‘But he’s right in the middle,’ Gianni responded with supreme cool. ‘So why drag out his demise? There’s no contest, is there?’
‘I don’t know wh-what you’re talking about,’ Faith stammered, although she was dreadfully afraid that she did, and what he was now suggesting terrified her.
Gianni dealt her a long, slow, sardonic look. ‘I don’t have much compassion to spare in Benson’s direction, but I’m fair enough to concede that he didn’t know he was poaching on my territory…so let him go now.’
‘Your territory?’ Faith parroted, scarcely believing her ears.
Gianni ran a mocking fingertip down the exposed line of her extended throat and watched her jerk and instinctively lean closer. ‘You’re still mine, cara. You don’t have any resistance to me at all. But then you never did have… I want you back, Milly.’
‘You couldn’t possibly! You’re nothing to do with me any more. Our only connection now is Connor!’ Faith asserted in a feverish rush of protest. Hurrying forward, she stooped to grab her son’s hand and turn back the way they had come. ‘It’s getting dark…it’s time I went home.’
‘Ducks?’ Connor cried in plaintive surprise.
‘The ducks have gone to bed,’ Faith told him with desperate urgency.
And the last sound she heard was Gianni’s husky appreciative laughter.
CHAPTER FOUR
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AFTER buckling a squirming complaining Connor into his car seat, Faith ruefully acknowledged that she had done it again. She had reached saturation point and fled when she could take no more. Once more Gianni D’Angelo had breached the boundaries of her expectations and forced her into uncharted waters.
His territory. She recalled that assertion with a shiver. Gianni wanted her back. And with that shattering statement of intent Gianni D’Angelo had plunged her into shock again. Just as she was struggling to regard and accept him as Connor’s father, Gianni had revealed a motivation she had never dreamt might exist.
He had been so casual about it too, but in the cool fatalistic fashion of a male referring to an inevitable event. And he had totally unnerved her when he had urged her to let Edward go. Edward was the man she loved, the man she was to marry in a few months’ time! Yet with frightening confidence Gianni had talked as though her fiancé was already on the way out of her life.
But mightn’t she herself have unwittingly encouraged that attitude? Faith squirmed, steeped in shame over behaviour which had merely increased her emotional turmoil. Gianni was incredibly attractive, but he had one trait more disturbing and more dangerous than all the rest put together, and that was a high-voltage aura of pure sex.
She had never recognised that in a man before. But she had been susceptible, indeed had found it quite impossible to control her own intense awareness of him. But then, around Gianni she was steadily becoming a person she didn’t know…
Edward hadn’t come into her mind once while her wretched body had come alive like an insidious enemy. And then, as she sat there fighting to understand what was happening to her, Faith suddenly found an escape route from the daunting conviction that in responding in any way to Gianni she had betrayed Edward.
Why was she being so tough on herself? What a fool she was being! That flashback about that long-ago phone call had destabilised her. The instant she’d realised that she had once loved Gianni it had become a huge challenge to deal with him as a stranger. So for a few minutes her barriers had slipped. The line between the past and the present had blurred. And in the enervated state she was in, she had reacted in a way she would never normally have reacted…
Now that she knew the problem it wouldn’t ever happen again, she told herself urgently. She had behaved as if she was still the woman making that phone call, hadn’t she? She had behaved as if Gianni was her lover. So she wasn’t really still attracted to Gianni. Involuntarily, she had responded to an eerie sense of familiarity.
Since Faith hadn’t heard the limousine pulling into the car park, and certainly hadn’t seen it, she almost leapt from her seat in fright when a hand gently rapped on the windscreen to attract her attention. Her head twisted round. She recognised Gianni’s burgundy silk tie and it was like an instant shot of adrenalin.
Gianni opened the car door to subject her to a fulminating appraisal.
‘What are you doing?’ Faith demanded defensively.
‘You’re sitting in the dark in an unlocked car in a deserted park. You’ve got a lot on your mind. Let me run you home,’ Gianni urged, his dark, deep drawl sending an odd little shiver through her.
‘If I’ve got a lot on my mind, whose fault is it?’ she condemned tautly. ‘Why can’t you give me five minutes of peace?’
‘You shouldn’t be on your own here.’ Delivering that assurance with the supreme confidence of a male making an unarguable statement, Gianni lowered his arrogant dark head to glance into the back of the car. His brilliant dark eyes connected with hers again. ‘Connor looks pretty miserable too.’
‘Daddy!’ Connor squealed in sudden excitement.
Flinching from that cry of recognition, Faith bowed her forehead down against the steering wheel and fought off an urge to bang it hard. But she had seen the reproof in his gaze. He hadn’t needed to say anything. ‘Go away, Gianni…’
‘Only if you go straight home and go to bed. You’re exhausted.
Faith tensed even more. She didn’t want to go home. No longer did she feel up to dealing with her parents, who were likely to be very upset by the news that Connor’s father had surfaced. Her past had caught up with her with a vengeance, and nobody was going to escape the fall-out, she acknowledged guiltily.
Lifting her head again, Faith turned the ignition key. ‘I’ll phone you tomorrow. I’m taking Connor to a fast-food restaurant for tea,’ she announced defiantly, and, reaching out, she slammed the door loudly on Gianni.