A Dangerous Solace Read online

  ‘We speak three times a year: Easter, Christmas and her birthday.’

  His eyes moved lazily over her and Ava shifted a little.

  ‘This morning will make it four—because of you, signorina.’

  ‘I’m bringing mother and son together,’ she responded dryly. ‘I’m doing you a service.’

  He ignored her. ‘According to the women of my family, with whom I make it my practice not to get involved,’ he added with wry emphasis, ‘you refuse to see your brother because you feel they have offended you in some way.’

  She didn’t miss the way he made it sound doubtful that anyone had offended her, as if his precious family couldn’t possibly have done anything to hurt her...

  Ava’s temper was rekindled. ‘What’s it got to do with them?’

  ‘Apparently they feel responsible for some unhappiness you experienced at your brother’s wedding all those years ago.’

  You. You are responsible for my unhappiness!

  Ava sucked in a breath, aware she had been far too close to blurting that sentiment out. Where on earth had it come from? Surely she didn’t believe that? But she was very afraid she did, and it was motivating her frustration with him.

  Almost helplessly she silently willed him to mention the real issue, which was their long-ago night together, so she could dismiss it out loud as unimportant and all in the past.

  ‘It’s not their business,’ she said mulishly when she realised that—just like a man—he had said all he was going to say.

  ‘You can discuss it with them,’ he said.

  ‘I’m certainly not discussing it with you!’

  ‘Bene. I have no interest in your varied sex life. I am, however, the man who will be sending you south this afternoon.’

  What varied sex life? He’d clearly confused her with one of his bimbos.

  She watched him scoop up her dress, which she’d so embarrassingly thrown onto the floor in her drunken state last night. He shook it out and tossed it to her.

  Ava watched in horror as he picked up her bra—all pretty black lace filigree, but substantial enough to support her—and dangled it in front of her.

  She snatched it from him, narrowing her eyes at him. He probably had a pile of these—souvenirs from all the other women who had passed through this room. Oh, if only the walls could talk—if only she could find that pile, wrench open the door and point out his stash and confront him with his rampant promiscuity...

  Gianluca said calmly, ‘Once you are dressed we will talk about this.’

  What? No suggestive comments? No questions as to why she’d seen fit to strip herself in the middle of the night...? No interest on his part in her being naked...?

  Ava was suddenly aware that what she was feeling was fast approaching disappointment. It was completely inappropriate and she veered her thoughts in the other direction. She really should have got dressed some time ago, instead of sitting here mulling over what he knew and didn’t know.

  It was clear he knew everything.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘DID YOU HEAR ME?’ he repeated impatiently. ‘Dress yourself and we will talk.’

  ‘Just a minute.’ She gathered the sheet around her, as if another layer might give her the requisite dignity she felt she was presently lacking. ‘What have you said to your mother about me?’

  ‘My mother?’ He rubbed the back of his neck, drawing into prominence an impressive bicep.

  ‘Yes—the woman who gave birth to you,’ she snapped impatiently, convinced he was just showing off his incredible body to taunt her. ‘Or did you spring fully formed from the head of Zeus? I wouldn’t be surprised...’ She muttered the last.

  ‘You really want to discuss my mother?’

  No, she wanted to run a hundred miles in the other direction from his mother!

  She had experience in facing down corporate sharks in boardrooms when a lesser woman would be knock-kneed to enter, but Maria Benedetti—La Principessa—had looked down her patrician nose at Ava seven years ago, as if the Lord family were somehow not good enough for the Benedettis.

  God knew what she would say about this situation—her precious firstborn son standing over her, fully dressed, groomed, every inch the cool upper-class Italian male, and she in her knickers, wrapped in a sheet, at a complete disadvantage after a drunken night on the tiles.

  If only she hadn’t rung Josh. But she’d been so unhappy when she had first landed in Rome she’d been desperate to hear a familiar voice. He’d been so standoffish she’d turned off her phone, and now his wife wanted to stick her nose in...

