The Ice Prince (13 page)

The man.

Most especially the man.

He was so different from what she’d expected, so different from the men she usually dated. He was beautiful to look at, yes, but what made him unique was harder to pin down, that tantalizing combination of strength and tenderness, that old-fashioned belief in honor …

That male arrogance.

Back to that again.

She’d always hated it.

Well, no.

She hated it in her father, where arrogance equated with dominance. In the men who surrounded him. She hated it in a handful of her colleagues, who sometimes spoke to her as if she were a girl and not a woman.

But her brothers were male to the core; they were incredibly arrogant and yet she loved that in them—their assertiveness, their protectiveness …

Her sisters-in-law, independent females every one, clearly loved those same qualities. Maybe whether you thought a man’s attitude was caring or dominating depended on what you felt for the man. On whether you respected him and admired him.

On whether you loved him—whatever that meant, because she didn’t believe in love. In the very concept of it. In being with one man forever, waking up in his arms, falling asleep
with your hand on his heart, feeling peace inside you just because you did something simple like—like sitting in the sun, eating ice cream while you leaned against him …

The cup of
gelato
slipped from her hand.

“Such a waste,” Draco teased as he scooped it up. Then he saw her face. “Anna? What is it?”

What, indeed? It wasn’t possible. It absolutely wasn’t. She was—she was a victim of her own imagination. The beautiful city. The beautiful man. A hundred movies and magazine articles with Rome as the setting, and that was all it was, this—this sudden gallop of her heart.

“Anna. Answer me. Are you ill?”

“No. No! I’m fine.”

Draco rose and drew her to her feet. “Are you sure?” His eyes were dark with worry.

“I’m positive. Too much sun maybe.” She managed a smile. “Or maybe too much ice cream after too much pasta. I mean, when your usual breakfast is whole wheat toast …”

He was supposed to laugh. Instead, he drew her into his arms.

“I know exactly what you need.”

There it was again. That damnable male attitude. No. She could never—

“In fact,” he said, his voice a rough caress meant for her ears alone, “I know precisely what you need. A cool drink. A cool bed. And my arms, warm around you.”

He was right.

He was right, and whatever that meant was …

It was terrifying.

Over the next few days Draco showed Anna more of his Rome.

The ancient, narrow streets. The magnificent fountains. The green parks. The centuries worth of paintings and frescoes
and sculptures. The passageways beneath the Coliseum, where she could almost hear the cries, smell the fear of the men and the animals about to die in the arena.

And he wanted to buy her things. A carnival mask from Venice. A tiny bejeweled heart from Bulgari. Each time, she offered a polite “Thank you, but no.”

He tried to overrule that
no
in a tiny, elegant shop on the Via Condotti, where he’d taken her after she said she really, really needed to buy some clothes, emphasis on the
really, really
in a way that told him what he already suspected—that his Anna wasn’t accustomed to spending much on herself.

Except for shoes. “My weakness,” she’d admitted one night, and he told her he was glad that it was, because the sight of her long, lovely legs in those killer heels, the rest of her clad only in a thong and matching bra, was fast becoming his.

But when she said she needed to get something to wear, that she couldn’t live in her lady lawyer suits, one pair of jeans and that T-shirt that made him laugh each time he saw it, Draco took her to the only place he could think of. The Via Condotti, its endless designer shops …

A mistake.

Any of the women who’d passed through his life would have been thrilled.

Anna was horrified.

“Ohmygod, look at the prices!” she’d hissed—at least she’d hissed it when there were prices to see. There were no tags on the things in some shops; when Anna asked, the clerk would ignore her and give the answer to him.

That they would assume he’d pay for her purchases made Anna even more indignant.

“Anna,” he’d said softly, “
bellissima,
be reasonable. This is how things are done.”

“Not by me.”

“But I want to buy these things for you. That dress. This
skirt.” He picked up a tiny gold-and-Murano-glass replica of the Trevi Fountain. “And this. Imagine how it would look on your fireplace mantel. Or the desk in your office.”

Imagine how it would remind you of this week we spent together,
he’d meant, but it was pointless.

