cottage.
She said, ‘I’ve always been perfectly safe until tonight.’
‘You were safe tonight. I made sure of that.’
‘Thank you for your concern,’ not concealing her sarcasm, ‘but it was unnecessary.’
‘Once I had seen you it was totally necessary,’ he contradicted her. ‘Do you mind if I pour myself a drink?’
‘Yes. I do mind.’
Black brows silently rose. The slightest flicker of his eyelids conveyed displeasure. ‘So rude?’
Stupidly, she felt reproved. As if he had a right to scold her for bad manners.
He looked at her for a moment or two, then without haste rose and went back to the cabinet, where with some deliberation he poured vodka into another glass. ‘Anything more for you?’ he inquired with equally deliberate courtesy.
Seethingly silent, she shook her head, and he returned to her side.
Damn him, he knew she couldn’t bodily throw him out. He was establishing his physical superiority, claiming territory. But this was her territory, and he was an intruder.
Looking down at the vodka without drinking, he said softly, ‘You surely don’t expect me to walk away now?’
If only. But she owed it to herself to try. ‘Would you,’ she inquired baldly, ‘if I asked you to?’
He was still staring into the depths of his glass. The liquid didn’t move—his hands were perfectly steady. Unlike hers. Her whole body was racked with tiny, invisible tremors. It was a moment before he said, ‘Are you asking?’
She stopped breathing. She was sure she could hear her heart beating, slow and heavy, and her throat was locked.
Say it. ‘Yes.’
She’d said it, not as decisively as she’d have liked to, but clearly enough, even if her voice was low in her throat.
Seconds ticked by. Then he lifted the glass and swallowed, lowered it again, holding it in both hands. He turned his head and she received the full force of the ferocious blaze in his eyes, so that she recoiled, her lower lip briefly caught in her teeth.
‘No,’ he said.
She shot to her feet, then halted because the sudden movement had made her a little dizzy—the damned brandy again—and besides, where was there to run to? He could corner her easily before she’d taken half a dozen steps.
As if to confirm it, he downed the remainder of his drink and stood up too, leaving the glass on the carpet by the couch. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘You can’t run from me any more, Roxane.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’M NOT running.’ It made her sound as if she’d fled without thought, in blind fear. The room tilted, and she hastily sat down again. ‘I’ve never run from you.’
‘What would you call it, then?’ he demanded.
‘It was a decision. A rational, sensible decision.’
His lip curled. ‘Rational? Sensible?’
A sensation sickening in its familiarity washed over Roxane. Helplessness, despair, and mingled with it a deep, inexpressible longing. ‘You don’t think I’m capable of that. But it was the best decision of my life.’
His jaw tightened and a small muscle in his cheek kicked almost invisibly. The anger that still smouldered in his eyes turned bleak before thick black lashes hid them. ‘Was it necessary,’ he asked bitingly, ‘to be so dramatic—cutting off all contact, swearing your parents to secrecy, making me communicate through your lawyer as if I were some brute who had beaten you?’
‘I told him you hadn’t,’ she said swiftly, looking down at her hands, wound tightly into each other. The solicitor had jumped to obvious conclusions, and she’d made sure he didn’t retain them. ‘You’re not a brute, Zito.’
‘God—’ he breathed the word as if it rasped his throat ‘—I thought I’d never hear you say my name again.’
Roxane winced, thankful that her head was still bent and he couldn’t see her face, shadowed by the shoulder-length sable fall of her hair. But the change in his voice forced her to look up, her clear green eyes wondering.
To find his expression rigid and unreadable, his gaze cool, almost indifferent. ‘Did it occur to you that if I wanted you back I could have found you?’
‘I know you could have.’ She tried to ignore the gibe in his caveat, if I wanted you… Zito could afford to pay any number of private detectives, for as long as it took.
‘You’d made it clear you didn’t want to be found.’ He paused, a corner of his mouth curving satirically. ‘Or were you hoping that I’d somehow do it anyway and come running after you, begging you to return to me?’
Sometimes, weakly, she had fantasised that he would track her down regardless of her efforts, that he’d come to her with apologies and promises and a new understanding—a changed and humbled man, and everything would miraculously be all right. There had been long cold nights when the fantasy had helped her through to another dawn.
But it would be fatal to admit it. ‘No!’
She thought she saw a brief flare of some emotion—frustration? disappointment?—before he resumed the guarded watchfulness he’d shown earlier. She must have been mistaken, falling prey to all-too-familiar wishful thinking. ‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ she said.
He swung away from her, pushing back the jacket of the perfectly tailored suit by shoving his hands into the pockets of his trousers.
Zito’s clothes had always been impeccable, discreetly expensive but worn with an insouciance that made them part of the man, not any kind of status symbol to impress others.
Now he was inspecting the walls that she’d painted palest jade green and hung with cheap reproduced art, along with a couple of originals by local unknowns.
His gaze next disdained the calico covers hiding the shabbiness of her comfortable secondhand couch and the mismatched armchairs facing it across the low table that bore the honourable scars of a chequered life. For a few seconds his attention was caught by the worn, silky antique rug that Roxane had spent too much on but loved all the more for it.
He swept another sharp-eyed glance about the room, before he turned to her.
Roxane asked defiantly, ‘Don’t you like it?’
He didn’t answer immediately, and when he did his voice was expressionless. ‘It’s very attractive. Small but…cosy.’
‘I like small.’
For a moment the wicked, teasing sexual humour that had attracted and excited and confounded her when they first met gleamed in his eyes, lifting one eyebrow and a corner of his mouth in subtle disbelief. And damn, she responded to it as always, with a frightening mix of inward laughter and sheer
