He turned her around to face him and reached for a first aid kit from the cabinet above her head, pulling out a plaster which he placed over the cut on the inside of her finger with an efficiency that might have intrigued Lara if she’d not been so distracted.
He said with a dry tone, ‘While I will admit to relishing your discomfort at the prospect of marrying me, Lara, I’d prefer to keep you in one piece for the duration of our union.’
Lara’s finger throbbed slightly, and just when she was going to pull her hand back he stopped her, keeping her hands in his. He was frowning, and Lara looked down. He was turning her hands over in his and suddenly she saw what he saw. She tried to pull them back but he wouldn’t let her.
The glittering ring only highlighted what he was looking at: careworn hands. Hands that had been doing manual work. Not the soft lily-white hands she used to have. Short, unvarnished nails.
Suddenly he let her hands go and said curtly, ‘You’ve been neglecting yourself. You need a manicure.’
Lara might have laughed if the space hadn’t been so tiny and she hadn’t been scared to move in case her body came into contact with Ciro’s. Panic rose at the thought that Ciro might kiss her. She didn’t need her dignity battered again.
She scooted around him and into the relative spaciousness of the plane’s bedroom, hiding her hands behind her back. She wasn’t unaware of the massive bed in the centre of the room but she ignored it.
‘You could have told me you were putting out a press release. This affects me too, you know.’
Ciro looked unrepentant. ‘Oh, I’m aware of that. But as soon as you agreed to marry me you set in motion a chain of events which will culminate in our wedding within a week.’
‘A week!’ Lara wanted to sit down, but she didn’t want to look remotely vulnerable. So she stayed standing.
Ciro shrugged. As if this was nothing more to him than discussing the weather. ‘Why not? Why drag it out? I’ve got a busy schedule of events coming up and I’ll need you by my side.’
Lara felt cornered and impotent. She’d walked herself into this situation after all. ‘Why not, indeed.’
A knock came on the door and a voice from outside. ‘We’ll be landing shortly, Signor Sant’Angelo.’
Ciro took Lara’s arm in his hand, as if to guide her out, but when he didn’t move she glanced at him and saw him direct an expressive look from her to the bed.
‘Pity,’ he said silkily. ‘Next time.’
An immediate wave of heat consumed Lara at the mere thought of such a decadent thing, and she pulled her arm free and muttered a caustic, ‘As if...’
All she could hear as she walked back up the plane was the dark sound of Ciro’s chuckle.
* * *
Lara was very aware of the ring on her finger. She turned it absent-mindedly as she looked out of the window at the view of Rome.
She was glad they were here and not in Florence. Florence held too many memories...and nightmares.
It was where she’d met Ciro on a street one day and her world had changed for ever. He’d been in Florence to close a major deal which would convert one of the city’s oldest palazzos into an exclusive hotel. Something the Sant’Angelo name was famous for.
Not that she’d had any clue who he was at first.
She’d been pushed into the road by another tourist, blind to everything but the beauty of Florence, when someone had grabbed her and pulled her back from the oncoming cars.
She’d looked up to see who was holding her arm with such a firm grip and laid eyes on Ciro Sant’Angelo for the first time. He’d fulfilled every possible cliché of tall, dark and handsome and then some. And, even though Lara had seen plenty of tall, dark, handsome Italian men by then, it had been this one who had stopped her heart for a long second. When it had started beating again it had been to a different rhythm. Faster.
Lara had been excited and terrified in equal measure. Because no one had affected her heart in a long time. She’d locked it away after losing her family. Closed it up tight to protect herself. And yet, in that split second, on that sunny day in Florence, she’d felt it start to crack open again. Totally irrational and crazy. But it had opened and she’d never managed to close it up again.
She’d looked him up on the internet a couple of days after meeting him and absorbed the full extent of his fame and notoriety as a playboy who came from a family steeped in Sicilian Mafia history.
She’d told him that she’d looked him up. His expression had shuttered immediately, and she’d seen him drawing back into himself.
He’d said to her, ‘Find anything interesting?’
She’d known instinctively that the moment was huge, and that she trusted him. So she’d said, ‘I’m sorry. I just wanted to know more about you, and it was hard to resist, but I should have asked you about yourself face-to-face.’
After a long moment he’d extended a hand and said, ‘Ask me now.’