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Geraint’s appeal was all subtlety and understatement, she realised, as opposed to the glaringly obvious. She could certainly never imagine him in skin-tight jeans. Well, on second thoughts perhaps she could! Only too well. . .
His expression was difficult to define as he followed her movements through the foyer, but he was frowning slightly, as though something about her puzzled him. But when Lola gave him a questioning look the watchfulness was replaced by a bland, social smile of greeting.
‘You look quite—exotic,’ he commented slowly.
‘D-do I?’ Even as she was speaking the words, Lola was shuddering inwardly at how absolutely wet she sounded. And hadn’t he sounded rather doubtful about her outfit? Had exotic been the effect she had been searching for?
He ran a finger slowly over one silken butter-cream cuff and just that one innocuous little touch made Lola shiver like a cat that had been left out in the rain all night.
‘I had it made in Hong Kong,’ she added rather breathlessly, more to fill in the rather awkward silence which had fallen than because she seriously thought he might be interested in her dressmaking tips!
He gave a lazy smile. ‘Really?’
Lola swallowed. Was he going to persist in making her feel uncomfortable all evening with his sardonic comments? More importantly, was she going to let him?
‘Why did you ask me to have dinner with you tonight, Geraint?’ she demanded.
‘Let’s discuss it in the taxi, shall we?’ he said, putting his hand firmly underneath her elbow and guiding her out of the door—with Lola acutely and embarrassingly aware of all the incredulous looks she was getting from the other women.
He must have felt her stiffen as the plate-glass doors closed behind them, for he looked down at her. ‘What is it?’ he demanded quietly. ‘What’s the matter?’
Lola tried to make a joke of it—for he must have noticed the reactions of the people in the foyer, too—but she knew that her voice only ended up sounding wistful. ‘All those beautiful women in there—they’re wondering what on earth you’re doing with someone who looks like me!’
He gave her a thoughtful glance as he opened the door of the taxi which had materialised as if by magic, and helped her inside.
‘Beautiful?’ he echoed wryly, then shook his dark head. ‘I don’t find stick-like bodies coupled with all-revealing clothes in the least bit beautiful. Whereas that silk suit you’re wearing. . .’
His eyes roved almost reluctantly over her, observing how the butter-cream silk clung faintly to every undulation of her body. ‘It hints rather than broadcasts, tantalises rather than emblazons,’ he murmured. ‘I find that infinitely more attractive than the kind of dress which threatens the wearer with being hauled up on an indecency charge.’
‘Oh,’ said Lola rather indistinctly, feeling ridiculously cheered by his obvious approval.
She was then rather nonplussed to see him lean forward and start speaking to the driver in rapid Italian. ‘You’re fluent!’ she observed in surprise.
He gave a half-smile. ‘You find that so remarkable?’
‘Yes, I do. Most Englishmen—’
‘Ah! But I’m not English, Lola—I’m Welsh.’
‘Oh, I see.’ So that explained the faint, almost musical lilt which made the deep voice so distinctive. And the tar-black tousled hair—its wildness only contained by the superb way he had had it cut.
She shot a covert glance at his impressive frame, at the broad shoulders and the rock-hard muscle of his thighs, visualising him on a ploughed-up field, blocking the other players’ every attempt to pass him. ‘And d-did you play rugby?’ she managed as she made a feeble attempt to squash the lustful vision of Geraint in a pair of mud-spattered shorts.
‘So you’re stereotyping me now, are you?’ he mocked her softly. “The man is Welsh, therefore he must play rugby and sing in an all-male choir! Right?’
‘No! I’m not stereotyping you!’ she protested, but she saw the hint of dark humour in his eyes and shrugged helplessly. ‘I’m only trying to be pleasant!’
‘Pleasant is fine,’ he teased. ‘But a little dull, surely, Lola?’
Lola sighed. If only he didn’t have the ability to make her tremble just by the seductive way he pronounced her name! ‘I don’t see how we can have a halfway decent evening if you block my every attempt at conversation with some smart remark like that!’ she objected.
‘You don’t have to make conversation with me, you know, sweetheart,’ he told her with an air of lazy containment.
‘Really?’ she enquired archly. ‘Then what else do you propose I do? And please don’t come out with something crass and obvious!’
He gave a low laugh. ‘I have no intention of being either of those.’
‘Good.’ She looked at him questioningly, her heart thumping very loudly in her ears.
He smiled. ‘Well, I rather like the way you look at me, when you’re trying your best not to. So why don’t you carry on gazing at me adoringly for now and we can save the life-stories for during dinner?’
Lola was outraged. What arrogance! Carry on gazing at him, indeed! And adoringly, too! Had she been? Oh, if only she had the strength of character to force him to turn the cab round and take her straight back to the hotel where she could spend the evening with Marnie.
Except that by now Marnie would have decamped with the rest of the crew to one of Rome’s noisiest discos and Lola would either have to eat a solitary meal in the hotel dining room or have something delivered up to her room.