  ‘Signorina Lord?’ he rapped out impatiently.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get dressed.’

  ‘No. I want to know what you said to her!’ Ava was aware her voice had risen rather shrilly and knew it could be ascribed to panic.

  He scrubbed his jaw with the heel of his hand. ‘I won’t be mentioning our little encounter, if that’s what concerns you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  Unaccountably she wondered why he wouldn’t mention it. What exactly was wrong with her?

  ‘Anyway, there was no “encounter”, as you call it,’ she grumbled. ‘Unless you had your way with me while I was unconscious.’

  An electric silence greeted her suggestion.

  ‘Not that I’m accusing you of anything,’ she amended, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.

  The silence lengthened.

  ‘All right—forget it,’ she muttered, not sure where to look.

  ‘I can assure you that did not happen,’ he breathed, as if she had been offensive.

  ‘I was joking.’

  ‘You are naked in my bed,’ he said with precision. ‘I call that an encounter.’

  ‘You must be slipping.’

  He gave her such a long look she began to feel a little flushed.

  ‘Indeed I must be,’ he said at last. Restlessly Ava tucked the sheet a little more firmly under her arms.

  ‘What do you call last night?’ he asked, still watching her closely. ‘A typical Friday night?’

  A typical Friday night for her was working after everyone else had gone home, a glass of her favourite wine and an episode of Poirot.

  She would just die if he knew that.

  ‘I call it being drunk and heartsick,’ she said haughtily.

  ‘Drunk, yes. But, flattering as I may find it, I doubt you are still holding a candle for me, cara.’

  Once you’ve ridden a giant rollercoaster, the small ones for ever after seem tame.

  Longing welled up at that thought and flooded her.

  ‘And if you are,’ he said, in the same stroking voice, ‘you need to let it go.’

  From nowhere, resentment went off in her body like a rocket.

  ‘Heartsick over my boyfriend, you pig—not you!’

  His expression grew taut again. ‘You will refrain from calling me names.’

  Ava felt the heat rush to her face and knew she was revealing too much about her feelings.

  ‘I apologise,’ she said stiffly, before adding, ‘But you provoked me.’

  One dark eyebrow lifted, as if this couldn’t possibly be the case. ‘Where is this boyfriend?’ he said, clearly sceptical.

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘He lets you out at night on your own? To sit at bars and drink?’

  ‘I do not sit at bars and drink! And what do you mean—lets me? I’m a grown woman. I can do what I like.’

  ‘He is not Italian, then?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The boyfriend.’ He said it as if she’d just made Bernard up.

  Hitching up the sheet, she strode off the bed like a ship in full sail and headed for her handbag, sitting on the armchair under the window.

  Furiously she rummaged in it with one hand.

  ‘What are you doing now?’

  The low rumble of amusement in his voice was not helping her temper. She wrenched open her bag and dug around until
she located her phone.

  ‘Here. This. Look.’

  She held up a recent image of Bernard’s pleasant settled face as he’d sat opposite her in a famous Sydney harbourside restaurant. She liked this picture because in it he looked like everything she’d needed him to be but often was not: solid, reliable, dependable.

  ‘My boyfriend,’ she said, as if producing a rabbit out of a hat.

  Gianluca glanced seemingly without interest at the image.

  ‘You could do better.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘He has no love for you or you would not be here on your own. If you were my woman you would know better than to behave as you did last night.’

  Ava tried not to imagine exactly what being his woman would involve, but her instinctive, completely un-PC response must have shown, because there was something all too like a male lion surveying his pride of females about the way he was looking at her.

  That did it.

  She wasn’t having this. She really wasn’t. Not from him.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Her voice rose to an unbecoming level. ‘Your woman? What does that even mean? And you know nothing—nothing—about my relationship with Bernard!’

  ‘Bernard?’ he repeated. The amusement lurking in those golden eyes almost undid her completely.

