The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

      ‘Like we’re still...you know,’ she completed, eyelashes lowering.

      ‘Like I still want to be inside you?’ Gio queried thickly. ‘But I do and right at this very minute I’m aching for you...’

      A tiny clenching sensation in a place she refused to think about forced Billie to shift uneasily on the seat. ‘I really didn’t need to know that, Gio. That was a very inappropriate comment to make—’

      Gio skated a long forefinger down over the back of the hand she had tautly braced to the leather seat. ‘At least it was honest and you’re not being honest—’

      ‘I’m not coming back to you!’ Billie interrupted loudly. ‘I’ve got another life now—’

      ‘Another man?’ Gio slotted in, deep accented voice raw with unspoken vibrations.

      And Billie seized on that convenient excuse like a drowning swimmer thrown a lifebelt. ‘Yes. There’s someone else.’

      Every lean, long line of Gio’s big body tensed. ‘Tell me about him.’

      Billie was thinking about her son. ‘He’s extremely important to me and I would never do anything to hurt or upset him.’

      ‘There’s nothing I won’t do to get you back,’ Gio warned as the limousine drew up outside his country-house hotel and the chauffeur leapt out to open the door. He also grasped at that same moment that he was not as law-abiding as he had always assumed because he knew that he was willing to break rules in order to get Billie back.

      Billie stole a reluctant glance at his lean, hard face, clashing with the golden glitter of his stunning eyes. She froze in consternation at that expression of menace she had never seen there before. ‘Is there some reason you can’t let me be happy without you?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I think I’ve paid my dues, Gio.’

      Gio’s nostrils flared at that declaration, exasperation roughening the edges of an anger he knew he had no right to express. If she had another man, she would naturally get rid of him because he refused to credit that any other man could set her on fire the way he did. But nothing could assuage his bone-deep ferocious reaction to being forced to imagine Billie in bed with someone else. Billie had always been his alone, indisputably his.

      As they crossed the foyer of the opulent hotel a familiar voice hailed Billie and she stopped dead and flipped round with a smile as a tall blond man in expensive country casuals moved towards her eagerly to greet her.

      ‘Simon, how are you?’ she said warmly.

      ‘I’ve got an address for you.’ Simon dug into his wallet to produce a piece of paper. ‘Got a pen?’

      Billie realised her bag had been left behind at the shop and looked expectantly at Gio. ‘Pen?’ she pressed.

      Totally unaccustomed to being ignored while others went about their business around him, Gio withdrew a gold pen from his pocket with pronounced reluctance, his beautiful obstinate mouth sardonic.

      Simon borrowed the pen and wrote the address on the back of a business card. ‘There’s a heap of stuff there you’ll like and it won’t cost you much either. The seller just wants the house cleared.’

      Impervious to the reality that Gio was standing by her side like a towering and forbidding pillar of black ice, Billie beamed at the taller man. ‘Thanks, Simon. I really appreciate this.’

      Simon studied her with the same appreciation Gio had often seen on male faces around Billie and his perfect white teeth gritted. ‘Maybe you’ll let me treat you to lunch here some day soon?’

      Gio shot an arm like a statement round Billie’s slender spine. ‘Regrettably she’s already taken.’

      Ignoring that intercession, Billie reddened but kept on valiantly smiling. ‘I’d like that, Simon. Call me,’ she suggested while knowing that she was only encouraging the other man to make a point for Gio’s benefit and feeling guilty about that because Gio was making her behave badly as well.

      ‘What was that all about?’ Gio demanded grittily as he urged her into the lift.

      ‘Simon’s an antique dealer. He tips me off about house clearances. I know a lot of dealers. That’s how I built up my business,’ Billie advanced with pride.

      ‘You can open a shop in London. I’ll pay for it,’ Gio told her grimly.

      Unimpressed, Billie glanced wryly at him. ‘Well, in a roundabout way you paid for this one and my house, so I don’t think it would be right for you to pay anything more.’

      ‘What are you talking about?’

      ‘I sold a piece of jewellery for cash. It was something you gave me.’

      Gio frowned. ‘You left everything I ever gave you behind.’

      ‘No, I took one piece. Your very first gift,’ Billie extended. ‘I had no idea how much it was worth. That was a surprise, I can tell you.’

      ‘Was it?’ Gio couldn’t even remember his first gift to her and he would have been prepared to swear, having checked the jewellery she left behind, that she had taken nothing with her when she walked out.

      ‘Yes, you’re so extravagant it’s a wonder you’re not broke. You hardly knew me and yet you spent an absolute fortune on that diamond pendant,’ Billie told him critically. ‘It paid for my house and setting up the shop. I couldn’t believe how valuable it was!’

      Gio thrust open the door of his suite. And just like that, the memory of the gift returned to him. He had bought the pendant after their first night together and he was furious that she had just sold it as if it meant nothing to her. ‘I don’t believe that there’s another man in your life.’

      ‘I’m not coming back to you,’ Billie told him in the most ludicrously apologetic tone. ‘Why would I want a shop in London? Why would I want to move? I’m happy here. And believe it or not there are men out there who would take me out with them into a public restaurant instead of hiding me inside their suite!’

      Billie had served a direct hit. Gio paled beneath his Mediterranean tan. ‘We’re in my suite only because we need a private setting in which to talk.’

      Billie gave him a wry smile. ‘Maybe that’s true this one time, Gio, but when it went on for almost two years, even I got the message. You might as well have been married from the moment I met you. I was like a guilty, dirty secret in your life.’

      ‘That is not true.’

      ‘No point arguing about the past now,’ Billie parried with determination. ‘It’s not worth it.’

      ‘Of course it is...I want you back.’ A spasm of open exasperation crossed Gio’s lean dark face when a knock sounded on the door, announcing the arrival of two waiters pushing a rattling trolley: lunch had arrived.

      Billie folded her arms, thinking of her grandpa’s favourite winning racehorse, Canaletto, and the reality that just four years ago she had never heard of the artist called Canaletto before. Recalling that blunder still made Billie cringe and die inside herself, for the moment she had entered the conversation she had known her mistake but it had been far too late to cover it up. Unhappily for her, the one and only time Gio had taken her out to mix with his friends she had made an outsize fool of herself...and him.

      Although he had reacted with neither anger nor criticism, he had dismissed her attempts to talk about the incident and explain that she had grown up more at home in betting shops than museums. But she had known that she had seriously embarrassed him in public in a way that would not be forgotten and, even worse, in a manner that had literally signposted the reality that she and Gio came from worlds and educational backgrounds that were light years apart.

      That was why she had never complained about being excluded from his social life and why she had happily settled for dinners out alone in discreet locations where he was unlikely to meet