“Oh, that’s where you are wrong, cara. Very, very wrong.”
He hemmed her in with long arms braced on either side of her. Flutters of heat fanned the desire simmering inside him, but his ego was fully on the line now. He wouldn’t make love to her until he had what he wanted: her. And he was the only man who would touch her ever again.
“I’m not coming back to another empty house and having a heart attack because you’re down the road flirting with university dropouts. You and I will be joined at the hip until you agree to marry me, sharing this house or staying in the city to see my family—which is where we are going tonight. Do you have something to wear or shall we go shopping?”
Lauren was gearing up to tell him to back off and get real, but her inner diva heard the magic word and went, O-oh, shopping. The suitcases upstairs were half empty and she had high intentions of filling them.
Paolo straightened and nodded. “Shopping it is.”
“Wait! That wasn’t agreement.”
“You want to know what marriage to me offers, do you not? Allow me to show you how you are treated when you are related to the most powerful banker in Milan. And you will agree to dinner. I would like my mother to know about us before the rumors start. Because they will.”
The assumption in that phrase “know about us” got her back up, but it was overshadowed by the resignation in his tone. Lauren shivered. She wanted to be as confident as she managed to sound about having her baby alone, but deep down she was as fragile and uncertain as any new mother. She longed for support she could count on, just not when it was being offered so reluctantly.
And despite the kisses they’d shared today and his claim that he was attracted to her, she was genuinely gun-shy about rushing into another marriage that was only trying to serve convention.
Getting out of the house suddenly sounded like an ideal distraction from dwelling on problems they couldn’t resolve.
* * *
Paolo had to give Lauren credit. As a man who had escorted countless women through the fashion houses in Milan—relatives, mistresses, his first wife—he was very familiar with where to go and whom to see. His own clothes were tailored almost exclusively by Corneliani; the son of his father’s tailor had been making Paolo’s suits since Paolo had been a ring bearer for Vittorio’s parents at three. Nevertheless, Paolo knew where they were headed even before Lauren seated herself next to him, placed two hands over the pocketbook she set on her knees and said with breathless anticipation, “Via Monte Napoleone, please.”
He privately smirked. She was a natural when it came to learning what a wealthy banker offered a woman.
Being wanted for his money didn’t bother him. He knew it was part of the package along with his looks and his position in society. He was secure enough to know his own worth apart from those trappings and, to be honest, was just as superficial when it came to singling out a woman. He liked the beautiful ones and if they possessed a sharp wit, all the better. None had ever made him ache with desire quite the way Lauren did, which unnerved him a little, but he was coming around to accepting it.
Marriage. The more he thought about it, the more determined he was to make it happen. There was something enormously satisfying in the image of her wearing his ring and standing by his side.
He still couldn’t believe she’d thrown a tomato at him though. What a virago! It made him want to laugh even as he recognized he’d have to tame that streak out of her. Who would have guessed so much emotion and passion had been stifled under that curtain of hair she’d been wearing all her life? He was incredibly stimulated by it—dangerously so. He feared it would feed into his own wildness. Stifling it in both of them could pose quite a challenge.#p#分页标题#e#
There would be compensations for tempering it, though. He took care to demonstrate that by saying to the woman who greeted them at the design house, “Lauren will need a page in the Donatelli account.”
“Of course, signore,” the woman said with a subtle shift of heightened respect and closer attention to her new client. “Is the signorina looking for anything in particular today?”
Lauren broke from her absorption of her surroundings to say in Italian, “I’m looking at everything. But, Paolo, don’t be silly. If there’s one place my grandmother would want me to spend her money, it would be here. She worked as a model for this house in the seventies,” Lauren added in an aside to the woman, moving deeper into the room with the awe most people saved for the frescoed ceilings of his country’s renowned cathedrals. “Did you ever hear of Frances Hammond?”