And shot awake in the gray hours before dawn, suddenly aware that she was wrapped in the embrace of a man she didn’t know.
A hot tide of shame engulfed her.
Trembling, she disentangled herself from the possessive curve of his arm. Dressed in the dark, slipped from the sumptuous suite and sneaked down the service staircase because the thought of facing the elevator operator made her feel ill.
Moments later, Nicolo came awake and reached for his lover.
The bed, the sitting room, the bathroom were empty.
He cursed, pulled on trousers and shirt, hurried out into the corridor, but she was gone. He rang for the elevator. No, the operator said, he hadn’t taken anyone down to the lobby.
He went to the reception desk, demanded to know if the clerk had seen a woman with honey-blond hair and violet eyes. The answer there was the same.
She had vanished.
As the sun rose over the city, Nicolo paced his rooms while he tried to figure out how in hell he would find a nameless woman in a city of eight million people.
The one certainty was that he would find her.
Nicolo Barbieri did not believe in defeat.
By Sunday evening, Nicolo had learned an ugly lesson.
A man didn’t have to believe in defeat to be subjected to it.
You couldn’t find a woman without a name, not even if you slipped hundred-dollar bills to the club’s bouncer and all its bartenders.
They all said the same thing. Lots of women came through the doors on a Saturday night. So what if one had hair the color of honey and eyes the color of violets? That didn’t mean much to them.
All right, Nicolo told himself coldly.
It didn’t meant much to him, either.
A woman had let him pick her up and take her to bed. She’d probably done the same thing dozens of times before. So what if he never saw her again? All that bothered him was that she’d slipped from his arms without a word.
It didn’t, she didn’t, mean a thing.
He told himself that as he showered Monday morning. Told himself, too, all that mattered was what had brought him to New York. The meeting at SCB with James Black. The acquisition of the old man’s kingdom. Nothing was as important as—
The phone rang.
Nicolo flung open the shower door and grabbed for the receiver.
The woman. It had to be.
But it wasn’t. It was Black’s secretary, calling to cancel the meeting. Black was indisposed. The secretary would be in touch when he was available again.
Nicolo said all the right things. Then he hung up the phone and stared blindly at the mirror over the vanity.
Was it true? Or had Black simply decided not to see him? The old man had a reputation. He liked to treat people like marionettes.
The woman with the violet eyes was the same. She seduced a man, gave him a few hours’ taste of what it was like to possess her and then she slipped away.
Nicolo’s hands knotted into fists.
Black would pay by selling him SCB. As for the woman…She would pay, too. Somehow, he would find her and teach her what it meant to walk out on him.
He was as certain of that as he was of his next breath.