A Dangerous Solace

‘There’s something I should tell you,’ Ava said.

‘Si?’ Gianluca asked.

‘This isn’t the first time we’ve met.’

‘Is that so?’

‘I don’t seem… familiar to you?’

He shrugged.

Ava knew right then that any chance of her making a little joke of it, or him being enchanted, or curious, or even maybe a little regretful had evaporated.

‘I meet many people. Forgive me if I don’t recall your face.’

His tone was reasonable, his words polite. But the sentiments—they stung…

I don’t recall your face. I don’t remember lying in the grass on Palatine Hill cradling you in my arms. I don’t remember a single one of the personal confessions you made because, really, it meant nothing to me.

‘You really don’t remember?’ she persevered.

A look of irritation flashed across those hooded eyes.

‘No doubt you will tell me.’

Ava knew it was irrational. She knew she had no right to expect something so fleeting, so long ago, to have stayed with him as it had with her. She hadn’t realised until that moment how deep she was into this fantasy. She really had to stop it now—unless she was keen on full shake-down humiliation.

‘I’m waiting,’ he said.

LUCY ELLIS has four loves in life: books, expensive lingerie, vintage films and big, gorgeous men who have to duck going through doorways. Weaving aspects of them into her fiction is the best part of being a romance writer. Lucy lives in a small cottage in the foothills outside Melbourne.

Recent titles by the same author:

PRIDE AFTER HER FALL

THE MAN SHE SHOULDN’T CRAVE

UNTOUCHED BY HIS DIAMONDS

INNOCENT IN THE IVORY TOWER

Did you know these titles are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

A Dangerous Solace

Lucy Ellis

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

GIANLUCA BENEDETTI APPRAISED the shapeless suit and then the woman in it. She had potential, if she ditched the floppy large-brimmed hat, took down her hair, stepped out of the suit and started all over again from scratch. She had the essentials. She was tall, her legs were good from what he could tell, and there was a liveliness to her that she seemed to be repressing as she went to stamp her foot but then arrested the gesture.

Which drew his attention to her shoes. They didn’t quite fit the image of the woman wearing them. Elegant low heels, graceful arch, red leather slingback, with a complicated knot of red silk flowers running over the toes. The shoes were fussy and feminine. The woman in them was not.

‘Give me back my money!’ Her voice was clear, crisp and no-nonsense, for all she was obviously angry. Gianluca could tell by her accent she was Australian, which accounted for the plain speaking.

The guy was giving her the runaround. In the crowded domain of the arcade people were making a detour around the brunette standing in front of the kiosk. She looked like a ticking time bomb ready to go off.

The foot trembling with indecision above the pavement came down with a decided stamp.

‘I am not going anywhere until you refund me that money. I gave your company forty-eight hours’ notice. It says clearly on your website that refunds are possible with twenty-four hours’ notice.’

Gianluca shut down the European markets, pocketed his personal device, and strolled away from the doorway of the coffee bar he’d been frequenting all his adult life in Rome.

Impeccable manners towards women instilled in him by a Sicilian grandmother had him approach her.

‘Signora, may I be of some service to you?’

She didn’t even bother to turn around. ‘I am not a signora, I am a signorina. And no, you may not help me. I’m perfectly capable of helping myself. Go and ply your trade with some other idiot tourist.’

Gianluca leaned closer. She emitted a light fragrance, something floral, definitely too feminine for this dragon of a woman.

‘My trade?’

‘Gigolo. Escort. Servicer of women. Go away. I don’t want you.’

Gianluca stilled. This dragon thought he was a male prostitute?

He looked her up and down. She hadn’t even bothered to turn around. Common sense told him to shrug and walk away.

‘So, signorina...’ he laid on the emphasis ‘...maybe you’re hard up, yes? You need to remember what it is to be a woman?’

‘Excuse me?’ She turned around, angling up her face, and in a single stroke Gianluca lost every preconception he had built around her.

The shapeless clothes, her tone—he’d taken her to be older, harder...certainly less attractive than—this. She had creamy skin, wide brows, amazing cheekbones and—what was most intriguing—soft, lush lips. A veritable ripe strawberry of a mouth. But her face was dominated by a pair of ugly white-rimmed sunglasses, and he had to resist the urge to tug them away and get the full effect.

Although he definitely got a sense of her eyes widening.

‘It’s you!’ she said.

He raised a brow. ‘Have we met?’

This wasn’t an unknown scenario over the years. His past football career—two years of kicking a ball around professionally for Italy—combined with his title had given him something of a public profile beyond the usual roaming grounds of Roman society. He made sure his tone offered no encouragement.

The dragon-who-wasn’t took a step back.

‘No,’ she said fast, as if warding him off.

He became aware that she was looking around as if searching for an escape route, and for some reason his own body tensed. He recognised he was readying himself to give chase.

