After a small hesitation Roxane sat in one of the armchairs facing him. Knees and ankles pressed together, she folded her hands in her lap. Capable hands, the nails allowed to grow just over the tips, and glossed with clear satin polish. Ringless hands. Hastily she covered the left one with her right.
When she looked up Zito was leaning against the couch cushions, looking disgruntled, his long legs sprawled in front of him. ‘I’ve been stupid tonight,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Clumsy and stupid.’
Startled by the admission, Roxane didn’t argue, regarding him warily.
His eyelids drooped as his gaze lowered to her mouth, and then without haste traversed her body, making her skin prickle pleasurably in reluctant response. ‘I should have caught up and stopped you after you got off that bus,’ he said.
‘Instead of scaring me witless?’
‘When did you know it was me?’
When he’d called her ‘darling’ in his unforgettable, dark-melted-chocolate-and-brandy voice, that she’d always imagined held a trace of his Italian ancestry, although he was a second-generation Australian.
‘Just before I hit you,’ she told him.
He laughed. She remembered that he’d laughed then too, although the slap must have hurt.
Old emotions stirred, treacherously. Against the quickening in her blood she curled her hands, gripping one inside the other.
To quell the memories she said, ‘What were you doing in Ponsonby Road, anyway? For that matter, what are you doing in Auckland?’
‘We’re thinking of opening a New Zealand branch of Deloras. I was dining at GPK.’
‘Checking out the possible competition?’ Zito’s grandfather had arrived in Australia as a penniless assisted immigrant, and worked as a dishwasher and kitchen hand until he opened his own small restaurant, and then another, and another. Over the years the family business had become a multi-million dollar Australian institution.
And now they were planning to expand across the Tasman Sea and conquer the New Zealand market?
‘Combining business with…pleasure,’ Zito said.
Her skin tightened. ‘You were with a woman.’
Of course he hadn’t been eating alone. And of course his companion had been female.
‘A woman I won’t be seeing again.’
‘I’m not surprised, if you left her flat in the middle of a meal.’ The waspishness of her voice was simply on account of his unusual lapse of manners, Roxane assured herself. She had no right to be jealous. And of course she wasn’t. ‘What on earth did you say to her?’
‘I apologised, gave her some money for the meal and a taxi, and said I’d phone her in the morning.’
Poor woman. Roxane very nearly laughed. ‘You’ll be lucky if she accepts the call.’
‘I’ll send her some flowers,’ he said dismissively.
‘Oh, that’s sure to bring her round.’ That and his notoriously irresistible charm. ‘You’ll have her eating out of your hand in no time.’
She’d irritated him. ‘As a gesture of apology,’ he said. ‘I told you I won’t be seeing her again. She’s a casual acquaintance—nothing more.’
Who had probably hoped to be much more. The woman would never know what a lucky escape she’d had.
Roxane knew she was being unfair. An older, more sophisticated woman, more sure of herself than Roxane had been when she married Zito might have been perfectly happy—and made him happy too. She took a deep breath, blinked fiercely and stared at a blank spot on the wall.
‘What’s wrong, Roxane?’
Strangely, he sounded as if he really cared about the answer. Roxane blinked again and made herself look at him, saying the first thing that came into her head. ‘I haven’t eaten since lunch. I’m hungry.’
The remark must have spilled out of her subconscious, perhaps triggered by his talk of an abandoned dinner.
And for some reason it seemed to make him angry again. ‘Will you never learn to look after yourself?’ he asked.
‘I have,’ she replied icily. ‘If you hadn’t attacked me and dragged me in here and poured brandy down my throat, I’d have had something to eat by now.’
That was probably half the reason for her sluggish light-headedness—shock followed by alcohol on an empty stomach.
‘I can fix that.’ He got up. ‘Where’s your kitchen?’
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’ He was already leaving the room. ‘I’ll find it.’
‘Zito…’ She stood up too, following after him while he strode along the short passageway and unerringly found the kitchen at the back of the house. ‘Zito,’ she repeated as he switched on the light, ‘I don’t need you to fix anything for me.’
He turned and gave her his most dazzling smile. Generations of charismatic Italian genes had produced that smile.
Taking her arm, he drew her to the small round table in the window corner, pulled out one of the aqua blue spray-painted wooden chairs and planted her on the cheerful patterned seat cushion. ‘I’m still hungry too. And there’s no reason you should have to cook for me. Just sit there and tell me where everything is.’
He slipped his coat and tie off to hang them over the other chair, and rolled his sleeves up muscular olive-skinned forearms as he went to the sink to wash his hands.
This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. She’d been tired after working late, she’d probably gone to sleep at the desk in her inner city office, and this was all a bad dream. Zito wasn’t really here in her kitchen, opening cupboards to haul out pans, finding a jar of pasta on a shelf, demanding to know if she had red onions and tomatoes, was the garlic bulb he’d discovered with the onions all she had, and were there any cloves?
‘In the cupboard next to the fridge,’ she answered automatically, as she’d answered all the other questions. She watched him shake cloves into his hand and sniff at them, eyes closed, his long lashes a black crescent against golden-brown skin as he inhaled the sweet-pungent scent.
He’d always done that, checking for freshness and potency the way his grandfather had taught him.
Every time the staff who had run their big white house in Melbourne had their days off, Zito had taken Roxane down to the huge, spectacularly well-equipped kitchen and they’d make a meal together.
‘Smell that,’ he’d say, after doing so himself, and she’d bend over his cupped palm, breathing in the scent of newly ground pepper, an exotic spice or a freshly chopped herb before he tipped it into whatever dish he was preparing.
He’d pause in the middle of slicing an apple or a crisp, barely ripe cucumber, taste a piece and then turn and hold out another bit for her to take in her mouth.
Sometimes she’d playfully nip his fingers, inviting retribution in kind. He’d scold her for distracting him from the serious business of cooking and promise her an erotic punishment, deferred until the evening.
But not always deferred after all, so that much later they would rise from a tumbled bed and after showering together return to the kitchen, perhaps wearing only a robe apiece, and resume the interrupted preparations. The food tasted even better for the delay in one kind of gratification to the satisfaction of another.
Making a meal had been foreplay, a seductive art that Zito practised with the same unselfconscious, epicurean enjoyment that he brought to their lovemaking.