The Ice Prince (9 page)

Anna cleared her throat.

“Nothing. I mean—I mean, I was just thinking …. Perhaps this would be a good time to agree on what happens next.”

He grinned. It made her pulse stutter.

“An excellent suggestion,
cara.
” He took her cup from her hands and set it beside his. His fingers brushed hers. She fought the sudden urge to fling herself into his arms.

What in the world is wrong with you, Orsini? Are you losing your mind?

“I suspect we can think of something,” he said.

“No.” Her voice was breathy, the kind of old-fashioned I’m-just-a-girl-and-you’re-such-a-sexy-stud thing she despised in women. “No,” she said, briskly this time, and drew back her hand. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

His eyes focused on hers. “What way did you mean it?”

Anna wished she were not wearing a robe, not sitting on a bed rumpled from a night of sex, not facing a man who looked as if he had just stepped out of
GQ.

“I meant … well, I was thinking that—that I hope you understand, this was, uh, it was fine.”

His eyes narrowed to obsidian slits.

“Fine?” he said softly, and Anna winced.

“It was great.”

“Great,” he said even more softly.

She was digging herself into a hole. She took a breath, forced what she hoped was a brilliant smile.

“You know what I mean. It was—it was—”

“What was, Anna? Breakfast? The coffee?” A muscle knotted in his jaw. “Or are you speaking of what happened between us in this bed?”

Now she was blushing. She knew it. And what was there to blush about?

He folded his arms over his chest.

“Let me save you the trouble. You were thinking that the sex had nothing to do with our situation.”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “I’m glad you understand. We’re still adversaries.”

He said nothing. Perhaps he hadn’t understood her. His English seemed flawless but, as an attorney, especially one who worked with the poor, she often dealt with people who seemed to speak excellent English and yet still struggled with words that had a particular subtlety to them.

“You know,” she said carefully. “The land.”

He went on looking at her, saying nothing. A muscle ticked in his jaw; she saw it and she stood up to gain whatever advantage it might give her.

“Look, I’m simply trying to set things straight. We slept together.”

“Such a charming phrase.”

“Why? Because it comes from a woman?”

Draco’s lips drew back from his teeth. “It comes from the Orsini
consigliere.
”

Anna’s chin came up. “You’re twisting my words.”

“Then let me untwist them. You’re telling me that we had sex. And I should not assume the event was a turning point in our little legal drama.”

His voice was more than flat; it was as cold as winter. Anna moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.

“I wouldn’t have put it quite so—so—”

“Bluntly?” He stood up, and she lost whatever pathetic advantage in height she’d had.

“Well, yes. I mean—”

“You mean,” he said with a quick, sharp smile, “I should not think that by sleeping with me, you’ve given up your right to try and take from me that which is mine.”

There it was again, all that upper-class arrogance. That I-am-rich-and-you-are-not rubbish that had driven her parents from Sicily, that she saw every day in her work.

“The land is not yours, and you damned well know it!”

“It is mine, it has always been mine, and no Sicilian thug is going to change that by sending his daughter to do his dirty work in her bed.”

“You—you aristocratic bastard!”

“Tell me, Anna. Whose idea was it to sleep with the enemy? Yours? Or your father’s?”

Anna’s hand flew through the air and cracked against Draco’s jaw. He caught her by the wrist, twisted her arm behind her, brought her to her toes.

“Did you really think I would tell you that I changed my mind? That I would be happy to let you have the land in exchange for me having had you?”

“That’s disgusting!”

“What is disgusting,” he said in a low voice, “is that I should have forgotten, even for a moment, that the blood of thieves and thugs runs in your veins.”

“Get out,” she snapped. “Get the hell out of my room!”

His hand fell from hers. “With pleasure,” he said, turning his back and reaching for his clothes.

“Just get this straight,” Anna said, her voice shaking with anger. “The Orsinis will see to it that you’ll never be able to use that land, not if I have to stay here for the next hundred years.”

He turned toward her just as his robe fell open.

Her heartbeat stuttered.

Naked, he was as dangerous looking as he was beautiful. The wide shoulders, leanly muscled torso and long legs. And the part of him that was male, that she knew so intimately, knew was almost frighteningly potent …

The air in the room seemed to turn thick and still.

