pulled herself together at speed and stood up, hand automatically outstretched.
‘Mr Gunn. I’m Sunny Porter...’
His cool fingers as they briefly touched her sent an electric impulse racing through her body and when she withdrew her hand she had to fight not to wipe it on her skirt.
‘Flora...’ she turned to the child, who hadn’t glanced up and was ferociously highlighting the photocopied piece of printed paper which Sunny had given her ‘...your father’s here.’
‘Flora!’ Stefano’s tone was sharp but he modulated it to add, ‘It’s time to go.’
‘I’d rather stay here,’ Flora said coolly, throwing Stefano a challenging stare.
For a few terse seconds complete silence greeted this mutinous remark. Embarrassed, Sunny cleared her throat and began shuffling her papers together. She could feel his presence and it was suffocating.
‘You seem to have captured my daughter’s interest with...what exactly is she doing?’
Sunny reluctantly looked up. She was tall, at five eight, but she still had to crane her neck to meet his eyes.
She’s beautiful was the thought that sprang into Stefano’s head as he stared down at her. Not just pretty or attractive, but a stunner, even though she couldn’t have done more to try and conceal that fact.
Her clothes were cheap and drab, the colours draining, but they still couldn’t subdue the radiant, startling beauty of her heart-shaped face and those huge green eyes. His gaze roamed the contours of her face, taking in the small straight nose and the full, perfectly formed mouth.
Sunny was used to men staring but Stefano’s brooding dark eyes didn’t send her irritation levels soaring. Instead, she felt her nipples pinch with sudden, forceful awareness and an unfamiliar, horrifying and unwelcome dampness spread uncomfortably between her legs.
Her response confused and panicked her.
Having lived the unstable, disjointed and bewildering life of a child with a mother whose primary concerns were men, drugs and drink, a mother who had been prone to disappearing for days on end, leaving her with a neighbour, any neighbour, Sunny prided herself on being tough, on being able to handle any situation.
Especially men.
She’d been attracting their attention since the minute she had become a teenager and started to develop. When her mother had died from an overdose, leaving behind her eleven-year-old daughter, she had been fostered by a couple and had lived on her nerves, uncomfortable with her foster father’s leering eyes, terrified into locking her bedroom door every night although he’d stared but never touched.
At thirteen she had won a scholarship to an exclusive boarding school and, even there, she had been ostracised because of her remarkable looks. She was the cuckoo in the nest, out of her depth with girls who came from serious money, isolated because whenever boys happened to be around, they drooled over her.
She had hated every second of it all but the shell she had developed had protected her, had allowed her to ignore what couldn’t be changed.
Men were driven to look at her. She had learned to blank them out.
She had told herself that the guy for her would be one who would want her for her brain, for what she had to say, for her personality.
Except when, at university, that guy had come along, dear, sweet John, who had been kind and chivalrous and thoughtful; she just hadn’t been able to respond physically to him. That had been two years ago but it still hurt to think about it.
Had she, under the tough shell, been secretly searching for love? Had she longed for someone to ignite the sort of gentle romance she’d fantasised about in the deepest, darkest corners of her mind? Was that what had driven her to John, who had ticked all the right boxes as candidate for the Big Romance? If that had been the case, then she’d been way off mark and what she’d got hadn’t been a Big Romance, but yet another tough learning curve which had closed the doors, for good, on any stupid belief that she was destined for a happy-ever-after life with the perfect soulmate. John should have been the perfect soulmate and she should have wanted to touch him all the time. It hadn’t been that way at all. She’d concluded what she should have concluded a long time ago, which was that her background had irretrievably damaged her. She had moved on and accepted her lot.
So why was she all hot and bothered now? In the presence of a man like Stefano Gunn? Since when had she ever felt hot and bothered when some guy stared at her? Hadn’t she stopped being an idiot two years ago when she and John had ended their doomed relationship?
‘Flora didn’t want to play with...any of her expensive toys—’ she fought to remember that this was a very important client and swallowed down her natural instinct to be contemptuous ‘—so I gave her some work to do and she’s been doing it for the past three hours.’
‘Work?’ He drew her aside while Flora continued doing what she was doing with the highlighters and making a pointed show of disinterest in his arrival.
‘Not actual work,’ Sunny explained, shifting a few inches away from him in an attempt to ward off the disconcerting impact of his presence. ‘I photocopied some pages of one of my law books, Petersen versus Shaw, and asked her to read it and highlight the bits she thought were relevant to Petersen winning the case.’
‘You did...what?’
‘My apologies, Mr Gunn.’ She stiffened, automatically defensive. What else was she supposed to do? Magic up some Lego and play building games with her? Was that even what eight-year-old girls were interested in doing? ‘She said she was bored with whatever...games are on her iPad...or laptop...and I had a stack of work to get through...’
‘I’m not criticising you,’ Stefano said drily. ‘I’m expressing open-mouthed amazement that Flora was drawn into doing something like that.’
Sunny relaxed and stole a glance at his handsome face. His voice was deep and lazy, as velvety as the smoothest of chocolate and his bronzed colouring spoke of an exotically foreign gene pool. And she could breathe him in, a woody, clean, utterly masculine scent that made her senses swirl.
‘She’s more than welcome to take the little file back with her.’ She could feel the hot burn of an uncustomary blush. ‘It’s a historic case. I would never have given her anything that could have remotely been seen as sensitive information.’
‘What are you doing later?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Her eyes flew to his face in consternation.
‘Later. What are you doing?’ The Savoy Grill would have to be put on hold. ‘I’d like to thank you for your impromptu babysitting by taking you out to dinner.’
‘There’s no need!’ Sunny was aghast at the thought of having dinner with him. She was aghast at the thought of doing anything with the man, aside from saying goodbye and never clapping eyes on him again. He did something to her that she didn’t like—something that made mincemeat of her nervous system—and for someone who valued her control that was tantamount to disastrous.
Stefano eyed her narrowly, taken aback by her horrified refusal.
‘I... I couldn’t.’ She backtracked from being outright
