tongue around her name sent an illicit shiver down her spine.
‘Samantha, but everyone calls me Sam.’
‘I prefer Samantha.’
Sam was wondering how to respond to that when without warning he stretched out his hand. She closed her eyes and swayed as the sensitive tips of his long brown fingers trailed slowly down the curve of her cheek.
‘So you are real. I was beginning to wonder, but for the scratches on my back I might have decided you were a figment of my imagination.’
The hot, mortified colour flew to Sam’s cheeks as she lowered her gaze, unable to maintain eye contact even though he couldn’t see her.
‘Look, I expect you’re wondering why I’m here.’ She’d started to wonder much the same thing herself… This was something that could have been done at a distance—clinically.
But then you wouldn’t have seen him, pointed out the sly voice in her head, and isn’t that what you really wanted…?
Cesare shook his head. ‘No, I assume you want something. I’d like to flatter myself and think it is my body, but…’
A choking sound escaped Sam’s throat. ‘You’re really not that fantastic,’ she told him as the erotic images playing in her head stood witness to her whopper of a lie.
‘That’s not what you said at the time… “Perfect, utterly perfect” were words mentioned several times, I think, and you also appeared to have a very high opinion of my abilities in bed.’
‘If you were any sort of a gentleman you wouldn’t have brought that up.’
‘I’m not.’
She shook her head. ‘Not what?’
Her stomach muscles clenched as the corners of his lips lifted in a slow predatory smile. ‘A gentleman, cara, not in any sense of the word, but then it wasn’t my beautiful manners that made you jump into bed with me, was it?’
‘I can’t believe I ever felt sorry for you!’ she gasped, glaring at him.
His head went back as though she had struck him. With nostrils flared and a thin white line etched around the sculpted outline of his lips, he retorted in a voice edged with ice, ‘So you slept with me because you felt sorry for me?’
Sam’s brow puckered into a frown as she returned to a mystery she had still not fully resolved to her own satisfaction. ‘I really don’t know why I did it—I’m always so sensible.’ She gave a perplexed shake of her head and sighed. ‘I knew what I was doing, I knew it was crazy, but it was as if…’
As he listened to her faltering response the hostility drained from Cesare’s expression. ‘You just had to in the same way you had to take your next breath.’
Sam looked up, amazed to hear her own feelings so simply but accurately expressed. ‘Exactly like that!’ Then, realising what she had just admitted and to whom she had admitted it, she blushed to the roots of her hair and added defensively, ‘I don’t feel sorry for you any more.’
The wolflike smile that revealed his even white teeth made Sam wonder if she had been too subtle in her effort to make the point that the madness had passed and she no longer felt unable to control herself.
‘But we are forgetting the formalities, Samantha.’ He said her name as though testing the taste of it on his tongue before inclining his dark head and announcing formally, ‘I am Cesare. But of course you already know this…you are here. The only question remaining is still why?’
The why was something she was still working her way around to. ‘I didn’t know your name when I…when we…’
‘Went to bed because you were consumed by pity—I must say you hid it well.’
The sardonic insertion brought a flush to her cheeks. ‘Oh, I didn’t feel it then, not until I saw your picture in an article.’ She had not believed for a moment that the man described as the financial genius of his generation was the same man she had spent the night with. Then she had read the brief paragraph that mentioned an accident that had robbed him of his sight and the subsequent calling-off of his marriage to a well-known actress.
‘And now you have discovered a new depth of feeling for me?’
Sam, baffled by the ironic suggestion, shook her head.
‘I…’
‘Now you deeply regret, in hindsight, leaving while I was sleeping?’
The guilty colour climbed to Sam’s cheeks. ‘That was… I…’ How could she explain the fact that she had been too embarrassed to hang around, that she’d never woken up beside a man before and she had panicked?
‘No need for explanations—I understand this change of heart totally.’
‘I doubt that,’ she muttered drily.
‘Oh, yes, I know from experience how people’s attitudes change when they discover how much money I have.’
It took the space of several seconds for Sam’s brain to translate the sarcasm. Teeth clenched, she levelled an angry, glittering violet-blue-eyed glare at his lean, sardonic face.
A man who had such a jaundiced view of human nature was not likely to greet the news he had fathered a child with an open mind.
‘For the record, I don’t care about your money.’
Cesare was conscious of a feeling of irrational disappointment as he dragged a hand through his dark hair—she was the same as everyone else after all.
What was her angle?
Cesare had never been a man who indulged in one-night stands and he considered men who slipped away like thieves in the night were displaying at the very least bad manners. He saw no reason not to apply the same rules to women.
And while her walking out on him had initially made him as mad as hell, once the anger had worn off he had realised she had just given and not asked for anything in return, which in his world made her pretty unique. Alas it now seemed that she was not so special.
‘Of course you don’t.’
His cynical drawl made her want to hit him. ‘And if I was as cynical as you…’ She drew a deep breath and bit back the retort, forcing herself to continue with more moderation as she added honestly, ‘I really had no idea who you were when I…we…at the time, and quite honestly I wish I still didn’t. But I was researching for an article and your photo…’
‘Researching…?’
Sam misread the edge in his voice as skepticism and she raised her chin in defence.
‘Actually, I work for the Chronicle,’ she said, trying to sound casual and failing—she still got a buzz from people looking impressed when she told them her job.
Cesare did not look impressed. In fact he couldn’t have looked less impressed. ‘You’re a journalist?’
‘Yes…’
