But she faced him anyway and pretended she was warm.
“You are still holding on to that,” she observed, trying her best to sound…well. Something close enough to amused. “All these years later.”
She expected him to deny that. Then bluster on the way men often did, pretending they had no feelings about anything.
But Antonluca was an Italian man. He did nothing of the kind.
“But of course I am still holding on to it,” he replied at once, and not as if he was remotely amused. “You essentially called my life’s work a sideshow. Acircus,Hannah.What reaction did you expect me to have?”
“I ate in your restaurant in Florence,” she told him. He scowled at her, so she tipped her chin up and folded her arms, which had the added benefit of making her feel slightly warmer, too. “I believe it was one of the earlier ones in your portfolio.”
“It was my second restaurant,” he said coolly. “But the first one I opened myself.”
“Like your flagship restaurant in Rome, it is a small, cozy, neighborhood sort of place.”
“You sound like Wikipedia.”
“That was actually written on the menu in Florence,” Hannah acknowledged. “But do you want to know what I think?”
“It seems as if you plan to tell me.” His voice was a dark thread of menace, somehow colder and hotter than the December wind, all at once. “Whether I wish to hear it or not.”
“It made me understand why you’re so famous,” Hannah told him quietly. She had waited in line outside for over an hour and a half and had sat at a tiny table crammed in between two larger, more boisterous parties. She’d ordered three things. A salad, a plate of pasta, and a single cannoli. And every single bite had beentransformative. “It wasn’t an art installation on a plate. It was a meal. Possibly one of the best meals I’ve ever had.”
“Anart installation,” he repeated, in disbelief. Those gray eyes of his blazed at her. “An art installation on a plate.”
“I’m just telling you my impression.”
“And here I thought you wanted to keep your job.”
Hannah supposed that she should have been intimidated by that, but she wasn’t. If anything, it was a relief. It reminded her of the stakes here. It reminded her of exactly who they were, and what that meant.
Yes, there were things she should tell him. But also, yes—he was a powerful man who could fire her once again, and then what would she do? How would that help Dominic?
She really should have thanked him.
“I do want my job,” she told him, after a moment, because she had to breathe first. “But in order to keep it, I suspect that you will need to know that you can trust me. If not me, personally, than certainly that I will tell you the truth.” She considered that obvious, glaring falsehood and added, “I am always scrupulously direct when it comes to my opinions, especially at work. You can depend on that. You’ll notice that I never apologized for what I felt about your food in New York. Only for the indiscretion in talking about it to someone who was not, as it turned out, a friend, after all.”
He shook his head at that and had the look of someone who might have laughed, if they were the laughing kind. If he was actually the picture they trotted out and claimed was him. “You think this is a mark in your favor, do you?”
“I do.” When his storm-tossed eyes slammed into her, she managed to shrug. “You are a very wealthy man. I’m sure you have more yes-men than you know what to do with. La Paloma liked the fact that this is not a role I know how to play.”
“Neither does Paloma herself,” he muttered.
It did occur to her then that they were standing here, outside a restaurant, in weather cold enough to keep everyone else safely and firmly indoors. There were no staff, no guests, anywhere nearby. They were as close to alone as it was possible to be in a fully booked-out hotel.
Something she couldn’t stop thinking about, feverishly, when he stepped toward her as if he was about to—
But he didn’t do it. He didn’t put his hands on her. He didn’t lean in any closer. He didn’t so much as graze her with a stray finger, yet her entire body reacted as if he’d plugged her directly into an electrical outlet, like one of the bare trees strung with lights around them.
Worse than that, since she was standing here in the cold with nothing resembling a coat, she was fairly certain that he could see every last reaction her body had to all those things hedidn’tdo.
Something simmered, there in that dark gaze of his. She thought she saw something awfully close to triumph, but then he stepped away again. And the spell was broken.
Hannah told herself she was relieved.
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he growled at her, and then set off for the main building at a pace that had her very nearly running to keep up.
And later, at home, after she’d settled Dominic into bed, she found she dreamed up a hundred different endings to that interaction. All of them involving his mouth on hers, or other tender parts of her body.
