Interesting arrangement. While her mother was alive, Warren would fly all night to get home to her. They hadn’t spent a night apart that wasn’t business. Her stomach twisted. In many ways, Sile’s tragic death at a far-too-early age had turned her father into a different man. Taken the small amount of softness Warren possessed with her, his anger at her death so raw and all-consuming.
“Does seven suit for dinner?” Matteo asked. “If you sleep after that you should be able to get into the time.”
“That’s perfect, thank you.”
“Fino a stasera. Until tonight...”
And why did even that sound sexy? She closed the door behind him and blamed it on the accent. Accents were always sexy on a man. His, particularly so.
She looked longingly at the bed. Just a couple more hours, she told herself, intending on showering first and catching up on email. But her eyelids burned from fatigue and she felt as if her body had been pummeled in a boxing match. Maybe a few minutes with her eyes closed on the high canopy bed in the beautiful, fairy-tale-ish room would refresh her enough to make it through dinner.
Help her figure out exactly how she was going to avoid the inescapable attraction she felt toward her host. Her reaction to him, she decided, curling up on the satin comforter, was probably due to the fact she hadn’t looked at a man since Julian had left. Had buried herself in work lest the humiliation of it all become simply too much to bear. She hugged the pillow to her. Quinn never intended to feel that kind of humiliation ever again. From any man. So she was missing the gene that allowed her to be truly intimate with another person.... The way she’d survived in this world, the way she’d survived as a Davis was to shield her heart. To not let herself feel.
It was easier that way. To not need anyone. And she wasn’t changing her strategy now.
Matteo knocked on the heavy wooden door of Quinn’s suite just after seven, his game plan firmly in place. Ply her with an incomparable Brunello, impress her with the history and atmosphere of De Campo over dinner in the cellar and, most importantly, find out why she’d ranked them fourth on her list.
A piece of cake, as the Americans would say.
When there was no response to his knock, he rapped again, harder. Nothing. Strange. Quinn seemed like the overly punctual type. He was knocking on the two-inch-thick door a third time when it flew open and she stood before him, bleary-eyed, dark hair flowing over her shoulders in a jumbled mass of curls.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “I fell asleep.”
He wasn’t. She had the face of an angel when she wasn’t frowning. Her big green eyes had a sleepy, muted golden edge to them, an intense vulnerability he couldn’t tear his gaze from. He had the feeling this was the real Quinn Davis. The softness behind the hard edge she liked to present to the world. Unfiltered.
His gaze drifted down over the flushed, rosy skin of her cheeks, her full, pouty lips that were the kind a man imagined wrapped around a certain part of his anatomy...
Matteo’s body temperature soared. Quinn cleared her throat. The flicker of sexual awareness that replaced the vulnerability in her eyes slammed into him with the force of a hammer. Merda. Where had he ever gotten the impression this woman was cold? Or maybe it was just that she was a perfect combination of fire and ice?
Quinn dropped her gaze to somewhere around his shoulder and waved a hand at him. “Give me five minutes and I’ll be ready.”
He nodded. The click of the door brought back his sanity. Bringing Quinn Davis to her knees in that particular fashion might have been the natural order of things for him—but, regrettably, he needed to use his brain on this one, not his body.
Unfortunate. But not nearly as unfortunate as the consequences of not playing this one by the book.
Quinn emerged in a navy dress that made the most of her voluptuous curves in her usual, conservative fashion. Her ultracomposed, cool demeanor was firmly back in place.
“I hope this is okay?” She smoothed her hands over her hips. “You didn’t specify.”
“Perfetto.” He nodded. “I’m sorry, I should have mentioned it was just the two of us dining in the cellar. Anything goes.”
A wary look crossed her face. His lips curved. “I promise my best behavior, Quinn. We can recite every last statistic on De Campo over dinner. I’ll even tell you what we polish the floors with.”
“Ha, ha,” she murmured, long lashes coming down to veil her expression. “I wasn’t worried.”
Si, you were. He wasn’t the only one having a hard time handling the chemistry between them, but he instinctively knew Quinn Davis had to feel in control of a situation for him to accomplish anything tonight, so he let it go.