Her breathing was all over the place and she stared at him with a boldness he had rarely seen directed at him, and certainly never by a woman.
‘Finished?’ he questioned.
Go on, then, thought Jessica. Sack me, and see if I care! ‘Yes,’ she said.
Salvatore’s lips twisted into an odd kind of smile. ‘I think I get the drift. You’re objecting not because I want to go to bed with you, but because I have not gone through the necessary rituals which society demands?’
‘Are you making fun of me?’
‘Not at all. For who am I to argue in the face of such a passionately put plea?’ Such passion boded well for the bedroom, he mused as he looked down at her flushed cheeks with some amusement. ‘What is it they say? The mouse who roared. Very well—I have heard you, my little mouse, and we shall play the games according to your rules.’ He glimmered her a mocking look. ‘So will you have dinner with me, Jessica?’
She swallowed. ‘As another pretend date, you mean?’
He shook his head and this time his tone was almost gentle. ‘No. As a real one this time.’
She was so taken aback that for a moment words completely failed her. ‘When?’
He gave a low laugh. ‘How about Tuesday?’
Jessica stared at him. How could he go from such urgency to a day which seemed ages away? ‘Tuesday?’ she questioned tentatively.
‘Sì, that is the first evening I have free. I’m flying to Rome for the weekend.’
‘Rome?’
‘Mmm. Ever been there?’
‘No. Never.’ She wanted to ask him who he was going to Rome with, but that was none of her business.
He moved a little closer and he could see the sudden wild darkening of her eyes, the instinctive way that her lips parted. He should kiss her now, take her here and have done with it—it wouldn’t be hard to overcome her coy reluctance.
Yet he had never been forced to wait. Nor to dance attention to a woman’s demands, and it was oddly exciting. Why not let her enjoy her brief moment of power while it lasted? Soon he would have her exactly where he wanted her. ‘So are you going to see me on Tuesday?’ he murmured.
‘Yes, I can do Tuesday,’ she whispered.
He stared down at her for one long moment, drifting a contemplative finger over the outline of her lips and feeling them tremble beneath his touch. He read her silent plea to have him kiss her once more, to seal the agreement in another traditional way—and with a brief, hard smile he turned away. Let her simmer. Let her wait as she had forced him to wait.
‘Until then, cara,’ he said softly.
And holding onto her stinging hand, Jessica was left weakly staring after him as he walked out of the room without another word.
CHAPTER SIX
THE restaurant took Jessica’s breath away. She’d heard of it, of course—but never actually imagined eating there. It was right in the middle of London’s theatre-land and so anonymous from the outside that you wouldn’t know it was there. A secret door opened straight onto the pavement. You stepped in from a crowded and busy street and it was like entering a different world.
It was a large yet intimate space with stained glass windows filtering in coloured light while keeping it private from prying eyes outside. Although it was a Tuesday evening, it was packed out. One of those places where it was impossible for mere mortals to get a table at short notice, though Salvatore had managed it without any trouble.
He seemed to be known here, thought Jessica as they were shown to their table. The waiters beamed. The sommelier nodded at him with a smile. Were staff in places like this taught to remember the names of all their influential customers, she wondered—or was it Salvatore’s bright blue eyes and dark, towering presence which would always stamp him indelibly on people’s minds?
She had never felt more self-conscious as they wove their way through the linen-draped tables. She saw a couple of faces she recognised from TV and spotted a well-known author who had won a literary prize last year and whose book she had at home.
The women all looked very thin and very beautiful. A couple of them glanced up as they passed and Jessica was certain she wasn’t imagining their faint frowns. They looked as if they were trying—and failing—to place her.
What’s a guy like him doing with a girl like her? their carefully made-up eyes seemed to ask—or was that just her own insecurity talking? All the same, she wondered what they’d think if they knew the truth!
‘You are amused by something?’ questioned Salvatore as she sat down.
Jessica let the waiter unfold a giant napkin onto her lap. ‘I’m just hoping I don’t pick up the wrong fork.’
Salvatore gave a low laugh. ‘I remember the first time I left Sicily. I went to stay in France and one of my uncles took me out to eat in the most famous restaurant in Paris. I could see what looked like fifty pieces of cutlery at each setting, and the very crème of Parisian high society surrounding me.’
‘And were you scared?’ asked Jessica, for a moment forgetting all her nerves, the anxieties which had plagued her all day, about how the evening was going to end and whether she looked okay.
Salvatore shrugged. He supposed that it wouldn’t be particularly helpful to her to know that nothing ever really scared him. That men were there to be strong and doubts were for women—but he wasn’t going to invent a timid persona just to make her feel better.
‘No. I watched my uncle and copied exactly what he did. The only difference was that he left food on his plate. It was a thing that people did then, to show that they were not peasants, but I had the hunger of youth, and finished mine. Every scrap.’
Jessica nodded, eager to hear more. The unexpected glimpse into his past made him seem less daunting somehow. More like the man who usually chatted to her in the office before this whole sexual attraction thing had blown up in their faces. It made it easier to forget what this evening was about and to pretend that they were alone in this gorgeous restaurant for no other reason than that they liked one another.
‘And don’t tell me,’ she teased, ‘that no food has ever tasted as good as the meal you ate that night?’
He shook his dark head. ‘On the contrary,’ he demurred softly. ‘They had messed around with the menu so that everything I ate was almost unrecognisable as the original ingredient. The best food of all is simple, and fresh—the fresher the better. The fish you pull from the water yourself and throw onto the flames. The rabbit whose blood is still warm and which goes straight into the pot. And no orange is sweeter than the one plucked from the tree.’ But other appetites had been satisfied that night, he recalled, with an ache of nostalgia.
He remembered the beautiful waitress who had slipped him her phone number while his uncle was paying the bill. Later, he remembered sneaking out to her tiny room close to the Sacre Coeur and the long, sensual night which had followed. The sound of the church bell striking the hour and voices shouting in the street outside as she had moaned her pleasure beneath him. The bowl of strong, sweet coffee he had drunk amid the rumpled sheets in the morning. How sharpened his senses had been then.
He stared at Jessica, at the way her hair hung in two shiny wings