to staff at the Palazzo Salarino, it took some considerable time to locate you. What were you doing?’
The silence that followed seemed to go on for ever. Slowly, and with a paralysing sense of dread, Eve dragged her eyes upwards from their intense study of the pattern on the carpet. And found herself looking straight into his.
It was like running at full speed into a wall of ice.
His expression was utterly blank as he held her in his dark gaze. Excruciating, yet indescribably erotic, like being intimately caressed while lying on a bed of nails. His voice, when he eventually replied, was very soft.
‘That, it suddenly appears, is a very good question.’
For a second Raphael thought that tiredness had got the better of him and he was hallucinating. But there was no mistaking those eyes, or the softly rounded lips that had filled his head with pleasure during the long hours he’d spent, halfway between sleeping and waking, in a chair at his father’s hospital bedside.
So she wasn’t a model. It was even worse than that.
She was a journalist.
His grip tightened on the pen in his hand as a wave of self-recrimination swept through him. Going too long without sleep had made him irrational and careless, but that was no excuse for his stupid behaviour last night. Thank goodness that the maître d’ had found him before things had gone any further, otherwise he might have been waking up to his name all over the front pages in headlines featuring the words ‘passion’, ‘playboy’, and probably ‘love-rat’.
He looked across to where she stood, head bent, her face partly hidden by a curtain of hair, the tip of her pen held between her softly parted lips, and felt his heart—along with other more basic parts of his anatomy—harden.
In his eyes journalists came a little below single-cell organisms in the evolutionary scale. Just because this girl had the wide-eyed innocence of a blonde Virgin Mary, it would be unwise to rule out the possibility that she might still attempt to concoct some kind of kiss-and-tell story. He would just have to track her down and make sure she didn’t.
She’d have her price. They all did. That was what was so disappointing.
‘Taxi! Taxi!’
Eve let out a shriek of outrage as yet another of Florence’s distinctive white cabs sped past her. That made five. She was beginning to wonder if she might just be invisible.
But of course she wasn’t. If she were she would have been spared public humiliation at the hands—or eyes—of Raphael Di Lazaro.
How dared he? she spluttered inwardly. How dared he look at her like that? As if she was some kind of inferior life-form from the Planet Vulgar, and way beneath his contempt?
‘Taxiii!’
If the street had not been crowded with intimidatingly glamorous Italian women, looking cool and inscrutable behind their designer sunglasses, Eve would almost certainly have sat down on the pavement and given in to tears. As it was, there was only one thing left to do.
Find chocolate.
The café nearby was small—just a handful of tables spilling out onto the pavement—but the enticing aroma of fresh coffee and hot pastries was irresistible. Taking her place in the queue of beautiful people at the counter, Eve wondered why everyone in Florence was so annoyingly good-looking. She had just arrived at the conclusion that Calvin Klein must be doing a casting session nearby, when, from the depths of her bag, she heard the tinny trill of her mobile.
Clamping her purse beneath one arm, she dug beneath the layers of old bus tickets, leaky Biros and odd gloves, triumphantly managing to unearth it before it stopped ringing.
‘Lou…!’
‘Hi, babe. You tried to call me. Everything OK?’
‘Where were you? I needed you!’
‘I was here. I’m just not answering my phone in case it’s Marissa. I’m supposed to be at death’s door, remember? The trouble is I got quite carried away with the story when I rang her to tell her, and now I can’t remember all the details. Anyway, never mind that. How’s it going?’
At the comfortingly familiar sound of Lou’s voice Eve felt the sting of tears at the back of her eyes again. The need to offload was overwhelming.
‘It’s awful. I’ve completely messed everything up!’
‘God, Eve, you’d better not have. Marissa will strangle me with one of her garish designer scarves if she finds out I made up all that stuff about your past modelling success and your dazzling journalistic career. Tell me it’s not that bad.’
Eve swallowed nervously.
‘Remember the time you interviewed that Hollywood movie star and spent the whole time giving him your come-get-me smile—then found out afterwards that you had lettuce stuck to your teeth? Well, it’s about a thousand times worse than that.’
There was a painful pause. ‘I don’t believe you. But I’m listening.’
Miserably waiting in the queue, Eve watched the sultry girl behind the counter sprinkle chocolate on the top of a cappuccino. Even the waitresses round here looked like supermodels. She held the phone closer to her mouth and dropped her voice to a whisper.
‘I kissed Raphael di Lazaro.’
‘Sorry? I can’t hear you. For a moment I thought you said you kissed Raphael di Lazaro!’ Lou laughed heartily, and then stopped abruptly. ‘Eve? Oh, God—that is what you said, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. Well, in that case I suppose just one question springs to mind—’
‘Fantastic,’ Eve whispered, staring straight ahead as the tears gathered in her eyes again. ‘He’s totally not how you’d expect.’
‘No, Eve! The question was not, What was it like? The question was, In the name of Aunt Fanny, why?’
‘Oh. I didn’t know who he was at the time.’
‘Now, wait a minute. I’ve known you since we both started university, and in all that time, Eve Middlemiss—four years of prime mating opportunities—I have never once known you to snog a guy without first meeting his mother and practising your new signature for after you’re married.’
‘That’s not fair! I—’ Eve hissed vehemently into the phone, but was unable to protest further as she’d reached the front of the queue at the counter. Hastily she ordered a chocolate croissant and a double mochaccino latte, adding sulkily, ‘With extra cream.’
‘Let’s be honest, Eve.’ Lou spoke more kindly now. ‘You’re not the kind of girl who kisses strangers. What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know, Lou. It was bizarre—like fate, or destiny, or something. I saw him…No, we saw each other, and it was like something just clicked. It felt right. Inevitable, somehow. Like I didn’t have to do anything because we both knew it was going to happen. It had
