Far From Perfect (7 page)

Granted, fathers both English and Italian were going to be over the moon in the short term…but in the longer term? Well, she didn’t like to think about it.

But Nick’s pointed smile told her she’d be wise to play along.

4.20 a.m.

Anna glared at her bedside clock’s illuminated display with gritty eyes that felt as if they hadn’t closed once since she’d finally escaped to her room.

Dealing with her dad’s unabashed delight and Nick’s steady, watchful triumph whilst striving to project a blissful fiancée image had been exhausting. But now she was in bed sleep comprehensively eluded her.

“Oh for crying out loud!”

Sitting up, she sighed and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. What a mess. If only she could turn back time and run the evening in an entirely different way.

Just a few hours ago, she’d been happily in control of her life, running a successful, satisfying business. Okay, she’d been slightly worried about breaking up with a man who was nice and companionable, but not very exciting. But when they were amicably parted, her future had looked pretty tranquil and mapped out.

Now everything was part of a roiling emotional weather system with Niccolo Lisitano slap-bang in the centre of its still, deceptive eye. Where he seemed to be perfectly happy, even if everyone around him was in turmoil.

Rising, Anna reached for her dressing gown, but paused as she caught a glimpse of herself in her pier glass. Something like a cross between a raving red-eyed freak and a repressed maiden aunt stared back at her. She pulled a face at the oversized, rather utilitarian nightshirt she’d chosen.

Even though there was still a chill in the spring night air, conditions weren’t all that Arctic. There was only one reason she’d bundled herself up from throat to ankle like this. It was psychological armor.

And guess who I’m protecting myself from?

She glowered at the wall, beyond which, a couple of doors down the hall her nemesis was no doubt sleeping the sleep of the totally untroubled. He’d had his overnight bag sent round from the Savoy at the behest of her father, and she didn’t like to think about what Clive was probably subconsciously hoping would happen.

The main sleep-dispelling problem was that knowing Nick was just down the hall was playing havoc with her imagination.

To her eternal cost, she knew that he always slept naked, and images of his gleaming muscular limbs, his powerful torso—and more—flooded into her mind and unleashed a riptide of alarming sensations. Gritting her teeth, she cinched the belt of her velour robe so tightly it almost choked her breathing, then with a sigh, she loosened it again.

A cup of tea. That’s what she needed. The perennial English answer to stress and trauma, both of which she’d been experiencing more or less continuously since she’d first opened the front door and set eyes on Nick.

And doors, that was another thing.

Frowning, she turned the key in the lock of her bedroom door as quietly as she could. Since when had she ever locked herself in her room at night? Not once, even when she’d been going through a brief adolescent rebellion phase. Yet tonight the need for security had been instinctive, even if unnecessary. For all his wild reputation as a player, Nick also adhered to a strict Italian code of chivalry towards the female sex. He’d certainly never come to a woman’s bedroom uninvited.

Which was more than she could say when the boot was on the other foot.

The familiar mix of embarrassment and anguish washed through her, the cocktail she’d lived with for four years. Surprise midnight visits were
her
prerogative.

“Never again,” she muttered, unlocking the door, but wishing she could lock up the past, and its resonances, and start afresh.

For about the hundredth time since Nick’s re-entry into her life had stunned her, she commanded herself to get a grip, then padded out onto the landing, her slipper-clad feet silent on the carpet. Going downstairs to the kitchen was questionable logic, to say the least, but if she lay brooding and tossing in the darkness much longer she’d probably go completely and utterly barking mad.

In the basement passage leading to Mrs. Brewster’s cozy kitchen domain, Anna came to a silent, breathless halt.

Faint sounds came from beyond the door.

The same sense of ominous pre-knowledge gripped her that she’d experienced earlier at the party. Cheerfully dismissive of energy bills and global warming, Mrs. B always left a light burning in the kitchen when she left, in case either Anna or her father wanted a hot drink in the night. Now it sounded as if somebody was in there, for just that purpose.

It’s Dad
, Anna instructed herself firmly, dismissing the idea of a burglar or other intruder because of their efficient security system.

Her gut, however, had other ideas. It, and her heart and her nerves and every molecule in her body, all knew exactly who was in the kitchen. And the urge to turn around and flee to her bedroom sent urgent messages to her feet.

