A Dangerous Solace

She lowered the sunglasses and those green eyes skewered him.

A dark admiration stirred. This woman had the makings of a formidable opponent.

He could enjoy this.

Basta! This was no vendetta. She was, after all, a woman, and he—naturally—wasn’t that kind of man. He was a chivalrous, civilised, honourable member of Roman society. This was merely an exercise in curiosity, in putting a footnote to a certain episode in his life. The first and only time a woman had run from him.

He slid into the Jota and gunned the engine.

The fact his knuckles showed white on the wheel proved nothing.

But as he merged with the chaotic traffic again he recognised it was not his Benedetti side that was in the ascendant here. It was the Sicilian blood from his mother’s people, and it responded instinctively to the knowledge that this little piece of unfinished business was at last in his sights once more.

CHAPTER THREE

AVA FORCED HERSELF to block the encounter out of her head as she followed his directions and caught her first glimpse in seven years of the Spanish Steps. Despite the crowd she found her tour group and fastened on, all too aware she was already hot and tired and flustered.

He’d followed her.

Yes, but he likes women. That’s his modus operandi. He sees a girl. He takes her.

He saw you, he wants you.

Ava tried to focus on what the guide was saying about Keats’s death, but all she could think about was her own small death of pride, which had her desperately wanting to go to this club tonight, to see him again...

She shut her eyes and screwed up her resolve. She wasn’t the kind of woman who slept with random men—and that was all it ever could be with a guy like Benedetti. A night, a handful of hours—entertainment for him.

You liked it. He saw you. He wants you.

It wasn’t any kind of reason for offering herself up to be hurt again.

It’s not as if you’ve got anything to lose. You’re a single woman and this is Rome.

For a moment her resolve slipped and her surroundings rushed in. For beyond the hurried crowd and the noise of traffic was the city itself, imprinted on her mind by countless Hollywood films. Bella Italia, where magical things were supposed to happen to single girls if they threw coins in fountains. And sometimes those things did happen—but this girl had misread the signs.

Every time she got it wrong. She wasn’t going to get it wrong again.

Emotions welled up unexpectedly, filling her throat, making it difficult to breathe. She’d been crying again this morning and she never cried! Not even when Bernard had rung her three days ago, at the terminal in Sydney International an hour before take-off, to tell her he wouldn’t be coming to Rome.

Just as her realisation had begun to take shape that there would be no romantic proposal in front of the Trevi Fountain, and before she could examine the overwhelming feeling of relief that had washed over her, he’d broken the news that he had found another woman—and that with her he had passion.

It had been a low blow, even for Bernard. He’d never been particularly sensitive to her feelings, but she had assumed up until that moment that half the blame for their lacklustre sex life was shared by him.

Apparently not. Apparently it was all down to her.

‘Passion?’ she had shouted down the phone. ‘We could have had passion. In Rome!’

Yet ever since—on the long-haul flight, on the taxi ride from Fiumicino Airport to her historic hotel, over the two nights she’d spent staring at the walls as she listlessly ate her room-service dinner in front of the Italian melodrama she was just starting to get hooked on—Ava had nursed a suspicion that she had chosen Rome as the site of her proposal for entirely romantic reasons that clearly had nothing to do with Bernard.

She was beginning to suspect there were unplumbed depths of longing inside of her for a different life.

A romantic life.

But it was no use. Romance belonged in the movies, not in real life. Certainly not in her life. She’d learned that young, from watching the break-up of her parents’ marriage, seeing her mentally ill mother struggle to support them on a pension, that the only way to survive as a woman was to become financially independent.

So she had worked hard to get where she was, but it meant she had never had time for a social life, had never gone through the rites of passage her peers had taken for granted.

As a consequence she had done a very silly thing seven years ago, and another silly thing when she’d convinced herself to marry a man she didn’t love.

No, Bernard was not the right man for her. But neither was an oversexed soccer player who thought he could just pick up a woman like a coin in the gutter and put her in his pocket.

Her fist opened to reveal the embossed card she’d been carrying around for the last half hour. She held it up and read the simply inscribed name and several contact numbers. A memory slid like a stiletto knife between her ribs. All those numbers—but she’d rung his numbers before, hadn’t she? None of them led to him.

Giving herself a shake, Ava slipped away from the group. She was going back to the hotel.

Everything was a mess and it was his fault.

Not Bernard’s. What had she been thinking, being with Bernard for two long years? Going so far as to orchestrate a romantic proposal? Booking the plane fares, a luxury hotel, a driving tour of Tuscany...?

What had possessed her to set up such a ridiculous romantic scenario with a man she didn’t love, in this city of all cities...?

Ava’s heart began to pound, because she had the answer in her hot little hand.

* * *

What was she doing back in Rome?

It was the million-dollar question and it had Gianluca entertaining scenarios that, frankly, were beneath him.

Behind him the private party was in full swing—a welcome back to Rome for his cousin Marco and his new wife—but Gianluca found himself constantly scanning the piazza below for a certain dressed-down brunette.

He hadn’t been able to get her out of his head all day. It wasn’t the fresh-faced girl who had lain down with him in the grass on the Palatino who was rifling through his thoughts, though, but the tense, angry woman who looked as if she hadn’t had a man between her thighs in a good many years. The sort of woman who, for whatever reason, had forgotten how to be a woman—although in this lady’s case he suspected it might be a wilful act.

He smiled slightly, wondered how hard it would be to perform that miracle.

Given the sexual attraction that had flared between them in the street today, not hard. Anger, he acknowledged, could be a powerful aphrodisiac.

His smile faded. His parents had conducted that kind of relationship. Volatile, glass-breaking performances on his Sicilian mother’s side, and passive-aggressive acts of sabotage from his father as he withheld money, access to the family jewellery, use of the Benedetti palazzi dotted around the country. Yes, the married state had a great deal to recommend it.

The irony was that he was here celebrating a wedding. The advent of a baby. The things that made up happiness in other people’s lives. Just not if you had Benedetti attached to your name.

It was a lonely thought and he pushed it aside. Life was good. He was young, fit and obscenely successful. Women fell at his feet. Men scrambled to get out of his way. Everything he touched turned to gold these days. Forget the dragon. Forget the past. Take those lessons and apply them to what was to come now.

He turned away from his contemplation of the famous square below and strolled across the terrace to join the party.

* * *

‘Signorina, we sit here all night or I take you somewhere else? Give me something to work with!’