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Too bad she wasn’t the slightest bit prepared for the meeting, but her father was right—she was a good lawyer, an excellent negotiator. She could handle this even if she didn’t know all the details and facts.
What did any of that matter? This was the privileged prince against the poor peasant and, okay, her father wasn’t poor or a peasant, but the principle was the same.
This prince, this Draco Marcellus Valenti, was an anachronism. He lived in an elegant past with no idea the rest of the world was living in the twenty-first century.
Like that guy in the VIP lounge who thought he owned the world, owned people …
And any woman he wanted.
He probably could.
Women, idiots that they were for good looks, undoubtedly fawned all over him.
But not her.
Not her, no matter how his mouth felt on hers, how his arms felt around her, how alive that one kiss had made her feel …
Ridiculous.
He’d kissed her for a purpose. To show her that he was male, and powerful, and sexy.
But did that impress her? Ha, Anna thought, and she put her head back and closed her eyes.
What was sexy about a man with a low, deep voice? With darkly lashed eyes that were neither brown nor gold, and a face that might have been carved by an ancient Roman sculptor? With a body so leanly muscular she’d felt fragile in his arms, and that was saying a lot for a woman who stood five foot eight in her bare feet.
What could possibly be sexy about being kissed like that, as if an absolute stranger had the power to possess her? To put his mark on her, as if she were his woman?
Anna shifted in her seat.
What if instead of slugging him, she’d wound her arms around his neck? Opened her mouth to his? What would he have done?
Would he have said to her, Forget that plane. That flight. Come with me. We’ll go somewhere dark and private, somewhere where I can undress you, whisper things to you. Do things to you …
A tiny sound vibrated in her throat.
She could almost feel it happening. The kisses. The caresses. And then, finally, he’d take her. She’d been with men. Sex was as much a woman’s pleasure as a man’s, but this would be—it would be different.
He would make her moan, make her writhe, make her cry out …
“Signorina?”
Make her cry out …
“Signorina. Forgive me for disturbing your sleep.”
Anna’s eyes flew open.
It was him. The man from the lounge. The man who had kissed her.
The man whose kiss she could still feel on her lips.
He was standing in the aisle, looking down at her. And the little smile on his beautiful mouth stole her breath away.
CHAPTER THREE (#udd2f8c82-befb-5918-af53-73188cfa6bb6)
DRACO watched as the woman’s eyes flew open.
Blue, just as he recalled, but to say only that was like saying that the seas that surrounded Sicily were blue.
Not so.
The colors of the Ionian Sea, the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Mediterranean were more than blue. And so were her eyes.
Not pale. Not dark. The shade reminded him of forget-me-nots blooming under the kiss of the noon sun along the Sicilian cliffs where he was reconstructing a place that he was sure had once been as magnificent as the view those cliffs commanded.
His gaze fell to her mouth. Her lips were parted in surprise. It was a very nice mouth. Pink. Soft. Enticing.
Draco frowned.
So what? The color of her mouth, of her eyes, was unimportant. She could look like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, for all it mattered to him.
He’d made his decision based on what was right and what was wrong, not on anything else.
A man who could not see past his own ego was not a man deserving of life’s riches. That had been another lesson of his childhood, learned by watching how men with power, with wealth, with overinflated ideas of their own importance thought nothing of trampling on others.
At the announcement that it was now permissible to use electronic devices, he’d put aside his glass of more-than-acceptable burgundy, thanked the flight attendant for handing him the dinner menu, plugged in his computer …
And thought, suddenly and unexpectedly, of the woman.
Yes, she had infuriated him, that arrogant, the-world-is-mine-if-only-you’d-get-out-of-my-way attitude …
But was his any better?
Half an hour or so of soul-searching—remarkable, really, when you considered that many of those who knew him would have insisted Draco Valenti had no soul to search—and he’d decided he might have overreacted.
After all, first-class flying was comfortable. Not as comfortable as his own jet would have been but still, it was acceptable. Yes, his legs were long, his shoulders broad but still, the seat accommodated him.
You could have made do with the one seat, he’d found himself thinking.
As for not wanting someone next to him who would jabber away the entire time … That wouldn’t be a problem. The reason the blonde wanted that vacant seat was that she had work to do.
In other words, she would keep to herself.
He would keep to himself.
No problem in that at all.
