Nicolo pushed back his chair. Took Vicki’s hand.
“Dance with me.”
He led her down the steps to the dance floor. Salsa music blasted the air, its insistent beat almost as sexual as the moves of Vicki’s ripe body lightly brushing his.
Yes. This was good. This was what he needed…
But it wasn’t. It was the wrong body, teasing his. The wrong face, lifted to his and smiling. The wrong eyes, filled with heat and desire.
Basta, he thought in disgust, and he put his arms around the woman and brought her tightly against him as the music segued into something slow and sexy.
She settled close against him as if she’d been waiting for the invitation. Her hair tickled his nose. It was stiff and smelled of hairspray.
Those honeyed curls this afternoon had been soft and fragrant with rain.
“It’s terribly noisy here,” Vicki said, her breath warm against his ear.
Why don’t we find a quieter place? That was the next line. His, or in these days of supposed equality, it could be—
“Why don’t we find a quieter place?” she whispered.
Nicolo cleared his throat.
“You know,” he said, “I think that’s—I think it’s—” An excellent idea. “I think I’ll have to take a rain check on that,” he heard himself say.
She looked as surprised as he felt but, damn it, he didn’t want this woman.
No substitutes, he thought as the music began to pound again, and the need, the desire he’d been suppressing all these hours ignited and threatened to consume him.
He knew what he wanted. What he needed. And there had to be a way, had to be something he could do to—
Nicolo caught his breath. He stopped dancing, let the other dancers and the music swirl around him.
There she was!
Honey-colored curls. Violet eyes. The woman who was driving him insane. No black suede coat. No hood. No boots. Instead she wore a clinging scrap of crimson silk that barely covered her body. Gold sandals, all straps and sky-high, needle-sharp heels. She was dancing, if you wanted to call it that. Moving in a man’s arms. Breasts swaying. Hips rotating. Head up, eyes locked to the man’s face, mouth turned up in a smile…
A smile she had denied him.
“Nicolo?”
Vicki, whatever her name was, said his name. Said something more and put her hand on his chest. He brushed it aside. Stepped away. Abandoned her in the middle of the crowded dance floor.
The part of his brain that was of this century knew all that. Knew, too, that his response to the events of the afternoon might not be entirely rational.
But the part that was as old, as savagely male, as time whispered, This is what I want. And I’m going to have it.
And Nicolo heard nothing else.
The music had turned wild; the throbbing pulse matched the insistent thump of his blood, the beat of his heart…
The fury eating inside him.
Fate, always capricious, had decided to favor him tonight. The woman who’d made a fool of him was here.
Now, he could even the score.
He shouldered his way through the crowd, eyes locked to his quarry. She was oblivious to him. Good, he thought grimly. He wanted to reach her before she had time to think.
But halfway there, she suddenly stopped dancing. Her partner said something; she didn’t answer. Instead she moved out of his arms and stood like a doe at the edge of a clearing, sensing the presence of a hungry predator.
Later, Nicolo would wonder if it weren’t the whole world that had gone still and waited, waited, waited.
A minute, an eternity, swept by. Then the blonde raised her head and looked directly at him.
He let a tight smile curve his mouth. Whatever beat its wings within him must have been in that smile, because the color drained from her face.
She took a step back.
He thought, again, of the doe.
Run, he thought.
And, just as if she’d read his mind, the woman with the violet eyes swung away from him and fled.
Nicolo didn’t hesitate. He went after her.
Chapter Three
YOU COULDN’T end up in the same place with the same man twice in one day. Not in a town the size of New York.
At first, when she saw him, Aimee told herself it had to be some other tall, dark-haired guy. There were tons of dark-haired, good-looking men in the city.
A second glance and that hope vanished. It was the overbearing, supermacho jerk who’d kissed her. It had to be. The truth was, nobody else would be as…
All right. No other man could possibly be as easy on the eyes. He was despicable—but he was gorgeous.
The last few minutes, she’d felt…What? A premonition? She didn’t believe in any of that stuff, but how else to explain that tingle at her nape? That feeling that eyes were following her as she danced with Tom or Tim or, dear God, she couldn’t even remember the name of the guy who’d bought her a drink, then led her onto the dance floor.
He was nice enough. Good-looking enough. And he was working hard at making an impression.
And he wasn’t the stranger from this afternoon.
No way would Tom, or whoever he was, grab a woman and kiss her, look at her through icy deep-blue eyes in a way that would make the memory of him lodge itself in her brain.
She hated men like the Neanderthal, no matter how hot-looking a Neanderthal he might be.
So, yes, it was good that the guy dancing with her wasn’t like that…Wasn’t it?
Of course it was.
He’d been coming on to her like crazy. And she’d tried her best to respond. Smiled. Laughed. Gone onto the dance floor and did her best to lose herself in the music, working off her frustrations to its insistent beat the way she’d have worked them off in the gym.
And then, suddenly, she’d felt a tingle, as if someone was watching her.
Well, of course, someone was watching her! People danced, other people watched.
Aimee had danced harder, throwing herself into the music with abandon, and the guy with her kept saying things like, “Wow, you’re good, baby,” and “That’s it, babe, way to go,” as if he were cheering her on.
Objectifying her, she’d thought with detached clarity—except, wasn’t that part of the deal tonight?
She’d come here to have fun, she’d thought grimly. To pick up a man. She was going to have a good time.
Except, she wasn’t.
She despised places like this. Not the club itself: it was, she had to admit, spectacular. It was what went with the place. The noise. The lights. The crowd. The desperate pickup lines.
And this was not the time to turn into an anthropologist studying the natives.
So she’d agreed when Jen said it was absolutely fantastic, laughed at what she assumed were jokes, let a nice-looking guy buy her a margarita, tell her she was the most beautiful woman in the place and lead her to the dance floor.
And tried not to cringe each time Ted or Tim or Tom called her “baby.”
And worked