Madre di Dio, what was going on?

A pulse pounded like a tiny drum at the base of her throat, and he couldn’t have said why but it held his attention. She made a soft sound of panic. His eyes flicked up to catch hers and sexual awareness erupted between them. It was so fast, so strong, it took him entirely off guard.

He stepped towards her, but she didn’t shift an inch. Her chin tipped up and her eyes flared wide, as if she was waiting for something.

Something from him.

Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

Basta! This was getting him nowhere.

Irritated by his own unprecedented behaviour—getting involved with a strange woman on the street, allowing his libido to get away from him, lingering as if he had the day to while away when he had a meeting lined up across town—he did what he should have done when he’d emerged from the coffee bar five minutes ago.

‘In that case, enjoy your stay in Rome, signorina.’

He’d only gone a few steps when he found himself turning around.

She was still standing there, swamped by that god-awful jacket and wearing those trousers which did nothing for her, and yet...

He was noticing other things about her—the pink of her nose, the slightly hectic expression on her face. She’d been crying.

It stirred something in him. A memory.

A weeping woman usually left him cold. He knew all about female manipulation. He’d grown up observing it with his mother and sisters. Tears were usually a woman’s go-to device for getting her own way. It never ceased to amaze him how a pretty bauble or a promise could dry them up.

But instead of walking away he strode over to the kiosk, read the sign that told him this was Fenice Tours, which was run by a subsidiary of the travel conglomerate Benedetti International had business with, and took out his phone. As he thumbed in the number he told the guy he had sixty seconds to refund the turista for her ticket or he’d close the place down.

With a few more well-placed instructions he handed over his phone. The man took it with a sceptical look that faded as his employer’s angry voice buzzed like a blowfly on the other end.

‘Mi scusi, Principe. It was a—a misunderstanding,’ the guy stammered.

Gianluca shrugged. ‘Apologise to the lady, not to me.’

‘Si, si—scusa tanto, signora.’

With gritted teeth she accepted the euros. For all the fuss she had made, Gianluca noticed she didn’t bother to check them, just folded them silently into her bag—a large leather affair that, like her clothes, seemed to be part of an attempt to weigh herself down.

‘Grazie,’ she said, as if it were torn from her.

There was no reason to linger. Gianluca was at the kerb opening up his low-slung Lamborghini Jota when he looked back.

She had followed him and was watching him, her expression almost comical in its war between curiosity and resentment—and something else...

It was the something else that kept him from jumping into the car.

She seemed to gird herself before walking over.

‘Excuse me.’ Her voice was as stiff as her manner, but it didn’t take away from the rather lovely combination of her full mouth and dramatic cheekbones, or the way her caution made her seem oddly prim. It was the stiff formality that had his eyes locked to hers.

‘I’m curious,’ she said.

He could feel her gaze searching his face as if hunting for something. Curious, but not thankful, he noted, amused despite the wariness that told him something about this wasn’t right.

‘Could you really have shut it down?’

She angled up a stubborn chin made somewhat less forthright by the soft press of a dimple and hard suspicion narrowed his gaze.

Where had he seen that gesture before?

Yet he gave her a tight smile, a smile that didn’t reach his eyes—the one he handed out to women as a courtesy, telling them he recognised that they were female, and as a man he appreciated it, but alas it could go no further.

‘Signorina,’ he drawled, ‘this is Rome. I’m a Benedetti. Anything’s possible.’

He was pushing through the mess that was Rome’s mid-morning traffic when her reaction registered. She hadn’t looked flattered. She hadn’t even looked shocked. She had looked furiously angry.

And against his better judgement it had him turning the car around.

CHAPTER TWO

AVA STOOD AT the kerb as the low-slung sports machine vanished into the traffic and let shock reverberate through her body until the only thing left was the burn.

Benedetti.

All she could think was that this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.

Over the years she’d had a few false alarms—moments when a deep voice, an Italian accent, a pair of broad shoulders had brought her head snapping around, her senses suddenly firing. But reality would always intervene.

Clearly reality had decided to slap her in the face.

It came over her in a rush. The flick of a broad tanned wrist at the ignition of a growling Ducati motorcycle. The tightening of her arms around his muscle-packed waist as they made their getaway from a wedding he’d had no interest in and she’d been cut up about. The memory of a flight into a summer’s night seven long years ago that she still couldn’t shake.

It was all Ava could do as she stood in the street to keep the images—those highly sexual images—at bay.

Finding herself in the early hours of a summer morning lying in the grass on the Palatine Hill, her dress rucked up around her waist, under the lean, muscular weight of a young Roman god come to life was not something a woman forgot in a hurry.

Finding herself repeating it an hour later, in a bed that had once belonged to a king, in a palazzo built literally for a princess, on a beautiful piazza in the centre of the city, and again and again into the first flush of dawn, was also something that had stayed with her. And all the while he had lavished her with praise in broken English, making her feel like a goddess he had every right to plunder.