  ‘Yes, Bernard.’ To her horror tears sprang up behind her eyes. She couldn’t bear it if this man made fun of her—of her sad, mixed-up reasons for that particular relationship. It was all such a mess. ‘For your information we came to Rome to get engaged, but we broke up! Oh, what would you know about relationships anyway? You use women and throw them away.’

  ‘Cosa?’

  ‘You heard me. You’re a—a rake.’

  ‘My English is usually very good,’ he said smoothly, ‘but are you comparing me to a garden implement?’

  And just like that the fight went out of her. He wasn’t taking any of this seriously and she was making an idiot of herself—again. Ava shook her head and quietly put Bernard back in her bag. She scanned the floor for her shoes.

  ‘I need to go,’ she said. ‘Just forget all of this even happened.’

  Gianluca didn’t respond, and when she glanced up she realised why. He had taken his phone out.

  Nice.

  Thoroughly disillusioned and miserable with herself, Ava dropped to her knees and reached under the bed, feeling for her shoes. Belatedly she realised she was sticking her most ample asset into prominence—but really what did it matter at this late stage?

  Gianluca Benedetti was a gorgeous man with a habit of beautiful women, and she wasn’t his type...at all. And, frankly, when it came down to it he wasn’t very nice...

  ‘Ava.’

  The way he said her name sent shivers through her. It was really inconvenient. Still, it wasn’t as if she’d be hearing her name on his lips for much longer.

  ‘What?’ she asked ungraciously, hooking her head out from under the bed.

  He was looking at her bottom.

  Ava almost hit her head on the bedframe in her haste to get herself vertical.

  ‘Bella, what are you doing?’

  Was it her imagination or was his voice pitched lower than earlier? And why was he calling her beautiful?

  ‘My shoes—they’re missing.’

  ‘You don’t say? Come here.’ He beckoned to her with that well-shaped hand.

  When she hesitated he looked faintly exasperated, as if waiting around wasn’t something he was used to.

  ‘Adesso, cara. I have something to show you.’

  He was clearly not used to waiting around. Most women probably leapt to attention when they heard His Master’s Voice, she thought witheringly.

  He extended his phone to her.

  It was one of those ultra-sleek not long on the market models. Under normal circumstances Ava would have practically salivated.

  Instead she almost dropped it.

  Her stomach bottomed out.

  A man and a woman engaged in a clinch on a cobblestoned square at night.

  It would have been romantic but for the identity of the couple.

  ‘It’s too far away. You can’t see the faces,’ she said hopefully, her voice airless.

  Gianluca scrolled to the next image.

  Himself—amazingly photogenic—it seemed, along with everything else—up close in a smooch with a woman whose eyes were closed and who had a look on her face Ava hadn’t even known she could produce. She looked as if she was swooning, and perhaps she was. She looked like everything her ex Bernard had accused her of not being.

  A woman carried away by passion.

  ‘Is that me?’ She lightly touched the screen with her index finger.

  The image didn’t dissolve. It was real.

  ‘Welcome to my life,’ he informed her tightly.

  For some reason she could feel him regarding her closely.

  ‘Public property.’

  Ava snatched the phone off him and began to scroll frantically through the shots. In two of them it was clearly her. Then she shrieked, ‘Oh, God—I look so fat!’

  ‘That’s all you have to say?’

  ‘It’s all right for you.’ She eyed him mutinously. ‘You’re not wearing shiny fabric and being shot at an unfortunate angle.’

  Gianluca retrieved the phone. ‘You look fine. And that’s not the issue.’

  She looked fine?

  Last night was the best she’d ever looked...and he thought she’d looked fine. That didn’t leave her with far to go this morning, with her bed hair and smudged make-up.

  ‘You need to leave Rome—now—and I’ll need to know where you are.’

  Still contemplating the fact that her round behind looked at least a size bigger in that photograph, and that the entire world was going to be looking at it and making comparisons with every skinny-minnie model he’d ever dated, she was a little slow to pick up on what he was saying.

  ‘Leave Rome?’ she repeated, then focussed. ‘Leave Rome! Why?’

