With an effort she brought her chin up, forced her green eyes to meet his dark gaze defiantly.
‘I’d prefer to be alone.’
‘Fun?’
He didn’t seem to have heard the last comment or, if he had, he was deliberately ignoring it.
‘Fun!’
Shock roughed his voice, stopped his restless prowling.
‘You think that this is just un divertimento? That I am playing with you?’
‘Well, isn’t it?’ Her chin lifted a little higher. ‘What else could it be?’ she challenged.
‘La verita!’ Cesare shot back, his tone like the crack of a gun. ‘The truth!’
‘The truth! Oh come on! Don’t…don’t…’
To her horror, her voice began to tremble, so that she stumbled over the words she wanted. It was too much. Too cruel. He’d taken his joke too far. And she was in no fit state to be able to cope with this new, sophisticated form of emotional torture.
‘Don’t do this to me!’ she wailed, her voice high and tight.
The pain in her words was like a blow to his face, making him freeze into stillness, eyes narrowing sharply. Something was very wrong here. Something much more than any distress at his heavy-handed teasing.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
And then, when she could only shake her head in mute, numb misery, he came close—closer—one warm strong hand sliding under her chin and lifting her face to meet his brown-eyed scrutiny.
Her cheeks were wet with tears. Tears that had trickled down her face, dripping off her chin. And more were welling up inside her eyes, making the deep green glisten like polished gemstones.
‘Carina, why are you crying? Meggie…’
Unthinkingly, the word slid past his lips, using the long ago nickname she had had as a child.
‘Tell me what’s wrong.’
It was the name that did it. If he hadn’t said ‘Meggie…’ in quite that way. If he hadn’t used that once familiar, now rarely spoken, nickname, the name only those closest and dearest to her had used in the past, then she might have been able to resist it.
But he had said ‘Meggie,’ and both his voice and his expression had softened on the word. Just for a moment he had pushed aside time and had taken her back to the days when life had been sweet, idyllic, uncomplicated. The perfect bliss of a summer when the sun had always seemed to be shining, and nothing could possibly go wrong.
Days when she had still held on to a dream that one day this man would love her. That somewhere, stretching ahead of her, lay a bright and wonderful future, filled with happy ever after. A future that now was totally beyond her reach.
And suddenly she knew, totally and irredeemably, without a hope of any other possibility, that she was going to tell him the whole sorry story.
‘MEGGIE—tell me!’
This time, Cesare’s use of the childish nickname was far from gentle. Her hesitation, the seconds she had spent hunting for the right words to tell him what was on her mind, had pushed him to the limits of his patience in a very short space of time. He was barely keeping hold of his tenuous grip on his temper, and the way the words hissed through his teeth made that plain.
‘Just what is the problem? I need to know.’
It was the impatience in his tone that caught on Megan’s tongue and held it immobile, unable to speak a word. That and the way that, towering over her, big, dark and dangerously imposing, a severe frown drawing together the black arcs of his brows, Cesare had reverted to the man she had known—and feared—as an adolescent. Then he had been able to strike her dumb simply by walking into a room, and any attempt to answer one of the occasional questions he arrogantly tossed her way had reduced her to a mumbling, stammering, red-faced heap of embarrassment totally unlike her normally reasonable, sensibly functioning self.
And that was just what he did to her now.
‘Megan…’
This time her name had a note of warning in it. One that only made matters so much worse. She could only shake her head despairingly, unable to find any words with which to answer him.
‘Is it your father? Are you worried about the problems he’s having with the company?’
‘He told you about that?’ Shock released her tongue, pushed the words from her mouth.
‘Of course he told me—I am a friend after all.’
‘Did he ask you to help him—to bail him out? And you agreed?’
Some degree of strength was returning to her limbs now, and her brain seemed to be functioning with just a degree or two of clarity. If he was prepared to help her father, save Tom Ellis from the almost inevitable bankruptcy that was now staring him in the face, then at least one of her worries would be eased.
‘You said you’ll lend him what he needs?’
The change in Cesare’s face gave her the answer without a word having been spoken. The dark, carved features seemed to close up; the burnt-coffee-coloured eyes clouding as they met the urgent entreaty in hers. He had moved away from her mentally before he stepped back physically, withdrawing into himself in the space of a couple of heartbeats.
‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I did not.’
‘You did not!’ Megan repeated, unable to believe what she had heard. ‘You said no! I don’t believe—’
‘Believe it!’ Cesare cut in sharply, not liking this direction the conversation had taken. ‘Your father told me of his problems. Regrettably…’
‘Regrettably… Oh, yes, I just bet you regretted it.’
The cynicism in Megan’s voice, the way it twisted at her mouth, dulled her eyes, made him wince. He wouldn’t have hurt her this way if he could have helped it.
‘You could have afforded it! The amount he needed would have been just a drop in the ocean compared with the fortune you possess! Why, you must make that much or more in just a year or so!’
Megan had got to her feet now and was coming towards him furiously. The anger that sparked in the depths of her eyes actually made him take a step or two backwards, away from her.
‘Yes, I could have afforded it.’
‘And you weren’t prepared to do so! I thought you were his friend!’
‘I am. Dannazione, Megan, you know I am!’
The haughty toss of her head dismissed his words with supreme contempt, green flames flaring in the angry eyes that blazed into his.
‘Some sort of friend that wouldn’t help him when he most needed you!’
Cesare could not hold back an impatient sigh as he raked both hands through the midnight-dark strands of his hair. He had hoped to have this conversation later—much, much later when things would have had a very different sort of perspective.
‘Meggie,’ he remonstrated as calmly as possible, ‘it wouldn’t have done any good. Your father understands that.’
‘Well, I don’t! I think you’re going to have to explain it for those of us who aren’t blessed with your near-genius financial ability. And don’t “Meggie” me! I might have let you call me that when I was growing up, but I’m no longer a child. I’m a woman of twenty-two,