And she didn’t want to. She wanted to be here. And with him. That was the trouble.
Surreptitiously sliding along the seat as far away from him as possible, Lola stared fixedly out of the window at the passing city with the sinking realisation that it didn’t seem to matter what kind of outrageous statements he came out with. Or how much he put her back up. Because she wanted him with all the fierce intensity of a woman who had just discovered desire for the first time in her life.
And because it hadn’t happened until she had reached the comparatively ripe old age of twenty-five it seemed to have hit her with the most overwhelming force.
She found herself at the mercy of new and rather frightening feelings, found that she wanted to do all those things she had previously thought were the province of the emotionally unstable—to tremble, and to weep, to reach out and touch him. . .
And didn’t all those things sound suspiciously like the symptoms of love?
She gave her head a tiny shake of denial—you simply did not fall in love with people you hardly knew!
‘Stop sulking,’ he urged softly.
‘I am not sulking. I’m enjoying the view.’
The Mimosa was easily recognisable with its hundreds of tiny white lights threaded into the still bare branches of the trees outside. Lola spotted people queuing around the block in an attempt to secure a table.
‘We’re here!’ she exclaimed, inadvertently tugging the sleeve of Geraint’s jacket in her excitement. ‘And just look at all the fairy lights—it’s absolutely beautiful!’
Her enthusiasm produced a look from Geraint which was half-indulgent and half-perplexed, as if he wasn’t used to such exuberant behaviour. But he said nothing before they were led through the restaurant and seated at what was, quite simply, the best table in the room.
‘So how did you manage to swing this?’ Lola asked as she broke a bread stick in half and crunched on it.
‘What? A date with you?’
‘The table,’ she told him.
‘Oh, that bit wasn’t difficult. Certainly not as difficult as securing the date.’
‘No?’ She studied him in disbelief. ‘That’s why all those people outside are virtually trying to break the door down to get in, is it?’
He shrugged. ‘I speak Italian. I do a lot of business here. I adore the country—the food, the wine and the culture. Given all those things, finding a table in a good restaurant doesn’t pose much of a problem.’
He made it sound as easy as ABC! Lola finished chomping on her bread stick and picked up another, to find him looking at her with reluctant approval. He obviously did like women who enjoyed their food, she thought in amazement, but that did not mean that she had to go over the top and completely pig out!
She put the bread stick carefully back down in front of her. ‘I don’t want to spoil my appetite,’ she explained.
‘Maybe we’d better order?’ he suggested with a smile, and he must have elevated an eyebrow or moved a broad shoulder or something, Lola decided, since the waiter appeared as if on cue.
The next couple of minutes were spent discussing the wine list and the recommended dishes and Lola tried to appear interested in her choices, but she might as well have ordered bread and sawdust—for the normal pleasure she took in anticipating her meal had been totally eclipsed by Geraint’s presence.
She felt as gauche as a teenager out on a first date, which was absolutely ridiculous! She had enjoyed lots of dates, and what she had thought was going to be a fairly heavy love-affair with a pilot, not long after she had started at Atalanta Airlines. But she had been far too young to cope with a smooth operator who seemed to be out of the country more often than he was in it.
The memory of that relationship still had the power to make her ask herself incredulously how she could have been such a fool.
The affair had ended before it had even begun—very painfully—with Lola’s shocked discovery that the pilot she had been planning to spend a romantic weekend with already had a fiancée tucked away.
Lola had had her fingers badly burned by the experience. She would never forget the misery she had experienced afterwards—because of his callous deceit more than anything else. And it had managed to put her off serious involvement, though that had been easy to avoid—there hadn’t been anyone else she had remotely fancied enough to contemplate plunging headlong into an affair with them.
Until now.
‘You promised me your life-story,’ she said hastily, and was slightly nonplussed by his reaction.
His shoulders had tensed as if he was suddenly under stress. ‘Did I?’ he queried coolly.
Lola sensed his reluctance, and wondered what had caused it. ‘You know you did!’
His expression was guarded. ‘And what if I told you that I don’t particularly care for talking about myself?’ he questioned.
‘I would say that either you’re repressed or you’ve something to hide!’
‘Touché!’ he laughed. ‘What would you like to know?’
Lola sat back in her seat. ‘Oh, I’m sure that an intelligent man like yourself doesn’t need any help from me,’ she told him sweetly.
His grey eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘Are you teasing me again, Lola Hennessy?’
‘Why?’ she laughed, enjoying herself hugely. ‘Can’t you take it?’
‘Oh, I can take anything you care to throw at me,’ he challenged in a sultry murmur. ‘Anything at all.’
The atmosphere began to crackle with an eroticism which was almost tangible, and Lola found herself unable to look him in the eye. She began fiddling unnecessarily with the thick linen napkin on her lap, and was indescribably pleased when she decided to let his mocking invitation go unanswered and started to speak.