  ‘Because more photographs will be taken of you. Information will be sourced. You will be a five-minute wonder.’

  ‘Information? What information?’

  ‘Your name, your origin, what you do, who you are. Run-of-the-mill for me, but not so much for you, si? So you go to Ragusa for a few days and this dies down.’

  ‘Like hell!’

  ‘There is also the small issue of my future wife,’ he said under his breath as he scrolled through the messages on his phone.

  Ava’s head whipped around.

  He glanced up and had the grace to look marginally uncomfortable.

  ‘It’s a joke, Ava.’ He made a gesture. ‘Non e importante.’

  Ava forgot all about her behind being shown around the globe for the world’s media to lampoon as she felt something fragile and new sprouting inside her wither and collapse.

  ‘You’re engaged and you cracked onto me?’ She couldn’t keep the feeling out of her voice.

  ‘Cracked?’ He pocketed the phone and made one of those extravagant Latin gestures of incomprehension with his hand.

  ‘Tried it on...made overtures...you know—cracked.’

  ‘I’m not engaged yet,’ was his cool response.

  ‘Semantics,’ she shot back, her entire stomach free-falling. ‘Oh, what a piece of work you are. Well, you can stuff it.’ She began looking for her shoes again, this time throwing things around—cushions, the throw on the armchair. She would have liked to have flung the chair at him.

  His voice wrapped round her like a strong arm. ‘I wasn’t the one trawling for sex, cara.’

  Ava stopped thrashing about. In point of fact her arms went spaghetti limp and her head jerked round. ‘Excuse me?’

  He was watching her with that cool, Italian sex appeal some women probably found irresistible.

  ‘Look, I understand you’re broken-hearted or whatever—’

  Again with the scepticism. ‘Let’s go with whatever,’ she retorted.
<
br />   ‘But you weren’t looking for Prince Charming last night,’ he finished with brutal candour.

  ‘And guess what?’ she snapped back. ‘I didn’t find him!’

  In that moment she hated him so much that if she’d had something to hand she really would have thrown it at him.

  He was engaged—and who knew how many women had been under his bridge in the last seven years?

  Whereas she’d had exactly three. Three! Three men under her bridge. She’d kept her bridge nice. He probably had a toll on his. Thousandth woman through gets a bottle of Bollinger and an engagement ring. How dared he call her morality into question?

  ‘I’m not going anywhere, bud. This is your problem. You caused this. You were the one who kissed me.’

  ‘I will remind you that it was you who chased after me like a demented banshee across that square. I wasn’t given much choice after that little performance.’

  Great—so now he’d kissed her because he’d had to.

  ‘And now, signorina, because of your activities last night we’re front page on Rome’s leading gossip sheet. Which means my PR people will be spinning this because you’re family, and so, like a good member of the extended Benedetti family, you’re going to be where the rest of us are this weekend.’

  ‘What do you mean? I’m not a member of the Benedetti family!’

  ‘You, madam, are going to Ragusa.’

  ‘I bloody well am not! I’ve booked a driving tour of Tuscany.’

  A romantic trip she was now doing all on her own.

  He laughed. He actually laughed.

  She didn’t think. She reacted. Overcome by a surge of feeling far beyond what his reaction warranted, she lunged at him.

  He caught her arm easily and dislodged the sheet. Ava gasped and, unable to stop the slippage, jammed her breasts up against his chest, effectively imprisoning the sheet but giving him a full body imprint. Outrage dissolved as she suddenly found herself in a very precarious position.

  He felt hard and hot and...interested. Yes, definitely considerable interest on his part. A lightning flash of sexual heat shot up her body in response and her nipples sprang out like little pink missile launchers. If she’d wanted his attention she now had it.

  She was appalled by how quickly this entire situation had got out of hand. She couldn’t believe she’d physically attacked him. Couldn’t believe anything about this mess and drama was turning her on—and, unexpectedly, him. Oh, yes, his arousal was unambiguous against her belly and she could feel the tremor in his body.