computer.
Settling the strap to her handbag on her shoulder, ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Do you have a car outside or do we need to use mine?’
‘I have a hire car.’
Turning away, he opened the door and stepped out onto the landing, then went to call the lift while Shannon locked up her flat. They rode the lift like perfect strangers, and left the building to walk into driving rain. Luckily his hire car waited only a few yards away. Using a remote control to unlock it, he swung open the passenger door to allow Shannon to get in and out of the rain before he strode round to the boot to stash her things, finally arriving behind the wheel wet through.
Neither had thought to catch up one of the umbrellas she kept by the front door. Neither seemed to give a damn. As the car engine fired Shannon turned her face to the side window. With only a swipe from a hand across his wet face, Luca ignored the raindrops running down the back of his neck and set them moving with the grim desire to get this over with as quickly as it was humanly possible.
He was angry with himself for making that comment about her personal life. It had placed him in the position of sounding hard and nasty, and could have given the impression that he cared when he didn’t. She could have as many Alexes as she liked lining up to take their turn in her bed. Joshua Soames was a different matter. Luca knew all about her close friend and business partner because Keira never ceased to talk about how their graphic design venture had taken off like a rocket from the moment the two of them had begun to trade. The two partners had been friends throughout university, both excelling in computer design. Luca had listened to Keira spouting proud things about her sister even that far back. Only his mood had been more indulgent then—his mind remembering a rather cute, if self-conscious, freckle-faced teenager with a head of gorgeous hair in a pale blue taffeta bridesmaid’s dress that managed to wear her rather than the other way around. She’d simply amused him then. He’d liked her because despite all her teenage awkwardness she’d had a tongue like a whip, which had entertained him all the way through Keira and Angelo’s long wedding breakfast.
Needless to say it was the image he’d used to conjure up of Shannon whenever Keira had mentioned her younger sister. So when, four years later, she’d arrived on her first visit to Florence and he’d found himself confronted by the grown-up version, he had been completely blown away.
Beautiful, he thought, and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. Astoundingly, fascinatingly beautiful. The freckles had gone; her body had filled out to take on a shape that was truly spectacular. And instead of teenage awkwardness he’d been faced with a supremely self-confident graduate with a hunger for life and lethal gift for flirtation. She’d plied him with coquettish looks and her plans to start up her own design company with Joshua Soames and take the world by storm. Older, wiser, and as cynical as hell about people with ideals so grand, he’d listened patiently, answered all her eager questions about financial management, and found it was he who was taken by storm.
The first time they’d kissed it had been meant as a brotherly salutation to finish off the evening they’d just spent together listening to Puccini. She had been eager to go to the opera and he had been happy to take her. They’d shared a candlelit dinner at his favourite restaurant afterwards and, even though he had known by then that he was getting in too deep, he had held onto the arrogant belief that he still had control of the situation—until that kiss.
Grimly driving them out of the city now in weather so foul a duck would find shelter, he felt his lips heat at the memory. He had not intended it to be a meaningful kiss, just one of those light exchanges you shared with someone you’d spent a pleasant evening with. But Shannon had fallen into that kiss with the same all-out enthusiasm she threw at life. It had shaken him, sent his libido soaring to a place it had never known was there.
Bringing the car to a halt at a junction, he checked the road either way and used the opportunity to cast a brief glance at her. She was sitting there with her head turned away and that silly little hat pulled down over her ears. Something hot shot from his heart to his loins, then stayed burning there. Only Shannon had ever made that connection, only she had ever been able to turn him into a mass of raging hormones without needing to try.
Ten years his junior, yet divided by almost a millennium’s difference in life experience, she’d caught him, trussed him up and packaged him in a box marked ‘taken’—by the woman with the amazing hair, the stunning face, a fantastic body and an insatiable set of desires that had him balancing on the edge of fear that she might decide to find satisfaction elsewhere.
Well, he’d got his wish, if that was what he had been looking for. And he should have been relieved he’d found out before he’d placed the wedding ring on her finger. Yet oddly he hadn’t been—not once the first flush of anger had worn off, that was. All he’d felt then was regret because at least a wedding ring would have given him a reason to go after her—haul her back by her lovely hair and make her pay for daring to betray him.
Instead he’d enjoyed two years of long, hard, festering about what should have been. And in that time bitterness had turned his view of women so sour he hadn’t been able to touch one since.
A great legacy for her to chew on, if she ever found out she’d rendered him impotent, he grimaced as they drove through rain like sheets of ice.
If he throws me one more nasty look I think I might turn round and hit him, Shannon decided as she sat watching his profile via the side-window reflection. Up to now she had watched him slice her one look of utter blinding derision, several of disgust and two of seething sexual denunciation. The roads were bad enough without him distracting himself from his driving by thinking lewd and hateful thoughts.
A slave to his ever-raging libido, she thought. Sex was all that Luca knew. Not Love but Sex—give me, I need, I want, I have to have. Physical, insatiable, inventive and so good at it that it was no wonder his reputation went before him. Variety—he used to say while grinning unrepentantly when she used to face him with grapevine chatter—is most definitely the spice of life. She should have realised then that she was nothing but a brand new and exciting variety he simply had to try out.
Love? Not this man. He had no idea of the concept if it didn’t attach itself to some physical act. The word? Oh, he’d known how to use the necessary words to gain the required responses. I love you. Ti amo mio per sempre l’innamorato. Whispered words in sensual Italian that could seduce a woman to mush.
Then suddenly she was a slut and a harlot, a woman beneath his dignity to know. One mistake—not even her mistake—and she had been put out in the cold so fast, she was still dealing with the shock of it two years later.
Over him? she asked. No, she wasn’t over him. She was still too angry, bitter and hungry to draw blood to be anywhere near getting over what Luca had done to her.
‘We will never take off in this weather,’ he gritted.
Tears pricked her eyes at the sudden realisation that she had allowed herself to concentrate on Luca instead of on Keira yet again. Oh, may God forgive me, she thought and had to rummage in her bag for a tissue.
‘You OK?’ Luca had heard her telling little snuffle.
‘Fine,’ she said, hating him—hating him with every fiber she was made of.
‘Not far to the airport,’ he said more levelly.
He knew she was crying. But then, he knew her so well. Inside, outside, every which way a man could know a woman he had lived and slept with for half a year before he’d chucked her out. Gritting his teeth together, Luca withdrew inside himself, dark
