There were many reasons she’d acted so out of character that unforgettable night, and that was just the first of them… Clasping her hands in front of her now, on the polished surface of the desk, it took every bit of courage she could muster to meet the disapproving gaze Luca was still directing her way and hold it.
‘I hadn’t planned to leave the way I did. I just…I just didn’t want to wake you. It was the last night of my holiday and I had a plane to catch. I should have mentioned it before, but—’ She blushed, certain her cheeks were glowing red as ripe russet apples.
‘But we were otherwise engaged at the time?’ Luca suggested wryly, a visible muscle throbbing at the side of his fascinating cheekbone. ‘Even so…you should have woken me—not just left without so much as leaving a phone number or an address where I could contact you!’
‘I’m sorry.’ Kate meant it, and there was a helpless catch in her voice. Yet part of her was reeling at the idea that a man who moved in the privileged and exclusive circles Luca did even cared that his one-night lover had not left a number or address where he might reach her. Was she wrong to have assumed he would forget her so easily? Had she just convinced herself of that so that she could get over the pain of leaving him and never seeing him again by making the cut quick and clean? Because it had pained her to leave him…
The attraction that had flared between them had smoked white-hot the second their glances had met, and even Kate’s relative inexperience with men hadn’t fooled her into thinking that was a common, everyday thing. And underlying that blistering magnetic pull she’d miraculously sensed the kind of soul-to-soul connection she’d long dreamed of. There had definitely been something special about Luca that Kate had not been able to forget. But at the time she’d been grieving on two counts. Grieving for the loss of her mother as well as for the loss of her fiercely guarded self-esteem—brought about by the other thing that had so devastatingly occurred back home. Both those momentous events had left Kate in no fit state either to think straight or make good decisions. And now she had to contend with the unbelievable twist of fate that had brought her right back into this man’s charismatic sphere again—turning up for a temp assignment that meant she would be his personal assistant for the next couple of weeks, while his permanent PA was on holiday.
‘Well…on reflection, I think it probably best that we simply forget what has happened between us in the past and concentrate on the present. It is unfortunate that this has come about, but we will just have to live with it if we are to work together over the next two weeks.’
Luca sighed, as if weighed down with too much responsibility. Beneath the fluid expensive weave of his faultless Italian tailoring, his hard lean body emitted a palpable sense of weariness, and Kate got the definite impression that work had been driving him to the exclusion of all else lately. It made her want to alleviate the burden for him somehow.
‘Though I have to say,’ he continued, ‘it is a very strange coincidence indeed that you should turn up in my office to stand in as my secretary, is it not? Tell me the truth, Katherine. Has someone put you up to this as some kind of joke? Tell me now, before I have to take the regrettable step of calling Security and getting them to escort you out of the building!’
She gasped. ‘What are you saying? Of course it’s not a joke! The agency I work for sent me and that’s the absolute truth! I had no idea that Gianluca De Rossi was you! How could I? You never told me your full name that night, and neither did you tell me you worked in London! I naturally assumed you worked in Milan.’
‘But you could have asked anyone at the party my full name and they would have enlightened you. It was my house and my party, after all! It would have been easy if you had probed further to discover that I have an office in London as well as Milan, and that I am mainly based here.’
‘For your information, apart from the friend I went with I spoke to hardly anyone else that entire evening but you! And my friend didn’t know who you were. She was given the invitation by someone in her office who couldn’t go, and her only information was the address! Anyway, why would I wait three months if I wanted to see you again? If I’d wanted to stay in touch it would have been far easier to leave you my details back in Milan!’
‘So you are telling me that you purposely did not want to get in touch? How flattering!’ Luca’s mouth pursed, as though he had tasted something disagreeable. ‘And now—if I am to believe what you say is true—it is fate that has conspired to bring us together again! I suppose one could conclude from that that we must have some unfinished business after all. What do you think, Katherine?’
Suddenly feeling quite faint, Kate frowned. What did he mean, exactly? She was doubly perturbed by his words when she considered the potentially explosive secret she was keeping that he didn’t yet know about… She just about held on to her scant breakfast of dry toast when she thought about that.
‘Unfinished business or not, I’m here to work as your secretary, and genuinely that’s the only reason I’m here!’
‘Then if you are to work for me, know this! I expect you to be absolutely first-class at what you do. I will not be looking upon you with any leniency because of what happened between us before! Are you up to the task, Katherine? Because if you are not then I will ring the agency now and get them to send somebody else.’
His smile was laced with mistrust as well as a deep cynicism. It wasn’t at all like the one Kate had been acquainted with, that had lit up a room as brightly as a hundred-watt lightbulb. Her stomach churned with misery and shock.
‘You don’t need to get anyone else. I’m good at what I do and completely professional!’
‘Well, then,’ Luca continued, ‘as long as you know that I am hardly accustomed to women treating me as an opportunity for some kind of casual sexual release, and that there will be no chance of a repeat performance, our working together should perhaps not pose too many problems after all.’
‘It wasn’t like that! I never—’
‘You never what, Katherine? You never had a one-night stand before, or you never left a man’s bed the morning after without saying goodbye? How do I know what is the truth? I only have the evidence of my own regrettable experience to go on as far as you are concerned, and the fact is that you did leave the next morning with clearly no intention of ever getting in touch with me again!’
‘It wasn’t like that at all! And it was never my intention to treat you as some kind of casual sexual release, I assure you! There were reasons why I left the way I did.’
‘A plane to catch, you said?’
‘Not just that.’ Feeling as if she was on a rock face, scrabbling for purchase, Kate gave Luca a nervous smile in the hope that she might somehow get through to him. After all, hadn’t they shared something special that momentous night, when they had not been able to ignore the passion and urgency that had driven them into each other’s arms? Something that had fuelled Kate’s sense of something vital having been missing in her life as nothing else had ever done before?
But it took only an instant for her to realise that whatever faint hope she’d nurtured for Luca’s understanding was a waste of time. The look on his face already told her that sympathy from him was in frighteningly short supply.
‘Something had happened at home that I was desperately trying to deal with at the time,’ she started to explain, agitatedly linking