‘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

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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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

AVA FORCED HERSELF to block the encounter out of her head as she followed his directions and caught her first glimpse in seven years of the Spanish Steps. Despite the crowd she found her tour group and fastened on, all too aware she was already hot and tired and flustered.

He’d followed her.

Yes, but he likes women. That’s his modus operandi. He sees a girl. He takes her.

He saw you, he wants you.

Ava tried to focus on what the guide was saying about Keats’s death, but all she could think about was her own small death of pride, which had her desperately wanting to go to this club tonight, to see him again...

She shut her eyes and screwed up her resolve. She wasn’t the kind of woman who slept with random men—and that was all it ever could be with a guy like Benedetti. A night, a handful of hours—entertainment for him.

You liked it. He saw you. He wants you.

It wasn’t any kind of reason for offering herself up to be hurt again.

It’s not as if you’ve got anything to lose. You’re a single woman and this is Rome.

For a moment her resolve slipped and her surroundings rushed in. For beyond the hurried crowd and the noise of traffic was the city itself, imprinted on her mind by countless Hollywood films. Bella Italia, where magical things were supposed to happen to single girls if they threw coins in fountains. And sometimes those things did happen—but this girl had misread the signs.

Every time she got it wrong. She wasn’t going to get it wrong again.

Emotions welled up unexpectedly, filling her throat, making it difficult to breathe. She’d been crying again this morning and she never cried! Not even when Bernard had rung her three days ago, at the terminal in Sydney International an hour before take-off, to tell her he wouldn’t be coming to Rome.

Just as her realisation had begun to take shape that there would be no romantic proposal in front of the Trevi Fountain, and before she could examine the overwhelming feeling of relief that had washed over her, he’d broken the news that he had found another woman—and that with her he had passion.

It had been a low blow, even for Bernard. He’d never been particularly sensitive to her feelings, but she had assumed up until that moment that half the blame for their lacklustre sex life was shared by him.

Apparently not. Apparently it was all down to her.

‘Passion?’ she had shouted down the phone. ‘We could have had passion. In Rome!’

Yet ever since—on the long-haul flight, on the taxi ride from Fiumicino Airport to her historic hotel, over the two nights she’d spent staring at the walls as she listlessly ate her room-service dinner in front of the Italian melodrama she was just starting to get hooked on—Ava had nursed a suspicion that she had chosen Rome as the site of her proposal for entirely romantic reasons that clearly had nothing to do with Bernard.

She was beginning to suspect there were unplumbed depths of longing inside of her for a different life.

A romantic life.

But it was no use. Romance belonged in the movies, not in real life. Certainly not in her life. She’d learned that young, from watching the break-up of her parents’ marriage, seeing her mentally ill mother struggle to support them on a pension, that the only way to survive as a woman was to become financially independent.

So she had worked hard to get where she was, but it meant she had never had time for a social life, had never gone through the rites of passage her peers had taken for granted.

As a consequence she had done a very silly thing seven years ago, and another silly thing when she’d convinced herself to marry a man she didn’t love.

No, Bernard was not the right man for her. But neither was an oversexed soccer player who thought he could just pick up a woman like a coin in the gutter and put her in his pocket.

Her fist opened to reveal the embossed card she’d been carrying around for the last half hour. She held it up and read the simply inscribed name and several contact numbers. A memory slid like a stiletto knife between her ribs. All those numbers—but she’d rung his numbers before, hadn’t she? None of them led to him.

Giving herself a shake, Ava slipped away from the group. She was going back to the hotel.

Everything was a mess and it was his fault.

Not Bernard’s. What had she been thinking, being with Bernard for two long years? Going so far as to orchestrate a romantic proposal? Booking the plane fares, a luxury hotel, a driving tour of Tuscany...?

What had possessed her to set up such a ridiculous romantic scenario with a man she didn’t love, in this city of all cities...?

Ava’s heart began to pound, because she had the answer in her hot little hand.

