If only she hadn’t rung Josh. But she’d been so unhappy when she had first landed in Rome she’d been desperate to hear a familiar voice. He’d been so standoffish she’d turned off her phone, and now his wife wanted to stick her nose in...
‘Signorina Lord?’ he rapped out impatiently.
‘What?’
‘Get dressed.’
‘No. I want to know what you said to her!’ Ava was aware her voice had risen rather shrilly and knew it could be ascribed to panic.
He scrubbed his jaw with the heel of his hand. ‘I won’t be mentioning our little encounter, if that’s what concerns you.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
Unaccountably she wondered why he wouldn’t mention it. What exactly was wrong with her?
‘Anyway, there was no “encounter”, as you call it,’ she grumbled. ‘Unless you had your way with me while I was unconscious.’
An electric silence greeted her suggestion.
‘Not that I’m accusing you of anything,’ she amended, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.
The silence lengthened.
‘All right—forget it,’ she muttered, not sure where to look.
‘I can assure you that did not happen,’ he breathed, as if she had been offensive.
‘I was joking.’
‘You are naked in my bed,’ he said with precision. ‘I call that an encounter.’
‘You must be slipping.’
He gave her such a long look she began to feel a little flushed.
‘Indeed I must be,’ he said at last. Restlessly Ava tucked the sheet a little more firmly under her arms.
‘What do you call last night?’ he asked, still watching her closely. ‘A typical Friday night?’
A typical Friday night for her was working after everyone else had gone home, a glass of her favourite wine and an episode of Poirot.
She would just die if he knew that.
‘I call it being drunk and heartsick,’ she said haughtily.
‘Drunk, yes. But, flattering as I may find it, I doubt you are still holding a candle for me, cara.’
Once you’ve ridden a giant rollercoaster, the small ones for ever after seem tame.
Longing welled up at that thought and flooded her.
‘And if you are,’ he said, in the same stroking voice, ‘you need to let it go.’
From nowhere, resentment went off in her body like a rocket.
‘Heartsick over my boyfriend, you pig—not you!’
His expression grew taut again. ‘You will refrain from calling me names.’
Ava felt the heat rush to her face and knew she was revealing too much about her feelings.
‘I apologise,’ she said stiffly, before adding, ‘But you provoked me.’
One dark eyebrow lifted, as if this couldn’t possibly be the case. ‘Where is this boyfriend?’ he said, clearly sceptical.
‘None of your business.’
‘He lets you out at night on your own? To sit at bars and drink?’
‘I do not sit at bars and drink! And what do you mean—lets me? I’m a grown woman. I can do what I like.’
‘He is not Italian, then?’
‘Who?’
‘The boyfriend.’ He said it as if she’d just made Bernard up.
Hitching up the sheet, she strode off the bed like a ship in full sail and headed for her handbag, sitting on the armchair under the window.
Furiously she rummaged in it with one hand.
‘What are you doing now?’
The low rumble of amusement in his voice was not helping her temper. She wrenched open her bag and dug around until she located her phone.
‘Here. This. Look.’
She held up a recent image of Bernard’s pleasant settled face as he’d sat opposite her in a famous Sydney harbourside restaurant. She liked this picture because in it he looked like everything she’d needed him to be but often was not: solid, reliable, dependable.
‘My boyfriend,’ she said, as if producing a rabbit out of a hat.
Gianluca glanced seemingly without interest at the image.
‘You could do better.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘He has no love for you or you would not be here on your own. If you were my woman you would know better than to behave as you did last night.’
Ava tried not to imagine exactly what being his woman would involve, but her instinctive, completely un-PC response must have shown, because there was something all too like a male lion surveying his pride of females about the way he was looking at her.
That did it.
She wasn’t having this. She really wasn’t. Not from him.
‘Are you serious?’ Her voice rose to an unbecoming level. ‘Your woman? What does that even mean? And you know nothing—nothing—about my relationship with Bernard!’