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working out.’
She heard a certain wistfulness in her voice and pulled herself up sharply, because the last thing she wanted was for him to guess at the depth of her feelings for him. When she told him that she was pregnant she would do so as a calm, collected adult whose only priority was to discuss technicalities and to reassure him that he could take as much or as little interest as he wanted.
‘Or so I would imagine,’ she added.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Sergio informed her. ‘I was never in love with that woman. It’s true she made a pass at me the first time we met, but I was involved with someone else at the time, and having fun with two women at the same time has never been my style.’
‘You were never in love with her? But I thought…’
‘You assumed—from a couple of throwaway remarks.’
‘How can you have a learning curve from someone you met in a club when you never had a relationship with her? Did she try and pickpocket you?’
‘My hotel. We’re here.’
Susie followed the direction of his finger to see a grand country house that was lit from top to bottom. Two uniformed men stood outside, as if guarding the entrance. She knew her aunt and uncle came to this hotel on a regular basis with friends. Apparently it did a very good dinner.
‘And, no…pickpockets don’t engender learning curves. Dominique Duval was a nurse, and she made a pass at me because she knew who I was. I was young at the time—barely out of my teens—and from a wealthy family. My mother had died years before and my father had never remarried. I was in line to inherit his fortune, but I think she knew from the get-go that a fortune in the future was a lot less enticing than a fortune she could lay her hands on immediately. Maybe if I’d been interested she would have climbed into bed with me for the fun of it, but she had set her sights higher.’
Looking back, he had been able to make sense of the interest she had shown in his background, in his widowed father—the caring, attractive ex-nurse, with a heart full of compassion and empathy because, after all, she had seen so many hurt and lonely widowers in her line of work.
‘She was a nurse? I thought that was a caring line of work…’ She was hanging on to his every word, barely noticing the grand surroundings of the hotel, or the way the woman manning the reception desk in the early hours of the morning jumped to attention the second he strode in and then scrambled behind them as they headed straight to the bank of lifts.
‘You’d think…’ Sergio flicked her a wry glance. ‘My first powerful lesson in never judging a book by its cover.’
‘And in always assuming the worst when it comes to other people’s motivations…’
‘Very good.’
‘What happened?’
Sergio’s eyes narrowed and he shrugged. His face was hard and coldly unforgiving, even though he was recalling a past situation and not currently enduring it.
‘She made sure to engineer an introduction to my father and pulled out all the right cards. She was a caring, fun girl, thirty years his junior, who could understand just what he might have been going through. She told him a life alone was no kind of life—not for a sexy silver fox like him. He was flattered. For the first time in years he decided that life was worth living after all. They were married within six months and it didn’t take long before her true colours started appearing. The caring, sharing nurse became the free-spending gold-digger she had been all along—and if that wasn’t enough she contrived to get my father to change his will. When he died suddenly of a heart attack pretty much everything went to her, and within five years she had managed to work her way through most of his fortune. Fortunately, he’d had the sense to leave the majority of his companies to me. She was cash-rich, with a couple of houses to spare, but she was still greedy enough to consult a lawyer, in the hope that she might get her hands on some of the companies. I spent five years batting her off until she finally gave up. Where she is now is anybody’s guess.’
Susie wandered over to the chaise longue by the window and sat down, her own problems temporarily on the back burner as she worked out just how he had ended up where he had.
There was safety in a hard-boiled career woman. She thought of her own sister. Alex would never be interested in anyone’s money, or in furthering herself on the back of someone else. She was fiercely independent and ambitious to get ahead under her own steam. That would be the sort of woman he would be seriously interested in. A woman who had her own life—just as he had his own life.
‘I’ve seen how a person can imagine they’re in love,’ he continued, taking up a position on the chair facing her, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his expression cool and remorseless. ‘They get swept away by emotion, lose all sense of perspective, abandon their self-control. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the sort of thing that never has a good ending.’
Susie thought that he might have been describing her.
‘In due course,’ he drawled, ‘I imagine I will want to settle down, but when that time comes it will be rather more of a business arrangement than a giddy loss of judgement.’
He was uneasily aware of just how fast his self-control disappeared when he was presented with her glorious body, but immediately dismissed that as a cause for concern because there was a clear line of demarcation between the physical and the emotional. On the emotional front he knew exactly where he was going, and on the physical front… Well, a little loss of self-control was perfectly acceptable…it made a great change to his usual predictable diet.
Susie heard the unmistakable clang of his boundary lines being repositioned.
Her breathing quickened and she flushed under the steady gaze of his eyes.
Why had she let herself be talked into coming back here with him? She knew why. Because she was weak and in love. Because one kiss from him could send her common sense flying in all directions. Because she was just the sort of emotional type he had told her he didn’t need as a long-term investment.
‘It’s late.’
‘So it is…’ He slanted her a smile that turned her bones to jelly. ‘Come here.’
‘I’m not in the mood for sex.’
‘No? Do you want to put that to the test?’
‘We need to talk, Sergio. There are things… Well, things I need to say to you…’
Sergio frowned. Women who had a pressing need to talk rarely said anything he wanted to hear. He reminded himself that she wasn’t like the other women he had dated. She talked a lot. She probably wanted to talk about the wedding—her parents, her sister, her huge array of cousins. It made such a change from his non-existent family, as an only child born to only children.
His face cleared and he smiled.
‘Let’s go to bed…’
‘This isn’t pillow talk.’
‘Who said it was? I’m just finding it hard to keep going with the chat when we could be doing other things. Why don’t you give an old man a kick and do a striptease for me…?’
‘You’re only thirty-two!’ Her face warmed and her body was going into its usual meltdown.
Sergio grinned and remained where he was, enjoying the way he had hardened for her, enjoying the thrill of what was going to follow. Sooner or later he would move on because, as she had pointed out, they weren’t suited to one another, but just at the moment familiarity was a long way from breeding contempt.
He tried to swallow down his dislike of her reminding him that he wasn’t her type, but it nagged away like a thorn in his side he couldn’t quite reach.
He stood up, strolled towards the bed, shedding his clothes en route until he was left in only his trousers, which