* * *

What was she doing back in Rome?

It was the million-dollar question and it had Gianluca entertaining scenarios that, frankly, were beneath him.

Behind him the private party was in full swing—a welcome back to Rome for his cousin Marco and his new wife—but Gianluca found himself constantly scanning the piazza below for a certain dressed-down brunette.

He hadn’t been able to get her out of his head all day. It wasn’t the fresh-faced girl who had lain down with him in the grass on the Palatino who was rifling through his thoughts, though, but the tense, angry woman who looked as if she hadn’t had a man between her thighs in a good many years. The sort of woman who, for whatever reason, had forgotten how to be a woman—although in this lady’s case he suspected it might be a wilful act.

He smiled slightly, wondered how hard it would be to perform that miracle.

Given the sexual attraction that had flared between them in the street today, not hard. Anger, he acknowledged, could be a powerful aphrodisiac.

His smile faded. His parents had conducted that kind of relationship. Volatile, glass-breaking performances on his Sicilian mother’s side, and passive-aggressive acts of sabotage from his father as he withheld money, access to the family jewellery, use of the Benedetti palazzi dotted around the country. Yes, the married state had a great deal to recommend it.

The irony was that he was here celebrating a wedding. The advent of a baby. The things that made up happiness in other people’s lives. Just not if you had Benedetti attached to your name.

It was a lonely thought and he pushed it aside. Life was good. He was young, fit and obscenely successful. Women fell at his feet. Men scrambled to get out of his way. Everything he touched turned to gold these days. Forget the dragon. Forget the past. Take those lessons and apply them to what was to come now.

He turned away from his contemplation of the famous square below and strolled across the terrace to join the party.

* * *

‘Signorina, we sit here all night or I take you somewhere else? Give me something to work with!’

Across the road Ava could see women in tiny scraps of nothing much going happily into the popular nightspot. She shoved money at the driver, took a breath and launched herself out of the cab. The cool air licked around her legs and she almost dived back in.

She knew she was being silly. The burgundy red cocktail dress came to her knees and covered her shoulders and arms. It was perfectly acceptable. Perhaps it clung to her long thighs as she moved, and her calves in black stockings felt exposed as she made her way across the road, heels clicking on the pavement, but nobody was going to laugh at her and point.

As she approached the glass front of the upmarket nightclub she began to feel a little differently. The pulsing blue and gold neon lights gave a dreamlike quality to the atmosphere, and far from feeling on show she realised for once that with her hair and her dress and her heels she fitted right in. There was nothing show-offish about her appearance.

She had a very real fear of making a spectacle of herself in public. Growing up, she had seen her mum’s illness provide far too many opportunities for that to happen. She had set up her life to avoid social situations as much as possible, but tonight she didn’t have much choice.

The doorman said something pleasant to her in Italian and Ava found herself inside, waiting behind the other patrons, relieved she had dressed up. For the umpteenth time her fingers went to the ends of her hair.

This afternoon she’d taken her long brown plait to the hairdresser, and after a process of a great deal of pointing and gesturing her hair was now swinging with more bounce and life than it had ever had around her shoulders. She’d left that hairdresser feeling as chic as any Roman woman, very modern, and in control of her own destiny once more.

As with cutting several inches off her hair, it had been her choice to wear a cocktail dress. That it was brand-new, bought today, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn a frock had absolutely nothing to do with a man this morning telling her she had forgotten how to be a woman.

She couldn’t see him anyhow as she came down the steps and made her way slowly through the crowded bar. Confusion assailed her. Should she wait? Should she ask for his table? Worryingly, the place seemed to be full of beautiful women not wearing very much clothing. She couldn’t possibly compete.

As if to hammer this home a glamorous blonde slunk past her on stab-your-heart-out heels, scantily clad in a dress that looked sewn on. Ava followed her progress, along with every man in the vicinity, although her thoughts—She must be cold—probably didn’t align with theirs.

