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‘It’s okay. I mean, I’m okay,’ she amended, trying to pull her hand away.
‘Maybe you are,’ he objected as he drew her towards the warmth of his body. ‘But I’m not.’
Her eyes opened wide, startled by pleasure and shock. ‘What … what are you doing?’
‘This,’ he said, his voice distorting savagely as he stared down into her pale face. ‘I have to do this.’
She knew he was going to kiss her—she could read it in the fractional dilation of his eyes. She could sense it in the sudden tension in his body and in the raw tang of masculine desire which made her forget everything she had vowed last night as she’d listened to the ticking of her bedside clock and waited for the alarm to ring. He was going to kiss her and, although she knew she should stop it, she could no more have stopped it than willed the earth to stop turning.
‘Salvatore …’ she whispered.
The ‘sir’ had gone once more, he thought, with grim satisfaction. ‘Sì,’ he agreed arrogantly, her breath warm against his lips. ‘That is my name.’
With a groan, he drove his mouth down on hers. She tasted sweet and minty, as if she had just brushed her teeth. Had she done that specially, hoping that he would kiss her? The thought that she had been anticipating this—wanting this—made him harder still.
He pulled her closer, his hands reaching down to cup her buttocks, and for the first time he appreciated how small she was. Positively tiny. In the car their bodies had been on a level, but now she seemed to slip into his arms and disappear into them, melding into his body like a pocket Venus.
Jessica clutched onto his shirt as his lips beguiled her, the palms of his hands skating with arrogant possession over her bottom. On and on his mouth continued to plunder hers until suddenly her knees threatened to give way—and perhaps he also sensed too that things were getting out of hand because he stopped kissing her, though he didn’t let her go. She gazed up at him uncertainly, in a daze.
His blue eyes looked almost black and his breathing was ragged and there was an odd kind of expression on his face, as though he liked what he was doing but despised it all at the same time.
‘We can’t stay here,’ he said flatly. ‘Come back to my apartment.’
Jessica swallowed. Stay focussed. Don’t behave like you’re expendable. You may have a lowly job but that doesn’t mean you don’t have pride. ‘No,’ she answered stubbornly. ‘I can’t.’
He shook his head impatiently. ‘Forget the cleaning for tonight.’
Jessica almost laughed. He thought that her refusal was solely about some loyalty to the dust levels in his office! Was that the only kind of thought he believed her capable of? ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’
Salvatore stilled as he heard the note of determination which had crept into her voice. He had allowed her a token show of defiance last night—but she was trying his patience now. Was she daring to bargain with him?
‘What did you mean?’ he demanded dangerously.
But Jessica was not going to be bowed or bullied simply because he was in a position of authority. She lifted her chin up and stared at him. ‘You think I’m just going to come back with you to your flat and let you make love to me?’
‘Why, are you planning to go all demure on me when we both know that’s what you want, cara mia?’
Jessica took a step back, needing the space and looking at him with a kind of defiance. ‘Life isn’t just about doing what you want, Salvatore, it’s about doing what’s right, too.’
Dark eyebrows rose in haughty surprise. ‘Don’t tell me we’re going to start talking morals now?’
Jessica shook her head, hurt now, but impatient, too. ‘Is it because I clean your offices that you think you can just pick me up like an ornament and put me down again? Do you treat all women like that? No, of course you don’t! If I were someone else—you’d at least do me the courtesy of going through the motions of normal behaviour. You might ask me out to the theatre, or take me out to dinner. You might at least pretend that you’re interested in getting to know me as a person, rather than how quickly you can get me into your bed!’
Her breathing was all over the place and she stared at him with a boldness he had rarely seen directed at him, and certainly never by a woman.
‘Finished?’ he questioned.
Go on, then, thought Jessica. Sack me, and see if I care! ‘Yes,’ she said.
Salvatore’s lips twisted into an odd kind of smile. ‘I think I get the drift. You’re objecting not because I want to go to bed with you, but because I have not gone through the necessary rituals which society demands?’
‘Are you making fun of me?’