Yet, irrationally, a more powerful force drove her onwards.

Fate? Curiosity? Rabid, destructive emotional death-wish? Whatever it was, Anna hovered just outside the partially open door, peering in from the cover of the shadows.

Nick had a cupboard door ajar, and with a frown on his face, he was studying a packet he’d extracted from it. A midnight blue silk robe clung lovingly to his lean, athletic frame, and the bareness of his legs and feet from the knees down suggested that the thin robe was his only protection against the chill of the night.

Trust you to be prancing about with next to nothing on
, Anna accused him grimly, fighting a losing battle against imagining what lay beneath the lightweight silk. She hugged her own far more substantial robe around her to suppress her own body’s instant reaction. Her breasts were tight and sensitized, and deep in the very quick of her belly, desire twisted low, honeyed and traitorous.

Every sense on high alert, she watched Nick place the packet on the counter, and turn his attention, brow still puckered, towards the coffee grinder. One long, elegant hand reached out and fingered the power cord, but then he seemed to think better of it. His lips moved in some unspoken expression of frustration, and he ran his hand through his tousled dark-gold hair.

“It’s all right. I’m not going to wake your father up by grinding coffee at this time of night.”

The softly spoken words hit Anna like a power-hammer to the chest. How could he know she was here? He couldn’t see her from where he was standing, and she could have sworn she hadn’t made a sound. But it was too late now to take the soft way out and run.

“I should think not.”

Her voice was admirably crisp as she moved into the kitchen and the circle of muted light from the wall lamp, “It’s bad enough you creeping around in the small hours like a cat thief without turning on the noisiest appliance in the house into the bargain.”

A strange light flared in Nick’s blue eyes as he slowly turned towards her. Was it irritation? Arrogant dismissal? Or was it the same betraying desire that she was feeling? It was hard to tell with him. He wore his masks like an Oscar-winning thespian.

“I’m not the only one creeping around,” he observed mildly, his glance flicking quickly away from her again, and alighting on the instant-coffee jar. His lusciously modeled mouth quirked with momentary distaste, but he picked up the inferior product nevertheless, then turned his attention to the kettle. “I trust this doesn’t whistle to tell us when it’s boiling?”

No, it squawks like a clown’s hooter
, she felt like saying, in the hopes it would drive him back to his room,
sans
coffee, in disgust. But instead she said, “No, it’s a silent kettle. You needn’t worry.”

“Good.” With no further comment he set about filling the kettle and gathering crockery.

Anna rolled her eyes when he deposited two heaped spoonfuls of coffee granules in one of the mugs, paused, then added another. Typical. When he slanted her a questioning glance, spoon poised over the jar again, she shook her head.

“No. Thanks. I’ll make myself some decaffeinated tea if you don’t mind.” She frowned in the direction of his mug. “How on earth do you expect to get any sleep after drinking a filthy brew like that? You’ll be bug-eyed on the ceiling after that lot.”

Nick gave a dismissive, very Latin grimace. As the steam rose, he turned and fixed her with a level, almost insolent look.

“Who says I’ve any intention of sleeping?”

Eyes like twin blue searchlights raked her from her slipper-covered toes to the crown of her disheveled blonde head, and despite her thick, comforting dressing gown and slightly less thick but still comforting nightshirt, Anna shuddered as if she’d been instantly stripped naked.

Why, oh why didn’t I go back to bed when I had the chance?

Fighting the urge not to pull her robe more protectively around her, she settled for fiddling nervously with her sash. When Nick’s eyes followed the tiny movement like a bird of prey assessing the strike distance to its victim, she knew she was in big trouble. Yet again.

Dannazione
! Why did everything about her bother him so much?

Steeling himself not to react, Nick still found himself mesmerized by the compulsive pleating action of Anna’s slender fingers as she worried the sash of her voluminous and bizarrely chaste robe.

She had beautiful hands, elegant, smooth-skinned and nimble, and just the mere sight of them had a stunning effect on his body. He suppressed an inner shudder, feeling again the delicate, instinct-guided stroke of those soft fingertips across his aching penis. The way she’d touched him, at first tentatively, then with more confidence.

