Читать книгу Sins of the Past - Elizabeth Power, Elizabeth Power - Страница 6

SANTO cielo! It was her!

With his skill at addressing the immediate, whilst keeping abreast of everything else going on around him, Damiano responded to something the woman behind the desk was saying, though his glittering black eyes were trained on the younger woman who had stopped briefly in the corridor beyond the glass partition.

Red hair—not long, as he remembered it, but short and fashionably tousled. She looked, with that natural curve to her mouth and those small pointed features, like some mischievous elf. Yet it was a mischief, he acknowledged through a rising tide of shock, motivated by opportunism and greed.

‘Mr D’Amico?’

Immaculate dark tailoring couldn’t hide the whipcord strength and physical power of a man in the peak of condition, a man of impressionable force and character, whose striking features were hardening now as he brought himself back sharply to the matter in hand.

How could he allow just one glimpse of that redhead to cause his concentration to slide? He had business to attend to. A chain of leisure centres and retail outlets to get up and running. But when he had arranged this meeting to finalise details with the design team who handled all his UK developments, he hadn’t expected to come in and be confronted by a ghost from his past.

‘That girl …’ She hadn’t seen him! He had only an impression now of feathery strands against an elegantly pale neck as she let herself into the office opposite the one in which he was standing and disappeared from view.

‘You mean Miss Singleman?’ His associate’s eyes had followed his, her swept up black hair and dramatically red lips emphasising the hard edge of a successful businesswoman in her fifties. But she knew who had been stealing his attention. ‘Riva?’

‘Riva …’ The word rolled off his tongue as sensually as it was savoured. So she was still unmarried. ‘Sì.’ He was trying to appear calm. Calmer than he felt! he decided, annoyed. His manner, though, demanded more, and the woman smiled, supplying it.

‘One of our newest recruits. She specialises in the domestic environment at present. She’s young, enthusiastic, a bit off-beat sometimes in her approach, but very, very talented.’

As well as untrustworthy and a scheming liar!

For one fleeting moment he fought the urge to walk out and take his future business elsewhere, rather than let a company who could employ the type of questionable character it had obviously employed with Miss Riva Singleman loose with his money. But intrigue as to how such a dubious little drop-out could possibly have come to be working for such a reputable firm of interior designers, along with the memory of how that lying little mouth had felt beneath his, got the better of him. He had never been faint-hearted. So why shouldn’t he get his business sorted out, accept the opportunity that fate had suddenly presented him with, and satisfy his curiosity along the way?

He listened to the matriarch of Redwood Interiors assuring him that everything was going to schedule, with all his wishes being met, and that whatever members of her team were allotted to handle his affairs at any time would give him no less than two hundred per cent satisfaction.

Like hell they would! he resolved, and gave the woman one of his blazing smiles, charming her witless as he had been doing with women for the whole of his thirty-two years, as he settled on his suddenly innovative and calculating plan.