heels blonde.
A sick feeling invaded her insides.
She was never going to be that woman.
For a teetering instant Ava was transported to that long-ago reception for her brother’s wedding. She had been a socially awkward young woman who just hadn’t fitted in with the glamorous, international crowd, watching from the sidelines as Gianluca Benedetti—Italian soccer star and possibly the most desired man on the planet—reclined on a banquette, gesticulating as he talked football with another guy. He’d had two girls wrapped around him like climbing vines, blonde and brunette. The equivalent of gelato flavours for grown men. He hadn’t even been paying attention to them.
At the time she had christened them vines, but, oh, how she had wanted to be like them. Just for one night to be a sexy, no-consequences girl, in slip and heels, hanging off the hottest guy at the party.
Even as she had struggled to come to terms with the odds of her ever being that kind of girl her eyes had moved over the object of their attention and for the first time in her life she’d been hit by something and hadn’t been able to hit back.
The tsunami of feeling that night had carried her past her inhibitions—past the little voice of caution that always asked if this was the right thing to do, if there would be consequences for her actions, the voice of a girl who’d had to look after herself from a very young age. That night she hadn’t cared about the consequences.
She had only cared about him.
Having him.
Feeling sick now, she was unable to credit that she had stepped so easily back into the same shoes, that she had learned nothing from her experiences.
Before she could even formulate her next move he was getting up, throwing back those broad shoulders and unexpectedly moving her way. It was so sudden her first instinct was to turn tail and flee, but she wasn’t an uncertain girl any more. She could handle this.
Sucking in her tummy, adjusting the line of her dress, she prepared herself for what she would say.
I came but I wish I hadn’t. You’re a womaniser, a cad and a bounder, and I wish I’d never met you.
He was less than a metre away when she realised he wasn’t coming over to her. His hard gaze moved unseeingly over her, as if she were one of the faceless crowd, and Ava realised she wasn’t going to have her moment.
He’d issued the invitation but he’d already forgotten about her. She hadn’t even made enough impact this morning for her face to register with him.
Her stomach buckled.
She watched him moving easily but inexorably towards the exit, the doors opening and swallowing him up.
Ava only became aware that she was struggling to push her way through the crowd when someone stepped on her foot and she lost a shoe. Pausing to scoop it up, she pushed through the exit doors, then virtually ran outside. She hesitated on the steps leading down into the square, but only to scan desperately for the direction he’d taken.
She gave a start as she caught sight of him, moving out of the darkness across the square.
Shoving it all aside—a lifetime of prudence, plans and protecting herself from men like this one...well, any man really...not to mention leaving her perfectly good A-line coat behind—Ava began to run after him.
CHAPTER FOUR
GIANLUCA HEARD THE FOOTSTEPS, light, fleet heels striking notes on the cobblestones.
He turned around and for a moment they simply looked at one another.
As she began to walk slowly up to him he wondered what had become of his determination never to let life take him by surprise again. His mouth ran dry, his body did what was natural when faced with this much woman. Because, Dio mio, she was a sight to make a man glad Adam had had a rib.
She’d obviously gone to some trouble in the transformation department.
It wasn’t a stretch to assume it was all for him.
He ran his eye from the erotic promise of her mouth to her decadent bosom and then to the dainty ultra-feminine shoes clasping her feet. No wonder.
The shirt and trousers she’d been hiding beneath this morning hadn’t advertised a shape that could only be fully appreciated by an Italian male—generous curves thrown into relief by the accent of her narrow waist.
This was the shape he’d discovered when he’d finally parted her from the puffy blue dress.
She was a walking fantasy if your tastes ran to Gina Lollobrigida.
His did. He’d had a poster of her on the wall of the room he’d kept at his grandparents’ villa outside Positano. Part of the pleasure of summer breaks from the military academy he’d been bricked up in by his indifferent parents had been getting back to that house, to his kind old grandparents, but also to Gina.
Almost at once the full force of the past swung in. She wasn’t the girl who had lain with him in the grass on the Palatino. That girl had never really existed. And now any trace of her was gone.
As she approached, the low lights of the square illumined her eyes and he glimpsed uncertainty and something else—hopefulness.
But it must have been a trick of the light, because she lifted her chin and her green eyes clashed like an army of the night with his.
There was a dark sort of satisfaction in the knowledge that she had come after him, and it cautioned him to wait and see what she would do.
At the same time he saw what else he’d missed. A huddle of paparazzo across the square. In a second they’d focus in on him, and in this mood the last thing he wanted was a mob of jackals around him.
As excuses went, it wasn’t a bad one.
Asserting the cool, dominant masculinity which got him what he wanted in most situations, he stepped up to her, hooked his arm around her waist and told himself this had nothing to do with what he wanted but rather was necessity.
‘Scusi, signora,’ he murmured, as if apologising for blocking her path, and in the next instant he was kissing her.
He spread his hand at the base of her neck and held her in place, aware this was incredibly intrusive...and undeniably very erotic as she wriggled frantically against him. He clamped his other hand on her wide shifting bottom.
It was still thumping through him exactly who this girl was when he began to enjoy her struggle. He wanted her fists to thump against his chest, her fury at being restrained to come out. Come on, cara, let’s see if you can get away this time.
He was fiercely turned on, not only by his thoughts but by the feel of her. Her body was so blatantly female every movement of it against his was virtually X-rated. The scent of night-blooming jasmine seemed to be everywhere. His mouth took hers again and then again, until hard and aching he forced himself to release her. All he could see were those bright, astonished green eyes, the curve of her upper lip pinpricked with tiny beads of perspiration, and lower the heaving of her bosom. Instantly he wanted to pull her in tight again, for the press of her warm curvy body that fitted him so perfectly.
In a world of women for whom high heels merely put them on stilts, failing to give them the length in their bodies he needed, he had one in his arms who was built to the perfect scale for a man like him—a little over six feet, with generous hips pressed to cradle his, her breasts soft and full against his chest.
He knew they’d been seen. So he bent his head close to hers. From any sort of distance it was an intimate gesture.
Her green eyes flew to his. Astonishment had given way to fury. It wasn’t just in her expression, it was in the aggressive tilt of her body. She was literally seething, and the female pheromones hit him hard and fast, tightening his body into the kind of surging lust he had been careful to keep in check on that long-ago night.
She