‘So you’ve changed your mind about champagne?’ he drawled.
She looked up from the menu, her heart thudding painfully in her chest. ‘We haven’t really got anything to celebrate, have we?’
Was it another sudden look of vulnerability that made him say it? ‘Except for the most erotic afternoon of my life,’ he answered softly.
‘Mine, too,’ she admitted helplessly.
‘So far,’ he added, and the soft blue gleam from his eyes set her pulses racing.
She stared at him, trying to see beyond the dark glamour of his looks and the lazy sophistication he exuded. ‘Listen,’ she sighed, ‘we can’t spend the whole evening talking about sex, can we?’
He laughed. ‘Well, we can…. I think what you mean to say is that it could become rather wearing.’
‘Thanks for the language lesson,’ she responded drily, taking a sip from the glass of lager which the waiter put on the table in front of her.
‘What do you want to talk about?’ he murmured. ‘You want to tell me a little something of your life?’
Again she tried to pretend that this was a normal first date, but her words came out in a stilted list of facts. ‘My parents live on the outskirts of London. One older sister. Her name is Lucy.’
‘And where is she?’
‘She lives in the flat below mine.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘So, two successful, affluent sisters living close to one another—how pleased your parents must be.’
‘Yes. They are.’ But she didn’t want to talk about herself—she wanted to learn about this man to whom she had given herself so freely. She looked at him curiously. ‘Your English is absolutely brilliant.’
‘There you go again,’ he murmured, recognising a deliberate attempt to change the subject. ‘Stereotyping me.’
‘I wasn’t!’ she protested.
‘Yes, you were!’ His faint accent became suddenly exaggerated and pronounced, like a caricature of a foreign accent. ‘You want me to talk like theese, cara?’
She laughed, but the stupid thing was that his voice sent shivers up and down her spine, no matter which way he talked.
She shook her head. ‘Tell me where you learnt to speak it so well.’
‘In America.’
So that explained the accent. And the fluency.
‘I lived there—for a year in between leaving college and starting work in the company,’ he explained, shrugging his shoulders in answer to the question in her eyes. ‘My father thought it wise to become completely fluent before I did so. It can be such a disadvantage to have to negotiate in a foreign language unless you are completely familiar with it. People can try to take you for a fool,’ he finished, on an odd kind of note.
‘I can’t imagine anyone trying to take you for a fool,’ she said slowly.
His eyes glittered. He wondered if she had any idea just how irresistible her mouth was. ‘If that was a compliment, then I thank you.’
‘Just an observation,’ she returned lightly and put her glass of lager down. ‘So what was life like in America?’
He sighed. He had worked hard and par
tied hard, and during the process had come into contact with many beautiful women who had made no secret of their attraction for the tall, lean Sicilian with the disconcerting blue gaze. But despite the attractions not once had he succumbed to any of their undoubted charms.
He had been dating Anna since his third year in college, and had recognised that in her he had found a woman who would make him the perfect wife. Through the many years which had followed, that certainty had never wavered. And yet he had thrown it all away for Kate Connors.
‘It was exactly as you would expect,’ he said coolly. ‘Very vast and very different to the land I had grown up in.’
She heard the edge to his tone and wondered wildly whether a getting-to-know-you dinner had been such a good idea after all. Were they destined only to be compatible when they were horizontal? How about the easy conversation she usually managed to achieve when she was in the company of an intelligent, attractive man? She struggled for the right, light touch, even as she despised her own eagerness to please him. ‘But you liked it?’