‘I come from Wales,’ he told her, and his musical accent deepened as he went on to describe the country of his birth. ‘Beautiful West Wales—which is wild and dark and thoroughly magnificent!’
Yes, thought Lola at once. Wild and dark and magnificent—just like you. . .
He looked at her keenly. ‘I’m afraid that it’s the classic, corny tale of rags to riches—sure you’re ready for it?’
Beneath the flippant tone and the throw-away statement Lola was convinced that she detected a chink in his steely armour and she found herself intrigued by this apparent streak of vulnerability. For surely it added an extra dimension to the man’s character, rather than detracting from it?
‘Quite ready,’ she told him truthfully, and something in her quiet, almost respectful tone made him grow still for a moment.
‘My father was a coal-miner,’ he began, and his grey eyes darkened with pain. ‘But he suffered a lot of ill health when he was still quite young—along with many others, of course.’ He ran a hand distractedly through his thick, tar-black hair. ‘When I was eight he was finally laid off and given an invalidity pension.’ His voice grew harsh. ‘But it wasn’t enough to feed a family of sparrows—let alone me and Mam and my sister, Catrin.’
He gazed down at the small centrepiece on the table, a glass bowl filled with yellow mimosa, and his features hardened with the memories. ‘So my mother went out to work—doing the only things which an early marriage had qualified her for. She cleaned houses, took in sewing—did whatever she could do which fitted in around Catrin and me. Mostly she was what I suppose you’d call a drudge.’
He shot her a bleak, almost defiant look and Lola suddenly caught a glimpse of the boy behind the man. The boy who had longed to protect his mother from hard work and penury, but because of his tender years and inexperience had been unable to do either.
Which must have been a heavy cross for a proud man like Geraint Howell-Williams to carry, Lola recognised instinctively. ‘And?’ she prompted gently.
‘Oh, it wore her down eventually. And him. His pride baulked at having to let a woman support him. The two of them used to go without to give us children fresh, wholesome food, and ultimately they suffered for it. When the flu epidemic swept Wales, they both succumbed to it. I was ten,’ he added as an afterthought, as if that fact were somehow unimportant.
Lola was no stranger to childhood pain, and she winced in distress as she tried to imagine his anguish at being left an orphan at such a tender age. ‘Oh, Geraint,’ she said softly. ‘How on earth did you manage?’
She saw the sudden deep lines of pain that scored his face, but they were gone again almost immediately—as though over many years he had schooled his expression so as never to betray them.
‘My sister brought me up,’ he told her, smiling for the first time, but the smile was laced with something bitter which Lola could not, for the life of her, work out. ‘She sacrificed her place at university in order to give me mine, years later—and for that I shall forever be in her debt.’ He turned to catch the eye of a waiter, and in profile his proud, craggy features might have been hewn from stone.
But by the time a bottle of mineral water had been placed on the table he seemed to have recovered his usual self-assurance and a frosty light which glittered in the depths of his grey eyes warned Lola that he would not tolerate her sympathy—however well-intentioned.
‘So you’ve heard all my secrets, Lola,’ he told her silkily. ‘Now I think it’s your turn, don’t you?’
Lola felt squirmingly uncomfortable at the way he was looking at her. Because it was no longer desire that she read in his grey eyes, nor even a benign interest. Instead, there was an air of detachment about him, a sudden air of almost icy curiosity which made Lola’s throat clam up nervously, and it took several mouthfuls of the gin and tonic he had ordered for her before the courage of her convictions returned, and she was able to face him with a resolute air.
‘What do you want to hear?’ she asked quietly.
‘Oh, the usual stuff.’
His voice was so brittle, Lola thought. It was almost as if he had decided that, having confided in her, he now needed to step back, become a cold and untouchable stranger. Was he always so unpredictable? she wondered. ‘How jaded you sound!’ she told him honestly.
‘Do I?’
‘But then I suppose you have women pouring their hearts out to you all the time.’
He gave an odd smile. ‘I’m not giving any secrets away, sweetheart—if that’s what you’re getting at.’
Did that mean he was discreet?
Lola wondered sightly hysterically just how many other women had paraded their upbringing in front of him like this, on request. Had some of them perhaps embellished their early years, in order to impress him—moulded them to a degree, by means of oversight or exaggeration, so as to measure up to what they thought he wanted of them?
Well, not Lola! Hers had been an unremarkable, isolated and often lonely childhood, but she had always refused to sentimentalise it.
‘I spent my early life in a small village called Taverton, in Cornwall,’ she told him starkly. ‘My mother still lives there.’
‘And your father?’
‘He died when I was eleven.’ Lola took a quick gulp of her drink and then regretted it as the tonic fizzed its way uncomfortably down her throat.
‘That’s something we have in common, then,’ he said quietly. His voice sounded strained—as though the fact was a shock to him, and an unwelcome one at that.
‘Yes.’ Lola looked up as once again the understanding flowed between them like a warm current, as it had done last night at the tennis club, and she suddenly realised how easy it would be to fall for him. To really fall for him.
