A small smile twitched on his lips as he took her hand. ‘Are you asking me my name? It’s Nolan Gray.’
‘I’m trying to thank you, Mr Gray.’ She couldn’t resist a smile of her own, something warm unfurling in her stomach. She imagined he rather regularly had that effect on women. Once more she counselled caution. She didn’t want to like him. She just needed him to get through the next four weeks.
* * *
He just had to get through the night. He had a naked woman in his tub and no idea what to do with her, a most novel situation to be sure. Usually he knew exactly what to do with a naked woman in the tub, out of the tub, on the bed, off the bed, against the wall, out on the balcony with the moon overhead. He had to stop, this was starting to sound like an erotic prepositional exercise or bad poetry. Too bad his tutors had not aspired to such creative lengths—he might have done better in school.
Nolan stripped out of his clothes at last, glad to be rid of the damp and stench of the canal. He towelled dry his hair and slipped into his banyan, feeling warmer, cleaner already, but that raised another point of concern. What was she going to wear? Her gown was beyond use, wet and ruined. It was past midnight. There were no shops open and he didn’t know any shopkeepers to rouse. But he did know a friend... Brennan. Nolan grinned and hurried next door.
Brennan answered, half-dressed and less than half-sober. ‘Do you still have that nightgown, Bren? The one you just ordered.’
‘The one I ordered for my special lady,’ Brennan drawled his correction.
‘I need it, Bren.’ Nolan leaned against the doorjamb, his voice low. If Brennan was home this time of night he wasn’t alone and he didn’t want his business broadcast to all and sundry. ‘I have a situation.’
‘I have a situation, too, as it were.’ Brennan directed his eyes downward meaningfully where his robe gaped.
‘Please, she fell in the canal and has nothing to sleep in.’
Brennan raised a brow. ‘And that’s a problem how? I thought you screwed naked.’
‘Normally I do.’ Nolan stopped. What was he doing? He did not have to justify that to Brennan. Nolan rolled his eyes. One of the consequences of living in his friends’ pockets was that they knew everything about him, personal habits and all. He had no privacy left even when he had separate rooms. Nolan pushed a hand through his hair, striving for clarity. ‘It’s complicated, Bren. I won her in a card game, she fell out of the gondola, she’s in the tub right now.’ Striving and failing. Nolan blew out a breath. He could see the explanation didn’t help. He was flubbing this up miserably in his haste to get back to the room.
Brennan waved him off with a hand. ‘Enough, you’re making my head hurt. You can have the damn nightgown if you’ll just stop with all these details.’ Brennan retreated into the dark of his room and came back, a silky white item in one hand. ‘Just to be clear, I won’t want it back when you’re done.’
‘Thanks, I owe you one.’
Brennan laughed. ‘One nightgown, to be precise. I will want it replaced. Now, go to bed.’
Bed was an interesting proposition indeed given there was only the one in his suite and he’d not planned on sharing it with the lovely, mercurial Gianna. He’d also not planned on having her in his room, let alone his bed. Nolan stepped into the steamy bathing room, calling out his approach from the dressing screen that shielded the tub from any intruders. ‘Are you decent? I found you something to wear.’
He heard the water slosh, her voice momentarily flustered. ‘Toss it over the screen, I’ll be out in a minute.’
‘There’s no need to rush,’ Nolan called back, trying to sound cheerful. No need at all. He was still trying to figure out what to do with her, but before he could do that, he had to figure out what to make of her.
He draped the silky material over the screen. The evening hadn’t gone quite as anticipated. He was supposed to have won money, not a woman. But he’d had a plan for that, too. That woman was supposed to have embraced her freedom and left him at the pier. It was a nice, expedient option that should have satisfied them both. In the main room, Nolan poured himself a drink and went out on the balcony to think and to wait. He’d had one plan, but apparently, she’d had another, and that was cause for wonder.
Nolan leaned on the railing, his gaze going out across the dark waters as he sipped at the brandy, letting his thoughts come fast and logical: Was Gianna Minotti a fraud? Was she for real? Was she a little of both, part fact, part fiction? Perhaps of more immediate concern, what did she want badly enough to turn down her freedom and accompany an unknown man to a hotel room, an act that had obviously inspired at least a little fear in her?
There was a delicate cough behind him. He turned, preparing himself for the sight of Gianna Minotti in whatever passed for Brennan’s taste in nightwear. There would be no reason to overreact. This wasn’t his first woman in a nightgown or his first woman anything—he was way beyond firsts when it came to what happened in a bedroom.
His preparation was not enough. Thankfully, years of rote response came to his aid. ‘Will it suffice?’ The words came out of his mouth with little effort from him because the rest of him seemed tongue-tied. The pale-blue dress with its heavy adornments had not done her justice. It had, in fact, distracted the viewer with its opulence from the full onslaught of her beauty. But there was no distraction now.
Nolan’s eyes were riveted on her face, helped there by the simple classic lines of the gown, the thin unobtrusive straps at her shoulders that demanded no attention and the dark cloud of her hair hanging loose and damp at her shoulders, framing her face and those striking hazel eyes. Her face itself was ultimately feminine, at once managing to be compassionate without being soft or delicate, intelligent without being hard. A smart man, a man who wanted to understand her, would study that face for hours and recognise its layers, the complexities of her expressions. Only when that was mastered would he move on to study the rest of her body, shown to perfection in the simplicity of the white gown. Tonight he could not be that man.
Nolan felt his body, typically well trained to reserve its judgement until his mind was made up, stir with arousal. The gown flowed over her curves at the behest of her body, not of fashions. Where the blue gown had forced her to conform, this silk conformed to the wearer, flowing over the swell of her breast, the nip and flare of waist and hip. No wonder Brennan had been reluctant to part with it. The gown had been made by a magician.
‘It suffices, I’d say.’ She took a few steps forward to the cluster of furniture around the fireplace, the silk emphasising the sway of her hips, her mouth quirked in a wry smile that said she’d noted his interest. Damn. He hated being the transparent one. Usually, those roles were reversed. Usually... How many times had he thought of such contrasts tonight? The ‘usual’ held no power here. Nothing that had happened tonight had gone according to plan or prediction.
‘I see the tea has come.’ She sat on the curved sofa and prepared to pour, presiding over the porcelain like a naughty angel in her white gown, her hazel eyes looking preternaturally green against the paleness of her surroundings. ‘Perhaps you’d prefer something stronger?’ She gestured to the decanter on the sideboard, noting the half-empty glass in his hand. ‘I think I’d prefer a little of both after all the excitement tonight.’
Nolan brought the decanter over and sat down, one leg crossed over the other, and let her serve him. If women served tea in nightgowns like this more often, men might actually enjoy the event. He admired the way in which she had manoeuvred things. It was neatly done indeed, masterful even. Of course, he recognised her strategy. It was a trick he used often. To take charge of a situation, one merely had to find a task to perform and then incorporate others into the scheme by asking them questions. Suddenly, you were giving orders and people were