“That little figure,” she’d said, “costs a king’s ransom. Besides, I don’t have a fireplace or a mantel in my walk-up, and if I put it anywhere in the hole-in-the-wall I call an office, one of my scruffy clients would try and steal it.”

A walk-up flat. A miserable office. Clients who probably spent more time making excuses for their failures than doing something about them. She deserved better than that, but he’d known that telling her so was pointless.

Almost as pointless as their shopping expedition until a clerk had taken pity on her, or maybe on him, and whispered the name of a place blocks away that dealt, she said, in things far less expensive. Anna had dragged him there and left him outside to cool his heels.

When she’d emerged a quarter of an hour later, carrying a huge, plain shopping bag, he’d been surprised.

“So fast?” he’d said.

“I don’t need to waste time. I know what I want when I see it.”

Yes. So did he. And what he wanted was Anna.

He wanted her all the time, and she wanted him with the same hot desire. And yet the more they made love, the more he felt that heat changing to something else. Something deeper and stronger, something powerful …

And frightening.

It was on his mind all the time.

That he felt something he couldn’t comprehend, and that their time together was coming to a close. Only another two days, he found himself thinking one night as they
were finishing dinner on the terrace of a small, very quiet, well—off-the-tourist-route restaurant in Trastevere.

Anna was talking. Animatedly.

Draco was listening. More or less. Mostly he was filling his eyes with her.

“… haven’t listened to a word,” she said suddenly, and he blinked and said, “What?”

She made a face. “See? And here I was telling you all my secrets.”

He reached for her hand. “I know all your secrets,” he said softly. “That place on your neck that drives you crazy when I kiss it. The taste of your nipples on my tongue …”

“Stop that,” she said, but her eyes glittered and her lips curved in a smile. “I’m talking about a different kind of secret. About my hair.”

He looked at her hair, hanging down her back like curls of spun gold.

“I love your hair,” he said.

“Yeah?” She flashed a smile so smug it made him raise his eyebrows. “I bet you wouldn’t have loved it when I dyed it black.”

He blinked. “You what?”

“I dyed it. Not just black. Jet-black. So then, of course, I went the whole route. Black nail polish, black lipstick, black T-shirts, black jeans …”

He tried to imagine it. And shuddered. “Why?”

“Teenage rebellion, maybe. I was, I don’t know, sixteen, seventeen. Or maybe it was a way to tell my father what he could do with his version of ‘young ladies are expected to be quiet, demure and obedient’ nonsense.”

“Was that what he expected of you?”

“Of course.” Anna eyed the tray of tiny pastries that the waiter had brought with their coffee, reached for one, pulled her hand back, reached for another, did the same thing, finally
sighed and gave the tray a delicate push away from her. “He had as much chance of me falling into line as a snowball has of making it through hell.”

Draco smiled.
Dio,
his Anna was tough!

“And your father said …?”

“He said if this were the fifteenth century instead of the twenty-first, he’d have locked me away in a nunnery.”

“I’m starting to understand that T-shirt of yours,” Draco said, and grinned. “The fish and the bicycle thing. I’m just trying not to take it personally.” Anna smiled. He reached for her hand and enfolded it in his. “So what did he do?”

“Well, what
could
he do?”

“Ah. No nunneries. I forgot.”

“He cut off my allowance. Big deal. My brothers made up for it.”

“Your brothers liked your black hair?”

“They liked that I’d stood up to our father, the way they had. Plus, I’m pretty sure they thought my Goth phase was cool. See, they’re pretty cool themselves.” She reached for the tray again. This time she grabbed a pastry and ate it in two quick bites. “They never took a penny from our father,” she said after she’d swallowed. “And now they run this humongous investment firm in Manhattan.”

Draco slapped his forehead. “Of course! Orsini Brothers.”

“Uh-huh.”

He chuckled. “It’s perfect. A crime boss rendered powerless in his own home. Nice work,
bellissima.
”

Anna’s smile broadened. “Thank you, Your Highness.”

Draco brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Did your sister rebel, too?”

“In the most innocent-seeming way. Izzy took to digging in the soil. Getting her hands dirty. Father found that to be beneath one of his daughters. The more he objected, the more she dug.” Anna’s eyes danced. “Checkmate.”