Perhaps she’d over-estimated the transformative powers of a new hairstyle?

Feeling her confidence slipping away, Ava scanned the room, spotted the winding stairs at either end. There was another level. She caught sight of the blonde making her wiggly way up and up. Should she go upstairs? Should she ask for his table?

For the first time it occurred to Ava with a stab of unease that the invitation had been general, more along the lines of come along—enjoy yourself. Not specific—not I find you attractive, perhaps even on some subliminal level remember you, and I want to spend some time with you. It was entirely possible she had misinterpreted him.

Yes, Ava, you’ve got it wrong again...

But in that moment she caught sight of a dark-haired woman in a burgundy dress staring back at her across the room. Her eyes were made up with kohl and lashings of mascara, dark and mysterious, her mouth was a vivid splash of red colour like a full-blown rose, explosive and passionate. She was something other than beautiful. She was dramatic.

It wasn’t until she lifted her fingertips once more to her hair that Ava experienced the little shock of recognition. It was a mirrored wall. The woman staring back at her was—well, her.

She ignored the thundering voices that told her she was lining herself up for a fall and made her way upstairs.

* * *

Marco handed him a fresh beer. ‘To the future.’

This was the first time Gianluca had been able to catch up with his cousin since the massive wedding back in Ragusa. They’d played professional football together in their early twenties. Marco had been dropped due to injury; Gianluca had cut his contract at the height of his career and fame to perform the military service expected of a Benedetti male.

He was still feeling the reverberations of that early shot at sporting immortality. Soccer was his country’s religion, and for two short years he had been its idol—Rome’s favourite son—and nobody let him forget it.

‘Your future,’ he amended, and scanned the room for the bride. Sure enough she was nearby, deep in a huddle with her girlfriends. She was also noticeably pregnant. She saw them and made her way over.

‘We were just toasting the Benedetti heir,’ Gianluca informed her, kissing each warm cheek she proffered gently.

‘That’s your son, not mine,’ Marco reminded him.

‘There aren’t going to be any, my friend. So drink up.’

‘According to Valentina there will be.’

‘You’ll fall in love, Gianluca,’ said Tina Trigoni, fitting herself into the curve of her husband’s arm. She barely came up to his shoulder. ‘And before you know it you’ll have six sons and six daughters. You’d better,’ she added. ‘I have no intention of sacrificing my children to the Benedetti legacy.’

‘Valentina—’ began Marco, but Gianluca gave her a faint smile.

‘Glad you’ve been paying attention, Tina.’

‘Although you’ll never settle down while you date these bubbleheads.’

He lifted a brow.

‘Women with bubbles over their heads—like in the cartoons,’ said Tina, making an illustrative gesture. ‘Blank bubbles for other people to fill the words in.’

Gianluca privately acknowledged she wasn’t far off the mark. But then he wasn’t looking for a mother for his children.

‘You’ve been talking to my mother.’

‘God, no. I’m not that brave. You do know she thinks a twenty-year-old Sicilian virgin would fill the nursery? I heard her talking to your sisters about it.’

Marco snorted. ‘Does your mother know you at all?’

Did his mother know him? Hardly. And that was the point. The Benedettis threw their boys out to be raised like Romulus and Remus in Rome’s foundation myth, to be suckled by the she-wolf of the military until they came of age.

His mother had conformed to the Benedetti traditions like all the women who came before her and expected him to do the same.

No, his mother didn’t know him—at all.

‘Find me a wife then, Tina,’ he said derisively. ‘A good, plump Sicilian virgin and I’ll follow all the customs.’

‘Find you a wife and thousands of hopeful women will weep,’ Marco observed, swigging his beer.

But Valentina looked interested. ‘I don’t know about virgins—are there any left over the age of twenty-one?’

Completely out of nowhere his mind reverted to a pair of unusual green eyes. There were some, he thought. Once. A long time ago.

‘But frankly, Gianluca, I don’t know if I should introduce any of my friends to you. It’s not as if you’re ever serious about a woman.’

