‘And, just in case I wasn’t, you were prepared to jump in and be upfront on my behalf. Or at least land me in as much bother as you could. Payback for bumping into you accidentally after eight years.’
‘Okay. If you’ve come here looking for an apology, then I apologise. Satisfied?’
‘No.’ Riccardo stretched out his long legs and settled back into the sofa. ‘I told you. You’ve been on my mind.’
Charlotte went across to the chair facing him and flopped bonelessly into it. Standing by the door, trying to be a woman in control, was difficult when your legs felt like jelly. ‘I’m not interested, Riccardo.’
‘Aren’t you? Is that why you’re shaking like a leaf? Because you’re so indifferent to me?’ Riccardo watched her nervously sweep her fingers through her hair. He could almost hear the cranking of the gears in her head as she tried to formulate a verbal deterrent. Really and truly, he hadn’t known what he was going to say to her once he arrived on her doorstep. Yes, he’d been annoyed at her interference with Lucinda, but that had not been anything he hadn’t been able to deal with.
More complex was his reaction to Charlotte. Ever since he had bumped into her, he had been behaving out of character, and for the life of him he couldn’t understand why. He just knew that he had resurrected an old relationship with Lucinda to prove to himself that the blonde who had surfaced after eight years meant nothing to him. It hadn’t worked, and he couldn’t figure out how a man like him, a man who could have any woman he wanted, would find himself going crazy with thoughts of a woman who wanted nothing to do with him.
Bumping into them, seeing her with her fiancé, had clarified at least one piece of the puzzle.
He wanted her. Whether he liked the fact or not. Hence sitting here now, on her sofa, watching her seethe in impotent frustration at his presence in her house.
‘Why don’t you just tell me what you want, Riccardo? I’ve apologised over the Lucinda thing, and I meant it. What you do is no business of mine.’ But watching him squirm had been worth its weight in gold!
‘And what you do shouldn’t be any business of mine, but I find that it is.’
Charlotte felt faint. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the hands of her watch ticking. Time was creeping by and Riccardo was showing no signs of leaving.
In one split instant, she realised that she had made a fatal error. She had hoped to quench Riccardo’s curiosity by producing a fiancé and she had also, she’d thought, killed two birds with one stone because she’d figured that a fiancé would show him just how much her life had moved on.
She should have known that his curiosity over Ben would not have politely stopped the minute she’d hopped in her little car and driven away. Riccardo was not a polite person. If he hadn’t bumped into her at that club, then sooner or later he would have tracked her down, because he would have wanted to meet the man he thought she was intimately involved with.
He was staring at her, waiting for her to respond, and knowing that with each passing second of silence her discomfort was increasing.
Casually he let his eyes drift through the room. Pale colours. Not what he would have expected from a woman with a deeply passionate nature, but then maybe she was trying to stifle that passion. A small flat-screen television was perched on top of an antique pine bookcase. And in front of that row of books…
Riccardo stood up and strolled towards the bookcase, then he squatted down and looked at the framed pictures. They were all of the same person. He picked one up and stood up.