The ever-present humor lit up his face. “No one would accuse me of being guided by wisdom, Ann-Sophie.”
“Nor I, it seems,” she said. “At least not this week.”
He leaned forward, so his lips brushed against the sensitive rim of her ear. “I wager that these people around us see an incorrigible playboy who found an intriguing woman to dance with. That’s all.”
It was difficult to concentrate on his words as memories exploded inside her mind. The sound of his whisper in her ear triggered an image of Alessandro, naked in the bed over her as he whispered the sweetest, softest endearments in her ear, driving her crazy, until she shattered.
“No one knows about our nights together,cara,” he whispered, the caress of his low voice sending another hot lick of desire through her. “They might wonder, but no one will ever know.”
The words were supposed to be a comfort, but Ann-Sophie could not ignore their bitter aftertaste. They reminded her of the truth. No one would know because what they had was not real. After tonight, their affair was over. She had entered the entanglement with no illusions of a future, and yet, as she felt his hard, thick muscles more under her hands, so overtly masculine under his tailored shirt, she knew she had been lying to herself. She wasn’t ready to let this end.
Alessandro had not planned to cross this room in front of business colleagues and gossipmongers to ask Ann-Sophie to dance. He had planned to wait until the festivities were winding down before he made his way up to her room for one last night of indulgence. But there had been something in the way the man standing a few meters away from her had looked at her. It had rubbed him the wrong way. He had watched the man approach Ann-Sophie, watched his frown when he turned away, and watched the man’s frown as he continued to look at her again.
Alessandro was aware that he could be constructing a narrative out of nothing, and yet he felt obligated to act on it. So he had crossed the room for her sake, he told himself, to make clear that this man was out of her league. Yes, there was an arrogance behind this string of thoughts, but that didn’t make them false. Alessandro knew his value and his position in life as well as anyone. And right now, he was enjoying every privilege this position allowed him. He was holding Ann-Sophie, and the brush of her soft curves against his body tempted him to forget this last night of diplomatic alliances and enjoy the startlingly explosive chemistry between them.
“I seem to be having my Cinderella moment,” she said, and her tone suggested that she wasn’t sure how she felt about it.
“Cinderella returned to her old life at midnight, if I remember correctly,” he said, checking his nonexistent watch. “You left me with no choice. I needed a place on your dance card before this lovely dress turns to rags.”
He used this as an excuse to move his hand over the soft curves of her hip. Under his fingers, her red dress washed over her body in a ripple of whisper-thin silk. It was as if he was almost touching her skin, but almost was never enough. He told himself that this craving he felt was just chemistry. Really, really good chemistry.
There were many things Alessandro had learned to close himself off to over the years, but he had found that he did not need to deny the bottomless ache inside him, as long as he dressed it with humor. In every other part of his life, he exercised control. But he allowed the pull of attraction to feed the hunger inside him. Though there were times that this lack of restraint may have suggested an intimacy that hinted at something more, his reputation spoke for itself. Alessandro never thought about the future when he was in the middle of one of these flings because there was no future. Ever.
“I threw away my dance card when the interpreter from Poland invited me onto the floor,” she said, and he could sense her smile, even with his eyes closed, his lips so close to her skin. “He is likely judging me at this very moment for my slight.”
She said all of this lightly, in that playful tone they communicated in, signaling that she understood that nothing between them should be taken too seriously, but the words still triggered something inside him that he might have called jealousy. That couldn’t be right. Still, there had been moments over this week that had felt…different. He could ignore these strange stirrings, he told himself, because tomorrow she would be his past. The affair with Ann-Sophie would end no differently than the others, even if he didn’t feel ready to let her go in the same way as he usually did.
“Show me who my competition is, and I will call him out, tomorrow at dawn.”
“On the cruel, dusty streets of Nice?” Ann-Sophie’s laugh soothed some of the tension inside. “You aristocrats have a reputation for letting others do their dirty work.”
She said the wordaristocratsin a tone that could have been reverence or mockery. Probably a bit of both. He didn’t point out that he was not, in fact, an actual aristocrat, though his family had more money than most aristocrats these days. Instead, he said, “I make an exception when it comes to a woman’s honor.”
