‘Have you decided?’ He closed his menu, setting it down on the linen tablecloth and looking across at her.
Ariana Killane. Her name hung in the space between them. Italian and Irish. A potent combination. He’d asked her about it in the taxi here. It had seemed like a neutral subject to begin their evening together.
‘Killane? And yet you speak perfect Italian?’ he’d thrown at her questioningly.
‘Irish father. Italian mother,’ had come the reply.
She hadn’t looked at him, hadn’t quite met his eyes across the narrow space in the cab.
Yet he knew she was as burningly aware of him as he was of her—it radiated from her. Just as it had when she’d so briefly met his fixated gaze when she’d stopped dancing, and when she’d immediately walked off after Charles’s wife’s blatant introduction, and when she’d stalked out of the elevator across the lobby. He felt it now, in the way she still didn’t meet his eyes as she answered his question in a faux casual manner.
‘I’ll be predictable, I think...’
Luca heard her response to his question and was glad to take his thoughts away from where it was inconvenient for them to go.
‘Thetournedos rossini.’
He gave a nod. ‘Good choice. It’s mine too.’
For a moment her choice of such a rich dish surprised him. Then, his eyes going to her generous figure, he realised it did not. This was no stick-thinfashionista. This was a woman nature had bountifully endowed with a sensual appeal and a body to match.
He beckoned the waiter, watched the sommelier coming over too. After both had been despatched, he let his eyes rest on the woman he’d invited, without any logic or sense, to have dinner with him.
And whatever came after.
Ariana reached for her wine glass. She felt she needed it. What in God’s name did she think she was doing? She’d let this man—a complete stranger but for his name—commandeer her taxi and bring her here to this oh-so-discreetly quiet French restaurant.
Beside the taxi she’d turned, astonished at his invitation, given that he’d clearly not even wanted to be introduced to her and that she’d stalked away from him. So what had changed his mind? Or hers?
I wasn’t looking for this...
Yet it had happened.
‘Why?’ The question had fallen from her lips unbidden.
His expression had flickered. ‘Don’t be tedious.’
He had sounded almost impatient, as though she were irritating him by presuming to question why he had asked her to have dinner with him when the answer was obvious.
That single glance when I stopped dancing. Cutting right into me. Deep inside...
That was all it had taken.
As she’d sat in the taxi, unconsciously pulling as far away from him as the confined space had permitted, it had been impossible to deny. Out of nowhere, a single glance from a stranger had—Hadwhat, precisely?
She’d been burningly aware of his presence a bare few feet away, conscious of the faint but evocative scent of his aftershave, of the sheer masculinity of the man, of the length of his outstretched legs, of his hand casually resting on his powerful thigh. She’d looked doggedly ahead, aware of her tight grip on her clutch bag but somehow unable to relax it, aware of the pulse thudding in her throat, the tightness of her lungs, trying to keep her breathing natural as she’d gazed sightlessly ahead of her at the stop-start New York traffic and the city canyons crushing around them.
Heading off for dinner with a man who was a complete stranger.
Luca Farnese.
The name rang no bells, but clearly he was one of those people who moved in the same circles as the van Hurens—a banker or an investor or some such. She lifted her wine glass to her lips, still burningly aware of the man sitting opposite her. of the impact he was having on her, as she took in his chiselled profile, the blade of his nose, the high cheekbones, the sable hair, the line of his jaw. He was the whole damn package, from his lean, taut body to that subtly spiced aftershave and his intense, overpowering masculinity.
As to why—why him?—she still didn’t know.
There were plenty of good-looking males in the world. But not a single one had ever had the effect on her that this one had—so that she’d upped and gone off with him when anything like that had been furthest from her intentions.
Well, why shouldn’t I have dinner with him? I’m single and unattached. So what if I’ve only just met him?