The bottom line? He’d been tired, grumpy and bad tempered. She’d been desperate, overeager and short-fused. Not a good combination under any circumstances, and in these particular circumstances, it had led to her being insulting and him being no better.
It was, he’d decided, an honest assessment and once he’d made it, he’d risen to his feet and headed toward the rear of the plane.
“Something I can do for you, Your Highness?” the eager flight attendant had said as soon as she saw the direction he was taking.
“Yes,” Draco had said crisply. “You can stop calling me ‘Your Highness.’”
He’d softened the words with a quick smile as he moved past her. Then he’d walked and walked and walked, going from first-class luxury to business-class efficiency and, finally, through what he’d tried not to think of as a sardine tin until he’d figured he might just end up in Oz.
And then, at last, he’d spotted her. Her sun-kissed hair was like a beacon. And when her eyes opened, her lips parted, he almost smiled, imagining how delighted she would be at the sight of him ….
Maybe not.
She was staring at him as if he were an apparition. If he’d given it any thought, and he hadn’t, he’d have known his sudden appearance would take her by surprise.
Well, it had.
But the look on her face, the shock and amazement, told him that she was a woman people rarely took by surprise.
That he’d done so was a bonus.
He could see her struggling for words. That was nice to see, too. She certainly hadn’t been at a loss for words earlier … except when he’d kissed her ….
And that kiss had as little to do with this as the color of her eyes. This was a matter of human decency. Nothing more and nothing less.
“Sorry to have awakened you,” he said politely.
She sat up straight and tugged down her skirt, which had ridden halfway up her thighs.
They were good thighs.
Actually, they were great.
Firm. Smooth. Lightly tanned to a sort of gilded bronze. Was she that color all over? Her hips. Her belly. Her breasts …
Damnit, he thought, and when he spoke again his tone had gone from polite to brusque.
“I said I’m sorry to have—”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
Probably not. Who could sleep, jammed between a woman who looked like a ticking time bomb’s worth of neuroses and a guy with a look about him that reminded Draco of some movie character he couldn’t place.
“And what are you doing here?”
Draco cleared his throat. This wasn’t going quite the way he’d anticipated.
“I, ah, I’ve changed my mind.”
“About what?”
Dio, was she going to make this difficult?
“About the seat. If you want it, it’s yours.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
Her tone was flat. Sarcastic. Was she playing to their audience? The guy to her right and the woman to her left were both watching him with the intensity of people viewing an accident on a highway.
So much for doing the right thing, Draco thought grimly, and met her slitted stare with one of his own.
“Why?” he snapped. “Because, fool that I am, I thought you might still prefer a first-class seat to—to this!”
“What’s wrong with this?” the woman next to her demanded, and Draco threw up his hands and started back up the aisle.
“Wait!”
The cry carried after him. It was her, the blonde with more attitude than any one person, male or female, could possibly need.
A smart man would have kept walking, but Draco had already proved to himself that he wasn’t being terribly smart tonight, so he stopped, folded his arms, turned …
And saw her hurrying toward him, that ridiculously lumpy briefcase swinging from one shoulder.
Despite himself, his mouth twitched.
What had become of all her crisp American efficiency?
The heavy case had tugged her suit jacket askew in a way he suspected Giorgio Armani would never approve; her golden hair had slipped free of its clasp. A shoe dangled from her fingers. In her rush to go after him, she’d apparently lost one of those high heels, which she’d managed to retrieve.
Those incredibly sexy high heels.
The thought marked the end of any desire to laugh. Instead, his eyes grew even more narrow. It was an indicator of his mood, and would have made any of his business opponents shudder.
“Well? What is it?”
“I—I—”
His gaze, as cold as frost on a January morning, raked over her.
“You what?”
It was, Anna thought, an excellent question. How did you admit you’d made a mistake? Not in judging this man. He was as cold, as self-centered, as insolent as ever—but that wasn’t any reason to have rejected his offer.
Never mind that she couldn’t think of a reason he’d made it, or that sitting next to him all the way to Rome would be the equivalent of choking down more humble pie than any one human being should have to consume.
Only an idiot would refuse gaining access to a spot where she could plug in her computer … and, okay, incidentally combine that with a seat that lacked the psycho bookends.
“I am waiting,” he growled, that accent of his growing more pronounced by the minute.
Anna swallowed. Hard. The first bite of crow did not go down easily.
