Back In The Brazilian's Bed. Susan Stephens

themed. Arabian Nights, wasn’t it?’

      ‘That’s right. And as for that dress,’ she added with relief, glad that he’d turned from suspicion to thinking back, ‘I could hardly expect my guests to turn up in costume while I wore a suit.’

      He huffed a laugh as he scanned her office outfit. ‘I doubt you had one in your wardrobe. You didn’t dress like an undertaker back then.’

      She stroked the shawl as she remembered the soft folds of chiffon of her birthday dress beneath her hands. The outfit she had chosen to wear at her party had been floating and insubstantial...and very easy to remove.

      Time to change the theme of their conversation to a safer track. ‘I love the shawl. Thank you.’ An involuntary quiver crossed her shoulders as his hands brushed the back of her neck. He was only lifting the shawl a little higher to protect her against the wind, but it was close enough to the danger area to make tremors of an unpleasant kind run through her. And then, thankfully, a group of people recognised him and crowded around, letting her off the hook.

      ‘You’re a complex man,’ she said, when he’d signed the last autograph.

      He frowned. ‘I’m complex because I talk to people?’

      ‘You’re so generous with your time, and that’s not the image you give out with the team.’

      ‘Ah, the team.’ His dark eyes turned black with amusement. ‘The brooding and unapproachable barbarians.’ He laughed. ‘Do you think we would attract the same crowds if our publicist worked the image of clean-shaven, pipe-and-slippers men?’

      Against her better judgement, he made her laugh. ‘There’s no danger of that.’

      Their gazes lingered a little longer on each other’s faces than perhaps they should have done, and then Dante turned serious. ‘These people are my audience, Karina. Of course I respect them. I’ll always make time for them. Without them I’m nothing.’

      ‘I think you’re more than you know,’ she murmured to herself.

      She wondered again about the years they’d been apart and Dante’s meteoric rise to fame and fortune after a childhood that had been less than perfect. His father had squandered the family fortune, by all accounts, and Dante had been proud but poor. Proud, but poor and determined, she amended. There had never been anyone like him, the rumour mill said. Dante was a natural horseman, and with his looks he had soon been inundated with requests from sponsors to become the face of first this big brand and then the next. She doubted he’d had to buy a car or a watch for years, and apart from those smaller perks the money that went with the huge deals had made him an extremely wealthy man. If Dante’s father could see him now...

      Baracca senior had been a cold, self-serving man who could always be depended upon for one thing, and that was to be dismissive and scathing about his son. He had never been interested in what the world had thought of Dante’s emerging talent because all he’d cared about had been recounting the times when he had done so much more.

      ‘Wool-gathering again?’ Dante suggested, staring keenly at her.

      ‘I was thinking about your father.’

      His expression instantly closed off, but then, to her surprise, he admitted, ‘My father was an unhappy man, who was always locked in the past.’

      Always trying to belittle him, she thought as Dante fell silent. She couldn’t bring herself to feel charitable towards a man who had been so relentlessly critical of his own son.