glance. ‘Belonged?’ she echoed gingerly and, when Libby said nothing, ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman sighed, guessing that something had gone terribly wrong in her young friend’s life, but clearly didn’t want to probe too deeply. ‘You never said.’
Libby shrugged. ‘It’s in the past.’ Only it wasn’t. It never would be, she thought, speared with wanting. Giorgio was hers—part of the here and now—and all she wanted was for this rowdy uninvited crowd to leave so that she could ring the boy’s uncle and tell him that she was ready to go with him. That she would throw in her job, her flat, and every commitment she’d made and leave now—this minute—with nothing but the clothes she stood up in just as long as she could see her baby again.
Hastily she stuffed the album into a drawer. ‘Promise me you won’t say anything to the others?’
‘Of course not,’ Fran uttered in compliance, and Libby didn’t doubt that the woman would be as true as her word. ‘Was there some connection with that gorgeous hunk who turned up on the shoot today? Did you have an affair with him or something?’
‘No!’ Fran knew that there was no man in her life, and that she didn’t date, so an eye-catching specimen like Romano showing up would naturally arouse her curiosity.
‘He seemed pretty possessive. The way he slung that door closed in my face. Only a lover behaves like that.’
‘No!’ Libby denied with a vehemence that had one of Fran’s dark brows lifting in patent scepticism. Why would she think that? Libby thought angrily, guessing that while her friend knew when to let the subject of a lost child drop, the possibility of such a ruthlessly attractive male as Romano Vincenzo as a candidate for Libby’s bed was too much even for the discreet Fran to ignore.
The music was still pounding away in the sitting room. Animated shouts with the rhythmic thud of feet reverberated through the apartment. Suddenly a loud banging was cutting insistently through the pandemonium.
‘Your neighbours?’ Fran suggested with a grimace.
‘Oh, good grief!’ If it was, then they had every right to complain. ‘Help me get rid of this lot, will you?’ Libby appealed despairingly to her friend.
‘I will,’ Fran promised, giving her an affectionate squeeze. ‘After all, it was my fault you got stuck with…’ Her words were drowned beneath a wall of sound as the bedroom door opened and the blond technician who had been on the shoot peered round it.
‘Having a tête-à-tête?’ His words were a little slurred, Libby noted, guessing that he had already been drinking heavily before he’d arrived and was clearly the worse for too much champagne. ‘I thought for a moment the lovely Blaze had got herself a man in here, but I should have known better, shouldn’t I?’
‘Leave it, Cullum,’ Fran advised, wiser now to what made Libby such a loner.
Steve Cullum, though, Libby noticed, looked aggressive enough to swing a punch at someone, and hurriedly she made to defuse the situation.
‘Let’s go back and join the others,’ she suggested to him in a placatory tone, pushing him gently back into the other room so that she could go and answer the persistent thudding on her front door.
‘Only if you’ll dance with me.’
‘All right. All right,’ she promised recklessly. ‘After I’ve answered the door to whoever’s out there first.’ Humour him. Don’t be offensive, she warned herself, knowing from experience that it was the only way to handle drunks. ‘Someone turn the music down!’ she shouted, making a move towards the hall.
‘Turn it up!’ The technician was grabbing her arm, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Turn it up! Blaze wants to dance! Blaze wants to dance with me!’
Libby tried to resist as he spun her round in the middle of the floor and, with his arms crossing her chest, pulled her back against him, forcing her body to sway with his to the raucous music.
His aftershave lotion was cloying, and his alcohol-stained breath was revoltingly warm against her throat. Somewhere in her repulsed brain it registered that the banging on the front door had stopped. That the neighbour had given up all hope of being heard and gone—probably to call the police!
‘Come on, baby, dance. You know how to move.’ The scoop-necked sweater she had changed into when she’d showered had slipped off one shoulder and the man’s mouth was suddenly moving, hot and moist, across her bare flesh. Trapped in his arms, she jerked her head aside, but he only laughed and tightened his hold on her.
In a minute, she decided, she was going to elbow him—hard!
The only thing that stopped her was the shocking silence as the music was cut dead, along with every other sound in the room.
All eyes were turned towards the CD player and the man in the impeccable dark raincoat and executive suit who was straightening up beside it. And it wasn’t just the formality of his clothes but that hard air of command that set him apart from everyone else in the room.
Romano Vincenzo!
Stunned, Libby could only gaze speechlessly at his strong, tanned face and those glittering black eyes, which, focusing only on her now, flared, like those proud nostrils, with unequivocal anger.
‘I think you’d better ask your friends to leave.’ His recommendation fizzed with seething displeasure.
Barely able to grasp that it must have been him who had been thundering on the door—that someone had let him in—Libby could only despair at the compromising position in which he had walked in and found her, locked as she still was in the technician’s arms. Things couldn’t look worse, she thought, knowing that it wasn’t the first time that he had caught her in a situation like this.
‘Romano!’
It was all she could utter as Steve Cullum lifted his head to demand in a slurred voice, ‘Are you suggesting I quit this party and walk out of here—just because you said so?’
Beneath his rain-splashed coat, Romano’s shoulders squared. The last thing he wanted was trouble. But the sight of Libby, the girl who had plagued his thoughts and got under his skin as he had allowed no other woman to do—filling him with self-disgust when she was married to his brother—and who still aroused the same complexity of emotions in him—not only living it up after all he had told her today without a care for her child, which just went to prove just how heartless she was, but also crushed against that lecherous drunk, which she was obviously consenting to, only fuelled his anger, filling his veins with cold, jealous fury.
‘That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.’ Anger blanched the skin around his taut upper lip. ‘Unless you’d rather be thrown.’
Feeling the technician’s body tightening up behind her, Libby sucked in a breath. The last thing she wanted to witness was a brawl. But one step forward from the man who was taller, broader and light-years ahead in the fitness stakes than the inebriated Steve Cullum had the technician instantly backing off.
‘OK, mate. OK. Keep your shirt on.’ Hands held up in acquiescence to the other man’s dominant will, he moved grudgingly away, while the others, bottles in hand, their eyes fixed on Romano, also started filing out, muttering their goodnights to Libby as they yielded to an authority they recognised as one not to be tested.
‘Still
