‘You’d better answer it, hadn’t you?’ asked Lady St John mildly.
‘If you don’t mind.’ Kate grabbed the bag and rose to her feet. ‘I’ll take it outside.’
But she was happy to escape from that unsettling stare and equally unsettling presence, and even happier to discover that it was Lucy who was calling. Lucy, her beloved older sister, who worked for Kate and ran her life like clockwork.
Kate clicked on the ‘talk’ button. ‘Lucy, hi! No, no, no, of course I understand—it can’t be helped! An emergency is an emergency!’
‘Kate, what on earth are you talking about?’ Lucy sounded confused. ‘What emergency?’
‘No, of course I can come back immediately,’ babbled Kate loudly. ‘I’ve just finished here, and I’m sure that I can be excused pudding and coffee!’
‘No doubt you’ll give me some kind of explanation later,’ came Lucy’s dry response.
‘Oh, definitely! Definitely!’ breathed Kate. Though how on earth would she put into words that she had fallen for a man with a cold, contemptuous face? The most beautiful man she had ever seen? And she wanted him, this blue-eyed stranger.
She shivered as she acknowledged the awful truth.
She wanted Giovanni Calverri!
CHAPTER TWO
‘KATE, what on earth is the matter with you?’
Kate looked at her sister with an unaccustomed blankness in her eyes.
She had spent the whole drive back from Lady St John’s house in Sussex veering between disbelief and self-disgust. In fact, the whole journey had been negotiated on some kind of auto-pilot. She had gone straight upstairs to Lucy’s flat, and it wasn’t until she was inside its elegant interior that she began shaking uncontrollably—like a person who had just come down with a fever.
‘It’s stupid. It’s nothing.’ She shook her head distractedly. ‘It would sound too far-fetched to explain—’
Lucy’s forehead creased with perplexity. ‘But Kate, you never leave your phone switched on during lunch. It’s one of your “unbreakable rules”, remember?’
Oh, yes, she remembered all right. And another of those rules was that she didn’t fall victim to grand and irrational passions. That she was ruled by her head, and not her heart. That she liked and respected herself, so that falling for a man who played the ‘treat them mean and keep them keen’ ticket was simply not on her agenda.
‘I just met a man,’ she said slowly, and ridiculously it sounded like the first line to a love song.
The frown disappeared, and Lucy relaxed. ‘Oh! And about time, too,’ she smiled, with the approval of someone who was happily established in a long-term relationship. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to fall in love for years and years!’
Kate nodded. So had she. But love was not an appropriate word, not in this case. If she was being brutally honest—and she always tried for honesty—then wouldn’t falling in lust be a more fitting description of what had happened to her some time over lunch?
She compressed her mouth into a determined line. ‘It isn’t like that,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t love him. How can I when I barely know him?’
‘But Cupid’s arrow has hit you with unfailing accuracy?’
‘A thunderbolt,’ admitted Kate in a dazed kind of voice. ‘The kind of thing you read about but think will never happen to you.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Lucy gave a wistful smile. ‘The French call it a coup de foudre.’
Kate shook her head. ‘That would imply that it was mutual.’
‘And wasn’t it?’
Kate thought about it. There had been an undeniable fizzle between them, yes, but…but… ‘He looked at me as though he didn’t really like what he saw.’
‘Or what he felt perhaps,’ said Lucy perceptively.
Kate looked at her sister. Two years older and the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, with her dark copper hair and thick-fringed green eyes.
Lucy had been born with looks to burn and a certain irresistibility to the opposite sex. But in the end she had fallen for her boss, unwilling and unable to stop the relationship even when the powers-that-be had threatened her with the sack if she did not.