LITMIR.BIZ

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nodded.

      He looked around the small apartment. The cozy and inviting undersized sofa didn’t look so cozy as a possible bed. It was several feet too short for his over-six-foot frame. The pull-down bed would have been a slight improvement, but he had no doubt she would refuse to share it with him.

      He looked at the floor with even less pleasure. “I suppose you’ll expect me to bed down on the carpet.”

      Her eyes grew wide and a flush suffused her face. “I don’t expect you to sleep here at all.”

      “I thought we settled this before we left.” It was a blatant untruth. He’d known she would balk at him spending the night.

      She stiffened in pure, independent female outrage. “You’re not sleeping in my apartment.”

      “I am until the auction is over.” His voice was as grim as his mood after dinner as the undesirable pariah. It was not an experience he was used to. Usually women fawned over him, even ex-girlfriends—but not this woman.

      The look of horror that came over her made no improvement on his deteriorating mood.

      “I’m not going to attack you,” he ground out. “I’m here to protect you.”

      “It’s impossible.”

      “Do you have a better solution? I’m not leaving you alone,” he added before she could open her mouth to answer.

      She gnawed at her lower lip in a gesture he remembered from before. It indicated she was in serious thought.

      The look of horror turned to one of disgust. “If you insist on being my bodyguard, you can spring for a suite with two bedrooms at a hotel or sleep in the hall. You pick.”

      He stared at her. It couldn’t be this easy. “A hotel.”

      “Fine. Give me a minute to pack.”

      Elisa threw clothes into a suitcase with little consideration for what she was packing. He’d looked shocked when she suggested the hotel, but she knew how intractable he could be. He would spend the night with her no matter what she wanted. Her apartment was out of the question. Just the thought of sharing such small living space with him made her cringe. She needed a door to shut between them, a room to call her own, a bed that would hold no memories.

      Not that he’d ever shared her bed in this new apartment, but somehow, if he stayed, she knew it would feel tainted by his presence. She would have to move again.

      She refused to consider why he had such a strong impact on her emotions still, or why hate sometimes felt like the other side of a bruised and bleeding love.

      CHAPTER THREE

      LYING in bed in the luxurious hotel suite later, memories she was too exhausted to fight washed over her.

      Seeing him had brought it all back.

      The debilitating pain. The sense of betrayal. The grief of loss, but also the glory of possession.

      For a short while, it had been the most glorious time of her life. She had belonged to someone, had a place in his life. Not a grudging place as she had with her mother. Not an inconvenient place as she had with her father.

      Salvatore had accepted and desired her for herself.

      Or so she had believed.

      If it were possible to go back in time she would go back, not to the point where she had met Salvatore in an effort to make a different choice with him. But she would go back to those four short weeks when she had believed herself loved as she loved, and if she could she would stay there forever.

      She would never know the misery of his defection, the humiliation of his hurtful beliefs about her, the desolation of his lack of commitment to her. All of that would be in a future she would not have to live…if it could be so. Nor would she know the pain of losing the one being she had been certain to belong to forever, who she would have spent a lifetime giving a mother’s love she had only ever dreamed of. 39

      Her mind took her back to the moment when she had realized Salvatore was interested in her.

      She’d been in Milan, attending an estate sale for a woman who was known for her jewelry collection. She remembered that her hotel room had felt stuffy because the air-conditioning unit was broken. The phone had rung just as she stepped out of a cooling shower. She’d considered letting the front desk just take a message, but in the end had traipsed across the room to pick it up, dripping and naked but for a thin towel wrapped around her.

      “Hello?”

      “Elisa. Salvatore here.”

      Salvatore? “My father’s friend?” she squeaked, unable to believe he was calling her in her hotel room in Milan.

      “I hope your friend as well, cara.”

      Oh, he was smooth. “Yes, of course. Is something the matter with him?”

      “Him?”

      “My f-father.” She stumbled over the words, tongue-tied in a way she hadn’t been since adolescence.

      “Why should you think that?” his voice purred down the line at her.

      “You’re calling me.”

      “And a man cannot call a beautiful single woman with any other reason than to discuss her father?”

      The gentle mockery had her knees going weak and she plopped down to sit on the edge of the bed. “Of course, I just…”

      “Come, cara. Surely you realized I was interested in you.”

      Funnily enough, she hadn’t. “You mean because you flirted with me?” she asked, feeling gauche for saying it. But still, “I thought you flirted with every woman.”

      “Do I?”

      “I don’t know.” He was practically a stranger to her. She had grown up with her mother in America and, as close as her father and Salvatore’s father were, she and Salvatore had met only infrequently over the years when she visited her father in Sicily.

      “It seemed like it to me.” He’d certainly flirted with her from the moment he found her on the sunlounger by her father’s pool her second day in Sicily the summer before.

      She could still remember the smooth joke about mermaids and the sexy glint in his eyes. Italian men took female appreciation to whole new levels, but she’d found Sicilians in a class all by themselves. And Salvatore was the most impressive of the lot.

      He had proceeded to flirt with her on and off over the next two weeks whenever he and his family were guests in her father’s home or vice versa. Which, considering how close the two families were, was quite frequent.

      She’d fallen for him like a ton of bricks.

      It had never once occurred to her the feeling might be mutual.

      “You will have to get to know me better,” he was speaking again, “to see that I am not a flirt, cara, far from it.”

      “I will?” She liked the sound of that.

      “Sì.”

      “All right.”

      “I’ll pick you up in forty minutes.”

      “What?” Now? He wanted her to get to know him now?

      “For dinner.”

      “You want to have dinner with me?”

      He made an impatient, but amused sound. “What do you think I am saying here?”

      “That you want to have dinner with me?”

      She might have been born to one of the most notorious and glamorous stars in Hollywood, but she lived a very quiet life and did not play man-woman games. She’d seen too much from a very early age and vowed never to be like her mother or the sycophants

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