“Indeed.”

“Okay. It’s your turn.”

“At what?”

“You know all about me, but I don’t know a thing about you. What were you like as a kid?”

Draco’s smile faded. “I was not—what did you call it? I was not cool, Anna.”

Her smile faded, too. “Draco,” she said softly, “I’m sorry. I should have realized. It must have been hard. Your father, your grandfather, whatever they’d done to lose everything …”

Had he told her about that? Yes. He had. What for? He didn’t talk about his childhood, his family … Except that now, without planning to, he found himself talking about all of it.

About his mother, who’d never been a mother to him at all. About his father, who had, literally, never noticed if he was there or not. About boarding school, and what it had taken to survive it …

Finally he ran out of words.

He fell silent. So did Anna. He couldn’t read her face at all.

“Well,” he said after a minute, trying for a laugh he couldn’t quite muster, “so much for ruining the evening.”

Anna shoved back her chair. A second later she was crouched beside him, her eyes suspiciously bright.

Draco looked around. A score of interested people looked back.

“Damnit, Anna,” he said.

“Damnit, Draco,” she replied, her voice as soft as the petals of a flower, and right there, on the crowded terrace of a crowded restaurant, she clasped his face with her hands, brought it down to hers and put her lips against his.

That was the moment he knew he could not possibly let her leave him at the end of the week.

He lay awake that night long after she fell asleep.

Two more days. Then Anna would fly to New York. She had a return ticket, she’d said when he’d suggested she use his plane, which was finally back in service. He’d argued, then given in. She was so damned stubborn, too stubborn even to agree to something when anyone could see that doing so would make sense.

As for him, he’d stay on in Rome for a few days, take care of some business. Then he’d fly to San Francisco. And the week they’d spent together, their affair, if you could call seven nights and two days an affair, would be history.

They would still see each other, of course. He’d fly east, she’d fly west. A weekend here, a weekend there. It was doable.

For a while.

Well, so what?

These relationships never lasted. Hell, why would he want them to? The sex lost its excitement. Conversation lost its luster. Yes, this week had been different. Morning conversation. Late-night kisses. Things he’d never even considered with other women had become not just enjoyable but important.

Damnit. He was not ready to let Anna walk out of his life.

New York. San Francisco. Three thousand miles. If only his offices were on the East Coast, or hers on the West. He could not change that. He’d spent years building his company. Hundreds of people worked for him. Anna, on the other hand …

Wait a minute.

What had she said about her work? A hole-in-the-wall office. Sleazy clients. A walk-up flat.

What if she had another opportunity? A much better one? She would, of course, accept it …

And just that quickly, Draco knew what to do. And how
to do it so it wouldn’t make her hackles rise. Underhanded? No. Clever, that was all. Clever and logical.

Carefully he eased his arm from her. “Mmm.” She sighed, and he smiled, thinking of how now he’d be sure to hear that soft whisper again.

He rose, pulled on his discarded trousers and went through the villa to his study. It took a while to make the necessary phone calls. Two hours, to be precise.

And then the deed was done.

No more East-Coast, West-Coast conundrum. One coast was all they’d need.

A few days from now, Anna would be headhunted by Vernon, Bolton and Andover, a top-flight San Francisco law firm. The firm he used, as a matter of fact. They’d explain that they’d decided to expand their
pro bono
cases and they needed an experienced litigator. They’d offer her four times her current salary, a staff and all the indigent cases they believed had merit.

And, as was often the case, the partner who recruited her would tell her they’d already scouted out an apartment she’d surely like.

By happy coincidence, it would be in the same building as Draco’s condo.

Draco had given that lots of thought. He really wanted her living with him, but maybe he wasn’t ready for that. Besides, he knew his Anna.

She liked feeling independent.

Having her own place, even if she spent most of her time in his, would make her happy. He’d let her pay the rent—she would believe the owner was renting it out—and Draco wouldn’t be fool enough to suggest letting him pay it. But she didn’t have to know that he was the owner, and that she was paying only half the actual monthly cost.