‘It’s still under consideration.’ Riccardo looked her straight in the eyes. Still as sexy as hell, he thought. Lucinda might be beautiful, but Charlotte was sharp and he liked that. In fact, he had forgotten just how much of a turn-on it was. His dark eyes slid across to where Ben was hurriedly downing the remains of his drink and standing up. The man was either firmly under her thumb, a complete bore with no mind of his own, or the perfect soulmate in a passionless love match, because he wasn’t reading anything in their body language.
He shifted so that he could look at them both, and was invigorated by the thought that he seemed to rouse her passion a hell of a lot more than her fiancé. Her fiancé who was obviously tight with money, judging from her lack of ring. Of course, her passion might not be of the hop-into-bed variety, but there was a fine line between the passion of anger and the passion of lust. Two sides of the same coin, he thought. He felt the sudden pull of forbidden attraction, and for a few seconds, staring at her, there was no club around them, no fiancé, no Lucinda. He was back in Italy, his body on fire, his head filled with thoughts of when, how and where he was going to bed her.
‘And I’ll be in touch.’
‘What?’ Charlotte said sharply.
‘About the house. I’ll be in touch.’
‘Well, you have Aubrey’s number.’ She turned away, leaving a goggle-eyed Lucinda suddenly very much interested in conversations about houses.
‘He’ll hate that,’ she confided triumphantly to Ben as soon as they were outside, settling themselves into the back of a black cab. ‘Some woman with stars in her eyes at the thought of houses and domesticity.’ She was so involved in savouring her small bittersweet victory that she missed Ben’s thoughtful expression as he watched her, as she leaned forward slightly, her eyes fixed on a distant horizon. ‘Least of all a woman who doesn’t conform to the well-connected Italian signorina he’s signed up for. Poor Lucinda. All the looks in the world couldn’t buy her an entry into that rarefied Italian world of his.’
It was half an hour before she found that the taxi had stopped outside her house, and only then did she realise that she had been boring the pants off Ben for the entire journey. But the babysitter was waiting inside and there was just no time for lengthy apologies. Just for a grateful peck on the cheek that he had rescued her from a hole that might just have caved in around her.
She hadn’t expected him to get in touch with Aubrey. There was no reason for him to buy his big investment house in any particular place, and he would take his time, making sure that he didn’t throw good money behind something that wasn’t going to reap him the maximum profit.
Anyway, he would be too busy trying to disentangle himself from the lovely Lucinda, just as he had disentangled himself from her eight years ago when she had foolishly believed that they’d been more than just a passing fling.
So on the Saturday morning, half an hour after she had returned from dropping Gina to play with one of her friends from school who lived a couple of streets away, Charlotte thought nothing when the doorbell went. She lived in a semi on a pretty, busy side street which looked deceptively peaceful because someone, years ago, had thought to plant trees here and there along the pavements. She was accustomed to people knocking on the door trying to sell her anything, from window cleaning to one-to-one power-yoga tuition.
Dressed in faded dungarees, hair scraped back with an Alice band and with her furniture polish in one hand—because she’d been going to utilise her Gina-free time by getting down and dirty with her cleaning stuff—she pulled open the front door, and froze.