Anna’s gaze flew to Draco’s face. She could hear the pulse of her blood beating in her ears. Neither of them moved until, at last, he gave a harsh laugh.

“You flatter yourself,
bellissima.
I have had my fill of what you so generously offered.” Slowly, confidently he dressed, then strolled to the door. “I’ll return for you in an hour. Be ready. I don’t like to be kept waiting.”

“Ready for what?”

“Ready to deal with our mutual problem so that we can see the last of each other.”

Anna moved toward him. “Just tell me where to meet you. I absolutely forbid you to—”

“Was that an order, Orsini?” His smile was as thin as the blade of a knife. “Because you have to know I don’t follow orders.”

“Listen, Valenti—”

“No,” he snarled, “
you
listen! I will be back in an hour,
il mio consigliere.
And if you have anything in your luggage besides those lady lawyer suits and ridiculous stilettos, I suggest you wear them.”

“You’re despicable,” Anna said. “Absolutely des—”

Draco caught her by the wrist, hauled her to him and stopped the angry flow of words with a merciless kiss.

Then he was gone.

T
HE
hotel doorman was not the same one as last night.

He looked shocked when Draco asked for his Ferrari.

A Ferrari? Here? No. That was impossible. Surely the
signore
could see that this was not a hotel at which anyone would leave such an automobile.

True enough.

The place was clean, but that was about it. Apparently, Cesare Orsini didn’t believe in providing his
consigliere
with a decent expense account.

Draco, fighting an anger he knew was meant for that
consigliere
and not for the pudgy fool dressed like an extra in a bad operetta, agreed.

The hotel was not the place for a Ferrari.

Nonetheless, he said, he had left
his
Ferrari here, at the curb, last evening. And as he said it, he took a hundred-euro note from his wallet and handed it over.

Ah, the doorman said, palming the bill, how could he have forgotten? He snapped his fingers, pointed at a pimply-faced kid wearing what Draco figured was a bellman’s costume, and sent the boy running. Seconds later the car was at the curb. Draco tipped the kid and got behind the wheel, burning rubber as he peeled away.

The intersection ahead was a typical snarl of traffic, cars and taxis and motorcycles growling like jungle beasts in
anticipation of the green light and the chance to cut each other off.

Draco floored the gas, steered between a truck and a taxi, skidded around a motorcycle, got to the front of the pack just as the light changed and kept going. It won him a chorus of angry-sounding horns. A joke, considering that obeying traffic laws was pretty much against Roman law.

Too bad one of the drivers didn’t feel like making something of it. That big guy on the black Augusta motorcycle, for example. Hell, if he was looking for trouble …

Dio.

Draco was the one looking for trouble, and for what reason? A woman he’d slept with had said something that had angered him. If he had a hundred euros for every female who’d ever said anything that had irritated him …

But this had gone beyond irritation. Anna’s suggestion, hell, her assumption that he’d figure the night they’d spent had changed the fact that they had a dispute to settle was insulting.

He had to put it out of his head.

Draco stepped down harder on the gas. The mood he was in, driving fast was safer than thinking, but how could a man stop thinking?

His head felt as if it might explode.

Damn Anna Orsini. Damn himself, too. How could he have forgotten that old saw about never mixing business with pleasure?

That he had just didn’t make sense.

Anna was attractive. So what? He knew dozens, scores of attractive women. Why be modest at a moment like this? Attractive women, beautiful women were his for the taking.

Hadn’t he just left one behind in Hawaii? In fact, he thought coldly, if you wanted to be blunt about it, Giselle was the better looking of the two.

Maybe not.

Maybe she was just more interested in pleasing him than Anna was.

Giselle was always perfumed, every hair in place, her face carefully made-up even when he knew she’d spent who knew how long making sure she didn’t look made-up. He’d been with her for, what, two months? In all that time he’d never seen her looking disheveled unless it was artfully so.

Sometimes he suspected she slipped from bed so she could tiptoe into the bathroom to fix her hair and face before he woke and saw her.

Anna certainly hadn’t bothered to do that.

By morning her hair had been a wild tangle, her lipstick a memory. She had not looked even remotely perfect.

Draco’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.

