She made her voice light, but pointed for all that, to make it clear that she was done with this one-way discourse.
He looked at her speculatively. As if assessing her.
Does he think I should know who he is?
She took him on. ‘The world of high finance, which I assume is your field, since you are a business acquaintance of Charles van Huren, is as unknown to me as interior design is to you,’ she said to him.
‘I invest,’ he said shortly. ‘I also speculate.’
Ariana raised her eyebrows. ‘Risky?’ she observed, deliberately using the word he’d applied to her earlier.
A curt shake of his head came her way. ‘Hedged,’ he said.
‘Ah...’ she took another mouthful of the melt-in-the-mouth tender fillet ‘...one of those!’
His mouth thinned. She could see it.
She knew he was about to speak, but she pre-empted him. ‘I know...’ Her voice was very dry, the look in her eye drier still.“‘Don’t be tedious?’”She eyed him. ‘You were going to say that again, weren’t you?’
‘In my experience...’ and Luca Farnese’s voice was even drier than hers ‘...those who deride hedge funds are those who can’t afford to invest in them or make the profits they bring.’
‘Well,’ she acknowledged consideringly, ‘I have no complaints to make. I earn my money from women who are rich enough to afford beautiful homes, and you and your kind are very often those who make the money to pay for those beautiful homes.’
She gave a half-smile as she spoke, meeting his gaze. Feeling its power. Wondering at it. And wondering, with almost a sense of confusion, just what it was about him that made her so physically...sexually...aware of him.
She’d known better-looking men, flirtatious and openly admiring, with handsome faces and good bodies—had even dated some of them when she hadn’t been busy on client projects. But not a single one of them had possessed the dark, powerful allure that this man did.
She was ultra-aware of him—everything about him. From the way his cropped hair feathered slightly at the nape of his neck to the faint sign of incipient regrowth at this hour of the evening along the strong line of his jaw, the way he wore his charcoal business suit and the thin wrap of gold around his wrist in the understated but formidably expensive watch, the equally understated studs of his cufflinks.
But it wasn’t the external things about him, nor even the darkly saturnine looks—it was more. Dangerously more...
It was the knowledge that the only reason she was here, having this unplanned, unscheduled dinner with him, was that he was responding to her in exactly the same way as she was to him. She wouldn’t be here otherwise...
It was both a heady sensation and a disturbing one.
This has come out of nowhere. Two hours ago I’d never set eyes on him. Yet here I am, dining with him.
Dining—and what else...?
She slid the question aside. Unwilling, right now, to face it, let alone answer it. Instead, she asked a different one aloud—one to keep the conversation going.
‘So...’ she sliced off another delicious sliver of tender beef, dunking it in the rich, truffle-based sauce ‘...what about you? Do you have a base? Or are you one of those globe-trotting financier types?’ She made her voice sound politely interested.
‘I operate out of Milan,’ he supplied.
‘Milan I could live in, at a pinch,’ she said musingly. ‘But New York never. Far too modern, too frenetic.’
‘I agree. But don’t you care for Milan?’
She shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she conceded. ‘Tuscany suits me better. I’ve lived in Central Italy all my life—my mother’s family is from there.’
She knew there was an automatic constraint in her voice. She did not want to think about either her mother or her grandfather, in his opulentpalazzoin Tuscany’s neighbour Umbria. It was a luxurious prison for those her grandfather wanted to keep at heel. But her mother had escaped—rackety though her lifestyle was—and she too had escaped.
Only her cousin was still trapped. Poor little Mia, her grandfather’s captive. Pampered and petted and kept in a cage she dared not break out of.
I offered her a way out—said she could come and live with me, work with me—but she turned it down. Didn’t dare. Didn’t want to lose our grandfather’s approval.
She could not blame her. Mia had seen first-hand their grandfather’s rage and his contempt for the granddaughter who had dared to break away from his control. Mia wasn’t strong, as she was. Her meekness, her timidity, her gentleness—all counted against her when it came to breaking free.