In the glare of a new morning she had slipped from the palace unnoticed and, Cinderella-fashion, left her shoes behind in her haste to flee what had promised to be an awkward aftermath.

Her feet bare, her frothy blue dress hiked up around her knees to allow her to run, she had been in equal measure elated and a little triste, her body pleasurably aching from all the unfamiliar clenching of muscles she hadn’t known she had.

She’d flagged down a taxi and driven away, and if she had looked back it had been only to fix the memory, because she’d known it would never happen again.

It had been a moment out of time.

She’d flown back to Sydney the next day, resumed her climb up the corporate ladder and assumed she would never see him again.

Clearly she had assumed wrongly.

Pulling herself together, Ava stepped away from the kerb and told herself she most definitely wasn’t going to allow the memory of one night with a Ducati-straddling, over-sexed soccer player to wreak havoc with her plans. She’d been handling everything so well up until this point.

Perhaps too well, niggled her conscience as she battled her way along the pavement. Wasn’t she supposed to be heartbroken?

Most women would be. Being dumped on the eve of expecting a proposal from your long-time boyfriend in a foreign city and then travelling on in that city on your own would unsettle anybody.

Fortunately she was made of sterner stuff.

Which was why she was on her way to the Spanish Steps, to join a tour of literary sites in Rome.

Ava pulled her hat down hard on top of her head. She certainly wasn’t going to allow a freak sighting of one of Italy’s natural wonders in a city street to derail her from her purpose.

So what if that puffy pale blue bridesmaid’s dress was buried deep in the back of her closet at home? So she’d kept the dress? So she was in Rome?

It had nothing to do with that long-ago night when everything she’d believed about herself had been turned on its head.

Well, not this time. Nowadays she had it all under control—when she wasn’t careering hot-headedly around the streets of Rome looking for the...what was it...? She consulted her map. The Piazza di Spagna.

She ignored the racing of her heart, told herself there was no way she was going to fumble through an Italian phone directory searching for the address of the Palazzo Benedetti. She mustn’t even think that! Rome had definitely been a mistake. The sooner she picked up that hire car tomorrow and headed north the better.

Now—Ava looked around in confusion, discovering she had walked into a square she didn’t recognise—where on earth was she?

* * *

‘This is pazzo,’ Gianluca muttered under his breath as he idled his car across from the little piazza. He’d followed her. He’d put the Jota into a screaming U-turn and cruised after that flapping hat, those flashing red shoes.

Inferno, what was he doing? He was Gianluca Benedetti. He didn’t kerb-crawl a woman. And not this kind of female—one who wore men’s trousers and a silk shirt buttoned up to her chin and seemed to have no conception of what it was to be a woman.

Many women had creamy skin, long legs, and if they did not have quite the drama of her bone structure they certainly did a lot more with it.

She wasn’t his type. Yet here he was.

He could see her pacing backwards and forwards over the cobblestones, holding something aloft. He got the impression it was a map from the way she was positioning it.

His phone vibrated. He palmed it.

‘Where are you?’ Gemma’s voice was faintly exasperated.

Stalking a turista.

‘Stuck in traffic.’

He glanced at the piece of Swiss design on his arm. He was extremely late. What in the hell was he doing?

‘What do I tell the clients?’

‘Let them cool their heels. I’m on my way.’

He pocketed the phone and made up his mind. As he strode across the piazza he wondered at the complication he was inviting into his life.

She was walking slowly backwards, clearly trying to get the name of the square from a plaque on the wall above her. He could have saved her the effort and told her she’d have no luck there. It was the name of the building.

She careened into him.

‘Oh, I do beg your pardon,’ she trotted out politely, reeling around.

The good manners, he noted, were for other people.

It was his last half-amused thought as he collided with her eyes. One part of his brain wondered if they were coloured contact lenses—except judging by the rest of her attire he doubted she’d go to the trouble.

No, the eye colour was hers, all right. An extraordinary sea-green. One of those colours that changed with the light or her mood. Eyes that shoved the rock out of the mouth of the cave inside him he’d had sealed up for many years. Eyes and a mouth, and a soft, yielding body which she had taken away from him when he had needed it most.

Her features coalesced around those unusual eyes and the impact fairly slammed into him. The other part of his brain was free-falling.

‘You!’

His sentiments exactly.

The softer note in her voice long gone, she leapt back in horror. But he noticed at the same time that she wrapped her hand around his arm, as if anchoring herself to him. Which struck him as entirely ironic, given the last time he’d laid eyes on this girl she’d been so anxious to escape from his bed she’d left her shoes behind in her rush.

From nowhere a resentment he hadn’t known he was carrying ricocheted like a stray bullet around his body.

What in the hell was she doing back in Rome? Back in his life?

