Three months after that day, Billie went out on a date with a charming Italian businessman called Pietro Castronovo. He took her out to dinner in a very fancy Florentine restaurant where she toyed with food that was too rich for her taste and tried to respond to his flirtatious chatter.
At ten o'clock, Alexei rang her and wrecked the evening. 'You should have checked with me before you went out. Pietro is a married man with two kids.'
'Thank you, sir,' Billie murmured flatly.
'I've got some work for you to do.'
'Right now, I'm on an evening out,' she responded thinly.
'Surely you're not planning on spending any more time with a married man?' Alexei enquired sardonically.
Billie came off her phone and apologised to Pietro for having answered it. 'I always take Alexei's calls.'
'You stand very high in his regard,' Pietro commented.
Billie breathed in deep. 'Are you married?'
Her companion's thin, good-looking face tightened and she knew the answer before he even parted his lips and acknowledged that he was. 'I should have asked,' she said ruefully. 'I wouldn't be here if I had known.'
Pietro tried to dissuade her from cutting the evening short, but Billie stood firm and wondered why she was so much angrier with Alexei than with Pietro. After all, Alexei's warning had been a timely one, coming as it did before she could get any more involved with the handsome Italian. But, somehow, being saved at the eleventh hour from a mistake by a male who had very few morals of his own simply incensed Billie.
When she returned to the penthouse hotel suite Alexei was occupying, Alexei was at work with the rest of the team. She sent him an accusing glance but would not have dreamt of telling him how she felt about his previous phone call in front of an audience. When the business was dealt with, he called her back before she could leave.
'Did you shake Castronovo off? He was born with the gift of the gab,' Alexei said very drily. 'I should have warned you about him.'
'I am able to look after myself,' Billie told him starchily. 'Thank you for the warning on this occasion, but please don't interfere like that again.'
'Naturally I interfered. I knew that you wouldn't intentionally date a married man.'
There was a little devil inside Billie's head and it deeply resented his assumption that she would never do anything untoward. 'Actually, that's not necessarily one hundred per cent true.'
'You were back at the hotel within thirty minutes of my phone call,' Alexei countered with dark amusement. 'Don't be ashamed of your principles. Too many people have none at all.'
And still she had wanted to slap him. Her long-overdue venture onto the dating scene had gone belly-up and left her with egg on her face. The person she most hated for his interference was, without a shadow of a doubt, Alexei. She would never choose to date another woman's husband, but Alexei had once again managed to make her feel a fool.