Kate suppressed a shudder at his choice of word. Houseguest. You couldn’t get any more coldly unemotional than that, could you? ‘She works for me. She takes and makes bookings, does my accounts, answers the phone—that kind of thing. And there’s no need to make it sound as though I have houseguests like you all the time!’
‘And do you?’ he drawled insolently, but the knife-edge of jealousy twisted itself sharply in his gut.
Bitter reproach sparked green fire from her eyes. ‘What do you think?’
He drove the jealousy away and forced himself to stay calm. ‘I’d like to think that this was a one-off situation,’ he told her steadily. ‘For you as much as for me.’
‘For your ego’s sake, I suppose?’ she questioned heatedly.
He shook his dark head. ‘No, Kate, more for my pride’s sake.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘And yours too, of course.’
‘Oh, you’re…you’re…’
He gave a soft laugh as he acknowledged her fire. ‘What am I, cara?’
‘Impossible!’ she declared, without really knowing why. Or maybe she did. Maybe her rage was directed more at the fact that he would never really be hers to have—other than in a particularly satisfying, but curiously empty, sexual sense. Angrily she turned away from him, but he reached a lazy hand out and stopped her, pulling her, still resisting, into his arms. She struggled a little. ‘Go away!’ she stormed as he bent to brush his lips against hers.
‘You know you don’t mean that,’ he murmured, feeling their velvet surface begin to tremble at that first contact.
‘Yes, I do…. Oh!’
He kissed her in earnest then, and she went under, only to gaze up at him dazedly when eventually he stopped the kiss. ‘That wasn’t fair,’ she whispered as she met the question in his eyes.
‘What wasn’t?’
‘You say outrageous things to me and then think you can just kiss them better!’
‘So what do you want me to stop doing, cara—saying the outra
geous things, or kissing them better?’
His cajoling tone coaxed her lips into an unwilling smile. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, and he tipped her face up to trap her in a blinding blue stare, a different kind of question in his eyes this time.
‘I think we’d better go back to bed and make up properly, don’t you?’ he questioned unsteadily.
‘But we’ve only been up an hour!’ Her protest sounded feeble even to her own ears, and the look of hungry intent on his face had her babbling at him like a tour-guide, watching in reluctant fascination as he smiled the smile of a man who knew he had won the battle. ‘And we were going to go to visit the Tower of London today, remember?’
‘It’s been standing there for centuries; it’ll wait for a few more hours,’ he told her arrogantly, and led her back towards the bedroom.
CHAPTER NINE
‘I THINK that’s everything.’ Giovanni clicked shut his suitcase, and turned to look at where she stood, silently surveying him, her face impassive, and he wondered what thoughts were going through that beautiful head of hers.
So far, at least, there had been no word or demonstration that Kate was going to miss him, after a fortnight spent almost exclusively together—save when she had made an excuse to go downstairs to see her sister to discuss work.
And Kate watched him with a dull ache in her heart. Intellectually she had known that this moment would come, and emotionally she had prepared herself for the inevitable pain it would bring. But the reality was far worse than even her worst imaginings.
‘What time does your plane leave?’
He flicked a glance at his watch, and then again at her. ‘In two hours.’ If it had been at any other time during the past two weeks then he might have tried to make love to her one more time. But this goodbye was turning into something he hadn’t quite anticipated, and to take her into his arms to lose himself in that mindless pleasure would, he knew, somehow devalue what they had shared together.
‘Would you like some coffee before you go?’
More in an attempt to dissolve the brittle atmosphere than because he really wanted a cup, he nodded in agreement. ‘Please.’