g she’d been requesting for months.
The bell rang again. And again. Whoever was out there was persistent.
Aimee sighed, rose to her feet and went to the door. She undid the locks. The chain. Cracked the door an inch….
And felt the blood drain from her head.
“No,” she said. “No—”
“Yes,” Nicolo growled, and just as he had that fateful night, he put his shoulder to the door and forced it open.
CHAPTER SIX
THEY SAID TIME defused anger.
The hell it did.
In the thirty or forty minutes Nicolo had spent looking up Aimee Black in the telephone directory, then taking a taxi all the way downtown, through the tangled snarl of midmorning traffic, his anger didn’t cool one bit.
If anything, it changed to something so hot and fierce he could damned near feel it inside him.
It was bad enough she’d been part of the ugly scam her grandfather had designed. If the actual seduction wasn’t part of it, at least the come-on was.
What was worse was that she’d kept lying to him, not only that night but again this morning.
She had intended to entice him. He was certain of that. Now, she’d lied about what she’d felt in his arms. She hadn’t intended to get caught up in her own game, but she had.
He was certain of it.
He knew women. The little things they did when they wanted to boost a man’s ego. The things they did when their passion was real.
What Aimee felt had been real.
The throaty little moans. The soft cries. The lift of her hips to his. Real. All of it. So real, he knew he’d never forget anything they had done together.
And he was damned well going to force her to admit it. She might have come on to him deliberately but after the first few minutes in his arms, everything had changed.
Aimee had followed where he led, all the way to ecstasy.
Dio, just thinking about it was making him hard, and if that wasn’t ridiculous, he didn’t know what was. He was a man who had his pick of women and even the occasional ones who started by pretending his touch drove them crazy soon forgot to pretend.
There were half a dozen women waiting for his return to Rome. One phone call, he’d have whichever of them he wanted ready to welcome him into her bed.
But he would be less a man if he didn’t end this in a way that made it clear who was the victor, not just by walking out on the deal James Black had engineered but by forcing the old man’s accomplice-in-crime to admit that what she’d felt in his arms had been real.
It was the penalty she’d pay for her duplicity.
Nobody lied to Nicolo Barbieri and got away with it, especially not a woman who had haunted his days and nights for three entire months.
The cab pulled up in front of a tired-looking, five-story tenement. James Black’s granddaughter, Saturday night’s party girl, lived here?
Maybe he had the address wrong.
There was only one way to find out.
Nicolo handed the cabbie a bill and told him to wait. Then he climbed the grimy steps to the front door. An unlocked front door.
Not a good idea in a neighborhood like this, but how Aimee lived was not his problem.