She had to know where she stood. She had to. ‘Did you?’ she persisted.
‘Yes. Yes, of course I did.’ There had been two tense, fraught meetings before Anna had realised that the clock could not be put back. He had told her sincerely that he wanted her to find happiness with someone who deserved her quiet devotion. She had told him to go to hell and somehow that had made him feel better.
‘How is she?’
He turned back again. ‘Do you really care?’ he demanded.
‘Of course I care! Do you think I feel good about what happened?’
‘I feel a lot worse about it than you do, cara, let me assure you.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘The last I heard, she had cut her hair and was flying to stay with her sister in Rome, who is promising to give her the time of her life.’
Still, there was something else she needed to know. ‘So there is no chance of a reconciliation?’
‘Kate,’ he said dangerously, ‘if this was troubling you then should you not have asked me before you agreed to come out here?’
‘I suppose so—’
‘But you didn’t?’
‘No.’ She bit her lip as she recognised the truth, that she had wanted to see him to the exclusion of all else—of pride…even of common decency.
He shook his head as if in quiet disbelief. ‘Did you really imagine that I would betray her for a second time with you?’
‘Is that all I am to you?’ she said bitterly. ‘A betrayal?’
In a sense, yes, she was, but she was more than that. His reaction to her had illuminated the fact that he did not have the steely control he had once thought defined his character. She was his weakness, too.
‘Would you be here tonight if I thought that?’ he grated.
‘It might have been easier if you had found yourself a different bed-partner,’ she said stiffly. ‘Someone who didn’t have such tainted associations as I clearly do.’
‘But I didn’t want another bed-partner. I wanted you.’ His eyes were luminously blue as he came to sit on the edge of the bed, his finger ruefully tracing the tremble of her mouth. ‘I wanted to see you again,’ he said starkly. ‘I had to see you again.’
But she thought that he made her sound like an addiction he couldn’t wait to be rid of. ‘Can I have a drink now, please?’ she asked him as a diversion.
‘You can have anything you want,’ he smiled.
Except his heart.
‘Magara mia,’ he whispered.
‘What’s that?’ she whispered back.
There was more regret in his face as he shrugged. ‘My witch.’
But witches could work magic, and there was no spell she could put on Giovanni to make him love her as she loved him. Lucy had been right all along, Kate realised. Because from unconventional beginnings had grown a feeling which now consumed her.
He gave her a robe to wear, and put one on himself, and then opened champagne just as the food arrived—tiny little tapas which he laid out on a table overlooking the glittering city.
Kate forced herself to forget her useless longings, to enjoy the view and the food and the man who sat before her, enchanting her with little looks of longing as he fed her morsels of delicious food with his fingers.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
KATE had rarely felt so nervous as she dressed for dinner the following evening—and her nerves were compounded when she emerged in her towelling robe from the shower to have Giovanni casually drop a large, flat beribboned box onto the still-rumpled bed.
‘What’s that?’ she asked him.
His eyes glittered. ‘Why not open it, and see?’