“You unnerve me for all manner of reasons.”
“Because I’m not what you expected me to be?”
He gave a tight laugh. “You arenothinglike I expected you to be.”
“For good or bad?”
“I haven’t worked that out yet.”
“Do you wish you hadn’t made the promise not to touch me?”
He wasn’t going to pretend not to understand her meaning. “No.” His fingers tightened their grip on his glass. “I don’t have much of a conscience, Miss Marino, but on the very rare occasion it nudges me, I listen to it. I’m too old and cynical for an innocent like you.”
Gino found himself holding his breath with no awareness of what he was holding it for. And while he held it, his eyes refused to look away from the beautiful innocent with the colour-saturated cheeks studying him so intensely.
“Tell me about your parents. They’re still alive?”
Her latest swerve of conversation took a moment to sink in, something he found as disarming as everything else about her.
Expelling the held breath slowly, he nodded. “Yes. They live on a yacht.”
“That sounds fun.”
“It is. They’ve always dreamed of sailing the world.” And it kept them out of the way and safe from his world.
“You bought the yacht for them?”
“Yes.”
“You made their dream come true.”
“It was the least I could do after all the sacrifices they made for me.”
The beautiful features he’d only vaguely realised had tightened, loosened. She smiled the soft smile he’d glimpsed earlier. “I think you’re a much better man than you want me to believe.”
“I can assure you, I’m not.”
She brought the wine glass to her lips, the smile becoming mischievous again. “We’ll see.”
His fingers gripped even tighter around his glass.
Francesca found herself having to summon courage to leave the bathroom.
The thrills that had zinged through her body pretty much since she’d woken seemed to have become turbo-charged. Everything inside her felt different. Thicker, somehow, and yet gooey. Her heart had turbo-charged itself too. It had done since Gino admitted he found her attractive.
She hadn’t planned to ask that. The whole purpose of her interrogation had been to annoy and needle beneath his skin...and to learn more about him. She didn’t deny that. She found Gino fascinating and deeply attractive, and he knew it. It was why he’d described the sex rooms of his club. He’d wanted to repulse her, and she’d instinctively recoiled, just as he’d wanted. What he absolutely would not have wanted was for the pulse of heat that had flooded her system on the tail of her revulsion.
Gino might not participate in the hedonism enjoyed in his clubs, but he facilitated it, and she justknewit was a hedonism he participated in elsewhere.
Whereas she’d never even kissed a man. Never been attracted to a man. How could she have when she’d gone to a private all-girls school and then spent her university years ferried to and from her lectures, a ghost amongst her peers, vanishing before the offer of a date could even be thought of, never mind asked?
That her kidnapper happened to be as handsome and sexy as the stars of the movies she so enjoyed had made it inevitableher hormones would zing to life for him. Flirting and teasing had been easy when she’d assumed he found her as attractive as a pair of old boots, but knowing the attraction was reciprocated... That put a whole new complexity to it and a complexity to her feelings.
Other than when he’d carried her clothing, she’d not felt an ounce of self-consciousness in front of him, but now she felt hugely self-conscious in the silk pyjamas that had been included in her earlier delivery. A pretty dusky pink, they were long-sleeved with buttons running down the front, the bottoms falling to her ankles. They showed minimal flesh, yet she felt more exposed in them than she had when she’d unthinkingly run out of the dressing room waving the hairdryer in that silk evening dress that showed half her breasts. More exposed than in Gino’s t-shirt when she’d deliberately flashed her bare bottom to him.
Swallowing hard, she opened the bathroom door.
The only light in the bedroom was her reading lamp. Gino was in bed, propped against his headboard, working on his phone.
