‘No?’ she queried in disbelief. ‘When your company’s name is synonymous with the world’s finest silverware? I’m not an expert—’
‘No, you’re not,’ he agreed coolly.
‘—but aren’t you missing out on an opportunity?’ she persisted, refusing to be cowed by his rudeness.
He shrugged as he acknowledged the compliment, noting almost reluctantly the way that her hair rippled in a fiery waterfall down over her breasts.
‘Our company’s success is based on traditional methods,’ he told her softly. ‘Over-expansion would be unwise—or so my father always maintained. We have never been a mass-market company, instead we make a limited number of very beautiful products. It is a lengthy and highly specialised process, and one of which my family is justifiably proud.’ He thought how passionate his voice sounded. How he rarely gave so much of himself away to a stranger. Danger.
His fervour drew her irresistibly in and she found herself leaning forward, clasping her hands on her knees. ‘How very romantic!’
Her face was earnest and the green eyes were huge and shining in her heart-shaped face. She looked, he thought with a sudden lurch of his heart, as eager and as animated as a child at Christmas. ‘It is a little,’ he agreed, with a slow smile. ‘Though sometimes I have a battle to rein in my ambitions.’
‘Beware of ambition which overreaches itself, Giovanni,’ she chided softly, without thinking.
‘Shakespeare,’ he observed. ‘Macbeth.’
‘You know the play?’ She couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice, and then saw the dangerous answering glitter of his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’
He gave a wry smile. ‘Oh, yes, you did,’ he contradicted silkily. ‘You’d placed me in your stereotypical little box, hadn’t you, Kate? The sophisticated veneer merely masking the Sicilian peasant who lies beneath? More familiar with the Mafiosi than with any kind of literature? Is that what you thought?’
Her lips opened to deny it, but the harsh way he had spoken had stripped away the urbane sophistication of this elegant man who sat opposite her.
And suddenly she saw someone quite unlike any other who had come into the safe confines of her London life. She saw centuries of pride and of striving encapsulated in that lean, hard body, and that proud and beautiful face.
She could not tear her eyes away from him, observing him with the intense preoccupation she usually gave to a house she was about to decorate.
The muscles which rippled beneath the silk shirt were not the pretty-precious muscles of a man who worked out with weights at the gym every morning. This was a man as men were meant to be. Tough and sometimes harsh, and totally uncompromising.
And she found herself wondering how a man like this would treat a woman.
He saw the dull flush of awareness which had spread rosy wings across her high, pale cheekbones and he rose from the sofa before the dull ache of temptation grew stronger. ‘May I use the bathroom?’
‘But of course!’ Thank heavens she had cleaned the sink that very morning! ‘It’s along the corridor—the third door down.’
Once there, he spurted icy water onto his wrists, as if doing that could subdue his heated blood. The eyes that stared back at him from the mirror looked like a stranger’s eyes with their hectic glitter transforming blue to black.
She is just a woman, he told himself. A very beautiful woman, but a woman all the same. And he had resisted many, many women over the years.
On his way back to the sitting room he passed what was obviously her study. He noted that she had left her computer on, and then he heard a loud buzzing, like the muted sound of a dentist’s drill, and saw a wasp as it battered uselessly at the window-pane.
He imagined its sting piercing her pale, smooth flesh and moved towards the insect, his mouth thinning as he acknowledged an inappropriate sense of protectiveness towards her. He raised the flat of his hand to crush the insect, and then relented, flicking the handle so that the window opened, and in that moment the wasp flew free.
As he shut the window he looked down at the scattered papers littered over the desk, and when an instantly familiar word leapt out at him he frowned.
Sicily.
His olive fingers flicked over the s
heets and a warmth stole over him as he gazed at the familiar shape of the island. So she was interested in him! Interested enough to bother to come straight back here and look up the land of his birth.
In that one moment he knew that he could have her. Recognised and rejected the tantalising idea before it had a chance to move from mind to body.
He went back into the sitting room.
‘It’s time I was leaving,’ he said abruptly.
Her heart lurched with disappointment, and Kate sprang to her feet. He looked so very right here, in her home—with his proud, dark beauty silhouetted against the golden backdrop of the light-dappled wall. Suddenly, she wanted him to stay.