‘I mean…’ now he was standing right in front of her, trapping her with her back pressed hard against the wall ‘…your colour’s all up.’
‘What can you expect?’ Charlotte said wildly. ‘I mean, you sit there asking all sorts of impossible things!’
‘Making all sorts of impossible allusions,’ Riccardo agreed on a husky note. ‘Daring to suggest that we can still do things to each other…’ He reached out and feathered a finger along her cheek. To Charlotte, it was like being brushed by a flame. She twisted her head away but her heart was pounding and her body…Her body was on fire, alive with a whirlwind of responses that she hadn’t felt for anyone since him!
She breathed in deeply, nostrils flaring, made herself remember the crucial footnote to his behaviour which was that he was using her to get what he desperately wanted. He wasn’t attracted to her!
‘I’ll call you, Riccardo.’
‘Not good enough, I’m afraid. You’re trembling. Why? Does the boyfriend make you tremble like this? Do you know that I can breathe you in? I remember the smell—of Italy and summer and your skin.’
‘Don’t!’ It had meant to sound like a forceful command. Instead it sounded like a plea. She placed one hand squarely on his chest, which was a bit of a tactical error, because instantly she was flooded with memories of how he looked bare-backed, his muscles tightly packed.
‘Why not? Scared?’
‘You can’t just come in here and do whatever you want.’
‘No, but I am happy to do whatever you want.’ And she wanted him. Riccardo could feel it. He was also achingly aware of how much he wanted her. Quite honestly, he had felt the pull the minute he had clapped eyes on her. He wondered now if he had ever really stopped wanting her. Yes he had turned away, because at the time he’d been convinced that a serious relationship was not what he wanted, least of all with a kid who had lied to him about his age, but he had never sought to replace her, had he? He should have forgotten about her, moved on to have a stable relationship with someone; Lord knew it was what his mother had spent years clamouring for. But he hadn’t. Instead, he had littered his life with a series of pointless bimbos. Now, here, breathing this woman in, he felt at ease with himself.#p#分页标题#e#
He leaned down, brushed her lips with his, and she tried to wriggle free but not with any conviction.
This was madness! She wanted to pull him to her and sink herself into his kiss. Instead, she pushed him away and found that she was panting as he straightened up and looked down at her.
‘Tomorrow,’ Riccardo said.
‘Tomorrow?’
‘I’ll be in touch.’
Well, he thought as he stepped out into the bleak blackness to hail a cab, she hadn’t left him very much choice, had she?
Yes, she had given him a long speech about Mr Right, but he knew this much: Mr Right was not Mr Fiancé. She might think that safety and predictability were qualities she was after, but she was wrong. He had felt it just then in her trembling struggle to tear herself away from him.
And she hadn’t told him what he had wanted to hear, that her relationship with Ben would be off. She had skilfully danced around the subject, and he had left none the wiser as to what her intentions were. But when he thought back to their conversation, he was sickly aware that running towards him, arms outstretched, for the sake of their daughter was just not enough for her.
Riccardo, accustomed as he was to life conforming to exactly what he wanted, was afflicted by an unexpected attack of mortal fear.
So what if she’d felt a little edge of nostalgic attraction to him? What did it mean? Nothing. Because she had emerged from her disastrous, disillusioning relationship with him into something she had convinced herself she wanted to be, and the fact that he was convinced otherwise meant nothing.
He would end up being a part-time father, taking Gina out to fast-food restaurants and trying to bond with her in two-hour sessions once a week. And eventually Ben—stolid, reliable, ‘let me cook for you honey’ Ben—would get his foot in through the front door until he became the full-time dad doing homework with Gina, watching her grow up, sorting out her problems.
It wouldn’t happen at once. She would do her utmost to accommodate him, because he knew that she felt guilty, but gradually the guilt would begin to fade and then the relationship that she might have put on hold would resurface. Riccardo knew human nature, knew that good intentions had a very short life span and guilt an even shorter one.