‘Not at all. For who am I to argue in the face of such a passionately put plea?’ Such passion boded well for the bedroom, he mused as he looked down at her flushed cheeks with some amusement. ‘What is it they say? The mouse who roared. Very well—I have heard you, my little mouse, and we shall play the games according to your rules.’ He glimmered her a mocking look. ‘So will you have dinner with me, Jessica?’
She swallowed. ‘As another pretend date, you mean?’
He shook his head and this time his tone was almost gentle. ‘No. As a real one this time.’
She was so taken aback that for a moment words completely failed her. ‘When?’
He gave a low laugh. ‘How about Tuesday?’
Jessica stared at him. How could he go from such urgency to a day which seemed ages away? ‘Tuesday?’ she questioned tentatively.
‘Sì, that is the first evening I have free. I’m flying to Rome for the weekend.’
‘Rome?’
‘Mmm. Ever been there?’
‘No. Never.’ She wanted to ask him who he was going to Rome with, but that was none of her business.
He moved a little closer and he could see the sudden wild darkening of her eyes, the instinctive way that her lips parted. He should kiss her now, take her here and have done with it—it wouldn’t be hard to overcome her coy reluctance.
Yet he had never been forced to wait. Nor to dance attention to a woman’s demands, and it was oddly exciting. Why not let her enjoy her brief moment of power while it lasted? Soon he would have her exactly where he wanted her. ‘So are you going to see me on Tuesday?’ he murmured.
‘Yes, I can do Tuesday,’ she whispered.
He stared down at her for one long moment, drifting a contemplative finger over the outline of her lips and feeling them tremble beneath his touch. He read her silent plea to have him kiss her once more, to seal the agreement in another traditional way—and with a brief, hard smile he turned away. Let her simmer. Let her wait as she had forced him to wait.
‘Until then, cara,’ he said softly.
And holding onto her stinging hand, Jessica was left weakly staring after him as he walked out of the room without another word.
CHAPTER SIX
THE restaurant took Jessica’s breath away. She’d heard of it, of course—but never actually imagined eating there. It was right in the middle of London’s theatre-land and so anonymous from the outside that you wouldn’t know it was there. A secret door opened straight onto the pavement. You stepped in from a crowded and busy street and it was like entering a different world.
It was a large yet intimate space with stained glass windows filtering in coloured light while keeping it private from prying eyes outside. Although it was a Tuesday evening, it was packed out. One of those places where it was impossible for mere mortals to get a table at short notice, though Salvatore had managed it without any trouble.
He seemed to be known here, thought Jessica as they were shown to their table. The waiters beamed. The sommelier nodded at him with a smile. Were staff in places like this taught to remember the names of all their influential customers, she wondered—or was it Salvatore’s bright blue eyes and dark, towering presence which would always stamp him indelibly on people’s minds?
She had never felt more self-conscious as they wove their way through the linen-draped tables. She saw a couple of faces she recognised from TV and spotted a well-known author who had won a literary prize last year and whose book she had at home.
The women all looked very thin and very beautiful. A couple of them glanced up as they passed and Jessica was certain she wasn’t imagining their faint frowns. They looked as if they were trying—and failing—to place her.
What’s a guy like him doing with a girl like her? their carefully made-up eyes seemed to ask—or was that just her own insecurity talking? All the same, she wondered what they’d think if they knew the truth!
‘You are amused by something?’ questioned Salvatore as she sat down.
Jessica let the waiter unfold a giant napkin onto her lap. ‘I’m just hoping I don’t pick up the wrong fork.’
Salvatore gave a low laugh. ‘I remember the first time I left Sicily. I went to stay in France and one of my uncles took me out to eat in the most famous restaurant in Paris. I could see what looked like fifty pieces of cutlery at each setting, and the very crème of Parisian high society surrounding me.’
‘And were you scared?’ asked Jessica, for a moment forgetting all her nerves, the anxieties which had plagued her all day, about how the evening was going to end and whether she looked okay.