‘Her friends are queuing up to be introduced,’ inserted Marco. ‘I’m glad I don’t make the kind of money you do.’

‘Yes, because then I would have married you for your money,’ said Valentina lightly, ‘instead of for your charm.’ She gave her husband a smart look. ‘Besides, I don’t think they’re entirely after his money, caro.’

Gianluca listened to Marco and his wife banter and for a moment acknowledged that this was what he would miss. All going well, Marco and Tina would grow old together, nurse grandchildren on their laps, reminisce about a life well lived.

In forty years’ time... He came to a dead stop. The way he was going he’d be a rich man in an empty castle. He looked past the happy couple and saw only his parents’ screaming matches, their empty lives performed on the stage set that was the Palazzo Benedetti. One of the most admired pieces of private real estate in Rome. If only people knew the generations of unhappy women who haunted its corridors.

His own mother had been a stunningly beautiful hot-blooded girl from the hills outside Ragusa. Maria Trigoni had married into the social stratosphere and contorted herself into the role of Roman principessa. She had played fitfully at being wife and mother when she hadn’t been completely taken up with her lovers or her much-desired role in society.

Her only real loyalty was to her family in the south—the Trigonis. Marco’s father was her brother. She would vanish down there for long periods of time. He remembered each one of those disappearances like cuts to his back. The first time it had happened he’d been three and had cried for a week. The second time he’d been six and had been beaten for his tears. When he was ten he’d tried to telephone his mother in Ragusa but she’d refused to take his call.

Privately Gianluca suspected the moment a woman put on the Benedetti wedding tiara she lost a bit of her soul. So sue him—he wouldn’t be passing on that little tradition.

* * *

He swigged his beer, barely tasting it as it went down. He had no intention of settling down, providing an heir to the Benedetti name. It was enough that he’d restored its honour.

Besides, after two years on active service he knew better than most that life was lived in the moment, and at this particular moment he was enjoying a little variety in his life. He knew it irritated his mother, disappointed his grandmother, but as a Benedetti male it was almost expected that he would pursue women in numbers.

The old cliché that there was safety in numbers was true. He had a reputation now for being a bachelor who couldn’t be hooked. He played up to it.

As if conjured by the direction of his thoughts a woman stepped out onto the terrace.

She was slender and curvy all at once, and the lights turned her hair platinum.

‘There’s my cue,’ said Gianluca.

‘Fast cars and fast women—this is why I refuse to introduce you to my girlfriends,’ Tina called mischievously after him.

As he approached, the blonde turned up a flawless face and batted long lashes over her Bambi eyes.

‘Come and dance with me, Gianluca.’

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ he said, shouldering past her. ‘Let’s get a drink...’ For the life of him he couldn’t remember her name.

‘Donatella,’ she said coldly, in that moment losing the little-girl act.

‘Donatella—si.’ He suspected from her tone that he’d forgotten her name more than once tonight. It wasn’t important. She’d only latched on to him because of his name, his reputation.

He slid a hand into his jacket, dragged out his PDA. He’d have a drink, do some work, lose the blonde. But she was a good excuse to put his head back into what mattered—making a deal, setting up the next one, keeping an eye on what the Asia-Pacific markets were doing overnight. Not contemplating what Marco had found seemingly so effortlessly: a good woman. While he, Rome’s pre-eminent bachelor, had been stood up by a sexless Australian dragon who clearly didn’t know her loss was what’s-her-name’s gain...

He rifled through his mind for the blonde’s name again, gave up, and hit the bar for another drink.

* * *

Ava gave her name to the hostess and naturally only drew a blank. Part of her had hoped she would just be waved on in.

‘Strawberries,’ she whispered.

‘Scusi, signorina?’

Ava cleared her throat. ‘I believe I’m listed under the name “Strawberries”.’