She’d looked like a woman who had enjoyed every moment she’d spent in her lover’s arms, but if that were true, would she even have thought of pointing out that their dispute was not settled just because they’d had sex?

Was there nothing on her mind but that cursed land in Sicily?

Probably not.

A woman with so much attitude …
Dio,
she was impossible. She had an opinion on everything. She was stubborn and defiant, and she argued at the drop of a hat.

He had to have been out of his mind to have slept with her.

Not that he preferred his women to be compliant.

He was not a male chauvinist—he was just a man who understood that men were men and women were women, and a little show of deference to the dominant sex, goddamnit, could be a very nice thing.

He was still driving too fast, but the traffic had lessened.
That was one of the benefits of living off the Via Appia Antica. A handful of villas, lots of parkland, lots of space.

And space, metaphorically speaking, was what he needed right now.

Unbelievable that Anna would think of the land first and the hours they’d spent making love a distant second.

Correction again.

They hadn’t made love.

They’d had sex. Anna had been very clear about that, and rightly so. That ability to see sex as a man saw it was definitely one thing he liked about her.

Making love was a woman’s phrase, a female way of twisting words to turn something basic and honest into something they could do without having to admit they had the same appetites as men.

Men spoke of making love, but the truth was that as far as they were concerned, “making love” was a euphemism for a four-letter word or, in polite company, a three-letter one.

S-e-x.

It was what men and women did in bed. It was what he and Anna had done. In bed, and out of it. Against the wall, with her legs wrapped around him. Against the vanity, with his hands on her hips. In the shower, with the soap turning their skin slick …

Was he insane? He had to be, or why would he be driving along at a zillion miles an hour and turning himself on with hot images of a woman he was sorry he’d ever met?

The gates to his villa loomed ahead. Draco slowed the Ferrari, depressed a button and the gates swung slowly open.

The point was they’d had sex. And then she’d brought them both down to earth by accusing him of figuring the night they’d spent together might have been a
quid pro quo.

What it had been, he thought grimly as he pulled up before
the villa and killed the engine, what it had been was pure, raw hunger.

It had filled him, nearly consumed him, though he’d refused to admit it, even to himself, until Anna had opened the hotel door, looking beautiful without makeup, with her hair a sexy tumble of untamed curls; looking delicate and strong—and no way was he going to try to figure out how a woman could seem strong and fragile at the same time.

Anna did, that was all.

She was too complex for her own good and certainly for his, and knowing that, he’d still wanted her.

And she had wanted him just as intensely, just as passionately, even though he was supposed to be her enemy.

She had an honest, open attitude toward sex. He liked that about her, too. And damnit, it was ridiculous to fault her for putting into words what a man might well have thought—that maybe being intimate had put an end to their legal dispute.

Only a man would think that way. Or, at least, speak so bluntly.

Was that what this was all about?

Was he angry because Anna Orsini was a gorgeous, desirable woman, never mind all that nonsense about her simply being attractive, who spoke a man’s thoughts and expressed a man’s hunger? He’d never dealt with a woman like her before.

Did it make him uncomfortable?

Or did it go beyond that?

Was it because in some deep, dark foolish part of him, he wanted to know if she was like this with other men? Was she as ready, as hot, as wet for them as she had been for him?

Not that he gave a damn …

Draco slapped his hands against the steering wheel.

There was no logic to it. There could not be any logic to it. He’d made a mistake, and that was that.

He should never have permitted the controversy with Cesare Orsini to go this far. He should have ignored that last letter. Failing that, he should not have gone ahead and met with Orsini’s representative without his own lawyer present.

But he had, and now he’d compounded the mess by sleeping with Anna.

He was tired of the nonsense. Of all of it. A thug who had spent his life stealing from others and thought he could go on doing it. A woman who thought he might see sex as a bargaining tool …

Draco narrowed his eyes.

Was that the real purpose of that little speech? Had she hoped that he truly had seen the night as a kind of trade? She’d given him a night to remember; he would give her the land?

Hold on,
a voice inside him said,
she never even suggested that. It was you, dummy. You haven’t just leaped to a conclusion, you arrived in that fantasyland all by yourself. And you didn’t just arrive there, you landed with both feet. Remember what you said about her doing her father’s dirty work in her bed?

A mess. At total, stinking mess.

