to eat her smoked salmon, not even tasting its delicacy as she recognised the sexual awareness that was once again singing through her veins.
She had never been so aware of anyone in her life as she was Cesare, and she wondered what it meant.
If it meant anything!
She could just be one of those frustrated women who suffered from sexual starvation at the end of their marriage. Especially as she knew now exactly what a wonderfully satisfying lover Cesare was …
‘I spoke to my father about you this morning,’ she ventured, once they had eaten their first course and the plates had been taken away.
Cesare raised dark brows. ‘In what way?’ he prompted guardedly.
She grimaced. ‘I told him that you had ravished me last night and now I had to marry you! In what way do you think I spoke to him about you, Cesare?’ She sighed her impatience with his suspicion.
He shrugged wide shoulders. ‘You could have decided to tell him of my … intentions towards Ingram Publishing.’
‘Hardly likely, after all the trouble I’ve already gone to to keep it from him—’
‘Trouble?’ Cesare repeated in a dangerously quiet voice.
Robin’s cheeks flushed uncomfortably, and she knew he had to be referring to the time she had wantonly spent in his arms yesterday evening. ‘I merely told my father that we have been seeing each other since the two of us were introduced last weekend,’ she snapped. ‘And that when—if—you propose to me, I intend accepting.’
Cesare gave a humourless smile. ‘And how did Charles take to the possibility of having me as a son-in-law?’
‘Badly.’ Robin didn’t even attempt to prevaricate. ‘But he’ll come round,’ she added confidently.
‘I admire your optimism,’ Cesare drawled.
It was impossible not to admire this woman, Cesare acknowledged. She certainly hadn’t backed off from his threats, and now she had opened the subject of their relationship with her father too. Which he appreciated could not have been easy.
‘Perhaps if you hadn’t sent his letter of condolence back quite so—aggressively?’ she reminded him.
Cesare’s mouth tightened. ‘My sister had been dead a matter of months; I was not feeling … kindly disposed towards anyone, let alone a member of the Ingram family.’
In fact he had felt murderous at the time. Carla had gone for ever, and Marco had been left completely parentless—although Cesare still hadn’t given up on finding the man who had deserted Carla when she’d most needed his support; he had a private investigator looking into exactly who had been his sister’s lover fifteen months ago. Because he would find Marco’s father, and when he did—
‘My father—both of us—we were suffering too,’ Robin reminded him huskily.
Yes, he could see that now. Cesare realised that Robin and her father had still loved the reprobate that Simon Ingram had become, that they had felt his death as keenly as he had felt Carla’s.
But that realisation changed nothing.
Made absolutely no difference to his own plans to make Robin his wife.
In fact, Cesare was even more determined on that resolve since last night!
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I’M STILL NOT absolutely convinced this is a good idea,’ Robin told Cesare later that evening, as the two of them went up to his hotel suite in the private lift.
He eyed her mockingly as he leant back nonchalantly on the other side of the lift. ‘Scared, Robin?’ he taunted.
‘Of you? No,’ she asserted, even as her fingers tightly gripped her evening bag. He wasn’t the one she was scared of—it was her own response to him that scared her. ‘I’m just not sure my father is ready for me to stay out all night, now that he will naturally assume I’m with you.’
‘You are twenty-seven years old—’
‘But I’m living in my father’s house at the moment,’ she returned swiftly.
Cesare shrugged, standing back to let her vacate the lift first once it had stopped at the penthouse floor. ‘You still have time to change your mind.’
Yes, she did, not having made the phone call to her father yet to tell him she wouldn’t be back tonight.
But, despite her uncertainty about exactly where in this spacious hotel suite Cesare would expect her to sleep—or not, as the case might be—Robin knew that she didn’t want to change her mind.
Her uncertainty about Cesare’s intentions apart, she just might see Marco again, might have the chance to hold him again as she had been aching to do since meeting him yesterday.
‘If it makes you feel better, Robin, I do not consider it … appropriate for us to share a bedroom tonight,’ Cesare rasped, impatient at her pondering silence. ‘Marco’s nursemaid is obviously also in residence, and as I intend for the two of us to be married. It is not appropriate,’ he repeated hardly. ‘And it is not flattering to me as a lover for you to look so relieved at the thought of not sharing my bed,’ he finished disgustedly.
Had she looked relieved? Robin wondered. Maybe. But not for the reason Cesare obviously thought; it just somehow seemed completely unacceptable that she responded so wantonly to a man who was forcing her into marrying him by threatening her family.
‘I was merely concerned that you might not benefit from missing another night’s sleep,’ she told him with a saccharine-sweet smile.
Cesare eyed her admiringly, not fooled for a moment by her insincerity. ‘A lot can happen before bedtime, Robin,’ he pointed out, rewarded by the delicate blush that instantly coloured her cheeks. ‘I will pour us both a glass of brandy while you call your father,’ he told her as he strode into the sitting room, deliberately giving Robin the privacy to make her call.
If he were Robin’s father—which he was not, thank goodness!—then he would have his concerns about her apparent choice of lover too.
Robin was frowning when she walked through to the sitting room several minutes later. ‘I spoke to the butler,’ she explained as she took her glass of brandy from Cesare. ‘He said my father seemed rather weary this evening and had retired early,’ she explained distractedly.
‘You think there is reason for concern?’ Cesare frowned.
Robin shook off her feelings of despondency to look up at him angrily. ‘Don’t pretend that you actually care, Cesare!’ she challenged. ‘Not when only yesterday you were quite prepared to ruin my father’s publishing company and probably kill him in the process!’ she reminded him accusingly.
Cesare’s expression darkened, a frown between those almost black eyes, his mouth a thin, disapproving line. ‘Must I remind you that I am not the one responsible for your father’s current ill health?’ he responded.
No, Robin acknowledged
