LITMIR.BIZ

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it was for a quiet dinner for two. There are two of us in this room right now.’

      His words drenched her in icy shock. Meghan stared incredulously. ‘You never even intended for someone else to come? What about the man you ate lunch with?’

      Alessandro’s expression hardened. ‘He has other plans for the evening. He is a business acquaintance, nothing more.’

      ‘And what am I?’ Her voice rose shrilly, and she pressed a fist to her lips. She moved around the room restlessly, seeking escape, but there was none. She didn’t have a car. She didn’t even know where the villa was. She had no place to go in Spoleto. And Alessandro was blocking the door.

      She’d walked straight into a trap. She’d agreed to it willingly. Who wouldn’t think she deserved this, that she wanted this? Disgust roiled through her, washed over in sickening waves. Terror followed on its heels. She closed her eyes, struggling for composure. Control.

      She opened them, saw Alessandro regarding her with a mixture of curiosity and compassion. She took a deep, shuddering breath. There was always Ana in the kitchen. She could handle this. She had to handle this.

      ‘Whatever you thought about me, it’s wrong. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to have dinner with you. Take me back to Spoleto now or I’ll press charges.’

      Alessandro raised his eyebrows, taking in her words with a thoughtful nod. ‘You’re scared,’ he said after a moment.

      Meghan laughed shrilly. ‘Of course I’m scared! A strange man—a powerful man—has trapped me in his house, alone! Under false pretences! Now, let me go.’

      He continued watching her, his expression assessing but not without compassion. Meghan didn’t care. Couldn’t think. She paced the room, caged and desperate.

      ‘Why weren’t you frightened,’ he asked after a moment, ‘when you believed I’d hired you to serve my lunch guest and me? Then there would have been two men here with you. Shouldn’t that have been twice as alarming?’

      Meghan whirled around and glared at him, fear replaced momentarily by anger. ‘It was a business arrangement.’

      He shrugged. ‘Then consider this such an arrangement as well. I’ll pay you the same rates. I just want to have dinner with you.’

      ‘I don’t want to be paid!’ she snapped. ‘I’m not a whore!’

      Alessandro stilled, his expression chilling. ‘I don’t remember calling you that.’

      She closed her eyes, pressed a hand to her chest as if she could still the frantic racing of her heart. ‘If you wanted to have dinner with me,’ she said after a few seconds of silence, her breathing ragged, uneven, ‘then there are more normal ways to have gone about it. You could have asked me straight out. It’s called a date.’

      ‘Admittedly I’ve used unconventional means.’ He shrugged, unperturbed. ‘I had to.’

      ‘Oh? And why is that?’

      ‘I’m a powerful man, Meghan. You remember that power can be abused? It works both ways.’ He smiled softly. ‘Picture this. A man is charmed by a pretty young waitress when he sees her in a restaurant. He likes her smile, and the way her eyes remind him of sunlight. He wants to get to know her better, but he also understands that his position and wealth either frighten women off or attract the wrong kind. So he makes up a little pretence to bring this woman he desires to his house. Nothing far-fetched, nothing sordid. And when she arrives, he intends to surprise her with a quiet, romantic dinner. A chance to know her, and for her to know him. And then he drives her home.’

      Meghan stared at him, arrested. Her lips parted, but no words came out. Her mind whirled, thoughts twisting away before she could snatch them, drag them to clarity. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

      ‘Wasn’t it?’ Alessandro’s quiet, sad little smile made her heart ache with regret and wonder.

       It wasn’t like that.

      She shook her head. She couldn’t believe. Couldn’t let herself. ‘You can romance it up all you want now, because you think I want to hear those silly pretty words. But you as good as admitted what you really want … what you really think of me. We both know that.’

      ‘What I want to know,’ Alessandro said softly, ‘is why you think so little of yourself.’

      ‘I don’t,’ Meghan snapped—a matter of instinct, yet her words sounded hollow. She turned away. ‘Why can’t you just take me home?’

      ‘Because I don’t want to.’ Alessandro sat in an armchair, ivory silk striped with gold, his legs elegantly crossed, his body relaxed. ‘Where do you come from?’ he asked pleasantly. ‘Why have you been travelling around Europe? Waitressing to pay your way, I presume?’

      ‘Stop it.’ She shook her head. ‘This is a farce. I’m not sitting here talking with you, discussing my life with you.’

      ‘It would perhaps make things more pleasant.’

      ‘I don’t want things to be pleasant,’ she snapped. ‘I want to leave here. Now.’

      ‘Then answer my questions. Ask some of your own. It’s called making conversation, you know.’

      ‘All right.’ She dropped her hands, took a deep breath. ‘Here’s a question … Alessandro. If I have dinner with you, will you drive me back to Spoleto afterwards?’

      ‘If that’s what you want.’ The implication was obvious. Dinner would be enough to make her change her mind. He smiled; it felt like a caress. ‘I like the way you say my name.’

      Meghan stared at him, watched as the heat in his eyes flared, turning them from steely-blue to indigo, and she wondered helplessly, hopelessly, if dinner would indeed be enough.

      ‘You do not need to be frightened,’ Alessandro said quietly. ‘That was never my intention. You can trust me.’

      ‘You told me not to,’ Meghan snapped, and Alessandro’s expression hardened for a moment.

      ‘I told you there was no reason to. Now there is.’

      ‘Oh, and what is that?’

      He smiled, although his eyes remained flinty. ‘Because I said so.’

      She opened her mouth to utter some scathing reply, the words not yet formed in her head, but then something left her. Her energy, perhaps, or at least her self-righteousness. Her ability to continue a verbal battle with this impossible iron-willed man. And her fear.

      She sank onto a cream leather sofa and leaned her head against its soft back. ‘You speak English very well,’ she said after a moment.

      ‘Thank you. I should. I spent most of my boyhood in England.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘I went to boarding school at seven, in Winchester,’ he explained. ‘All of my siblings did.’

      ‘You have brothers and sisters?’

      ‘One sister.’ He opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it abruptly. Meghan almost asked what he’d been going to say, but the shuttered look in his eyes made her realise that topic was now off limits. All of his siblings had gone to boarding school, yet he only had one sister? Something didn’t make sense.

      ‘Who are the di Agnios, anyway?’ she asked. ‘Something big, obviously, but what do you do?’ She sat up straight, the thought of the Mafia suddenly shooting through her. Surely not …

      ‘We’re entrepreneurs.’ The rich laughter lacing his words showed he knew exactly where her train of thought had led her. ‘Primarily jewellery, but we’ve branched into property, finance— a bit of everything really.’

      ‘Di Agnio …’ With a jolt Meghan remembered passing boutiques of that name, shops with locked

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