****sorry, i quite small wording in the 1st chapter.. try to making it bigger and easy to read****
Nate parked his Lamborghini Murciélago outside the restaurant. Giovanni’s. That was it. Time to find his mystery woman and discover why she’d run for the hills.
Inside the restaurant he found every cliché associated with Italian cuisine. Checkered tablecloths, a tenor singing opera on the sound system, burning candle stumps melting down the necks of old wine bottles. But there was a warm atmosphere to the dimly lit room. And he barely had the door closed behind him before he was greeted like an old friend.
“Come in, come in!” a beaming woman with dark hair in a neat bun spoke with the lilt of an Irish accent. “Are you meeting someone?”
Nate found what he sought in the dinner crowd. “She’s over there.”
The woman turned in the direction he’d indicated with a pointed finger. Then she looked at him with a puzzled expression. “Which one?”
“Dark hair. White shirt.”
“Erin?” To his surprise the woman took a step back and looked him down then up, nodding firmly as if he’d passed some kind of test. “About time we met you.”
Next thing he knew he was being guided through the tables.
“You should have said your boyfriend was coming.”
Nate was frowning in confusion when his gaze locked with Erin’s. Her eyes widened, her jaw dropped, she even blushed. Then she blinked, and her gaze shifted to the woman at his side.
“Momma—”
“Get up, get up.” Her mother waved her other hand in an upward motion. “We’ll get you a table in the corner, away from the crowd…”
Nate glanced at the curious expressions of the two women Erin was with. “Perhaps you’d prefer we sat with your friends?”
Not that it was his first choice. But then neither was meeting her mother before he knew her name.
“Nonsense!” her mother said with a look of admonishment. “I tell Erin—you gotta make the time for a man. She never makes time. That’s why she’s not married, y’know. We’d have had her married five times already if it wasn’t for—”
“Momma!” Her eyes flickered to his long enough for him to see her increased embarrassment, then she shot her mother a silent plea.
So Nate cut her some slack and reached out his hand, offering his upturned palm the same way he had before as he threw a smile at her mother. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
He looked back at Erin as she frowned at him. “Doesn’t it, sweetheart?”
The question brought her stare sharply upward.
Roll with it, he told her without words. And she did. But she ignored his hand.
Five-star restaurants had never given him the attention he received in the next twenty minutes. Considering who he was, that was saying something. He’d never met three generations of a woman’s family so fast, either. Her father, Giovanni, a sister who took on Erin’s waitress’s duty, a grandmother who came in from the house they apparently all lived in next door. Nate managed to answer their questions without blowing Erin’s cover until eventually he was sitting back with a glass of red wine and enough food to feed an army on the table in front of him. If it wasn’t for his fascination with the woman visibly squirming in the seat opposite him, he’d have been exhausted.
“All your boyfriends get this welcome?”
She grimaced. “Look—Mister Van Rothstein—”
“Nate.” When she hesitated he smiled lazily. “It’s my name.”
“I’m sorry you walked into this, but—”
“Is there a boyfriend?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Is now.”
“Why is it?”
Nate watched as she dampened her lips the way she had before he kissed her, the memory of it causing the same visceral reaction it had when she’d kissed him back. “There are lines I don’t cross.”
She glanced around the room and mumbled, “No boyfriend.”
“Your family thinks there is…”
“Because the only way to stop my family finding one for me, was to tell them I already have one. They think I’ll end up like Great Aunt Carlotta.” She aimed a pained expression at a random point over his shoulder. “She had cats.”
“You don’t like cats?”
“I have nothing against cats.”
“Carlotta must be scary, then…”
Long lashes flickered as she searched his eyes with the same emotive look she’d had when they’d danced. Without artificial polish, the soft sheen of her midnight hair and the natural prettiness of her features made her look like a different woman. Less ethereal, possibly? More real? There was just something about her…
Nate was determined to discover what it was. Among other things.
She asked the obvious. “Why are you here?”
He dug into the pocket of his jacket and pushed a cell phone across the table. “You left this behind. I’d never have found you without it. New York is a big place.”
“Why would you want to find me?”
Reaching for a fork, he loaded it with pasta in a rich, creamy sauce before calmly informing her, “To finish what we started.”
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