Salvatore shrugged. He supposed that it wouldn’t be particularly helpful to her to know that nothing ever really scared him. That men were there to be strong and doubts were for women—but he wasn’t going to invent a timid persona just to make her feel better.
‘No. I watched my uncle and copied exactly what he did. The only difference was that he left food on his plate. It was a thing that people did then, to show that they were not peasants, but I had the hunger of youth, and finished mine. Every scrap.’
Jessica nodded, eager to hear more. The unexpected glimpse into his past made him seem less daunting somehow. More like the man who usually chatted to her in the office before this whole sexual attraction thing had blown up in their faces. It made it easier to forget what this evening was about and to pretend that they were alone in this gorgeous restaurant for no other reason than that they liked one another.
‘And don’t tell me,’ she teased, ‘that no food has ever tasted as good as the meal you ate that night?’
He shook his dark head. ‘On the contrary,’ he demurred softly. ‘They had messed around with the menu so that everything I ate was almost unrecognisable as the original ingredient. The best food of all is simple, and fresh—the fresher the better. The fish you pull from the water yourself and throw onto the flames. The rabbit whose blood is still warm and which goes straight into the pot. And no orange is sweeter than the one plucked from the tree.’ But other appetites had been satisfied that night, he recalled, with an ache of nostalgia.
He remembered the beautiful waitress who had slipped him her phone number while his uncle was paying the bill. Later, he remembered sneaking out to her tiny room close to the Sacre Coeur and the long, sensual night which had followed. The sound of the church bell striking the hour and voices shouting in the street outside as she had moaned her pleasure beneath him. The bowl of strong, sweet coffee he had drunk amid the rumpled sheets in the morning. How sharpened his senses had been then.
He stared at Jessica, at the way her hair hung in two shiny wings by the side of her face, and he felt an unexpectedly savage kick of lust. He wanted her, he realised, with a sharp hunger he had not felt in a long time.
All weekend he had thought about just how much he wanted her and how her sweet, flowering perfume had invaded his senses. He felt a pulse beating deep at his groin. Maybe he just liked the kind of woman who would never make any demands on him.
The waiter came over with two glasses of champagne and made as if to leave them alone with their menus, but Salvatore waved him back, eager for the formality and constraints of the meal to be over. ‘Shall we order?’ he questioned unevenly.
‘Yes, of course.’ He might as well have announced, Let’s get it over with! Jessica knew exactly why he wanted to speed through the meal—she could read it in the way he was looking at her and the sudden tension in the air. The way his face had changed. The sudden tension in his body.
This whole occasion was a formality, she reminded herself painfully—it wasn’t real, it was phoney. And suddenly the nerves which had been simmering away came bubbling up to the surface. She forced a smile, clasping her hands together so he couldn’t see them trembling. ‘What would you recommend?’
‘Let’s have steak, and salad, oh, and a half bottle of Barolo,’ he added, glancing up at the waiter and then leaning back in his chair to study her once the man had gone. ‘So where do you usually go to eat?’ he questioned politely.
‘Small independents, mainly,’ she answered, horribly aware that they were now going through the motions of having a conversation. As if Salvatore really cared where she normally ate! ‘Though it’s hard when there are so many chains. I’m not really mad about—’
‘You’re looking very … delectable tonight,’ he cut in softly.
‘Am I?’
‘Yes, you are. Almost unrecognisable. That colour suits you.’
‘Thank you.’ Nervously, Jessica licked her bottom lip as she responded to a compliment she wasn’t really sure she merited. It was another borrowed outfit, loaned once again by Willow, but given more grudgingly this time.
‘He’s taking you out again?’ Willow had demanded in disbelief when Jessica had arrived back from work, pale-faced with shock as she’d shared her news.
‘That’s right. For dinner.’
She hadn’t said why. She hadn’t dared. She found it hard to believe it herself—that she should be pursuing something which had the power to wreck her admittedly dull, but relatively ordered life. She had been the one who had wanted this evening to happen and yet now it had arrived she felt as flat as a punctured balloon.
