been able to read her mind?
‘This is delicious,’ she said politely.
Liar, thought Giovanni as she chewed without enthusiasm. You have barely touched a thing, angela mia.
The plates had just been cleared away, when her mobile phone began shrilling from her bag, and Kate stared down at it in consternation as she heard Giovanni’s unmistakable click of annoyance. What had she been thinking of? She always switched her phone off when she was eating!
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, reaching down for her bag.
‘The curse of technology,’ came his low, mocking response.
‘You’d better answer it, hadn’t you?’ asked Lady St John mildly.
‘If you don’t mind.’ Kate grabbed the bag and rose to her feet. ‘I’ll take it outside.’
But she was happy to escape from that unsettling stare and equally unsettling presence, and even happier to discover that it was Lucy who was calling. Lucy, her beloved older sister, who worked for Kate and ran her life like clockwork.
Kate clicked on the ‘talk’ button. ‘Lucy, hi! No, no, no, of course I understand—it can’t be helped! An emergency is an emergency!’
‘Kate, what on earth are you talking about?’ Lucy sounded confused. ‘What emergency?’
‘No, of course I can come back immediately,’ babbled Kate loudly. ‘I’ve just finished here, and I’m sure that I can be excused pudding and coffee!’
‘No doubt you’ll give me some kind of explanation later,’ came Lucy’s dry response.
‘Oh, definitely! Definitely!’ breathed Kate. Though how on earth would she put into words that she had fallen for a man with a cold, contemptuous face? The most beautiful man she had ever seen? And she wanted him, this blue-eyed stranger.
She shivered as she acknowledged the awful truth.
She wanted Giovanni Calverri!
‘KATE, what on earth is the matter with you?’
Kate looked at her sister with an unaccustomed blankness in her eyes.
She had spent the whole drive back from Lady St John’s house in Sussex veering between disbelief and self-disgust. In fact, the whole journey had been negotiated on some kind of auto-pilot. She had gone straight upstairs to Lucy’s flat, and it wasn’t until she was inside its elegant interior that she began shaking uncontrollably—like a person who had just come down with a fever.
‘It’s stupid. It’s nothing.’ She shook her head distractedly. ‘It would sound too far-fetched to explain—’
Lucy’s forehead creased with perplexity. ‘But Kate, you never leave your phone switched on during lunch. It’s one of your “unbreakable rules”, remember?’
Oh, yes, she remembered all right. And another of those rules was that she didn’t fall victim to grand and irrational passions. That she was ruled by her head, and not her heart. That she liked and respected herself, so that falling for a man who played the ‘treat them mean and keep them keen’ ticket was simply not on her agenda.
‘I just met a man,’ she said slowly, and ridiculously it sounded like the first line to a love song.
The frown disappeared, and Lucy relaxed. ‘Oh! And about time, too,’ she smiled, with the approval of someone who was happily established in a long-term relationship. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to fall in love for years and years!’
Kate nodded. So had she. But love was not an appropriate word, not in this case. If she was being brutally honest—and she always tried for honesty—then wouldn’t falling in lust be a more fitting description of what had happened to her some time over lunch?
She compressed her mouth into a determined line. ‘It isn’t like that,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t love him. How can I when I barely know him?’
‘But Cupid’s arrow has hit you with unfailing accuracy?’
‘A thunderbolt,’ admitted Kate in a dazed kind of voice. ‘The kind of thing you read about but think will never happen to you.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Lucy gave a wistful smile. ‘The French call it a coup de foudre.’
Kate shook her head. ‘That would imply that it was mutual.’
‘And wasn’t it?’
Kate thought about it. There had been an undeniable fizzle between them, yes, but… but… ‘He looked at me as though he didn’t really like what he saw.’
‘Or what he felt perhaps,’ said Lucy perceptively.
Kate looked at her sister. Two years older and the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, with her dark copper hair and thick-fringed green eyes.
Lucy had been born with looks to burn and a certain irresistibility to the opposite sex. But in the end she had fallen for her boss, unwilling and unable to stop the relationship even when the powers-that-be had threatened her with the sack if she did not.
Lucy had duly lost her job, and although Jack had not he had left anyway, using the opportunity to work for himself at long last. But at least they had stayed together, thought Kate, even if Jack now spent the majority of his life abroad. And Kate had been able to offer her sister a job as her assistant at just the right time. That was the pay-off for being neighbours as well as workmates, she realised. As sisters, she and Lucy looked out for one another.
She looked around Lucy’s flat, which, with Jack helping to pay for it, was much larger and more opulent than her own.
‘How’s things?’ she asked absently, still unable to get Giovanni out of her head.
Lucy stared at her. ‘Tell me about him,’ she said suddenly. ‘This man who’s making you tremble like that.’
Kate looked down with surprise at her unsteady hands. What could she say? That he had the coldest, proudest and most beautiful face she had ever seen? And eyes so startlingly blue that the summer sky would have paled in comparison? She shrugged, but her shoulders felt unusually heavy. ‘There’s nothing to tell. Like I said, I don’t know him. I’ve barely exchanged half a dozen words with him. He’s Lady St John’s godson—’
‘Mmm. So, he’s well-connected, then?’ murmured Lucy.
‘Oh, yes. And he’s Italian—or, rather, he’s Sicilian.’
‘There’s a difference?’
‘That’s exactly what I said! And apparently there is. A huge difference.’ Kate thought of his quietly furious response to her innocent question. ‘His family owns the Calverri silver factory. You must have heard of them.’
Lucy’s eyes widened. ‘You are kidding?’
‘No, I’m not. He’s rich. He’s handsome.’ Kate shut her eyes and forced herself to see facts rather than fantasy. He is curiously unsmiling and there is an impenetrable barrier between him and the rest of the world, she thought with an instinct which seemed to come from nowhere.
‘He sounds perfect.’
‘I’m sure he is,’ said Kate lightly. ‘For someone who doesn’t mind a man who looks arrogantly down his beautifully patrician nose at you!’
‘Hmm! So you’ve got it bad!’
‘Not really. A passing fancy,’ answered Kate tightly. ‘And anyway—I’ll never see him again. Why should I?’
Never. It sounded so brutally final. Oh, what magic had he woven during