Skin touched skin. Electricity went crackling up her arm with such clamouring speed that it almost knocked her right off balance! She let out a gasp; there was no containing it, nor the sharp way that her head came up. Blue eyes clashed helplessly with deep dark brown.
After that there was stillness, a complete and utter stillness with hand touching hand and eyes holding eyes, swapping a knowledge that neither was doing anything to disguise.
No, her common sense was trying to advise her. Don’t let this happen. It’s wrong, it’s dangerous, it’s too darn complicated to warrant taking the risk.
But he’s so irresistible, her weaker self whispered. Exciting, beguiling, utterly compelling. She even felt herself leaning closer—just as she had done the last time she had looked deeply into his eyes…
Somewhere in the distance a phone began to ring. It was her salvation. And, good grief, but she needed saving! she acknowledged as, on a flurry of embarrassment, she withdrew her hand and scrambled to her feet, then fled back into her own office, leaving him still squatting there, with his dark eyes following her every single step of the way.
The call was an internal query that took all her powers of concentration to answer without sounding drunk. By the time she came back, the files had been stacked on the coffee-table and Giancarlo Cardinale was poring over the contents of one of them.
‘Come and sit down,’ he instructed without a single inflection in his tone to so much as hint at what had just passed between them.
She moved on legs that were still feeling weak and unsteady, over to the sofa on the opposite side of the table.
‘No, not there,’ he said. ‘Sit here, next to me so we can look at these together.’
Together, she repeated to herself. What a buzzword. What a provocatively tantalising buzzword. And as she moved to perch herself stiffly on the cushion next to his she found herself wishing that the man were as ugly as sin.
‘Coffee?’ he offered.
‘I don’t drink it,’ she politely refused.
An eyebrow tweaked as he scanned the typed print on the piece of paper he was reading. ‘What—never?’ he asked, but she had a feeling the raised eyebrow was mocking the stiff way she was sitting there.
‘Sometimes—after dinner maybe.’ She shrugged, stubbornly deciding that it was time to take every single word he spoke at its absolute face value. No hearing hidden meanings, no looking for anything other than a professional boss-assistant relationship.
‘A cup-of-tea girl,’ he presumed, placing one piece of paper aside to pick up another.
‘I prefer water, if you must know,’ she told him.
‘A woman with simple tastes, then.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded—very firmly because she was a woman of simple tastes. And Giancarlo Cardinale was not simple at all. He was a rare delicacy only the very rich or the very reckless would consider trying. She was neither rich nor reckless. In fact, she was the most cautious person she knew!
Which only made her reaction to Giancarlo Cardinale all the more perturbing. It just wasn’t like her.
‘Now…’ he said on a complete change of manner ‘…explain to me why this company needs the skills of marketing experts when the product they produce virtually sells itself…’
Peering over his arm, she saw the famous Fillens logo, and smiled ruefully at his comment. ‘Geoffrey Fillen and Edward were at school together,’ she explained. ‘Fillens have been using Edward’s marketing skills for as long as he has been in business.’
‘Ah, the
old school network.’ Giancarlo grimaced understandingly. ‘Lucky Edward. Does the business from this company also come via the same route?’ he asked, indicating towards a different file.
After that, she became engrossed in a lesson on the astuteness of this man’s business mind as he began picking out the base-root foundation upon which Edward had built his company.
And as the afternoon wore on she found herself becoming more and more fascinated by Edward’s brother-in-law as he displayed qualities that by far outweighed the merely physical. He was shrewd, he was quick, he was incredibly logical when it came to matters of business.
He possessed a low-pitched and easy telephone manner that clearly kept his listeners safely assured that, though he might not be where they wanted him to be, he was still accessible and in control, with his finger most firmly on the pulse of everything beneath the Cardinale Group umbrella.
She even knew when he was talking to his secretary because his tone grew firmer, sharper, more commanding—though she didn’t understand a word because he was speaking in Italian. A language that worked on the senses like alcohol, sluicing out tensions and replacing them with warm, soft feelings of—
Oh, no, not again. With a jerk she fixed her attention on the stream of notes he’d had her taking. The phone went down—and rang again almost immediately. Without a pause he switched from Italian to English, and began a discussion about corporate profit projections that left her completely flummoxed.
Dynamic was the word she was toying with when he suddenly sat down beside her again. Heat sizzled between them, but she grimly ignored the stomach-curling effect it had on her.
By five o’clock, open files lay scattered all about them and the coffee-table, and the lights were on to supplement the loss of sunlight seeping in through the blinds.