarded her with benign contempt. Mr Crenshawe wouldn’t expect Nick Delisantro to notice her, because like most of the people she knew, he had never really noticed her either. Henry Crenshawe had always taken her work completely for granted, had never given her the credit she was due.
Roots Registry hadn’t located the Duca D’Alegria’s missing heir, she had—after weeks of painstaking research on the historical data, most of which had had to be translated from Italian. It had been a mammoth task, checking marriage records, tracing the movements of every young bride within a fifty-mile radius of the Alegria estate in the year in question and then correlating the birth certificates of the babies born to them.
And it wasn’t the first time her concentrated and creative investigation of the known facts and her diligent attention to detail had pulled in a major account. Even so, she’d been the only one of Crenshawe’s researchers not to be considered for a promotion when the company had expanded a year ago. She was paid less than all her male colleagues and she’d only had one modest bonus in three years. While she adored the job she did at Roots Registry, she’d always shied away from any contact with her boss, because she knew he was a sexist blowhard who didn’t understand or appreciate the work she did… Except when it came to the bottom line.
What made her temper spike, though, was the fact that Crenshawe’s scorn towards her and her efforts had been partly her own fault, because she’d never once stood up for herself.
Until now.
Yes, she’d made a mistake sleeping with Nick Delisantro. But his negative reaction to the news of his grandfather’s existence had not been caused by their night together. He’d clearly already been aware of his illegitimacy before she’d said anything. And the deep-seated resentment there had nothing whatsoever to do with her.
But more than that, Crenshawe was wrong about her. She wasn’t the mouse he clearly thought she was. Not any more.
Nick Delisantro had noticed her. She hadn’t been invisible to Nick. And while it might have been
better for her employment prospects if she hadn’t had sex with him, she was through feeling guilty or ashamed about what she’d done. She didn’t deserve Henry Crenshawe’s contempt, any more than she deserved Nick Delisantro’s.
‘I slept with Nick Delisantro that night,’ she announced, pleased with the firm tone and her refusal to relinquish eye contact when Crenshawe’s eyebrows shot up to his receding hairline. ‘And he misconstrued my motives the following morning.’
‘You did what?’ Crenshawe yelped, the sheen of sweat on his forehead glistening. ‘You… You…’ His double chin wobbled with fury, the mottled colour in his cheeks turning scarlet. ‘You stupid little tart.’
He was going to fire her. She could see it in the vindictive light that came into his beady eyes as he stomped around the office, gesticulating wildly and throwing out a series of increasingly personal insults about her and her work.
Her fingers released on the seat cushion and she kept her chin thrust out, more than ready to take the blow, an odd sense of calm and detachment settling over her.
Well, what d’you know? Mr Crenshawe has noticed me at last.
Nick tapped the parting line of dialogue into the template on his computer. Then paused to reread the scene he’d spent all morning sweating blood over. And groaned.
His detective hero sounded like someone with a borderline personality disorder. He ran his fingers through his hair, then stabbed the mouse to close the script window on the laptop.
Getting up from the desk, he crossed to the window, glared down at the street below which was all but deserted in the middle of the afternoon on a workday. Maybe if he got out of the apartment for a few hours, took a ride on his bike and blew the cobwebs out of his head. But as soon as the thought registered he dismissed it.
The bike was out. He’d gone for a ride yesterday, and somehow ended up on the Marin Headland, the memory of Eva Redmond’s lush body plastered against his back and the high-pitched whoop of her laughter as they’d crossed the bridge reverberating through his subconscious every inch of the way.
Why couldn’t he get her out of his head? It had been a full week since that night. The woman was an operator, had investigated him and his origins and then had the gall to sleep with him without telling him the truth about who she was. That should have been more than enough to end his fascination.
He swore softly, slung a hand into the pocket of the sweatpants he wore when writing. How had she got her hooks into him so deep?
He squinted against the afternoon sun shining through the study window and pictured her face the last time he’d seen it. The pallor of her skin, her lips trembling and those wide translucent blue eyes, the pupils dilated with shock.
Instead of the resentment, the cleansing anger that had sustained him for the last seven days, he finally acknowledged the trickle of guilt.
‘Hell!’ The expletive cut the quiet like a knife.
Eva Redmond might not have been one hundred per cent forthcoming about who she was, but there was no getting around the fact that he had seduced her. Not the other way around.
As soon as he’d spotted her in the Union Square gallery, her glorious curves displayed to perfection in red velvet, her shy but direct gaze locked with his, he’d wanted her. And while he’d become a lot more cautious in the last decade or so, a lot more discerning about who he pursued, one thing hadn’t changed. When he saw a woman he wanted, he went after her.
The only difference with Eva was that he had been more relentless, more eager and more determined in his pursuit. There had been numerous signs of how innocent, how out-of-her-depth she was, long before he’d taken her virginity, and he’d chosen to ignore every one of them to have her. So whose fault was it really that he’d ended up getting burned? Plus when he replayed all the conversations they’d had during their evening together—something he’d done with alarming regularity in the last seven days—he could see she’d tried to tell him who she was. And he’d stopped her elaborating, because he hadn’t wanted to hear anything that might stop him getting her into bed.
