Free The Sicilian's Bride by Carol Grace Page A

you get them installed.”
    “Of course.”
    There was a soft knock on the door. Now what?
    This time it was the maid with her dinner. She came in and set up the plates on the table. For some reason it appeared to be a dinner for two. Had the personnel seen Dario go up to her room and figured they would be expecting an intimate meal for two? Or had he told them he was staying for dinner? Dinner with the one woman he most wanted to get rid of? The woman he’d already had breakfast and lunch with? Hardly.
    “Are you staying for dinner?” she asked.
    “It looks that way,” he said.
    No “thank you.” No polite refusal. Did he want to stay? Probably not. Then why do it? He must have his reasons. Did she want him to? Definitely not.
    Whatever the reason, the maid seemed to know what she was doing, serving veal Madeira in a white-wine-and-mushroom sauce over creamy polenta from a silver chafing dish, along with sautéed fresh spinach. She poured two glasses from a bottle of Pinot Grigio and quietly left the room with a shy smile.
    The whole scenario was surreal in the extreme. Was this really Isabel Morrison having dinner in nothing but a robe with the richest and best-looking man in all of Sicily? The same man she’d had lunch and breakfast with? If he shared her sense of the absurd, he didn’t let it show. For all she knew, he dined with half-clad women in their hotel rooms every other night. The best she could do was to pretend to be at least that sophisticated herself.
    She couldn’t possibly change into her clothes at this point, but she did retreat to the bathroom to take the towel off her head, and run a comb through her tangled hair.
    Dario looked up when she came back with her hair in a damp cloud of dark-red curls. He swirled some wine around in his glass to keep from staring at her bare legs and the wayher robe gaped in front giving him a tantalizing glimpse of one pale breast.
    Maybe he shouldn’t have barged in this way and invited himself for dinner. It was only now he realized how bizarre the situation was. It had been a long time since he’d eaten dinner with a woman in her hotel room. The first time ever with a redheaded American woman in a robe in her hotel room. And he hadn’t planned on her being a distraction, but she was.
    The situation had its advantages over the expensive restaurants where he usually dined and where he might have taken her if he’d wanted to have dinner with her. No one but the night clerk knew he was here in her room. Also, he had to admit that any gown she might have worn for dinner would not be as sexy as this robe which covered most of her body, but left him free to imagine what was underneath it.
    “I have to say they serve a decent wine,” Dario said, tearing his gaze away from her for a moment. He really hadn’t meant to stay for dinner. He’d only meant to hand over her camera case, thank her for helping his grandmother and tell her he’d hired some workers. But seeing her with the towel over her head looking like what he imagined a concubine in a harem would look like, had set his senses reeling.
    Maybe it was the seductive smell of the soap that clung to her skin that had such a strange effect on him, or maybe he was losing his mind. He told himself to go, to get out of here before he did something stupid, but the voice in his head wasn’t very loud or insistent. So then he told himself to shut up and relax.
    No getting around it; Isabel looked very different from the enemy he knew she was. Instead she looked soft and warm and very feminine. The kind of woman you wanted to wrap your arms around and get into that queen-sized bed with. The kind of woman whose skin looked so soft and inviting you wantedto taste and touch it. If she wasn’t who she was, and if he was someone else, he might be tempted. In fact, he was tempted.
    How could this red-haired woman who knew nothing about winemaking, wearing only a bathrobe, be a threat to him or his family? She couldn’t