Olivia Gates - One Night In…

In the past he had bought properties out of boredom or for a challenge or simply to irritate the people who tried to stop him, but this one was different. Angelo Emiliani wasn’t in the habit of analyzing his feelings—in fact his entire purpose in life was to keep busy enough to avoid having to have them at all—but he was prepared to acknowledge how much this project mattered to him. For old times’ sake.

For Lucia.

‘…south facing, meaning the light is particularly lovely in here.’

There was something wistful in her tone that jerked him back to the present. Thrusting his hands into his pockets, he took a steadying breath in before turning his attention back to her.

She was standing by the window, looking out across the treetops to where the sea lay in a glittering arc. And she was right about the light, he thought bitterly. The evening sun fell on to her face, outlining her profile in gold-dust, highlighting the sudden softness of her sulky mouth. Crushing down the anger that smouldered somewhere inside his chest, he managed a smile.

‘You’ve been very helpful, Felicity. Really. I appreciate you showing me round.’

She looked up at him and blinked, clearly taken by surprise by the softness of his tone. Walking slowly towards her, he could see that she was trembling slightly, but bravado flashed in her dark eyes. The combination caused an odd sensation in the pit of his stomach, which he recognized as lust spiked with something more complicated.

‘It’s nothing. I shouldn’t have been here really …’

He stopped a couple of feet away from her. ‘I’m very glad you were. I’ll be sure to tell your boss how impressed I am by your professional dedication.’

That shook her. He tried not to let the tiny leap of triumph in his chest show on his face as he watched the colour flood her cheeks.

‘Please don’t. I probably shouldn’t have—’

The bare room was bathed in softest apricot, turning the pink in her hair to gleaming copper.

‘OK—but let me make it up to you in some other way. You said you were staying in Cannes—please let me take you out for dinner tonight.’

‘I can’t,’ she said hastily. ‘I’m meeting a friend.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘In fact, I’m late. I really should go.’

He nodded. Her refusal didn’t surprise him in the slightest— he hadn’t expected anything else—but, looking at those slanting, wary, kohl-smudged eyes, he felt a sharp kick of disappointment which caught him completely unawares.

She was already walking to the door, casting a last look around the room before going out on to the landing.

He followed her. Her footsteps echoed on the wooden stairs as she ran down them.

‘Where are you staying? I’ll give you a lift.’

Smiling slightly, he wondered how she would get out of that one, but she tossed a nonchalant glance at him over her shoulder.

‘Thanks. Hotel Paradis, if that’s not out of your way?’

Watching her shut the front door of the château, Angelo felt himself frowning.

He was used to having all the answers, to being at least ten steps ahead of the game. But he had to admit it that right now this girl had him floundering in the dark.

Which was an intoxicating image. But a very disturbing feeling.

‘NICE car.’

Anna made an effort to mask her contempt behind a façade of admiration as she glanced around the white leather interior of the ridiculously flashy sports car. But she couldn’t quite stop herself from adding with a simper, ‘I always think that cars say so much about their owners.’

This one was shouting, I belong to a man with obscene amounts of cash and issues about his masculinity, she thought with some satisfaction. Maybe Angelo Emiliani wasn’t as cool as he came across.

‘Do you?’

Admittedly his voice was infuriatingly cool, as was the way he seemed to lounge in the driver’s seat, controlling the powerful car with one hand and easing it around hairpin bends on the narrow road at speeds which …

Anna swallowed and averted her eyes from the speedometer.

‘So you’ve no doubt come to the conclusion that I’m an insecure misogynist with more money than taste?’ She felt the colour leap to her cheeks at the accuracy of his guess. ‘Well, I hate to spoil the theory, but the car is only hired. I simply asked for the fastest model available—which should tell you that I’m very impatient and I like to get everything done in the shortest possible time.’

‘In that case, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a chauffeur? So you don’t need to lose a second of valuable working time?’

‘Yes. But my impatience is perhaps only outweighed by my desire for control.’ His mouth curved into the merest suggestion of an ironic smile, letting her know he’d picked up the minute sting of sarcasm in her tone, and his blue gaze flickered over her for a second. A blissful, spine-tingling second. ‘I do have a chauffeur, of course. But wherever practical I prefer to drive myself. What about you, signorina? What sort of car do you drive?’

‘I don’t. Cars are—’

She was about to spring automatically into the standard GreenPlanet sermon about the evils wrought on the planet by the internal combustion engine, but managed to stop herself just in time. Not, however, before she noticed the smirk of satisfaction on Angelo Emiliani’s face.

‘A nuisance where I live, in Central London,’ she finished lamely, looking out of the window. ‘I take the tube everywhere.’

He’d very nearly caught her out. And, dammit, he knew it. He didn’t reply, but his silence spoke more articulately than anything he could have said.

The traffic grew heavier as they came into Cannes, and Angelo guided the car effortlessly through the streams of expensive vehicles towards the hotel. He wondered what she would do when they got there. Wait until he had gone and hitch a lift back to the protesters’ camp, he guessed. There was no way she could possibly be telling the truth about staying at the Paradis.

Was there?

‘I don’t think I got your full name,’ he said casually. With this girl it was best not to take any chances.

‘Hanson-Brooks’

‘Felicity Hanson-Brooks,’ he repeated, echoing her clipped upper-class pronunciation with a slight curl of his lip. That accent, with its suggestion of effortless privilege and complacency, never failed to set his teeth on edge and make his hackles rise. ‘That’s a very smart name.’

She glanced across at him and shrugged slightly. Defensively?

Out of the corner of his eye he watched her stretch out her long legs and shift slightly in her seat, arching her back away from the hot leather upholstery with the lissom grace of a cat stretching.

Angelo Emiliani had slept with so many women—from cocktail waitresses to contessas. Novelty, the ruthless pursuit of the new, which was what drove him in his work, was something he no longer expected to experience in the bedroom.

But he’d never had an eco-warrior.

Idly he wondered what lay beneath that perfectly simple, perfectly demure black linen dress. There was something raw about her, something earthy. He had grown tired of the neat, waxed sterility that turned every woman he undressed into a conveyor-belt Barbie—perfect and plastic. This girl looked as if she was liberatingly, excitingly beyond all of that. He breathed in deeply, savouring the thought, and was suddenly aware of the scent of her.

She smelled of dark things—bitter chocolate, black coffee, overlaid with woodsmoke.

Strong. Exotic. Delicious.

Benedetto Gesù. The very things he didn’t trust about her were the things that turned him on.