She gasped.
He raised speculative brows as he opened the white wine cooling in the galley, revealing none of the pleasure he felt at hearing her use his given name for the first time. ‘I wasn’t complaining. I merely wish to be pre-warned if that is the case.’
She looked more flustered than ever. ‘I didn’t accept your invitation—I’m only here because you promised to give me information about my father,’ she reminded him flatly.
‘All the while knowing how much I want you.’
‘I was only—I didn’t—Why do you always have to turn everything back to—?’
‘My wanting you?’ Gregorio finished softly. ‘Perhaps because possessing you has obsessed my mind for some time now.’
She snorted. ‘I find that very hard to believe!’
He poured the wine into two glasses before pushing one towards her, an indication that she should drink some of it. ‘That I want you? Or that I have thought of you constantly since I first saw you?’
‘I was engaged to another man!’
Gregorio gave a brief glance at her bare left hand. ‘An engagement is not a marriage.’
‘Obviously not,’ she acknowledged heavily. ‘But I find it difficult to believe you felt an instant attraction to a woman you had only just met.’
‘Possibly because you prefer to continue believing me a man capable of hounding people to their deaths.’
She winced at this reminder of her earlier accusations. ‘Talking of possessing someone—me—isn’t exactly normal behaviour,’ she defended.
‘You would prefer that I flatter and seduce you with words before I attempt to make love to you?’
‘That’s the way it’s usually done, yes.’
He gave a dismissive shake of his head. ‘I have no time for such games.’
‘And, personally, I would prefer it if you never referred to the subject again.’
‘Then you are lying to yourself.’
‘You—’
‘Would you like me to show you how much you are lying?’
‘No!’ Lia could see the raw passion burning in his dark gaze.
He drew in a deep breath as he continued to study her for several long seconds. ‘Drink some of your wine,’ he finally encouraged huskily.
‘And you call me bossy!’ She eyed him impatiently.
He studied her over the rim of his glass as he took a sip of what proved to be a very good glass of white wine. He waited until Mancini had served their first course before speaking again. ‘You believe me to be a male chauvinist?’
She grimaced. ‘Maybe it’s just a cultural difference?’
‘You do not believe that any more than I do,’ he observed dryly. ‘And you should have met my father—compared to him I am a fully enlightened man who believes in equal opportunity for all three sexes.’
‘He’s...no longer with you?’
‘Neither of my parents is still alive.’ Gregorio inwardly berated himself for unthinkingly introducing the painful subject of the death of a parent. ‘My father believed it was my mother’s role to be a wife to him and to bring up their three sons.’
‘And you don’t?’
Lia took her glass of wine. Their conversation was far too personal for her liking. Combining that with how casually dressed Gregorio was this evening, this situation—the private jet, the personal chef—was all too disturbing for her peace of mind.
‘My mother ensured my two brothers and I have a more modern attitude.’ Gregorio shrugged. ‘For instance, she insisted all of us learn how to cook.’
‘How did your father react to that?’
‘As a man who had never had to learn how to so much as boil an egg, he was horrified,’ Gregorio recalled with one of those smiles that changed his face from austerely attractive to devastatingly handsome. ‘My mother loved my father enough to allow him to believe he was the patriarch of the family, when in actual fact she was the one who decided what, when, where and how.’
‘She sounds amazing.’
Gregorio heard the wistful note in her voice—a reminder that Lia had grown up without a mother. It seemed as if every subject they touched upon had the potential to blow up in his face.
‘She was,’ he dismissed briskly.
‘But you’ve never married?’
‘There has been no time for a woman in my life.’
‘That isn’t what the newspapers say!’
‘I was referring to a woman I might wish to marry.’
‘Rather than go to bed with?’
His jaw tightened. ‘Yes.’
‘What happened to the woman you were having dinner with that night at the restaurant?’
‘Happened to her...?’
Lia nodded. ‘She looked nice.’
Gregorio’s company had been in negotiations to buy Fairbanks Industries for some weeks before he had recognised Jacob Fairbanks in the restaurant that evening. Both of them had been dining with other people. David Richardson was known to him as Fairbanks’s lawyer. But he’d never before met the woman seated between the two men.
She had been exquisite.
Gregorio had seen his dining companion seated before immediately going over to Fairbanks’s table to seek an introduction to the beautiful redhead. Amelia Fairbanks—Jacob’s daughter. And the lawyer was her fiancé.
When Amelia had stood up to go to the powder room half an hour later, Gregorio hadn’t been able to resist following her. Or kissing her. Only to receive an angry slap to his cheek as soon as the kiss had ended.
The evening hadn’t gone at all as Gregorio had originally intended it should. Not only had he mainly ignored his dining companion for the rest of the evening, in favour of staring at Amelia Fairbanks, but he had also put the other woman in a taxi as soon as they’d left the restaurant, rather than accepting her invitation to go back to her apartment for the night.
He straightened. ‘I never saw her again after that evening.’ Nor had he dated any other women in the past few months.
‘Why not?’
He gave her a pointed glance. ‘Because I saw you that night and I wanted you.’
Lia turned away from the intensity of that
