Cristiano laughed and reached out to curl one finger into a strand of her copper hair. ‘Always brunettes,’ he murmured, ‘although I’m beginning to wonder why. Is this the real colour of your hair?’

‘Of course it is!’ Excitement leapt inside her at his casual touch and her green eyes widened. ‘Not everyone gets their hair colour from a bottle!’

‘But quite a few do.’ Her hair felt like silk between his fingers.

‘So, in other words, you only go out with brunettes who dye their hair?’

‘They tend to have other characteristics aside from the dyed hair.’ He had an insane desire to yank her towards him and do what came naturally. Very unlike him. He reluctantly released the strands of hair and stood back just in case primitive instinct got the better of him. ‘Long legs. Exquisite faces. Right background.’

‘Right background?’

Cristiano shrugged. ‘It’s important,’ he admitted. ‘Life can be stressful enough without the added hassle of wondering whether the woman sharing your bed is more interested in your bank balance than in your company.’

Bethany’s stomach gave a nervous flutter but she was reassured by the fact that she knew she definitely wasn’t after his money. ‘Maybe you’re a little insecure.’

‘A little insecure?’ Cristiano looked at her with rampant incredulity. ‘No. Insecurity has never been a problem for me,’ he told her with satisfaction. ‘And please tell me that you aren’t going to spend the evening trying to analyse me.’

‘Where are we going to eat?’ Bethany changed the subject and when he named a restaurant which was as famous for its inflated prices as it was for the quality of its fare she gazed down at her jeans with dismay. Lesson one in how the super-rich operate. With a complete disregard for social convention. Cristiano clearly couldn’t care less whether she was dressed for an expensive night out or not. He, himself, was casually attired in a pair of dark trousers and a white shirt which would have looked average on any other man on the planet but which looked ridiculously sexy on him.

‘I’d rather not go there in a pair of jeans, flat shoes and a wrap,’ Bethany told him tersely. She also suspected that walking into a place like that on the arm of a man like him would make her the cynosure of all eyes and she had never enjoyed basking in the limelight, particularly now, when the limelight would have a very dubious tinge. And what if he introduced her to someone? The rarefied world of the rich and famous was notoriously small. In Rome, it was probably the size of a tennis ball. She would be revealed for the imposter she was in seconds flat.

‘You look…charming.’

‘Not charming enough to go to that particular restaurant.’ Bethany was feverishly cursing herself, yet again, for having succumbed to his invitation to dinner.

‘Don’t worry. I know the owner. Believe me when I tell you that he won’t mind if I bring along a woman dressed in a bin bag.’

‘Because you can get away with something doesn’t give you the right to go ahead and do it,’ Bethany said, making sense to herself though not to him if his expression of bemusement was anything to go by.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s important to have respect for other people,’ she told him, repeating the oft held mantra with which she and her sisters had grown up.

Cristiano was looking at her as though she was slowly mutating into a being from another planet and Bethany blushed uncomfortably. She was well aware that she was probably in the process of contravening yet another unspoken dictum of the unbelievably rich, namely that she shouldn’t be blushing like a kid.

‘A socialite with principles,’ he murmured with a slashing smile that made her breath catch in her throat and put paid to all her niggling qualms about what she was doing. ‘I like it. It’s rare in my world to meet a woman who’s prepared to be vocal about her beliefs…’ In truth, the women he went out with generally didn’t give a hoot about what happened outside their own orbits. They were rich, had led, for the most part, pampered lives and their birthright was to accept the adulation of males and the subservience of everyone else.

Not that they would ever have dreamt of setting one foot into Chez Nico unless they were dressed to kill. In actual fact, he doubted whether very many would have dreamt of going anywhere unless dressed to kill because appearance was all.

‘I’m not a socialite,’ Bethany said uncomfortably.

‘No? You just own a monstrously big apartment in the centre of Rome which you use as a holiday pad. You do fundraisers. You’re under thirty. Hate to tell you this, but that pretty much qualifies you as a socialite.’

‘I told you, things don’t work quite that way in…um…where I come from.’

‘And where’s that?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t have heard of it,’ Bethany told him truthfully. ‘It’s a little place in Ireland…um…in the middle of nowhere…’

‘A little place with a large ancestral manor house, by any chance?’

‘Yes, there’s a large ancestral manor house…’Years ago, she could remember her mother doing a cleaning stint there to get some extra cash for Christmas. It was a great grey mansion with turrets and a forbidding, desolate appearance.

‘So you must be half Italian…Which half?’

Bethany gave a self-conscious laugh. ‘Are you always so interested in dinner companions you ask out on the spur of the moment?’

‘No. But, then again, I don’t usually have to drag information out of my dinner companions. It’s a fact that most women love nothing more than talking about themselves.’

‘You mean they try to impress you.’

‘Do you want the truth or shall I treat you to a phoney spectacle of false modesty?’

‘You have a very big ego, don’t you?’

‘I prefer to call it a keen sense of reality.’ Cristiano was enjoying this banter. He had had to work to get her to this place, on a date with him and, having got her here, was discovering her to be skittish and unpredictable company. It made a change from the doe-eyed beauties who were always eager to oblige his every whim. ‘Don’t you feel the need to impress me?’ he murmured, his words cloaked in a languorous, sexy intimacy that sent shivers racing up and down her spine.

‘Why should I?’ A frisson of danger rippled through her. This was no simple, exciting night out with a stranger. She felt as though he was walking round her soul, opening doors she hadn’t known existed.

‘Because I feel the weirdest desire to impress you.’ He also had the weirdest desire to find out more about her. Weird because getting to know her had not been remotely on the agenda when he had asked her out to dinner. He had seen her, had been curiously attracted to her, had thought nothing of entertaining himself with a one-night stand. It wasn’t usually his scene but, then again, he would have been a complete hypocrite if he had tried to dredge up a bunch of reasons why he should not indulge in a night of passion with a woman he would probably never see again. It wasn’t as though his goal in life, thus far, was to recruit a love interest for a permanent place in his life.

‘Why don’t you tell me what it would take…?’

His voice was like a caress, as was the lazy, amused, speculative expression in his eyes, although she noticed that he was keeping his distance, half leaning against the door, his long legs eating into the free space between them. She had not started the evening in the anticipation that it would end up in bed and had he tried to invade her space she would have pulled back at a rate of knots, but there was something wildly erotic about his self-restraint. It was a sobering thought to know that he would probably be repelled had he known her modest background. He might consider himself a man of the world, and he undoubtedly was a man of the world, a sleek, highly groomed, fantastically sophisticated animal who was the master of all he surveyed. Except there was quite a bit that he didn’t survey, wasn’t there?