“Here,” he said, thrusting the hat out to her.
“Grazie,” she said a bit reluctantly, snatching the brim of the hat as if it was radioactive.
“Prego.” Time to regroup. He’d never met a female who was so prickly. Unless it was his sister when she didn’t get her way. “At least allow me to escort you back to the hotel when you’re done-” he glanced at her bag, “-er…with whatever you’re doing.”
She remained silent, looking at the horizon, but Luca could practically hear the gears turning in her head.
“If you behave,” she tossed out blithely, but not before Luca caught the furtive, sideways glance she gave him before she jammed the hat back onto her head in apparent dismissal of his presence.
If.
That brief glance was enough for Luca to have caught it. She had checked him out.
The little witch! He swallowed a smirk. Not an all out rejection after all. She was more clever than he had thought.
Luca’s smile returned. She had angled her body away from him. Since she couldn’t see it, he allowed it to broaden into an anticipatory grin. Luca hadn’t played this game in a very, very long time and so it took a moment for the realization to hit him. Sabrina Connelly was playing hard to get.
Chapter 2
Sabrina Connelly, you’re such an actress. Chase would be so proud of her if he could see her right now. She had to turn away momentarily from the sight of bare, firm chest and taut abdominal muscles. It was driving her to distraction. And good God, her nipples were pebbling. She had grabbed the first swimsuit she could find this morning. It was the one from Chase. Sabrina decided to wear it since there would probably be no one at this part of the beach this early.
Wrong.
She knew who Luca Argenti was. She had seen him arrive at the hotel last night. She had even dreamed about him.
She was seated at the lobby café hoping to catch a glimpse of any of the Konstantinos clan’s arrival. The staff were trained not to give out any information on the coming and goings of the guests, as any reputable hotel should, so she had been reduced to hanging out in the lobby on the off chance that she would spot any of them.
Instead she had seen him.
Or rather, she had heard him.
Rich, masculine laughter drifted to where she was seated behind a strategically placed potted plant. It was followed by a spate of emphatic, melodiously inflected words spoken in such a deep, liquid voice that Sabrina wanted to locate the speaker. It rose above the tranquil piano music drifting from the gallery that wrapped around the second floor of the hotel. She tried to guess. Was it Spanish? Or was he speaking in Italian?
She took a peek behind the magazine she had been pretending to read for the last hour. It served double duty to hide from men who might approach her and as camouflage to lessen her visibility to the staff who might become suspicious of anyone spending an inordinately huge amount of time at the hotel lobby.
She chided herself for being silly. He was probably a middle-aged man with a paunch. All men who spoke Spanish or Italian sounded sexy to her American ears.
But then he laughed again. It sounded closer. Sabrina imagined her lover would sound like that when they were in bed, cocooned in the afterglow of lovemaking. She, whispering naughty and daring things to her lover, and he, in laughter, both tender and indulgent.
Growing annoyed with her fanciful thoughts, she decided to ruin her illusion and peered between the fronds of the plant. She saw two men striding down the middle of the lobby towards the front desk. One she recognized as the hotel manager, nodding his balding head vigorously. The other one, who was much taller, had to be the laughing stranger. She could hear him talking and see him simultaneously gesticulating. She could make out the back of a head covered with dark, neatly trimmed hair, a dark jacket, and slim-fitting trousers. He was holding a black leather carryall. They stopped walking and the stranger tilted his body to follow where the manager was currently directing his attention to− the right wing of the lobby where Sabrina was hiding in.
She leaned back so she would not be caught staring.
A small angle of opening between the fronds served as her peephole. Now she could finally see him.
Sabrina braced herself for disappointment. Instead, she was terrified by how perfect his voice and face fit.
He had angled cheekbones, a high-bridged nose, and full lips. The light scruff on his jaw was sexy. He was dark, but his eyes appeared pale colored from where she was. He had a beige scarf looped twice around his neck. He looked like he had stepped out of a magazine. She had been around Chase and his friends long enough to know that his outfit was designer label. But where Chase and company were always so conscious of the provenance of their clothes, this man wore it so effortlessly. “Sprezzatura” the Italians called it, a kind of nonchalant elegance.