The Italian Billionaire's Secret Love-Child(41)

‘I told you. After what happened between us, I had a big rethink on what I wanted out of a relationship and I knew that it wasn’t just sex. It didn’t matter how good the sex was, in the end it just never counts for very much.’



As swiftly as he had hit the top of the world, he plummeted back down to earth and straight back into the brick wall of her not liking him. He knew he should rise above this. Damn it, it was hardly as though he hadn’t enjoyed women, having made sure that they knew in advance that he was only interested in relationships that came without strings. He was no saint, but he felt as if she was enclosed within four ice walls. And she didn’t want to bring the paragon Ben into the conversation because she still needed him.



‘Look.’ She stepped out of the bed and began putting on her clothes, glad for the distraction of doing something rather than lying there next to the man she now, with gut-wrenching dismay, realised she still loved. ‘I’m prepared to put Gina ahead of myself and let you stay here, at least for a while, until she gets to know you and feels safe enough to let you move out without thinking that you’ll disappear for ever. But there’s one big condition.’#p#分页标题#e#



And he would never know how important the condition was for her health, because sleeping with him had been a crazy mistake and she couldn’t do it again. It would be bad enough having him in the house, but to start having a sexual relationship with him again would spell a honeyed trap which she couldn’t fall into again.



‘We don’t do this again.’ Clothes on, she looked at him sprawled on the bed, half covered with the tousled bed clothes that were a mocking reminder of her weakness. She took a deep breath. ‘It was a mistake, and I guess it was a mistake we both had to make, but the same old same old doesn’t work for me any more.’



‘Same old same old?’



Charlotte shrugged. ‘Same old Riccardo, the good lover with nothing more on his mind.’



‘I proposed marriage!’ Riccardo reminded her, enraged at his impotence, at her for her moral high-ground, and at his own confusion because the thought of her and her sensitive twenty-first-century wimp stirred hot, ugly jealousy inside him.



But where’s the love? she asked herself sadly. ‘You just don’t understand, Riccardo. Anyway. That’s not important. I’m going to have my bath, and like I said we’ll both put Gina first and see how it goes for a little while.’ She didn’t trust herself with him. He could manoeuvre a conversation in directions she didn’t know existed until she found herself going down one of them, and she couldn’t let herself be persuaded into a relationship with him on his terms. So she opened the door and, before he could say anything else, she let herself quietly out of the room and straight to the bathroom.



Not important? Not important? Riccardo, staring in frustration at the closed door, was outraged. What, he thought venomously, did that man have that he didn’t? And how could she just write off physical attraction as something that didn’t count for anything? Moreover, would she still be able to have a relationship with the man after she had slept with him? He could have kicked himself for not asking her that vital question, and then it occurred to him that maybe, in the great scheme of things, he was emotionally so unimportant that their one-night mistake wouldn’t even register.



But he was finding he damned well wanted it to register! He had been young and arrogant and had let her go, thinking that it was the best for the both of them. He was beginning to wonder whether that had been a mistake from which he had never really recovered. But fate had given him this second chance. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, not when there was so much at stake.





CHAPTER EIGHT





‘WHAT’S going on?’ Charlotte stepped through her front door at a little after seven-thirty, to find Riccardo right there and apparently waiting for her. This was disconcerting. In fact, the past two-and-a-half weeks had been disconcerting. She could accuse him of a lot of things, but not making an effort for the sake of his daughter was not one of them. How long he could keep it up was anybody’s guess, but if the object of the exercise was to get close to his daughter then he was succeeding with flying colours.

He’d been getting back to the house by seven. He had taken Gina to the cinema twice to see shows which she couldn’t imagine he’d enjoyed in a month of Sundays. He had endured a Saturday evening meal in a fast-food restaurant surrounded by babies, toddlers, young children running about and harassed mothers without complaint. He had played Scrabble and contrived to lose, Monopoly—which he hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to lose—and endless games of cards which Charlotte could only think he’d found supremely tiresome compared to his previous adult pursuits. On a scale of one to ten, where, she wondered, did gin rummy figure compared to a Friday evening in the company of one of his leggy blondes at a posh restaurant?#p#分页标题#e#