Draco got out of the car and slammed the door behind him.

Who cared who had done what? He’d had enough of the Orsinis, father and daughter.

By nightfall he’d be rid of them both.

Anna had packed lightly for her trip to Rome.

Two suits. Four white silk blouses. Three pairs of heels, and what had that full-of-himself fool meant by calling her stilettos ‘ridiculous’?

“You try going without lunch for four months to buy a pair,” she muttered as she pawed through the clothes she’d brought with her.

Better still, let him try wearing them.

The picture that leaped into her head, Draco attempting to stuff his big feet into her size sevens, might have made her laugh if she’d been in a laughing mood. But she wasn’t, not even over the Cinderella story told in reverse.

Besides, no matter how you turned things around, Prince Valenti was no Prince Charming.

He was an aristocratic, autocratic idiot, she thought grimly. And if she owed him for anything, it was that he’d gone out of his way to remind her of it.

Such an overreaction to her simple statement about them still being adversaries. How could you insult a man by telling him the truth?

Or maybe that was the problem. Maybe the truth was that he’d figured he was so good in bed that he’d dazzled her into giving up what had brought her to Rome in the first place.

Anna rolled her eyes as she searched through her clothes.

That would never work with her. She wasn’t a girlish fool who’d lose her girlish heart over him just because she’d slept with him, and what was with the silly euphemism?

They hadn’t slept together—they’d had sex. That’s what it always was to a man, and to any woman with a functional brain.

One of the things Anna loved about the law was that it had the right words to describe whatever needed describing.

Sex was like that.

Why pretend? Why give the act fanciful names that had to do with sleeping or, even worse, with romance? Why make it sound as if the heart was involved in a strictly biological act?

As for her pointing out that a night of sex had not changed the bottom line … The almighty prince might not like hearing the truth, but people traded sex for what they really wanted all
the time. Her professional life was full of examples. Sad-eyed women staying with men who beat them, just so they could have roofs over their heads. Gorgeous models married grotesque old men so they could wallow in money and jewels.

Anna’s mouth thinned.

There were other kinds of trades, too. Look at the one her own mother had made.

Sofia Orsini stayed with her gangster husband so that she wouldn’t have to face the disgrace that went with an old-fashioned Sicilian woman asking for a divorce. What other explanation could there possibly be?

Anna slapped her hands on her hips and blew a curl off her forehead.

Well, she wasn’t like that.

She didn’t need a man to keep her housed, clothed and fed. She didn’t want jewels or anything she couldn’t afford to buy for herself. And she sure as hell would divorce a bastard who deserved divorce, except she’d never have to.

Marriage, a lifetime commitment, was absolutely not on her agenda.

She liked men, liked spending time with them, liked having sex on occasion, but all on her own straightforward terms. No trading. No promises. No lies.

Love was an illusion. Sex was sex, and what did any of that have to do with the ugly little scene here a few minutes ago?

She’d made a candid statement. How had Draco managed to make it sound, well, cheap? It wasn’t. It had been honest, that was all.

The prince didn’t like honesty? Too bad.

And she wasn’t going to forget that accusation he’d hurled at her. Suggesting she’d gone to bed with him to change his mind about the land …

That had hurt. Because making love with him … No. Having sex with him had been, it had been …

“Damnit,” Anna said, her voice shaking.

Never mind thinking about what had happened.

It was time to look forward.

And where were the jeans, the T, the sneakers she knew she’d packed? She always brought along stuff like that. Getting snowed in at an airport in upstate New York on a ski trip her senior year in law school had taught her two things.

One, she hated skiing.

Two, when you flew anywhere, you always had to pack something comfortable to wear.

And there were the things she’d been looking for, tucked on a shelf in the tiny hotel-room closet. Old jeans. Older sneakers. An ancient T-shirt that she positively adored.

Who wouldn’t?

This was not any T, it was the one Isabella had given her on her last birthday. It was vintage, from the 1970s. Isabella said she’d found it in a little shop in Soho. The shirt was gray and slightly faded, but the words that marched across the front of it read loud and clear.

A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle.

Truer words had never graced a T-shirt.

Anna took off the robe, pulled on a bra and panties, stepped into the jeans, zipped them up and tugged the shirt over her head.