Ah,
Dio Mio
, how she’d held him.

Groaning inside, he felt that self-same flesh react violently as if crying out for her innocent caress. Summoning a supreme act of self-control, he managed to suppress the most patent evidence of his discomfiture, but even so, he was grateful that once he was sitting at the kitchen table, the cheerful red and white checked cloth masked his groin.

But the heavy atmosphere, latent with a thousand unspoken words and accusations, was more uncomfortable in its own way than his ferocious arousal.

“So?” he queried, unable to bear the electric tension one second longer.

The minute it was out of his lips, he knew he’d miscalculated. About to sit herself, Anna remained on her feet, glaring down at him like an avenging angel swaddled in what looked like twenty layers of night attire. For a moment he thought the cup of tea in her hand was about to end up on his head.

“‘So’? What do you mean ‘so’? Shouldn’t that be my question?”

Her voice was impressively composed, but he could see her knuckles were white. “You pull a fast one on me. You foist your mad scheme on everybody before I’ve even had an hour or two to digest it, and then you make with the ‘so?’ as if it’s me that’s done something wrong.”

With enviable self-containment, she sat at the table, facing him, her eyes like a green inferno as she boldly met and held his look.

Another surge of raw, animal feeling wrenched at him.

Dio
, but she was magnificent.

He’d been with his share of women, all beautiful, all with poise and star quality, all able to make an entrance and dominate a room, play the seductress and captivate a man physically. But Anna possessed a rare quality to which not one of his past girlfriends could hold a candle. An inner spirit and individuality that had haunted him, no matter how he’d tried to deny it. She was a drug in his blood that would never let him rest, always nagging him, always standing between him and the possibility of a wholly satisfying relationship with another woman.

If he didn’t get Anna Felgate out of his system somehow, every lover he bedded in the future was doomed to seem ultimately lacking.

“So?” she mocked him, still glaring, her elegant chin up.

Drawing on formidable powers of his own, and the control and self-belief that had always served him admirably in business and with all other women, Nick held his ground. A staring and slanging match was stupid and pointless, so he tried a different angle. Truth—at least partial—and honesty and no more evading critical issues.

“You’re right, I made a mistake. I acted in haste and I was unfair to you.”

Reaching calmly for his coffee, he took a sip and wrinkled his nose at the less than aromatic taste. “But I was afraid you wouldn’t agree to the engagement, and I couldn’t risk that, for Carlo’s sake. So I moved things on a little more quickly than I should have done.”

Anna’s brow puckered and she ran her thumb round the rim of her mug, the almost unconscious gesture making Nick feel uncomfortable again.

“Do you think I’d be so cruel and thoughtless that I’d just ignore Carlo’s wellbeing?” she challenged, “Of course I want to help. And I know that going along with you is the right thing for the moment.” Her eyes narrowed and she gave him a look of sudden, chilly dislike. “But I expected a certain degree of consideration on your part. Assurances. Firmly drawn ground rules.”

She set down the mug and Nick noted that she hadn’t touched a drop of her tea. “
And
a chance to put Martin in the picture first. He deserves that. If circumstances had been different I might have been announcing my engagement to him tonight. Not you.”

He knew she was lying outrageously, but even so, black jealousy enveloped Nick like a descending thunderstorm. The same irrational urge he’d experienced earlier out in the square, the desire to break things, to seek and hunt and obliterate, surged through him. His
sangfroid
teetered on the edge of shattering completely, but by the closest margin he managed to hang on to it. Just.

“I see.”

He wanted to roar, but he kept his tone soft. “And an engagement to Johnson is so infinitely more desirable than an engagement to me?” Slowly, with a precision that felt like a Herculean effort, he pushed away his unwanted coffee.

“At least an engagement to Martin would have been genuine. Not the sham that you’re suggesting. What happens to Carlo when eventually we have to pretend to call it off again? And what happens to Dad too?” A look of pain flickered across her face, revealing and very real. “He’s ecstatic, you know. How’s he going to feel when we snatch all this happiness away from him? He’s having a hard enough time as it is, what with one thing and another. Don’t tell me you don’t know that Felgate’s is rocky.”