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‘So how did you manage to swing this?’ Lola asked as she broke a bread stick in half and crunched on it.
‘What? A date with you?’
‘The table,’ she told him.
‘Oh, that bit wasn’t difficult. Certainly not as difficult as securing the date.’
‘No?’ She studied him in disbelief. ‘That’s why all those people outside are virtually trying to break the door down to get in, is it?’
He shrugged. ‘I speak Italian. I do a lot of business here. I adore the country—the food, the wine and the culture. Given all those things, finding a table in a good restaurant doesn’t pose much of a problem.’
He made it sound as easy as ABC! Lola finished chomping on her bread stick and picked up another, to find him looking at her with reluctant approval. He obviously did like women who enjoyed their food, she thought in amazement, but that did not mean that she had to go over the top and completely pig out!
She put the bread stick carefully back down in front of her. ‘I don’t want to spoil my appetite,’ she explained.
‘Maybe we’d better order?’ he suggested with a smile, and he must have elevated an eyebrow or moved a broad shoulder or something, Lola decided, since the waiter appeared as if on cue.
The next couple of minutes were spent discussing the wine list and the recommended dishes and Lola tried to appear interested in her choices, but she might as well have ordered bread and sawdust—for the normal pleasure she took in anticipating her meal had been totally eclipsed by Geraint’s presence.
She felt as gauche as a teenager out on a first date, which was absolutely ridiculous! She had enjoyed lots of dates, and what she had thought was going to be a fairly heavy love-affair with a pilot, not long after she had started at Atalanta Airlines. But she had been far too young to cope with a smooth operator who seemed to be out of the country more often than he was in it.
The memory of that relationship still had the power to make her ask herself incredulously how she could have been such a fool.
The affair had ended before it had even begun—very painfully—with Lola’s shocked discovery that the pilot she had been planning to spend a romantic weekend with already had a fiancée tucked away.
Lola had had her fingers badly burned by the experience. She would never forget the misery she had experienced afterwards—because of his callous deceit more than anything else. And it had managed to put her off serious involvement, though that had been easy to avoid—there hadn’t been anyone else she had remotely fancied enough to contemplate plunging headlong into an affair with them.
Until now.
‘You promised me your life-story,’ she said hastily, and was slightly nonplussed by his reaction.
His shoulders had tensed as if he was suddenly under stress. ‘Did I?’ he queried coolly.
Lola sensed his reluctance, and wondered what had caused it. ‘You know you did!’
His expression was guarded. ‘And what if I told you that I don’t particularly care for talking about myself?’ he questioned.
‘I would say that either you’re repressed or you’ve something to hide!’
‘Touché!’ he laughed. ‘What would you like to know?’
Lola sat back in her seat. ‘Oh, I’m sure that an intelligent man like yourself doesn’t need any help from me,’ she told him sweetly.
His grey eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘Are you teasing me again, Lola Hennessy?’
‘Why?’ she laughed, enjoying herself hugely. ‘Can’t you take it?’
‘Oh, I can take anything you care to throw at me,’ he challenged in a sultry murmur. ‘Anything at all.’
The atmosphere began to crackle with an eroticism which was almost tangible, and Lola found herself unable to look him in the eye. She began fiddling unnecessarily with the thick linen napkin on her lap, and was indescribably pleased when she decided to let his mocking invitation go unanswered and started to speak.
‘I come from Wales,’ he told her, and his musical accent deepened as he went on to describe the country of his birth. ‘Beautiful West Wales—which is wild and dark and thoroughly magnificent!’
Yes, thought Lola at once. Wild and dark and magnificent—just like you. . .
He looked at her keenly. ‘I’m afraid that it’s the classic, corny tale of rags to riches—sure you’re ready for it?’
Beneath the flippant tone and the throw-away statement Lola was convinced that she detected a chink in his steely armour and she found herself intrigued by this apparent streak of vulnerability. For surely it added an extra dimension to the man’s character, rather than detracting from it?
‘Quite ready,’ she told him truthfully, and something in her quiet, almost respectful tone made him grow still for a moment.
‘My father was a coal-miner,’ he began, and his grey eyes darkened with pain. ‘But he suffered a lot of ill health when he was still quite young—along with many others, of course.’ He ran a hand distractedly through his thick, tar-black hair. ‘When I was eight he was finally laid off and given an invalidity pension.’ His voice grew harsh. ‘But it wasn’t enough to feed a family of sparrows—let alone me and Mam and my sister, Catrin.’
He gazed down at the small centrepiece on the table, a glass bowl filled with yellow mimosa, and his features hardened with the memories. ‘So my mother went out to work—doing the only things which an early marriage had qualified her for. She cleaned houses, took in sewing—did whatever she could do which fitted in around Catrin and me. Mostly she was what I suppose you’d call a drudge.’
He shot her a bleak, almost defiant look and Lola suddenly caught a glimpse of the boy behind the man. The boy who had longed to protect his mother from hard work and penury, but because of his tender years and inexperience had been unable to do either.
Which must have been a heavy cross for a proud man like Geraint Howell-Williams to carry, Lola recognised instinctively. ‘And?’ she prompted gently.
‘Oh, it wore her down eventually. And him. His pride baulked at having to let a woman support him. The two of them used to go without to give us children fresh, wholesome food, and ultimately they suffered for it. When the flu epidemic swept Wales, they both succumbed to it. I was ten,’ he added as an afterthought, as if that fact were somehow unimportant.
Lola was no stranger to childhood pain, and she winced in distress as she tried to imagine his anguish at being left an orphan at such a tender age. ‘Oh, Geraint,’ she said softly. ‘How on earth did you manage?’
She saw the sudden deep lines of pain that scored his face, but they were gone again almost immediately—as though over many years he had schooled his expression so as never to betray them.
‘My sister brought me up,’ he told her, smiling for the first time, but the smile was laced with something bitter which Lola could not, for the life of her, work out. ‘She sacrificed her place at university in order to give me mine, years later—and for that I shall forever be in her debt.’ He turned to catch the eye of a waiter, and in profile his proud, craggy features might have been hewn from stone.
But by the time a bottle of mineral water had been placed on the table he seemed to have recovered his usual self-assurance and a frosty light which glittered in the depths of his grey eyes warned Lola that he would not tolerate her sympathy—however well-intentioned.
‘So you’ve heard all my secrets, Lola,’ he told her silkily. ‘Now