‘Excuse me?’ She turned around, angling up her face, and in a single stroke Gianluca lost every preconception he had built around her.
The shapeless clothes, her tone—he’d taken her to be older, harder...certainly less attractive than—this. She had creamy skin, wide brows, amazing cheekbones and—what was most intriguing—soft, lush lips. A veritable ripe strawberry of a mouth. But her face was dominated by a pair of ugly white-rimmed sunglasses, and he had to resist the urge to tug them away and get the full effect.
Although he definitely got a sense of her eyes widening.
‘It’s you!’ she said.
He raised a brow. ‘Have we met?’
This wasn’t an unknown scenario over the years. His past football career—two years of kicking a ball around professionally for Italy—combined with his title had given him something of a public profile beyond the usual roaming grounds of Roman society. He made sure his tone offered no encouragement.
The dragon-who-wasn’t took a step back.
‘No,’ she said fast, as if warding him off.
He became aware that she was looking around as if searching for an escape route, and for some reason his own body tensed. He recognised he was readying himself to give chase.
Madre di Dio, what was going on?
A pulse pounded like a tiny drum at the base of her throat, and he couldn’t have said why but it held his attention. She made a soft sound of panic. His eyes flicked up to catch hers and sexual awareness erupted between them. It was so fast, so strong, it took him entirely off guard.
He stepped towards her, but she didn’t shift an inch. Her chin tipped up and her eyes flared wide, as if she was waiting for something.
Something from him.
Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Basta! This was getting him nowhere.
Irritated by his own unprecedented behaviour—getting involved with a strange woman on the street, allowing his libido to get away from him, lingering as if he had the day to while away when he had a meeting lined up across town—he did what he should have done when he’d emerged from the coffee bar five minutes ago.
‘In that case, enjoy your stay in Rome, signorina.’
He’d only gone a few steps when he found himself turning around.
She was still standing there, swamped by that god-awful jacket and wearing those trousers which did nothing for her, and yet...
He was noticing other things about her—the pink of her nose, the slightly hectic expression on her face. She’d been crying.
It stirred something in him. A memory.
A weeping woman usually left him cold. He knew all about female manipulation. He’d grown up observing it with his mother and sisters. Tears were usually a woman’s go-to device for getting her own way. It never ceased to amaze him how a pretty bauble or a promise could dry them up.
But instead of walking away he strode over to the kiosk, read the sign that told him this was Fenice Tours, which was run by a subsidiary of the travel conglomerate Benedetti International had business with, and took out his phone. As he thumbed in the number he told the guy he had sixty seconds to refund the turista for her ticket or he’d close the place down.
With a few more well-placed instructions he handed over his phone. The man took it with a sceptical look that faded as his employer’s angry voice buzzed like a blowfly on the other end.
‘Mi scusi, Principe. It was a—a misunderstanding,’ the guy stammered.
Gianluca shrugged. ‘Apologise to the lady, not to me.’
‘Si, si—scusa tanto, signora.’
With gritted teeth she accepted the euros. For all the fuss she had made, Gianluca noticed she didn’t bother to check them, just folded them silently into her bag—a large leather affair that, like her clothes, seemed to be part of an attempt to weigh herself down.
‘Grazie,’ she said, as if it were torn from her.
There was no reason to linger. Gianluca was at the kerb opening up his low-slung Lamborghini Jota when he looked back.
She had followed him and was watching him, her expression almost comical in its war between curiosity and resentment—and something else...
It was the something else that kept him from jumping into the car.
She seemed to gird herself before walking over.
‘Excuse me.’ Her voice was as stiff as her manner, but it didn’t take away from the rather lovely combination of her full mouth and dramatic cheekbones, or the way her caution made her seem oddly prim. It was the stiff formality that had his eyes locked to hers.
‘I’m curious,’ she said.
He could feel her gaze searching his face as if hunting for something. Curious, but not thankful, he noted, amused despite the wariness that told him something about this wasn’t right.
‘Could you really have shut it down?’
She angled up a stubborn chin made somewhat less forthright by the soft press of a dimple and hard suspicion narrowed his gaze.
Where had he seen that gesture before?
Yet he gave her a tight smile, a smile that didn’t reach his eyes—the one he handed out to women as a courtesy, telling them he recognised that they were female, and as a man he appreciated it, but alas it could go no further.
‘Signorina,’ he drawled, ‘this is Rome. I’m a Benedetti. Anything’s possible.’
He was pushing through the mess that was Rome’s mid-morning traffic when her reaction registered. She hadn’t looked flattered. She hadn’t even looked shocked. She had looked furiously angry.
And against his better judgement it had him turning the car around.
CHAPTER TWO
AVA STOOD AT the kerb as the low-slung sports machine vanished into the traffic and let shock reverberate through her body until the only thing left was the burn.
Benedetti.
All she could think was that this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.
Over the years she’d had a few false alarms—moments when a deep voice, an Italian accent, a pair of broad shoulders had brought her head snapping around, her senses suddenly firing. But reality would always intervene.
Clearly reality had decided to slap her in the face.
It came over her in a rush. The flick of a broad tanned wrist at the ignition of a growling Ducati motorcycle. The tightening of her arms around his muscle-packed waist as they made their getaway from a wedding he’d had no interest in and she’d been cut up about. The memory of a flight into a summer’s night seven long years ago that she still couldn’t shake.
It was all Ava could do as she stood in the street to keep the images—those highly sexual images—at bay.
Finding herself in the early hours of a summer morning lying in the grass on the Palatine Hill, her dress rucked up around her waist, under the lean, muscular weight of a young Roman god come to life was not something a woman forgot in a hurry.
Finding herself repeating it an hour later, in a bed that had once belonged to a king, in a palazzo built literally for a princess, on a beautiful piazza in the centre of the city, and again and again into the first flush of dawn, was also something that had stayed with her. And all the while he had lavished her with praise in broken English, making her feel