Tension fizzed in the silence. Rachel found herself clinging to her little black beaded purse. The car swished along London’s busy streets, recently drenched by a heavy downpour of rain. Everything outside the car seemed to glitter and sparkle in the darkness, everything inside the car was shadowed and oddly flat.
Raffaelle wished he knew what he was feeling right now, but he didn’t. It was crazy to have been so taken aback by her reminder of what this was all about when they’d done little else but argue about it since they’d first met.
But he had been taken aback by it, stunned by the gut-twisting reminder that none of this was real—that she wasn’t real.
Not tonight anyway.
She was the sleek look-alike sister of Elise Castle-Savakis, pretending to be a version of Rachel Carmichael that just did not exist. Even the dress was Elise’s, classy and stylish and very sexy on Rachel, but he would be prepared to bet it was not of her own taste or choice.
He preferred the other Rachel with the curls and the spark of defiance in her blue eyes.
‘Having second thoughts about risking me in there amongst your friends?’ she asked suddenly.
Raffaelle blinked, realising that they’d come to a stop outside the restaurant. By the atmosphere inside the car, they’d been here like this for several seconds.
The restaurant was one of the best Italian restaurants in London. It was a place where the rich set ate. It was his kind of place and his kind of life, but neither were hers.
He turned his head to look at her. Barely an hour ago, she had been coming all around him in a breathtaking pulse of intimacy that still circulated in his blood. He looked at her silk-straight hair and her beautiful pearly-white complexion, the heavily accentuated black-lashed blue eyes and the sexy pink-coated mouth.
He could taste them. He could feel those soft pink-coated lips warm against his own whether she was this Rachel or the other Rachel. And if he was sitting here like this, wanting to know where the two Rachels became one, then he’d found it in that mouth and what happened to her when he claimed it.
‘I won’t embarrass you, if that’s what’s worrying you,’ she stated, fizzing inside with resentment at the analytical way he was looking her over as if he was actually having to give some deep thought to the sarcastic question she had tossed out.
‘You sound very sure about that, little farmer girl,’ he said huskily.
‘Well, I’m not,’ she admitted honestly. ‘I suppose I should have said I will try not to embarrass you.’
Easing his wide shoulders into the corner of the seat, his eyes glittered over her tense face. ‘Do you really believe I will care if you do decide to embarrass me?’ he asked curiously.
Rachel offered a shrug. ‘I don’t know you well enough to judge.’
‘No, you don’t …’
She didn’t like the way he had said that, or the way he was looking at her now. Her tension was zinging along just about every nerve ending she had in her body and she wished he would just—
‘Are we going to go in there or not?’ she flicked out.
‘In a minute,’ he said smoothly, ‘This conversation is just getting interesting …’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Because it has nothing to do with whether you are going to embarrass me,’ he said ignoring her interruption. ‘It is to do with you being scared that I might embarrass you.’
Rachel stared at him. ‘Why should you want to do that?’
‘My thought exactly,’ he said softly. ‘Yet you are scared that I am going to take you in there, then just leave you to sink or swim.’
Her pink upper lip gave a vulnerable quiver. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of being served up along with the main course,’ she confessed.
He laughed. It was bad of him. But it was a very low, sexily-amused laugh and Rachel laughed too—one of those tense little sounds that jump up unexpectedly from the throat.
The atmosphere changed in that single moment, spinning the tension into a fine thread that eddied across the gap between them then morphed into something else. He moved so fast that she didn’t see him coming, and then it was too late when he had taken arrogant possession of her mouth.
‘You’ve stolen all my lipstick,’ she protested when the kiss came to an end.
‘I know.’ He sat back a little, watching her as she fumbled in her bag for a tissue and her lipstick case. ‘Keep on reapplying it, cara,’ he advised as she reapplied a coating of pink with a decidedly unsteady hand. ‘Because I find I like doing it. In fact I do believe I am becoming addicted to the taste.’
She handed him the tissue. ‘It looks better on me than it does on you.’
And he grinned, wiping pink from his lips while his eyes tangled with hers. It was no use pretending that they weren’t doing something else here, because they were.
Then suddenly he was being serious. ‘Listen to me,’ he urged. ‘I don’t want you to be anyone but yourself tonight, okay? I don’t care if you want to spend the evening going on about the pros of organic produce. I don’t care if you decide to ruffle your hair into curls or you march off to the kitchens to tout the chef for his business—’
‘I’m not quite that uncouth!’ she cried.
‘You are missing the point,’ he chided. ‘The point being that I don’t give a damn if you are just yourself and act like yourself. The only thing I do care about is that you stick to the main story as to how we met and keep in mind that, when we leave here, we go home to my apartment together as a couple, then to bed and to—this.’
Another kiss was on its way to her. ‘Don’t you dare,’ Rachel drew her head back.
But he did dare—quickly, briefly, not enough to steal her lipstick a second time but more than enough to distract her from what he was about to do next.
She felt her left hand being taken. By the time she had the sense to glance down, the fake sapphire ring had been removed and he was already replacing it with one that looked exactly the same.
‘W-what have you done that for?’ she demanded.
‘The fake might have been a good fake, cara, but it did not stand a chance of fooling the experts we are about to meet.’
‘It fooled you when you saw it.’ She was staring at the exact copy now adorning her finger.
‘I was too angry to notice it then.’
‘It’s so—gaudy.’ She sighed, staring at the ring as it shimmered and sparkled much more than its predecessor.
‘Not to your taste?’
‘Not to anyone’s taste,’ she said ruefully. ‘It was only meant to grab Leo’s attention … How did you get hold of this one so quickly?’
‘I am the kind of man who gets what he wants when he wants it,’ he answered with careless conceit.
He went to put the fake ring into his pocket.
‘No—’ As quick as a flash Rachel plucked it from his hand and pushed it into her beaded purse. ‘I’ll wear the real one when we are out together, but only then,’ she informed him stubbornly. ‘Otherwise I’ll wear the fake one.’
‘If you’re afraid of losing it, it is insured—’
But Rachel gave a shake of her head. This had nothing to do with losing the real ring, but more to do with the fear that if she didn’t hang on to the fake she would lose