She returned her attention to her phone and replied to her mother’s text.
Promise you’ll ring if there’s a problem.
It took five seconds for the reply. I promise.
Paige texted back. Anything at all. No matter how trivial. She released the message into the ether and held on fast to the phone, tension tightening her stomach muscles.
She knew people thought she was too uptight about her daughter but what did they know? It was she who lived every day with the reality of McKenzie’s fragile health, not them. And one thing was for certain—being vigilant had kept McKenzie alive.
With the operation only a couple of months away now, Paige was determined to keep McKenzie healthy and avoid any more delays. It had been rescheduled three times already. No more.
The phone vibrated in her hand and Paige opened the message. I’m switching the phone off now. Go and have fun. That’s an order.
Paige smiled. She’d obviously stretched her mother’s patience enough for one night. Thank God for her parents. She would never have got through the past few years without them.
A tinkling of cutlery on glass cut through the low murmur and Paige turned to see Alessandro standing. She pushed all thoughts of the world outside the room aside, determined to follow her mother’s orders, and motioned for the drinks waiter.
‘So,’ Valentino said, topping up Paige’s half-full glass with some more champagne, ‘I believe it is a custom in your country for the best man and the bridesmaid to dance the bridal waltz together.’
His voice was low and close to her ear and her body reacted as if he had suggested something much more risqué than a customary dance in front of a room full of people. It took all her willpower not to melt into a puddle. Not to turn her head and flirt like crazy.
Except it seemed like a million years ago now that she’d last flirted and she was pretty sure she didn’t have a clue how to go about it. And why she would choose to do so with a man who was all glamour and sparkle, after her experience with Arnie, was beyond her.
The bitter burn of memories was never far from reach.
‘That’s right,’ she said, refusing to look at him, focusing instead on the bubbles meandering to the surface of her champagne.
‘Eccellente. I’m looking forward to that.’
Well, that made one of them. The thought of them dancing, his arm around her practically bare back, their bodies close, was sending her heart into fibrillation. Sitting next to him at the table, aware of his every move, every breath, their arms occasionally brushing, his deep voice resonating through tense abdominal muscles, was bad enough. Being pressed along the magnificent tuxedoed length of him? Frankly it scared the hell out of her.
She felt gauche and unsophisticated and totally out of her depth next to his man-of-the-world, model-dating perfection.
What if she stuffed up the steps? Or trod on his foot?
What if she liked it too much?
‘You are worried your boyfriend will mind that we dance, yes?’
Valentino’s comment snapped her out of the vision of her clinging to him like some sort of groupie as he pressed kisses down her neck. She glanced at him, startled.
A big mistake.
Thus far she’d managed not to look at him this close up. And now she knew why. This near, he was simply dazzling. Gorgeous hair the colour of midnight waved in haphazard glory, thick and lustrous with not a hint of grey. It brushed his forehead and collar and Paige finally understood the itch some women talked about to run their fingers through a man’s hair.
Jet-black eyebrows quirked at her as her gaze widened to take in his square jaw line, heavy with five-o’clock shadow. His full lips curved upward and were bracketed by dimples that should be outlawed on anyone over five. His eyes, dark like a shot of the best Italian espresso, were fringed by long black lashes and promised fun and flirting.
A buzz coursed through her veins at the fifteen different kinds of sin she could see in them.
Valentino smiled at the little frown that knitted Paige’s caramel brows together and crinkled her forehead. She was a most intriguing woman. Her grey eyes were huge in her angular face dominated by prominent cheekbones and a wide mouth.
She wore no eye make-up to enhance them, she didn’t need to. They drew the gaze regardless. Her strawberry-blonde hair had been severely styled into a pixie cut that feathered over her forehead and would have looked boyish on anyone else but only seemed to enhance the hugeness of her eyes and the vulnerability he saw there.
She was no beauty. She certainly wasn’t his usual type. He liked them curvy. Everywhere. Not rail thin like Paige. And confident. Women who were secure in their sexuality, who smiled and flirted and enjoyed life. Women who knew the score.
And yet…
There was something about her that intrigued him. Not least of all the fact that she’d been the only female in the room who hadn’t clamoured to be closer to him.
‘I see you texting. All night,’ he prompted when she still didn’t say anything. ‘I figure a beautiful woman…’ He shrugged and shot her his best hey-baby grin, ‘it must be a boyfriend?’
Paige shook her head to clear it as Valentino’s smile muddled her senses. ‘I’m a little old for a boyfriend, don’t you think?’
‘Paige. We are never too old for love.’
The slight reprimand in his voice didn’t register. Nothing registered beyond the way he’d said her name. Paige. He had drawn it out a little at the end, giving it a very European flair, and it had stroked across every nerve ending in her pelvis.
She shut her eyes. This was madness. He was just a man. God knew, she hadn’t even thought about the opposite sex since her husband had walked out on her. And, besides, she just didn’t have time for a man. Especially not a model-dating, Italian playboy whose interest in her would no doubt wane the minute after he had his way with her.
Which wasn’t going to happen.
Even if, deep down, in a secret, hidden part of her, she wanted it very, very badly.
I am a single-mother of a high-needs child.
I am a single mother of a high-needs child.
She turned back to her champagne and took a long deep swallow, the bubbles pricking her throat as they slid down, matching the prick at the backs of her eyes. ‘I am.’
Tonight, as always, Paige felt absolutely ancient. ‘Excuse me,’ she murmured, rising and headed for the refuge of the bathroom.
Valentino watched his cousin dancing with his new wife, a gladness in his heart that Alessandro had finally found love after the train wreck of his first marriage.
It always humbled him when he saw two people ready to make a lifetime commitment. Sure, after an early escape he’d worked out it wasn’t for him, but that didn’t mean he didn’t believe in it