His eyes narrowed on her.

‘Are you following me?’ she accused swiftly.

‘Si.’ He was not going to deny it. Why would he?

The look on her face was priceless.

‘You appear to be lost, signorina,’ he observed smoothly, raking his gaze over her eyes, her mouth, the amazing clarity of her skin. ‘And as we already know one another—’

If anything the rapt horror on her face only increased, heightening his sense of satisfaction.

‘Allow me to offer some more assistance.’

She tugged self-consciously at the atrocious silk shirt and stood a little straighter, sticking out that chin.

He was going to enjoy making her squirm, and then he would let her go.

‘Is this a profession for you? Following women around the city, pushing help on them whether they want it or not?’

‘You appear to be the exception to my rule to let a woman struggle on alone.’

‘Do I appear to be struggling to you?’

‘No, you appear to be lost.’

She pursed her lips, staring rather pointedly at the map. She was torn—it was all over her expressive face. The indecision and—more satisfying to his ego—anxiety.

Gianluca told himself a sensible man would walk away. Anything between them now was beneath him. He’d made the identification. He knew exactly who this woman was—or who she purported to be. Seven years ago he’d entwined all kinds of ridiculous romantic imaginings around this girl, none of them bearing scrutiny in the harsh light of day.

Besides, on this day she was proving entirely ordinary—a little frumpy, in fact. Certainly not a woman he would glance at twice. Which didn’t explain why he’d turned the Jota around and right now was unable to take his eyes off her.

‘It’s too late now anyhow,’ she muttered to herself.

Si, far too late. Although unexpectedly he was fighting a very Italian male need to assert himself with this woman.

‘I’ve missed the start of the tour,’ she said, as if it was somehow his fault.

Gianluca waited.

She stared holes in the map.

‘We’re supposed to be meeting at the Spanish Steps,’ she added grudgingly.

‘I see.’ Not that he did see.

He decided to cut to the chase and draw down the time this was taking.

‘The Spanish Steps are straight down here.’ He pointed it out. ‘Make a left and then a second right.’

She was trying to follow his directions, which meant she was forced to look at him, and at the same time she was fumbling to put on her ugly sunglasses. Seeing as the sky was overcast, it was clearly a clumsy attempt at disguise.

Something about her hasty and long overdue attempt to hide irritated him. She clearly wasn’t very good at subterfuge, and yet she had been a true genius at escape seven years ago. Gianluca found he was tempted to confiscate the glasses.

Safe behind the shaded lenses, she tipped up her glorious cheekbones. ‘I suppose I should thank you.’

‘Don’t feel obligated, signorina,’ he inserted softly.

Those lips pursed, but nothing could destroy their luscious shape.

Pushing aside the knowledge that this promised endless complications, he reached into his jacket and took out a card, took hold of her resistant hand and closed her fingers over it. They felt warm, smooth and surprisingly delicate.

She snatched her hand back and glared at him as if he’d touched her inappropriately.

A far cry from the last time he’d had his hands on her.

‘If you change your mind about thanking me, signorina, I’ll be at Rico’s Bar tonight around eleven,’ he said, wondering what the hell he thought he was doing. ‘It’s a private party but I’ll leave your name at the door. Enjoy your tour.’

‘You don’t even know my name,’ she called after him, and it sounded almost like an accusation.

His gut knotted.

Exactly. If he’d known her name seven years ago this little piece of unfinished business would have been forgotten.

Just another girl on another night.

But it hadn’t been just another night.

It was a night scored on his soul, and the woman standing in the square was a major part of that. Si, it explained why his chest felt tight and his hands were clenched into fists by his sides.

Ruthlessness was in his blood, and Gianluca never forgot he was a Benedetti. In this fabled city it was impossible to forget. His ancestors had led Roman legions, lent money to Popes and financed wars down the ages. There was enough blood flowing through the family annals to turn the Tyrrhenian Sea red.

It enabled him to look at her with detachment.

‘How about Strawberries?’ he drawled. The quiet menace in his tone was usually enough to send CEOs of multinational corporations pale as milk.

She lowered the sunglasses and those green eyes skewered him.

A dark admiration stirred. This woman had the makings of a formidable opponent.

He could enjoy this.

Basta! This was no vendetta. She was, after all, a woman, and he—naturally—wasn’t that kind of man. He was a chivalrous, civilised, honourable member of Roman society. This was merely an exercise in curiosity, in putting a footnote to a certain episode in his life. The first and only time a woman had run from him.

He slid into the Jota and gunned the engine.

The fact his knuckles showed white on the wheel proved nothing.

But as he merged with the chaotic traffic again he recognised it was not his Benedetti side that was in the ascendant here. It was the Sicilian blood from his mother’s people, and it responded instinctively to the knowledge that this little piece of unfinished business was at last in his sights once more.

CHAPTER THREE