And afterwards he lay there in silence for a little while, before eventually opening his eyes and giving her a rueful look.
‘Wow,’ he breathed.
She felt flushed and brimming over with confidence and with life. ‘You liked that?’
He gave a lazy smile. Caught a lock of her hair and pulled her head down so that their lips were a whisper apart. ‘Oh, sì, cara. I liked it. I liked the way you were so wild and so free.’ He slipped his hand between her legs and she gasped. ‘And you like that?’ he murmured.
She began to squirm with pleasure. ‘Oh, God—yes. Yes! Please don’t stop.’
The smile became a growl of a laugh, like a lion. ‘Stop? Let me tell you, cara mia, that I haven’t even started yet.’
But the weekend came to an end all too quickly and at the airport he kissed her with a passionate goodbye which left her reeling.
‘Stay an extra day,’ he murmured into her ear.
The temptation almost overwhelmed her. Reluctantly, she withdrew a body which felt as though it could quite happily stay glued to his for ever.
‘I can’t,’ she said regretfully. ‘I have an early studio call in the morning.’
He nodded, dropped a kiss on the top of her head. ‘I am away in the States for a month,’ he said. ‘And I will call you. Very soon.’
‘Do.’ She squeezed his hand and walked away, clutching her overnight bag.
Was that the irony of life? he wondered as he watched her sashaying towards the departure lounge with just a careless wave and a smile as she disappeared. That you always wanted what you couldn’t have? If she had been living in the same city, there was no way he would have asked her to stay an extra day! Protectively, he would have wanted and guarded his own space.
He turned and began to walk away, oblivious to the women who watched him as his mobile phone began to ring and he slid it from his pocket and began to speak.
Eve arrived home in time to run herself a bath before bedtime, which she enjoyed by candlelight, dreamily and rather sentimentally listening to some Italian opera as she soaked in the lavender-scented suds.
And she was as bright as a button the next morning, despite a weekend of very little sleep, handling a sulky teenage pop star with aplomb and cleverly questioning the local Member of Parliament about why so little was being done about local traffic congestion.
&nbs
p; In fact, she was on cloud nine, not really living in the real world but existing instead in the perfect world of the imagination, where life was like that weekend all the time. Until she reminded herself that life was never that good. It couldn’t be, could it? Because it wasn’t real.
Maybe it was because when you took a lover, he dominated your normal routine and drove everything else into the shadows. Especially when it was someone like Luca.
Was that because he lived so far away, and therefore the bits of him she got were the exciting, glamorous bits, with none of the everyday drudge bits in between, which usually made you view a relationship much more realistically?
If he were living up the road in the same village and they had settled into a grinding routine, then would she still feel this crazy floating-on-air feeling?
It was a couple of weeks later that she happened to glance up at the calendar on the kitchen and her eyes stayed fixed on it with a mounting sense of disbelief, her heart missing a beat of very real fear.
She was late.
Very late.
She carried on preparing her stir-fry, even though her hands were trembling, but when the fragrant rice and prawns were served out on a pretty plate decorated with sunflowers, she pushed it away, her appetite gone.
She was never late. Never, ever, ever. Not once in her life—why, she could have set her clock by it. Was that why she hadn’t noticed it before, because she took it so much for granted? Or was it because her thoughts and her senses had been so full of Luca?
But she couldn’t be pregnant. They had used condoms and they had been careful.
She tried to ignore it, but couldn’t, clicking onto the search engine of her computer, to discover that there was a three percent chance the contraception could have failed. She felt sick, until she told herself that the odds were still hugely in her favour.
For a while longer she allowed herself to hope, but it was a hope which became increasingly forlorn.
The days became a series of long, agonised minutes while she waited and waited for something to happen which stubbornly refused to happen.