Lucy Ellis - A Dangerous Solace

He was noticing other things about her—the pink of her nose, the slightly hectic expression on her face. She’d been crying.

It stirred something in him. A memory.

A weeping woman usually left him cold. He knew all about female manipulation. He’d grown up observing it with his mother and sisters. Tears were usually a woman’s go-to device for getting her own way. It never ceased to amaze him how a pretty bauble or a promise could dry them up.

But instead of walking away he strode over to the kiosk, read the sign that told him this was Fenice Tours, which was run by a subsidiary of the travel conglomerate Benedetti International had business with, and took out his phone. As he thumbed in the number he told the guy he had sixty seconds to refund the turista for her ticket or he’d close the place down.

With a few more well-placed instructions he handed over his phone. The man took it with a sceptical look that faded as his employer’s angry voice buzzed like a blowfly on the other end.

‘Mi scusi, Principe. It was a—a misunderstanding,’ the guy stammered.

Gianluca shrugged. ‘Apologise to the lady, not to me.’

‘Si, si—scusa tanto, signora.’

With gritted teeth she accepted the euros. For all the fuss she had made, Gianluca noticed she didn’t bother to check them, just folded them silently into her bag—a large leather affair that, like her clothes, seemed to be part of an attempt to weigh herself down.

‘Grazie,’ she said, as if it were torn from her.

There was no reason to linger. Gianluca was at the kerb opening up his low-slung Lamborghini Jota when he looked back.

She had followed him and was watching him, her expression almost comical in its war between curiosity and resentment—and something else...

It was the something else that kept him from jumping into the car.

She seemed to gird herself before walking over.

‘Excuse me.’ Her voice was as stiff as her manner, but it didn’t take away from the rather lovely combination of her full mouth and dramatic cheekbones, or the way her caution made her seem oddly prim. It was the stiff formality that had his eyes locked to hers.

‘I’m curious,’ she said.

He could feel her gaze searching his face as if hunting for something. Curious, but not thankful, he noted, amused despite the wariness that told him something about this wasn’t right.

‘Could you really have shut it down?’

She angled up a stubborn chin made somewhat less forthright by the soft press of a dimple and hard suspicion narrowed his gaze.

Where had he seen that gesture before?

Yet he gave her a tight smile, a smile that didn’t reach his eyes—the one he handed out to women as a courtesy, telling them he recognised that they were female, and as a man he appreciated it, but alas it could go no further.

‘Signorina,’ he drawled, ‘this is Rome. I’m a Benedetti. Anything’s possible.’

He was pushing through the mess that was Rome’s mid-morning traffic when her reaction registered. She hadn’t looked flattered. She hadn’t even looked shocked. She had looked furiously angry.

And against his better judgement it had him turning the car around.

CHAPTER TWO

AVA STOOD AT the kerb as the low-slung sports machine vanished into the traffic and let shock reverberate through her body until the only thing left was the burn.

Benedetti.

All she could think was that this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.

Over the years she’d had a few false alarms—moments when a deep voice, an Italian accent, a pair of broad shoulders had brought her head snapping around, her senses suddenly firing. But reality would always intervene.

Clearly reality had decided to slap her in the face.

It came over her in a rush. The flick of a broad tanned wrist at the ignition of a growling Ducati motorcycle. The tightening of her arms around his muscle-packed waist as they made their getaway from a wedding he’d had no interest in and she’d been cut up about. The memory of a flight into a summer’s night seven long years ago that she still couldn’t shake.

It was all Ava could do as she stood in the street to keep the images—those highly sexual images—at bay.

Finding herself in the early hours of a summer morning lying in the grass on the Palatine Hill, her dress rucked up around her waist, under the lean, muscular weight of a young Roman god come to life was not something a woman forgot in a hurry.

Finding herself repeating it an hour later, in a bed that had once belonged to a king, in a palazzo built literally for a princess, on a beautiful piazza in the centre of the city, and again and again into the first flush of dawn, was also something that had stayed with her. And all the while he had lavished her with praise in broken English, making her feel like a goddess he had every right to plunder.

In the glare of a new morning she had slipped from the palace unnoticed and, Cinderella-fashion, left her shoes behind in her haste to flee what had promised to be an awkward aftermath.

Her feet bare, her frothy blue dress hiked up around her knees to allow her to run, she had been in equal measure elated and a little triste, her body pleasurably aching from all the unfamiliar clenching of muscles she hadn’t known she had.

She’d flagged down a taxi and driven away, and if she had looked back it had been only to fix the memory, because she’d known it would never happen again.

It had been a moment out of time.

She’d flown back to Sydney the next day, resumed her climb up the corporate ladder and assumed she would never see him again.

Clearly she had assumed wrongly.

Pulling herself together, Ava stepped away from the kerb and told herself she most definitely wasn’t going to allow the memory of one night with a Ducati-straddling, over-sexed soccer player to wreak havoc with her plans. She’d been handling everything so well up until this point.

Perhaps too well, niggled her conscience as she battled her way along the pavement. Wasn’t she supposed to be heartbroken?

Most women would be. Being dumped on the eve of expecting a proposal from your long-time boyfriend in a foreign city and then travelling on in that city on your own would unsettle anybody.

Fortunately she was made of sterner stuff.

Which was why she was on her way to the Spanish Steps, to join a tour of literary sites in Rome.

Ava pulled her hat down hard on top of her head. She certainly wasn’t going to allow a freak sighting of one of Italy’s natural wonders in a city street to derail her from her purpose.

So what if that puffy pale blue bridesmaid’s dress was buried deep in the back of her closet at home? So she’d kept the dress? So she was in Rome?

It had nothing to do with that long-ago night when everything she’d believed about herself had been turned on its head.

Well, not this time. Nowadays she had it all under control—when she wasn’t careering hot-headedly around the streets of Rome looking for the...what was it...? She consulted her map. The Piazza di Spagna.

She ignored the racing of her heart, told herself there was no way she was going to fumble through an Italian phone directory searching for the address of the Palazzo Benedetti. She mustn’t even think that! Rome had definitely been a mistake. The sooner she picked up that hire car tomorrow and headed north the better.

Now—Ava looked around in confusion, discovering she had walked into a square she didn’t recognise—where on earth was she?

* * *

‘This is pazzo,’ Gianluca muttered under his breath as he idled his car across from the little piazza. He’d followed her. He’d put the Jota into a screaming U-turn and cruised after that flapping hat, those flashing red shoes.