mesmerising force field of his.
‘Why? I thought it was all arranged.’ His long, lean fingers curved gently around her jaw and his head lowered just a little. A preliminary to kissing her senseless?
Unwilling to take that risk, she jerked her head away, dragging in an anguished breath. Of course she’d meant to stay, drawn to his presence like the proverbial moth to the flame, saved only by antennae that had sensed and finally and unmistakably understood the danger before it had been too late.
Her fingers digging into the soft kid of her slim evening bag, she mentally formed the words that once spoken would be completely final.
He would accept what she said with a word or two of polite regret; he had too much pride to ask her to reconsider. From the moment the words were out it would be over. There would be no going back.
A steadying breath, a straightening of her shoulders, a flick of a tongue-tip over lips that felt stiff and dry. ‘It’s over, Cesare. I won’t be seeing you again.’
There, it was out, the bald statement that would leave her with some self-respect, that would save her heart from permanent damage. It had taken all her resolve to say the words that had felt as if they were being dragged from her, dropping like stones into an atmosphere that had suddenly become charged with more than the effect of her tightly wired nerves.
The tension was coming from him now, a subtle hardening of his strong jawline, a momentary flicker in the depths of those enigmatic eyes, a lifting of the dark head, emphasising the whippy power of a six-foot frame that was outrageously masculine. It made her shudder in instinctive response.
Cesare gritted his teeth against a violent internal surge that seemed to be tearing him apart and had to use all his self-control to prevent himself from taking her in his arms and kissing her lovely mouth until she retracted her words.
She couldn’t leave him. He wouldn’t let her!
Pulling a sharp breath through his nostrils, he closed his eyes briefly before allowing them to dwell on her face. Beautiful. There was a touch of the exotic about her creamy skin, the smooth black hair, lush mouth and long amber eyes, her slender, perfectly formed body clothed tonight in glowing tawny silk.
She couldn’t disguise the way her soft lips trembled, but there was a cold light of determination in her eyes that told him that, although the touch of his lips to hers, the slide of his hands, moving slowly from her slender shoulders to the globes of her breasts so tantalisingly delineated beneath the thin silky fabric, would ignite the conflagration of passion they were both helpless before, nothing would change her decision.
A vague uneasiness at the way their relationship had been going had been eating away at him for many weeks. Her refusal to move in with him, the look of pain when she’d refused the gifts that had been meant to give her pleasure, the way she had never once invited him into her home, her soft evasiveness when he’d questioned her about her family, her upbringing, her hopes for the future.
He knew as little about her now as he had done when he’d first met her and had known, with shattering immediacy, that he’d wanted her in his bed.
Despite the gossip, he hadn’t had as many mistresses as he’d been credited with. And when the time for parting had come, as it inevitably had, there had been no rancour on either side, no heartache.
So was it the mystery of her that made her different? He didn’t know. He only knew that he had never felt like this before. Emptied of his normal assurance, his self-sufficiency, filled instead with a yearning pain.
Denying the temptation to reach out and touch her, evoke the magic that would keep her with him just one more time, he thrust his hands into the pockets of his narrow-fitting black trousers and said with an impulsiveness that rocked him back on his heels, ‘Marry me, Bianca.’
CHAPTER TWO
MARRY him!
The shock of Cesare’s proposal had turned Bianca to stone, the only movement detectable being the frantic beating of her heart as it hammered against her ribs. Only the arrival of Denton, Cesare’s manservant, a few seconds later, snatched her out of the fantasy land where she and Cesare were bound together by love until death did them part and plunged her back into stark reality.
‘Your cab’s arrived, Miss Jay.’
Just five cockney-accented words were all it took to clear her head, strengthen her resolve, move her out of the paralysing shock that had held her immobile, allow her to focus on Denton’s impassive, homely features, force out a pallid smile, a word of thanks, turn again to Cesare, not meeting his eyes, and push the single word ‘goodbye’ through her lips.
And walk from the room, anguish a tight band around her heart, leaving behind the man she was growing to love with more passion than reason, pointedly ignoring his offer of marriage as if it were beneath her consideration, that insult the final and firmest nail in the coffin of their relationship.
As the cab made uneven progress towards Hampstead through the late-evening traffic Bianca pressed her fingertips against the burning pressure of her eyelids. She would not cry. She couldn’t allow herself that luxury. And even thinking about that shock proposal of marriage was counter-productive. If anything, it made everything worse. Far worse.
A permanent relationship was the last thing Cesare wanted; hadn’t he told her that much?
So why that shock proposal of marriage?
Shuddering as her stomach tied itself in nauseating knots, she forced herself to face facts, to find an answer to that question. He obviously hadn’t yet tired of their nights of blazing, unforgettable passion, she ticked off mentally. Cesare still wanted her physically, perhaps because the time they’d spent together had been governed by the foreign travel made necessary by his business commitments, her refusal to move in with him, her insistence that when she stayed with him she left at dawn, alone, taking a cab back to the home she shared with her mother.
So their time together had been snatched—and inevitably all the more precious for that. There had been nothing routine or predictable about their affair. Therefore, it followed, Cesare hadn’t yet grown bored.
Hence the surprise proposal. Bind her legally until he tired of her. It was the sort of thing that was taken for granted in the ultra-sophisticated circles he moved in. The sort of thing that brought devastation in its wake, as she knew only too well.
It was over, she lectured herself staunchly as the cab drew into the street where she lived. She had done the right, the sensible thing and now she had to forget Cesare Andriotti, forget the brief dead-end affair that had started to mean far too much to her, and concentrate on the immediate and problematic future.
Giving mental thanks for Aunt Jeanne’s willingness to be co-opted, Bianca paid off the driver and stood for a moment in the warm late-May evening, readying herself to enter the house.
She had to put her own anguish aside and get to grips with the love and duty she owed to her mother. Without Aunt Jeanne’s presence, she reminded herself, she would have been unable to attend Claudia’s birthday dinner party this evening, an event which had helped her to finally make up her mind about ending her affair with Cesare.
And without her aunt’s promise to keep an eye on her sister, Bianca’s mother, she would have had to have asked her boss, Stazia, for an extended period of leave, at least until her mother’s problems had been resolved.
Expelling a short sigh, she turned to face the house that wouldn’t be theirs for much longer.
The steps up to the white-painted door sheltered by a stone pediment, the empty window-boxes on either side that she really should have planted up weeks ago, the elegantly curtained windows. The desirable façade proclaimed respectability but hid anything but.
As if to reinforce her wry observation the door in front of her was flung open and a golden-skinned youth wearing a singlet and boxer shorts half fell, half hurtled down the steps followed by sundry articles of clothing accompanied by her mother’s