Her mouth felt dry, her skin prickled, and she was sure the couple behind her were finding this hilarious. She closed her eyes briefly to fortify herself. Public humiliation suddenly felt all too close. ‘I’m Signor Benedetti’s guest.’

Just saying it made this all real, and Ava felt her Dutch courage—a glass of white wine before she left the hotel and two reds downstairs—curdle in her stomach like milk left in the sun.

‘Ah, si.’

The hostess seemed to find nothing unusual in a woman being listed as a fruit on Gianluca Benedetti’s guest list, and the thought made Ava’s belly clench a little tighter.

She made her way through a crowd of women in slips and heels and men in Armani before coming to a standstill.

Gianluca Benedetti was lounging like some kind of broad-shouldered Caesar, with his arms thrown across the back of a black leather settee, his powerful shoulders and chest delineated in a form-fitting dark shirt. His high cheekbones, sensuous mouth and uncompromisingly firm jaw gave him the look of one of Michelangelo’s marble carvings of male beauty.

Genetics had been so good to him there had to be a price. Spitefully Ava wished she could be around to see it exacted from him. He wasn’t alone—as if she had ever expected him to be alone. What had she thought? He’d be waiting for her? This was some sort of date?

His head was angled negligently to one side for a scantily clad blonde to whisper sweet nothings in his ear.

The blonde, naturally. The stab-your-heart-out heels blonde.

A sick feeling invaded her insides.

She was never going to be that woman.

For a teetering instant Ava was transported to that long-ago reception for her brother’s wedding. She had been a socially awkward young woman who just hadn’t fitted in with the glamorous, international crowd, watching from the sidelines as Gianluca Benedetti—Italian soccer star and possibly the most desired man on the planet—reclined on a banquette, gesticulating as he talked football with another guy. He’d had two girls wrapped around him like climbing vines, blonde and brunette. The equivalent of gelato flavours for grown men. He hadn’t even been paying attention to them.

At the time she had christened them vines, but, oh, how she had wanted to be like them. Just for one night to be a sexy, no-consequences girl, in slip and heels, hanging off the hottest guy at the party.

Even as she had struggled to come to terms with the odds of her ever being that kind of girl her eyes had moved over the object of their attention and for the first time in her life she’d been hit by something and hadn’t been able to hit back.

The tsunami of feeling that night had carried her past her inhibitions—past the little voice of caution that always asked if this was the right thing to do, if there would be consequences for her actions, the voice of a girl who’d had to look after herself from a very young age. That night she hadn’t cared about the consequences.

She had only cared about him.

Having him.

Feeling sick now, she was unable to credit that she had stepped so easily back into the same shoes, that she had learned nothing from her experiences.

Before she could even formulate her next move he was getting up, throwing back those broad shoulders and unexpectedly moving her way. It was so sudden her first instinct was to turn tail and flee, but she wasn’t an uncertain girl any more. She could handle this.

Sucking in her tummy, adjusting the line of her dress, she prepared herself for what she would say.

I came but I wish I hadn’t. You’re a womaniser, a cad and a bounder, and I wish I’d never met you.

He was less than a metre away when she realised he wasn’t coming over to her. His hard gaze moved unseeingly over her, as if she were one of the faceless crowd, and Ava realised she wasn’t going to have her moment.

He’d issued the invitation but he’d already forgotten about her. She hadn’t even made enough impact this morning for her face to register with him.

Her stomach buckled.

She watched him moving easily but inexorably towards the exit, the doors opening and swallowing him up.

Ava only became aware that she was struggling to push her way through the crowd when someone stepped on her foot and she lost a shoe. Pausing to scoop it up, she pushed through the exit doors, then virtually ran outside. She hesitated on the steps leading down into the square, but only to scan desperately for the direction he’d taken.

She gave a start as she caught sight of him, moving out of the darkness across the square.

Shoving it all aside—a lifetime of prudence, plans and protecting herself from men like this one...well, any man really...not to mention leaving her perfectly good A-line coat behind—Ava began to run after him.

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