Katie Palmer was a beautiful woman, an exciting woman, and yet she’d begun to leave him cold even before the pink razor and its endless refills had appeared. He wasn’t quite sure why. She was exactly the sort of woman he usually dated—beautiful, slightly superficial and intellectually undemanding.
Renzo picked up his laptop again and stared at the report he’d been working on. He should have perhaps taken Faith’s suggestion to invite a former girlfriend tonight instead of pressing her into service, but when the idea had first struck him as he’d sat at his desk and stared at a neatly typed memo with a helpful sticky note arrow pointing to the line for his signature, he’d had a sudden idea that taking his capable, mousy little PA with him would be far more productive than taking a woman who expected him to pay attention to her.
If he took Faith, it was business. She was a quiet, competent girl. She was not necessarily unattractive, he supposed, but he’d never really looked at her for signs of beauty. Why would he? She was his PA, and she was quite good at her job. His calendar had never been so orderly or his appointments so seamless.
Faith was perfect, even if she wasn’t much to look at. She wore severe suits in dark colors that hid whatever figure she might have and scraped her golden hair back into ponytails and buns. She looked, truth be told, like a box. She also wore dark-rimmed spectacles.
But her eyes were green. He’d noticed that before, whenever she’d looked up at him through her glasses, her gaze sparking with intelligence. They were not dark like an emerald, but golden green like a spring leaf. And she smelled nice. Like an early-morning rain mingled with exotic flowers. There was no sharp perfume, no stale smell of smoke or alcohol or tanning solution.
But when she’d looked up at him this afternoon, her eyes flashing and a blush spreading over her cheeks, he’d had one wild, inconceivable moment when he’d imagined pulling her across the desk and fitting his mouth to hers.
Which made no sense. Faith Black was neat and efficient and smelled nice, but she wasn’t the kind of woman he preferred. He liked her because she was professional and excellent at everything she did. He was not attracted to her.
It was, he supposed, an anomaly. A sign of the stress he’d been under for the past few months as his engineers worked to bring the Viper to top form. There were problems that had to be worked out or the bike would fail on the track.
And Renzo refused to accept failure. He’d poured a great deal of money and time into the development of this motorcycle, and he needed it to succeed. Success was everything. He’d known that since he was a teenager, since he’d realized that he actually had a father but that his father had not wanted to know him.
Because he wasn’t a blue blood like the Conte de Lucano, or like the conte’s children with his wife. Renzo was the outcast, the unfortunate product of a somewhat hasty affair with a waitress. He hadn’t been supposed to succeed—but he had, spectacularly, and he had every intention of continuing to do so.
Lorenzo D’Angeli never backed down from a challenge. He lived for them, thrived on them.
The limousine came to a halt in front of a plain concrete apartment building in a somewhat shabby neighborhood. Renzo winced as he moved his leg. It ached enough that he should allow his chauffeur to retrieve Faith, but he was just stubborn enough to refuse to permit even that small moment of vulnerability.
The car door opened and Renzo stepped onto the pavement, looking right and left, surveying the street and the people. The area didn’t seem unsafe, yet it was worn. An unwanted memory tugged at his mind as he stood there. Another time, another place.
Another life, when he’d had nothing and had to struggle to feed his mother and younger sister. He’d been angry then, terribly angry. He’d always thought that if his mother had been more forceful, more demanding, she could have at least gotten the conte to make sure they had food and shelter. But she was weak, his mother, though he loved her completely. Too weak to fight back when she should have done so.
He ruthlessly squashed the feelings of helplessness the memory dredged up. Then he strode into the building and made his way to Faith’s apartment on the second floor. There was no elevator. Renzo took the stairs quickly, in spite of the sharp throb in his leg. When he reached Faith’s door, he took a moment to blank the pain from his mind before he rapped sharply.
She answered right away, the door whipping open to reveal a woman who might have made his jaw drop had he not had better control of himself. Faith Black was … different. A small spike of something—he did not know quite what—ricocheted through him as he studied her. She had not transformed into a voluptuous goddess, but she had transformed. Somehow.
The glasses were gone, and she was wearing makeup. He wasn’t certain she ever wore makeup at the office, though perhaps she did. If she did, it wasn’t quite like this, he was certain. Her lips were red, full and shiny from her lip gloss. Kissable.
Kissable?
“Mr. D’Angeli,” she said, blinking in surprise.
“You were expecting someone else?” he asked mildly, and yet the thought of her doing so caused a twinge of irritation to stab into him. Odd.
“I—well, yes. I had thought you were sending your car. I had thought I was meeting you at the event.”
“As you see, this is not the case.” He let his gaze drop slowly before meeting her pretty eyes again. She seemed surprised—and somewhat annoyed. She’d never been anything but professional in all their interactions, but what he saw in her eyes now made him wonder if it was possible that she did not like him.
Impossibile. Of course she did. He’d yet to meet a woman who didn’t. He turned his best smile on her. “You look quite delightful, Miss Black.”
And delectable, he was shocked to realize.
Her hair was piled on her head, but it wasn’t quite as scraped back as usual; instead she’d pulled it into an elegant twist from which one disobedient tendril had escaped to lie against her cheek. Her pale lavender gown was demure, with a high neck, but it was also sleeveless and molded to her full breasts before falling away in ripples of fabric to the floor.
It was disconcerting, to say the least, to realize that she had a shape—and that shape was not a box. Quite the contrary, she was a study in curves, from the soft curve of her jaw to the curve of her bosom and down to the curve of her hips that he could just make out beneath the flowing fabric of her gown. He couldn’t quite take his eyes from her, as if she might change back into the creature he knew if he looked away.
Color stained her cheeks as her green gaze fell from his. Satisfaction rippled through him. She was not immune after all. “Thank you. I—I was just searching for my earring backing. I dropped it and I’m not sure where it’s gone.”
He noticed then that she was only wearing one small diamond earring. “Allow me to help,” he said, pushing the door wider. She stepped back somewhat reluctantly, but she let him inside.
The apartment was small, but neat. The furnishings were worn, and there were a variety of magazines piled on a central table—including a couple of motorcycle magazines, it amused him to note. He was on the cover of the topmost one, in full leathers, looking grim as he stood beside a prototype of the Viper. And with good reason, considering the bike had fallen far short of what he’d been aiming for when he’d taken it out on the track. Not that the reporter had known, of course.
He dragged his gaze away from the magazine, continuing his study of Faith’s home. A shelf stacked high with books ran along one short wall. The walls were industrial white, but she’d tried to punch it up with bright pictures and pillows on the furniture. It was a decidedly feminine space, though not in any overt way.
He thought of his mother decorating their tiny apartment in Positano with garlands of flowers