Page 213 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

‘Okay, then.’ He was back in control. ‘Like you said, the bed is big enough.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Why don’t you go on up? You don’t need to wait for me,’ he added. ‘I have some work to finish up.’

His dark gold gaze held her captive momentarily and then he turned to pick up the plate and she didn’t quite run but she moved swiftly through the silent house and back into the bedroom. Undoing the robe, she let it drop to the floor and climbed into bed, her body shimmering and strange to her, and she stayed that way when he slid in beside her as the light began to creep beneath the shutters.

‘Dovrei preparare una caffettiera fresca, Signor McIntyre? Questo è freddo.’

Glancing up at his housekeeper, Tiger shook his head. ‘No,grazie, Silvana.’

Normally he could drink any amount of coffee without any noticeable side effects at all, but today he had barely drunk more than a quarter of the French press that Silvana had brought to the table and he was already suffering from a sensory overload.

Or maybe the cause of his twitching pulse and headache was not the contents of the coffee press but the contents of the yellow shirtdress sitting opposite him in the soft Venetian sunlight.

He had woken early, but when he’d rolled over, the bed had been empty and the sheet smoothed flat as if she had never been there. As if he had dreamt her.

But she wasn’t a figment of his imagination, any more than that kiss.

Yet here she was sitting opposite him, calmly sipping her coffee as if nothing had happened in the kitchen. And he didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry. When he’d strolled onto the terrace, he hadn’t expected her to smile but her mouth had curved up at the corners because Silvana was there too, he’d realised a moment later. But then she’d tilted her head up so that he’d caught a glimpse of the smooth arc of her throat and he’d leaned in and brushed his lips against hers.

She had stiffened fractionally and then her lips had parted and he’d had to fight against every urge to deepen the kiss because this arrangement was on his terms and that meant being able to pull back.

‘Buongiorno,’he’d said softly, lifting his mouth and pulling out a chair in one smooth moment as Silvana had returned with a bowl of freshly bakedcornettos. Sydney had selected an almond-flavoured one and as he watched her pull it apart, he wondered why the process of sharing breakfast with her today seemed so much less of a big deal than it had done on the plane.

No doubt it was because they had already eaten off the same plate last night or the early hours of this morning, depending on which time zone you applied. Although, right now, nothing seemed to matter as much as getting her to keep looking up at him like that so that he could see the pale underside of her neck.

He leaned forward casually. ‘Did you sleep well?’

She nodded. ‘Ho dormito come un ghiro.Like a dormouse?’

He raised an eyebrow. It was an Italian phrase, but Sydney didn’t speak Italian. ‘Where did you pick that up?’

‘I did some miming to Silvana.’ She pressed the palms of her hands together and rested her head on them. ‘She told me what to say in Italian and then I checked on my phone to make sure I hadn’t got the wrong end of the stick.’

‘Or mistaken fireflies for lanterns.Prendere lucciole per lanterne.It’s the closest to getting the wrong end of the stick in Italian.’

He leaned a little closer, drawn to the flicker of curiosity in her brown eyes because, other than himself, he couldn’t think of a single person he knew who would be interested in learning idiomatic Italian for a week-long trip.

‘So, you like languages? I thought hackers were all maths nerds.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Do I look like a nerd to you?’

No, he thought. She didn’t. In that dress, with that hair and those toenails, she looked as if she were about to sashay down the Rio Terà de le Carampane to meet some girlfriends for lunch at Terrazza Cattana.

She shrugged. ‘Coding is like a language. Equations are just sentences with numbers. At school I never really understood that. I thought words weren’t my thing. Reading, writing was always such a struggle, so my teachers told me to focus on maths.’ She glanced away as if she was remembering a classroom somewhere and he found himself trying to picture her as a child. Skinny, he thought. Plaits and maybe a brace, he thought, remembering the way she had covered her mouth sometimes.

‘What changed?’

Her shoulders stiffened. It was the smallest of movements, so subtle that another man might not have noticed it. But thanks to his father, he was an expert at reading people and there was something about that infinitesimal shift that made his chest tighten.

‘I realised that letting other people set your boundaries was the easy option. Pushing back feels harder at the time. And it feels like an unnecessary risk to take, because you might fail.’ There was an odd undertone to her voice that pulled at something inside him. She was choosing her words with care, he realised, not just because she wanted to be clear about what she was trying to say. She was also trying to conceal some things too.

‘But if you don’t push back, you stop being you. And then every day a little piece of you will disappear until finally there’s nothing left.’

Sydney felt her stomach tighten. Tiger was lounging back in his chair, his face bathed in sunlight, one arm resting lightly along the back of the chair beside him, his long legs stretching out casually beneath the table. He was wearing a pale blue, short-sleeved linen shirt and loose cream-coloured trousers and he looked every inch the relaxing business mogul on vacation.

Except his eyes. Which were staring at her intently.

‘That’s quite a theory,’ he said at last.

She forced herself to shrug but inside her head was spinning. It was true, she did feel that way, but she had never articulated it out loud because it wasn’t just reading and writing she found hard. Speaking her mind, making herself heard, was also a problem. It was another reason why she liked working with computers. Coding didn’t require actual speech.

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