‘I will wait here for you if you wish to tell your friends where you are going.’ He glanced across to where her friends were seated outside the cafeteria, chatting and laughing together as they enjoyed warming drinks.
‘I—Yes.’ Colour warmed her cheeks. ‘How thoughtful of you.’
Not thoughtful at all, Luc acknowledged cynically, but merely an effort on his part to make sure that the night he was now contemplating enjoying with this young woman was not interrupted by her friends if they came looking for her.
He reached up and gently touched the creaminess of her cheek, instantly aware of the darkening of those wide blue eyes and the way her breath caught and held in her throat. ‘Do not keep me waiting long, hmm?’ he encouraged throatily.
Once again Annie felt that thrill of awareness down the length of her spine. Dear God, this man was lethal. Absolutely, one hundred per cent lethal. And for once in her so-far-practical life, Annie was going to be daring. Reckless.
And to hell with the consequences.
Chapter One
Lake Garda, Italy
June 2010
‘I’LL be home in a couple of days, darling.’ Annie spoke warmly into her mobile, totally unaware of the sunshine and beauty of the scenery of the lake outside the long windows of the bustling hotel as she hurried down the carpeted hallway to the conference room on the ground-floor level. ‘I love you too, Oliver—oomph!’ Annie was brought to an abrupt—and painful—halt as she crashed into an immovable object.
A warm, firmly muscled, very male object, Annie recognised as the free hand she had raised to steady herself came to rest on one broad shoulder and she felt the ripple of those powerful muscles beneath her fingers.
‘I’m so sorry—’ Annie’s laughing apology strangled in her throat, her face paling, as she looked up into the coldly brooding, breathlessly handsome face.
No…
It couldn’t be Luc!
Could it?
Annie felt absolutely stunned. Could this man really be the same one she’d met four and a half years ago? Apart from the fact that she had only ever seen the tall and lithely muscled Luc in ski wear or casual denims and cashmere sweaters, and this man was dressed in an expensively tailored suit and white silk shirt with a silver-coloured tie meticulously knotted at his throat, he certainly looked a lot like the man Annie had met, and spent a hot and steamy night with, all those years ago.
Except…
That Luc had had shoulder-length dark hair, whereas this man’s hair was cut short—in an effort to control the inclination it’d had to curl? But this man’s eyes, dark as onyx in an arrogant and harshly uncompromising face, were the same. As was the long slash of a nose, and the chiselled mouth above a ruthlessly set jaw.
He looked identical, and yet, at the same time, so very different…
The Luc Annie had met on an Italian ski slope four and a half years ago had possessed a reckless glint in the ebony darkness of his eyes. His hard grin had betrayed that same air of devil-may-care that had drawn the quiet and—until then—eminently sensible twenty-year-old Annie to him, like a moth to a flame.
There was not even a hint of that dangerous recklessness now in those penetrating black eyes that returned Annie’s gaze so coldly.
Eyes that also seemed to totally lack the same jolting recognition that she now felt…
Annie removed her hand as if burnt from the broadness of his shoulder as she took an involuntary step backwards. At the same time becoming aware that she hadn’t so much as drawn in a breath since she had looked up and instantly recognised her fiercely passionate lover in this icily controlled man.
Annie took a much-needed breath. ‘Scuse, signore—’
‘I speak English, signorina,’ he bit out curtly.
Dear God, that voice…
No amount of steely coldness could ever disguise the voice that had once murmured husky encouragements against Annie’s throat and breasts as she climaxed again and again beneath the fierce, possessive thrusts of his hard body…
It was Luc.
But a different, much colder Luc than Annie remembered.
Twenty-six-year-old Luc had been wild and restless. Everything he did—from skiing to lovemaking—had been possessed of a driving, single-minded energy that dared anything and anyone to deny him. The same single-minded energy with which he had set out—and succeeded—in seducing Annie…
No one looking at the man standing in front of her could ever doubt that he possessed that same determination of purpose. But now that energy was as fiercely controlled as it had once been wild, and his emotions were hidden behind a face that showed only an arrogance and ruthlessness that made Annie shiver as he continued to look down at her coldly from a vastly superior height.
Luc’s patience, never at a premium, evaporated with each second that this young woman continued to stare up at him as if she had seen a ghost. Or her worst nightmare. Certainly not the reaction that Luc was accustomed to evoking in any woman!
A humourless smile curled his lips. ‘Or perhaps it is signora?’ he asked.
‘No, you were right the first time,’ she answered.
Luc felt a slight stirring of memory as the woman spoke softly. Her voice possessed a husky quality that somehow seemed familiar.
He took in her medium height and slender body, clothed in a black business suit and white silk blouse. Her hair was a deep chestnut brown secured at her nape, her face heart shaped. It was an arrestingly beautiful face with a small, uptilted nose, and sensually full lips above a pointed and determined chin. A face dominated by eyes as deep a blue as Lake Garda itself.
Again Luc felt that slight stirring of familiarity. ‘Have we met before, signorina?’ he asked slowly.
She blinked before giving a brittle, dismissive laugh. ‘I don’t know, have we?’ she said, deflecting his question back at him.
Luc bit back his increasing impatience. ‘I believe I asked first?’ he pointed out coldly.
And he could go on asking, as far as Annie was concerned! All this time, all these years, Annie’s worst fear had been that she would somehow, somewhere, meet Luc again. A meeting that she knew would complicate her life in ways she didn’t even want to contemplate.
Now, by some terrible mischance, she had met him again, had met the man who had changed her own life forever—and he didn’t even remember her!
The relief Annie should have felt was overlaid by a deep resentment. This man had literally skied his way into her life and introduced the normally reserved Annie Balfour to an intensity of passion and excitement she had never known before or since, before disappearing again just as abruptly.
Only for her to now realise that their time together, all those wonderful memories that she had never quite been able to put from her mind, had meant so little to him that he didn’t even remember her.
Arrogant louse!
Her chin lifted in silent challenge. ‘I’m sure one of us would have remembered if that were the case, signore.’
Luc wasn’t so sure. The pallor of this woman’s face, the angry resentment he sensed beneath her tone, seemed to tell a completely different story. One in which he had patently not appeared in a good light.
As the only son and heir of a rich and powerful Italian business entrepreneur, Luc’s youth had been one of wealth and privilege, with his every wish being granted. As a consequence, Luc knew he had become arrogant, and