The flicker of her lashes told him he’d hit the right button to achieve his aims. And, as if on cue, the driver stepped out of the Mercedes and jumped to open the rear door for them. Silently, Giancarlo thanked him for his perfect timing.
‘Come on,’ he invited. ‘I will take you home.’
‘My home,’ she said, swinging her head round to look directly at him at last.
His hands twitched at his sides with a need to just grab her and kiss some healthy life back into her. But the frost went too deep and it might ruin his chances completely. ‘If that is what you want,’ he therefore agreed.
‘It is,’ she confirmed and without another word she stepped forward and slid into the back of the Mercedes.
With a grim nod of his head at the driver, he closed her inside, then he walked around to the other side of the car to get in as the driver sat behind his wall of tinted glass.
They moved away from the kerb with Natalia staring fixedly out of her window and Giancarlo gauging that he had about five minutes before she began to realise she wasn’t going to Chelsea.
‘A Russian great-grandmother,’ he remarked. ‘Now I know where all the fire and the passion comes from.’
Her head flicked round, and it was as if a light had suddenly been switched on inside her. ‘Don’t you dare comment on my background!’ she threw at him hotly. ‘Don’t you even so much as dare to make it any business of yours!’
‘It is my business if you are sharing your genes with my baby,’ he pointed out, quite happily fanning the flames.
‘I am not pregnant!’ she flashed.
‘You cannot know that with such certainty,’ he replied.
‘Tomorrow will tell,’ she muttered, and turned away again.
‘Why tomorrow specifically?’ he asked curiously, following every flash and restless quiver she made and loving every one of them because it meant he was beginning to melt the ice. Once the ice was gone he could begin dealing with the melting woman. A woman who was in for a big fight if she was foolishly allowing herself to believe that he was going to let go of her now.
Because he wasn’t.
‘I’ll buy one of those test-kit things,’ she informed him. ‘First thing in the morning.’
‘Good idea,’ he said agreeably. ‘We will watch the result with interest—together—’
‘You won’t be there to watch it!’ she flung at him.
The caution brought her eyes back into contact with his—and this time he held on to them by sheer grim resolve. ‘Oh, yes, I will,’ he countered very seriously. ‘For I do not think I should trust you to tell me the truth, you see…’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT WAS like waving a red rag to a bull, especially when Natalia had been intending to do just that if necessary and lie to Giancarlo! ‘Will you want a DNA test done as well, if I find I am pregnant?’ she enquired ever so, ever so acidly.
The dark eyes flickered, though they didn’t release her eyes. ‘Do you think it could be a possibility that such a test may be required?’ he countered.
It was a clean hit. Natalia even found herself acknowledging it with a gasp, because she knew she had set herself up for that. They had known each other for a few weeks only. Not long enough to cover a full menstrual cycle, in fact. So even with his rotten suspicions about her relationship with Edward out of the way, she could quite easily be pregnant by some other imaginary guy, she supposed. How would he know that she hadn’t been involved in an intimate relationship with any man for years?
She had been too involved in other things, such as a mother dying, and a newly found father to pour all her emotions into.
‘No, a DNA test won’t be needed,’ she replied, resenting having to say it at all. Then she wrenched her eyes away to glare out of the side window while she waited for him to come back with some cynically disbelieving reply.
And why not? she asked herself bitterly. You fell into his bed like a woman who did that kind of thing all the time! Shame engulfed her, followed by a real contempt for the person she had allowed herself to become in her reckless desire for this man.
Then she stopped thinking. Her eyes blinked into focus on what it was she was actually glaring at. ‘We’re going the wrong way,’ she announced, and was already leaning forward to knock on the glass partition so she could tell the driver—when another hand closed around her hand.
Suddenly the sparks were flying, crackling around the inner compartment and bouncing off all surfaces in a skin-against-skin chemical reaction that rendered her totally breathless.
Unable to stop herself, she glanced at him and felt her heart begin to race when she saw what was written in his eyes. He was going to kiss her—and she didn’t want him to!—yet her eyes dropped to his mouth of their own hungry volition. It began to move, her throat locked, her own lips beginning to heat in preparation for what was about to come to them.
‘Keys,’ he said.