was over Cesare, had been over him for months; ever since that disastrous party at New Year when he had humiliated her so badly. Before then she had worshipped the ground he walked on, but that night he had taken her devotion, her pride, and trampled it underneath his beautifully polished, handmade leather shoes.
‘If you want to see my dad, then he’s not here…’
‘I know,’ Cesare cut in sharply, a faint frown drawing his dark straight brows together. ‘It was you I came to see.’
‘Me?’
That frown, and something in the intonation of his lyrically accented voice set her nerves on edge, raising the tiny hairs on the back of her neck in wary apprehension. She was suddenly painfully aware of the blurred marks of tears on her cheeks, only roughly scrubbed away with the back of her hand.
‘What did you want me for?’
She got to her feet as she spoke, moving away from the direct light of the window, into a more shadowy part of the room.
‘I didn’t think you ever wanted to speak to me again.’
‘Why ever not?’ Infuriatingly it was touched with a thread of amusement that scraped over her skin.
‘You made it plain that you didn’t want to waste your time with me.’
His slow, sexy smile did terrible things to what little composure she had left, making her feel as if a powerful cord was tightening around her heart and tugging hard.
‘Oh, Megan, cara, you weren’t in any fit state to spend time with anyone—waste or not.’
‘I’d had a glass or two of champagne!’
But what she was never going to admit was that it had not been the sparkling wine that had intoxicated her, but the sheer impact of his presence, lethally elegant and stunning in the stark black and white of traditional evening wear.
‘Or three, or four…’ Cesare returned drily. ‘And the problem was that you were hellishly enticing in your tiddly state. Do you have any idea just how sweetly seductive you looked in that slip of a dress?’
‘Sweetly…’ Megan echoed, totally bemused.
Had he really said what she thought he had said? Had he really used the words enticing and seductive to describe her? Even through the haze of misery that clouded her thoughts, the words touched something in her. Something that she had believed was long since dead. Something that still lingered in the heart she was sure she had armoured against him after that last, humiliating, public rejection of her.
‘You’re kidding!’
‘Not at all.’
Cesare shook his dark head, moving at last, strolling into the room with the lithe ease of a hunting cat, letting the door swing to silently behind him.
‘It was all that I could do to keep my hands off you.’
The only response that Megan could manage was a loud, unladylike snort, vividly expressing her cynical opinion of that comment.
‘Oh sure! You had such a struggle that you put me aside as if just touching me might contaminate you. And then you…then you ignored me for the rest of the night. No?’
She blinked in confusion as Cesare shook his dark head.
‘No,’ he stated flatly. ‘There was no way I could ignore you, no matter how I tried. I’ve never been able to ignore you. Not from the moment you bounced into my life as a pretty thirteen-year-old, the first time I ever visited this house. I couldn’t take my eyes off you then, and I’ve never been able to since.’
He still couldn’t. If she was in a room, there was only one direction in which his eyes would be drawn. She was like some vivid, bright spark, burning so brilliantly that it almost blinded him. And the hardest thing had been that he could never admit to it; never reveal the way he felt.
Until now.
And she was so much more lovely now; the beauty that had promised as an adolescent becoming reality in the young woman who stood before him. She had hair like the burnished leaves of a copper beech tree, eyes like the deepest, mossy pools above the finest cheekbones he had ever seen. Tall and slender, she was curved in all the right places that declared her femininity, and her skin had the smooth softness of a peach so that his fingers itched to touch it.
But he had given his promise to her father, and had sworn to abide by it until the date of her twenty-second birthday set him free.
‘You’re kidding!’
‘I would never joke about something like this.’
‘Cesare…’
Megan shook her head in bemusement. This couldn’t be happening! Nothing he was saying seemed as if it could possibly be true. And the worst, the bitterest irony, was that these words were the ones she had always dreamed of hearing him say. Dreamed, but known that those dreams would never become reality.
She had had the world’s greatest crush on this man since she had been in her teens. But he was eight years older than her, a sophisticated, cosmopolitan businessman, the owner of the huge corporation of which her father’s firm was just one microscopic, unimportant component. Men like Cesare Santorino didn’t take any notice of girls like her.
‘Stop messing—don’t tease me like this.’
‘What makes you think that I’m teasing?’
Looking into his dark, inscrutable face, she could almost believe that he meant it. There was no trace of amusement in those burning eyes, no hint of a smile on the sensual mouth.
‘But you have to be…’
Again his proud head moved in denial of her protest.
‘No, cara. There is no “have to be” about this. I am telling the absolute truth.’
‘You can’t be…’
All the strength went from her legs and she dropped down into the nearest chair, unable to keep upright any longer. And at least this way she could put some distance between them.
‘I don’t believe you!’
‘Believe it!’
Oh, this was worse than ever! Bending down, he had placed both strong-fingered hands on the arms of the chair, one on either side of her. Imprisoned in the cage made by them and his powerful body, the wall of his chest in the immaculate white shirt a solid barrier between her and escape, she could look nowhere but into the smouldering bronze of his eyes.
And suddenly she was reminded of the volcano Etna on his native island of Sicily. The burn of his eyes made her think of the molten lava that had poured down the mountain’s sides, scorching everything in its path. She felt as if his gaze had just the same heated power, searing over the delicacy of the exposed skin of her face and neck.
He was so close that she could smell the clean scent of his body, mixed with the tang of some citrus cologne, light and invigorating—and painfully stimulating