He braced his hand on the window sill, forced himself to confront the truth. He’d done a lot of crummy things in his life. None of which he was proud of. But some of them had been necessary to survive. When you ran away from home at sixteen with just the clothes on your back and a belly full of anger, you ended up doing a lot of things that you would later regret. And he’d done more than his fair share.
He was enough of a pragmatist, though, to realise that he couldn’t go back and undo those things now. And in many ways, he wouldn’t want to. He wasn’t a hypocrite and he knew that what he’d managed to make of his life had been largely due to that feral survival instinct—and the burning anger that had kept him strong and resilient in the face of often impossible odds. You couldn’t go back, you had to go forward. But that didn’t mean he could keep repeating those mistakes over and over again.
The only way he was going to be able to put this episode behind him was to see Eva Redmond again—and wipe that vision of her eyes bright with unshed tears out of his head.
Unfortunately, seeing Eva had the potential to open up a whole other can of worms.
He huffed out a harsh laugh, felt the hum of heat pulse through his system as he recalled the sight of Eva reflected in the glass, her nipples large and distended, and her soft sighs of pleasure spurring him on. He’d woken in a hot sweat every night since that night. His sex hard and erect, and throbbing with the urge to bury himself deep inside the tight clasp of her body. He’d got so damn wound up by the erotic memories he hadn’t been sleeping properly, had barely been able to write—and everything he had written was terrible.
So the urge to see Eva again wasn’t entirely altruistic. Given the shoddy way he’d treated her the morning after, he doubted she was going to be all that amenable to jumping back into bed with him—but that didn’t seem to bother his libido.
The bright trill of his phone had him jerking upright. He turned to stare at it flashing on his desk. Probably his agent Jim wanting to know how the script was going. Not a conversation he really wanted to be having, seeing as the damn thing was going nowhere fast. But even so, he picked up the handset. Better to be lying to Jim than wrestling pointlessly with the apparently insolvable problem of Eva Redmond.
‘Hi,’ he said, struggling to inject some enthusiasm into the greeting.
‘Hello, may I speak to Niccolo Delisantro?’ replied a male voice with crisp and efficient British diction.
‘Speaking, although the name’s Nick,’ he corrected, curious even though he didn’t want to be. The only people who had called him Niccolo in recent memory were Eva and her friend Tess.
‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Delisantro. Nick,’ came the effusive and fawning reply.
‘Who is this?’ Nick said, feeling less curious and more annoyed by the second.
‘My name is Henry Crenshawe, I’m the managing director of Roots Registry. We’re based in the UK. We do genealogical research for high-profile clients who wish to discover the—’
‘Cut to the chase, Henry,’ Nick interrupted the flow of unnecessary information as the short hairs on the back of his neck tingled. Roots Registry? Wasn’t that the name of Eva’s employer?
He heard a slight pause on the other end of the line, then Crenshawe’s voice came back, the tone oily and obsequious. ‘This is a very delicate situation, Mr Delisantro. I’m calling to offer my sincere apologies for the reprehensible conduct of our former employee Miss Eva Redmond. I can’t stress enough our absolute—’
‘What do you mean your former employee?’ Nick asked as his heartbeat kicked up a notch.
‘We fired her, of course,’ the man replied, in an officious voice, and the trickle of guilt turned into a torrent.
‘As soon as we discovered her grossly inappropriate behaviour during her visit to San Francisco,’ Crenshawe continued in the same pompous tone. But Nick couldn’t really hear what the guy was pontificating about.
Ev
a had lost her job over their night together.
‘And I’d like to assure you she will never get another job in the genealogical research industry again after this incident—’
‘Wait a minute,’ Nick cut in, his temper finally putting in an appearance. ‘How did you find out we slept together?’ Was he being watched by these people?
He thought he heard a slight choking sound, then a supercilious little laugh. ‘Um, well, Miss Redmond admitted to the indiscretion, Mr Delisantro, this afternoon.’
He raked his fingers through his hair.
Damn it, why had she told them? But even as he asked himself the question he could see the guilty flush on her cheeks when she’d admitted to being a virgin—as if she’d tricked him or something—and he knew the answer. Because she was an honest and forthright and hopelessly trusting person. Unlike him.
And to think he’d accused her of being an operator. What a joke. Eva Redmond was about as devious as Snow White.
‘Here at Roots Registry we couldn’t possibly condone that kind of behaviour,’ Crenshawe continued with the same self-righteous indignation. ‘We’re a reputable company in every respect and we value our reputation above all else.’
‘But not your employees,’ Nick remarked coldly, his anger at the man rising.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr Delisantro?’
‘You heard me—how long did Eva work for you?’
‘Approximately three years,’ Crenshawe replied with affronted dignity. Nick could almost see him puffing up his chest.
‘And during that time, did she ever do anything like this before?’
‘Well, no, of course not. She was a quiet and, we thought, demure employee—we never had any reason to suspect she would—’
‘But even so you didn’t think she was worthy of a second chance?’ Nick interrupted again. The creep had sacked Eva without a moment’s notice and by the sounds of it was intending to blacklist her too—and all because she’d succumbed to the explosive physical chemistry between them that even Nick, with all his sexual experience and cynicism, hadn’t been able to resist.