“How principled of you.” This time, her tone definitely leaned toward mockery. “It’s unfortunate that I will be at the airport when all the excitement takes place. I hate to miss it.”
There it was, that little waver in her voice. He had heard it the past night, too, when she had made a passing comment about tonight’s event, when she had uttered the wordslast day.And one of those moments that felt sodifferenthad stretched out between them, like a strange, sweet hunger that had gnawed at him.
He had, of course, dismissed it. There were plenty of reasons their connection felt a bit…intense at times. For example, the circumstances were somewhat different this time. For the duration of these affairs, Alessandro had always eased his conscience with the knowledge that the women came to him, not the other way around. They willingly entered into an arrangement with him, knowing the reputation he had clearly established for attachments that were sizzling, satisfying and short-lived. As a rule, he was never to seek out a woman. Alessandro had broken this rule with Ann-Sophie. Even that first night, when he crossed the empty bar and sat next to her, a sense of foreboding had warned him away. He didn’t want to think too carefully about why he hadn’t ignored it.
There was something so artless and unselfconscious about her, so much the opposite from the way he kept himself strictly under control. As if she didn’t feel the weight of expectations on her shoulders. On that first night he had entered the quiet bar around the corner from the hotel to get away from the wariness he couldn’t seem to shake when he spent too much time around Massimo and his new wife. But the moment he had sat on the barstool in the corner, next to Ann-Sophie, he wanted her. Craved her enough to set aside the warning signals and pursue her.
Inexplicably, that feeling had grown over the week, not fizzled out. Right now, in the flickering candlelight of the ballroom, he wanted to touch her in a way that might have rattled him if the end of this affair wasn’t so clearly in sight. He wanted to run his fingers over her soft skin right here, in front of every business associate that mattered. Dancing with any other woman tonight seemed impossible, and the idea of seeing her dance with indolent royalty and ruthless businessmen, let alone a colleague who might know parts of her that Alessandro hadn’t yet learned… It was a vision he put out of his head. Tomorrow he would let Ann-Sophie go, but tonight she was still his.
She shifted under his touch. “You are confident you will win this duel?”
“Of course, I will,” he answered smoothly. “If for no other reason, in addition to defending your honor, my demise would mean my brother would single-handedly control our family’s fortune. You must have heard talk of the competitive nature of our relationship.”
She laughed at this misleading truth. Leaving his brother alone was the last thing he wanted to do, but it had nothing to do with competition. At fifteen, he had been on a path to destruction at the latest boarding school his parents had shipped them off to. Reading and dyslexia weren’t a good match, even for someone willing to put in the hard work of that uphill battle. That wasn’t Alessandro. Instead, he turned to other distractions, and when his reckless fights had gotten them both kicked out, Massimo stood by his side. They never talked about the period of their lives, when Alessandro’s emotions had gotten so out of hand. Massimo, too, had watched their parents’ all-consuming relationship, but while his brother had turned inward, Alessandro had shifted into all-out rebellion. He had let his anger and frustration with the things he could not change control him, and that had almost taken down both him, and his brother with him. The poisonous feelings had controlled him until he had turned off that part of himself. It had been the only way to stop the destruction. He would never, ever make Massimo pay for his own sins again.
If Ann-Sophie detected any of the intensity of the responses he was having, she didn’t let on. He was grateful for that, he told himself.
“Of course, you will win the duel, as men like you always do,” she said lightly, though the humor in her voice had a bite to it. “And then you will return to Milan and bask in the riches of your newfound deals this week.”
It was only the vaguest reference to the future, but this comment brushed up against his rule to never speak about the past or the future. His affairs were suspended in a present of mutually satisfying indulgence. When it ended, he left all of it behind. And yet, this week, he had found his conversations with Ann-Sophie drifting outside these boundaries.
He knew he had to cut off this topic, so he indulged Ann-Sophie’s question with an answer that diverted her attention. “I will do my celebrating at my flat in Milan, while my brother and his wife will leave for a remote fjord in Norway, which I have been told has many appeals.”
“You have never been there?”
