Ariana wanted to curl up with him elsewhere, to talk, to kiss, but most dangerous of all she actually ached to know him better.
And if she stayed she would cross a line. The business meeting had surely concluded and to keep it at that, she needed to leave. ‘Thank you for a lovely dinner.’
‘I’ll arrange a car—’
‘Gian,’ she cut in, ‘the concierge can do that.’
‘Then I’ll walk you out.’
They stood at the entrance and tried to pretend that they had never tumbled naked into bed, had never been more than old friends.
‘Your ideas are excellent,’ Gian said as the doorman blew his whistle to summon a vehicle.
‘Except for dessert.’
‘Except for dessert,’ he agreed.
‘And you think it’s okay not to have a theme?’
‘I think it’s better.’ Gian nodded. ‘It’s going to be a tricky night...’
‘Yes,’ Ariana agreed.
They had been over this already. The car pulled up and it was time to stay or leave.
‘Gian—’ she started, for she wanted so badly to ask why there was no possible hope for them.
‘I’ll say goodnight,’ Gian cut in, because if he didn’t he would break his own rules about separate lives and kiss her beneath the lights and take her to his private apartment where no lover had ever gone. And they would take things further than he’d ever dared, for no one was permitted a place in his closed-off heart.
And so he kissed her on both cheeks, and as he did so a little pink petal that had been hanging temptingly from a strand of her jet-black hair, just waiting for him to pick it off, glided down to his lapel. Her eyes drifted down. ‘You’re wearing my blossom.’
He glanced down. ‘Yes.’
She would not be Svetlana, Ariana decided, and pick it off. Or one of the doubtless many others that had come before her and dared to demand more. She bunched her fist so hard that her nails dug into her palm, and smiled. ‘You’d better tidy yourself up then.’
To her everlasting credit, Ariana got into the car and went home alone.
CHAPTER NINE
BYANDBY, the Romano Ball drew closer.
Gian had quickly forged a strictly business code.
There were emails and phone calls and even a couple of face-to-face meetings, but there was no low-level flirting or alluding tothem.
For there was no them.
If anything, it was all so professional that Ariana actually wondered if she’d completely misread the mood that night after dinner, if it really had all been just business to him.
Sometimes she wondered what might have happened if she hadn’t asked him to leave her apartment that morning, because she’d been unable to grasp at the time that it really was to be the end of them.
Sometimes she just stared into space for a whole afternoon, blinking as she realised it was getting dark, just wondering about him.
A man who did not want love.
Everyone breathed a private sigh of relief when Angela Romano, unable to bear Rome at the time of the Romano Ball, headed off on a cruise.
Phew!