Tabula Rasa

Chapter 42

Catching Ranieri's eye was easy. So easy that Calina's low opinion of him sank even further.

A flash of her back in her very low cut dress was all it took to hook him on the end of her line. She wound him in further with a sultry smile and a lick of her lips, and landed her catch by crossing one long leg over the other as she perched on a stool at the makeshift bar.

Mere seconds later, he was shoving his mostly-empty champagne glass on the table next to him and heading straight for her.

As he crossed the packed ballroom, Calina could see why the tabloids favoured him, with his chiseled jaw and his artfully dishevelled hair (that he probably spent an hour moulding into place).

He was objectively handsome...but to her, he resembled nothing more than a wet, flopping, floundering fish.

Easily baited and caught.

Pathetic.

God, men like him were such comically superficial creatures. It wouldn't matter to him if she was a noble-prize winning genius, or a simpleton with barely two brain cells to rub together, he would have crossed that room regardless.

All because of the way she looked.

No, not even that. He probably wouldn't care much about the real Calina - the woman who barely wore make-up and did little more than pull a brush through her hair in the morning.

No, he wanted the living Barbie doll that she'd styled herself as tonight, with the extensions in her hair, and the fake eyelashes, and the contoured face. He wanted a trophy. A beautiful, sexy prize that he could parade around the room to prove he was the most virile alpha at this party.

"Buonasera bellissima," he drawled, as he finally reached her. He rested one arm on the bar behind and crowded close, his powerful cologne saturating the air between them.

Calina's smile felt more like a grimace as she returned the greeting. But he didn't seem to notice. His own smile just got wider when she answered him in Italian, and he launched off a series of questions about where she was from.

His smile dipped slightly as 'Eliise' revealed her Croatian heritage, but it wasn't enough for him to lose interest completely - especially when Calina followed up her admission by running one manicured hand down his lapel.

The touch overrode his innate xenophobia, and Calina congratulated herself on her choice of cover-story. It was clear that Ranieri was interested in her tonight, but he wouldn't be calling her tomorrow.

She was too beneath him - hot enough to want to fuck, but not the kind of girl he could bring home to his Grandfather.

Calina's disgust with him grew, and it took all her skills and training to hide her contempt, especially as the conversation droned on. Although calling it a conversation was overselling it. A conversation implied a back-and-forth exchange of information.

This was more like a TED Talk.

It turned out Ranieri's enquiry about where she was from was the extent of his curiosity about her. He asked her nothing more about herself, and just launched into a spiel about himself - his background, his business ventures, his recent vacation to the Maldives, the case of wine he'd just bought from Tuscany.

It was all him, him, him.

The quintessential narcissist.

Calina played along, fluttering her fake eyelashes, laughing where expected and generally hanging on to every word as if it was the most interesting thing she'd ever heard.