‘Oh sure! You had such a struggle that you put me aside as if just touching me might contaminate you. And then you…then you ignored me for the rest of the night. No?’
She blinked in confusion as Cesare shook his dark head.
‘No,’ he stated flatly. ‘There was no way I could ignore you, no matter how I tried. I’ve never been able to ignore you. Not from the moment you bounced into my life as a pretty thirteen-year-old, the first time I ever visited this house. I couldn’t take my eyes off you then, and I’ve never been able to since.’
He still couldn’t. If she was in a room, there was only one direction in which his eyes would be drawn. She was like some vivid, bright spark, burning so brilliantly that it almost blinded him. And the hardest thing had been that he could never admit to it; never reveal the way he felt.
Until now.
And she was so much more lovely now; the beauty that had promised as an adolescent becoming reality in the young woman who stood before him. She had hair like the burnished leaves of a copper beech tree, eyes like the deepest, mossy pools above the finest cheekbones he had ever seen. Tall and slender, she was curved in all the right places that declared her femininity, and her skin had the smooth softness of a peach so that his fingers itched to touch it.
But he had given his promise to her father, and had sworn to abide by it until the date of her twenty-second birthday set him free.
‘You’re kidding!’
‘I would never joke about something like this.’
‘Cesare…’
Megan shook her head in bemusement. This couldn’t be happening! Nothing he was saying seemed as if it could possibly be true. And the worst, the bitterest irony, was that these words were the ones she had always dreamed of hearing him say. Dreamed, but known that those dreams would never become reality.
She had had the world’s greatest crush on this man since she had been in her teens. But he was eight years older than her, a sophisticated, cosmopolitan businessman, the owner of the huge corporation of which her father’s firm was just one microscopic, unimportant component. Men like Cesare Santorino didn’t take any notice of girls like her.
‘Stop messing—don’t tease me like this.’
‘What makes you think that I’m teasing?’
Looking into his dark, inscrutable face, she could almost believe that he meant it. There was no trace of amusement in those burning eyes, no hint of a smile on the sensual mouth.
‘But you have to be…’
Again his proud head moved in denial of her protest.
‘No, cara. There is no “have to be” about this. I am telling the absolute truth.’
‘You can’t be…’
All the strength went from her legs and she dropped down into the nearest chair, unable to keep upright any longer. And at least this way she could put some distance between them.
‘I don’t believe you!’
‘Believe it!’
Oh, this was worse than ever! Bending down, he had placed both strong-fingered hands on the arms of the chair, one on either side of her. Imprisoned in the cage made by them and his powerful body, the wall of his chest in the immaculate white shirt a solid barrier between her and escape, she could look nowhere but into the smouldering bronze of his eyes.
And suddenly she was reminded of the volcano Etna on his native island of Sicily. The burn of his eyes made her think of the molten lava that had poured down the mountain’s sides, scorching everything in its path. She felt as if his gaze had just the same heated power, searing over the delicacy of the exposed skin of her face and neck.
He was so close that she could smell the clean scent of his body, mixed with the tang of some citrus cologne, light and invigorating—and painfully stimulating to her already overwrought nerves. Her heart was thudding in double-quick time, her breath coming raw and uneven.
‘Don’t do this to me! Not now! What is this, Cesare—some sort of twisted little game? Do you get some fun out of tormenting me, lying to me? Because—’
‘Would it help if I swore I am not lying now—but that I had lied in the past?’
‘Lied?’
It seemed that with every word he spoke the situation got stranger and stranger, more complicated and tangled, impossible to sort out. It was as if the Cesare Santorino that she had thought she knew had been taken away and someone new and totally alien had been put in his place.
‘When did you lie to me?’
Her mouth had dried painfully and the words came out on an embarrassing croak.
‘When I said I wasn’t interested in you. When I acted as if you bored me. When I—’
‘No—stop it—no, no, no!’
Megan flung her hands up to cover her ears and then rapidly moved them so that they covered her face.
‘Stop it!’ she muttered into the protection of her concealing fingers. ‘This isn’t fair!’
This time last year—on her twenty-first birthday—she would have been overjoyed to hear those words. At Christmas, and even more at that dreadful New Year party, they would have set her heart dancing for joy, made her spirits sing. But now it was too late.
Then she couldn’t think of anything that could have been better. Now she couldn’t think of anything worse. Because if anything Cesare claimed was the truth in any way, then it very soon wouldn’t be when he found out…
‘Stop it!’ she repeated more fiercely this time.
‘Mi dispiace—I am sorry.’
He’d moved too fast, Cesare told himself reproachfully. Impatience had always been a fault of his and this time he’d rushed right in when he would have done so much better to take things slowly.
He had promised himself he would take things slowly. But in the moment that he’d walked into the library and seen Megan in the flesh for the first time in over six months all his control had deserted him. He had struggled to hold on to that control for over six years now, and he hadn’t been able to do so any longer.
‘Forgive me Megan…’
His tone was so rough, so unbelievably raw with some emotion that it forced Megan to lower her protective hands, gazing up at him in shock and bewilderment.
And that bewilderment struck at Cesare like a reproach.
‘Forgive me…’ he said again, lifting his hands swiftly from the chair arms and flinging them up and out in a supremely Italian gesture of surrender.
‘You are right. I was in the wrong to tease you—wrong and cruel. I should never have done it.’
It was only what she had expected, Megan told herself dully as she watched him swing away from her and prowl moodily across the wide, polished wooden floor, his shoulders hunched, hands pushed deep into the pockets of his trousers. She had known all along that he wasn’t telling the truth. That he was just tormenting her as he had done when she was little more than a child, and he had been a sophisticated twenty-two year old.
Then he had mocked her starry-eyed hero-worship of him playing on it mercilessly to have her fetching and carrying for him, taking advantage of her keenness to perform any tiny task she could for the object of her devotion. And now it seemed that he was doing it again.
It was only what she had expected but, right now, with the worry that was always there, just below the surface of her mind, nagging at her and throwing her into total confusion about what she should do, his teasing seemed so much worse.
It hurt. It hurt terribly, adding another layer to the pain of the way Gary had behaved,