Chilled by the sobering and humiliating recollection that Gio had not even considered her a possible candidate for a ring, Billie brought out the new garments she had prepared at home and began to price the stock. Theo was napping peacefully in his travel cot in his little cubbyhole at the back of the shop. Customers browsed, purchased and departed as she served them while she worked. Only a month earlier, she had hired her first employee, a Polish woman called Iwona, who did part-time hours when Billie couldn’t be at the shop. In fact, the business was doing well and was steadily fulfilling all Billie’s hopes. But then she had always loved the character and superior workmanship of vintage clothes and she was careful only to stock quality items. Slowly but surely she had built up a list of regular customers.
Gio climbed out of his limo while his chauffeur argued with the traffic warden and his security team were disgorged from the vehicle behind. He scanned the shop front, adorned with the name, ‘Billie’s Vintage’, and frowned, positively transfixed by the idea that Billie could have opened up her own business. Yet there was the proof in front of him. Theos! He shook his arrogant dark head, thinking that women were strange, unpredictable creatures and finally wondering if he had ever really known Billie at all because nothing that she had done or said so far had appeared on his list of her potential reactions. His frown grew even darker, lending a saturnine quality to his hard, dark features. He had important projects to manage and people to see and yet here he was still stuck after twenty-four exceedingly boring hours in a back-end-of-nowhere Yorkshire town chasing Billie! What kind of sense did that make?
Dee and Iwona arrived at the shop within minutes of each other. Dee strapped Theo into his pram and asked Billie what she fancied eating for supper while Iwona wrapped a purchase for a customer. That was when Gio strode in, utterly frying Billie’s brain cells because she stopped mid-conversation with Dee and totally forgot what she had been about to say.
Garbed in a charcoal designer pinstripe suit that sheathed his tall, muscular body like a tailor-made glove, Gio simply took her breath away. His white shirt accentuated his bronzed complexion and the very masculine black stubble already beginning to shadow his handsome jaw line. A startling sunburst of honeyed heat blossomed between Billie’s thighs and she pressed them tight together, her colour steadily climbing. She was even more painfully aware of the swelling heaviness of her breasts and the sudden tightening of her nipples. She was appalled that Gio could still have that immediate an effect on her, an effect that was markedly more intense than the day before when she had blamed her surrender to that kiss on the fact that he had caught her unprepared. What was her excuse this time?
‘Billie...’ Gio breathed in his dark, velvet drawl, poised several feet away and acting as if his appearance in her shop were the most natural thing in the world.
‘G-Gio...’ she stammered half under her breath, quickly closing the space between them, fearful of being overheard. ‘Why are you here?’
‘You’re not stupid, don’t act it,’ Gio advised, glancing around. ‘So, you left me to open a shop—’
‘You. Left. Me,’ Billie spelt out with a bitterness she could not restrain but it was the truth: he had left her to place a wedding ring on another woman’s finger.
‘We can’t talk here. We’ll catch up back at my hotel over lunch,’ Gio decreed, closing a hand round her arm.
‘If you don’t let go, I’ll slap you!’ Billie hissed, determined not to be railroaded by his overpowering personality and drive.
His dark eyes glittered like pyrite as if the prospect of a good slap was an entertaining challenge. ‘Lunch, pouli mou?’
‘We’ve got nothing to say to each other,’ Billie told him, noting that his entire hand was still wrapped round her arm, forcing her to stay by his side.
His sensual mouth quirked as he studied her full pink mouth. ‘Then you can listen—’
Butterflies danced in her tummy as she looked up at him. ‘Don’t want to talk, don’t want to listen either—’
‘Tough,’ Gio pronounced and then he did something she would never ever have dreamt he would do in public. He just bent down and scooped her up off her feet and headed for the door.
‘Put me down, Gio!’ she gasped, making a wild grab at the flouncy skirt of her dress, which had flown up to expose her thighs. ‘Have you gone crazy?’
Gio glanced at the two women standing together behind the counter. ‘I’m taking Billie out for lunch. She’ll be back in a couple of hours,’ he explained with complete cool.
‘Gio!’ Billie launched in disbelief, catching a glimpse of Dee’s laughing face before Gio shouldered open the door and hid her cousin from view.
The chauffeur swept open the passenger door as if they were royalty and Gio shoved her into the back seat with scant ceremony. ‘You should’ve known that I wouldn’t stand there arguing with an audience,’ he pointed out smoothly. ‘In any case, I’m out of patience and I’m hungry.’
In a series of angry motions, Billie smoothed down her dress, tugging it over her knees. ‘Why didn’t you go back to London yesterday?’
‘You should know by now that saying no to me only makes me try harder.’
Billie rolled her bright green eyes in mockery and said angrily, ‘Well, how would I know that when I never did say no to you?’
Disconcertingly Gio laughed, genuine amusement illuminating his darkly handsome face. ‘I’ve missed you, Billie.’
Her annoyance fell away and she turned her head in a sharp movement, both shaken and hurt by that claim and by how very empty it was. ‘You got married. How could you possibly have missed me?’
‘I don’t know but I did,’ Gio ground out truthfully. ‘You were so much a part of my life.’
‘No, I was like one tiny little drawer in a big busy cabinet of drawers,’ Billie countered. ‘I was never part of the rest of your life.’
Gio was sincerely astonished by that statement. He had phoned her twice a day every day no matter where he was in the world and no matter how busy he was. Her soothing happy-go-lucky chatter had provided him with necessary downtime from a hectic schedule. In truth he had never had so close a relationship with any woman either before or after her. He had trusted her and he had been honest with her, which was a very rare thing between a single man and a single woman in Gio’s world. But it was steadily sinking in on him that none of that mattered because he had married Calisto. Billie, who had never shown a jealous, distrustful streak in her life, had clearly been jealous and distressed by that development. He didn’t like that idea, he didn’t like it at all, and he kicked out that thought so fast it might never have existed.
Gio had constructed a protective shell while he was still a child to ensure that he could remain untouched by emotional reactions. Emotion didn’t need to get involved. Emotion complicated and only exacerbated an already difficult situation. Calm, common sense and control had always worked far more efficiently for Gio in every field of his life, only not with Billie, he acknowledged grudgingly. But the past was the past and he couldn’t change it, while life had taught him that with enough money, energy and purpose he could form the future into any shape he wanted.
Billie, however, was not practical; she was all about emotion and perhaps that essential difference between them had been one of the things that attracted him to her and which was now sending her in the wrong direction. His shrewd, dark eyes rested on her angry, flushed face and suddenly he wanted to flatten her to the seat of the limo and