And that was the trouble. When Salvatore had taken her to that dinner party she’d had nothing to lose—she had been there acting as his girlfriend. She had been given a role and known how to play it. But tonight was different. The meal was one that she had demanded in order to put a gloss of respectability over something which wasn’t respectable at all. She was contemplating going to bed with her boss.
Tonight she was here as herself and never had the differences between them seemed so glaringly obvious. Had she really thought that they could just sit through a meal together and then go off to have sex as if it were the most natural thing in the world? Didn’t matter how much she wanted him or how long she’d had a stupid crush on him—deep down she knew this was wrong. It had to be wrong, surely, when two people came from such different worlds?
Jessica stared down at her plate. ‘It was a mistake to come here tonight,’ she said unhappily.
Salvatore surveyed the gleaming and neatly parted crown of her head, the way that her silk-covered shoulders were hunched in an expression of defeat. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because … oh, come on, Salvatore—you know why,’ she whispered.
‘I thought you wanted to eat dinner with me.’
‘Yes, I did—but maybe I was wrong to want it. Or maybe the circumstances surrounding it were wrong. Are wrong.’
‘You weren’t being so coy or so dismissive the other day,’ he said slowly.
‘I know that. And maybe I’m regretting it now.’
‘Are you?’ When she didn’t answer, his voice deepened into a silken caress. ‘Jessica, look at me.’
In the background she could hear the distant laughter and chatter of the other diners and the chink of glass and cutlery. Everything sounded as if it were coming from a long way away.
Reluctantly, she raised her head and stared into the bright blue eyes—instantly caught and mesmerised by their sensual light. She could feel the inevitable leaping of her heart, the heavy singing of excitement in her blood as she looked across the table into his ruggedly handsome face.
Had he known that would happen—one look and she would be captivated? Yes, of course he had. He wasn’t a stupid man and he must have capitalised on his undeniable power over women time and time again.
Reaching across the table, he took one of her hands in his, turning it over to study it. The nails were cut short and filed down sensibly and the skin was unusually dry. The women he usually dated had silky-soft flesh, buffed and creamed and indulged during their innumerable sessions at the beauty salon.
These were worker’s hands, he realised with a start, and suddenly he found himself wanting to pamper her. He had thought that this place might be a treat for her—but now he could see that it might be something of an ordeal. ‘We don’t have to stay here, you know,’ he said.
‘But we’ve only just ordered.’
‘We can cancel it. Go back to my place and have something there, if you’re hungry.’
‘I’m not.’
‘No.’ Their eyes met. ‘Neither am I.’
Jessica swallowed, because now his thumb was stroking a tantalising little circle on her palm. He was weakening a resolve which was already terminally weak. She looked at the sensual curve of his lips, scarcely able to believe that they had kissed her so passionately, and yet just the touch of him was making her shiveringly aware that they had. ‘Won’t it look … strange if we just walk out?’
Salvatore smiled. ‘Who cares what it looks like? I don’t spend my life seeking the opinion of others.’ He gave a shrug and his thumb began to stroke a bigger circle, and then to trace a slow path up the length of her middle finger. He smiled as he saw her eyes darken at the unconscious eroticism. ‘Come on,’ he ordered huskily.
In a way, it was the craziest solution of all. If Jessica had felt out of place before, then choosing to leave just as the waiter was bringing out the red wine and salad was guaranteed to focus attention on them.
But even in spite of that, she felt an overwhelming sense of relief that they were going—because anything was better than trying to maintain a façade that this was like a normal date, when clearly it was anything but. Of having to try to chew her way through a piece of steak, no matter how tender it was, when food was the last thing she wanted right now.
When they got outside she could tell him that the whole thing had been a bad idea and that it had all been a stupid mistake on her part. She should never have asked for this. But at least if she called a halt to it now, she wouldn’t get hurt.
The January air which hit them was bitingly cold and Jessica wished she’d remembered to bring gloves.
‘I think maybe it’s best if we just forget all about tonight,’ she said, pulling her coat tighter around her. ‘I can make my own way home on the Tube.’
