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At last he was to become a father.
‘But I was determined to keep the baby…even if I had to raise him on my own!’ Kate touched her hand to her chest, as if to calm her racing heart. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to support me even if I did manage to contact you. I was wary of seeing you again when we had only known each other for just a night.’
Raising the child on her own… The thought absolutely affronted his profound sense of honour and his duty to do what was right—not to mention the fact that this child would be the sole heir to his family fortune and all that Luca possessed! There was no way—no way on God’s earth—that Kate was going to raise the baby alone!
The day Maggie Cox saw the film version of Wuthering Heights, with a beautiful Merle Oberon and a very handsome Laurence Olivier, was the day she became hooked on romance. From that day onwards she spent a lot of time dreaming up her own romances, secretly hoping that one day she might become published and get paid for doing what she loved most! Now that her dream is being realised, she wakes up every morning and counts her blessings. She is married to a gorgeous man, and is the mother of two wonderful sons. Her two other great passions in life—besides her family and reading/writing—are music and films.
Recent titles by the same author:
THE SPANISH BILLIONAIRE’S CHRISTMAS BRIDE
THE RICH MAN’S LOVE CHILD
SECRETARY MISTRESS, CONVENIENT WIFE
BY
MAGGIE COX
www.millsandboon.co.uk
MILLS & BOON
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To Tony with all my love
CHAPTER ONE
‘WELL, well, well… Look who it is!’
As the honeyed sea of that mesmerising voice reached her, washing around her ankles, threatening to pull her under, Kate Richardson stared in mute shock at the man facing her across the room. Her memory of his electric blue eyes having the power to dazzle like the most flawless glinting gemstones had not failed her, but she did not recall them having the ability to almost slice her in two even as he smiled. Uncurling her fingers from their death lock on the door handle, she knew her surprised expression must easily mirror his. But as she had barely any sensation of her facial muscles functioning at all Kate couldn’t have sworn to it.
‘Luca…’ All she could do right then was stare in wonder, because her mental faculties seemed frighteningly slow in catching up with her speech.
‘At least you remember my name.’
Did he really think she would ever forget it? ‘The agency sent me.’ Kate could barely find the words to explain her presence. ‘You—you need a secretary for the next few days…apparently.’ Her shoulders lifted in a nervous shrug.
His jaw hardened. No spare flesh spoilt its perfect symmetry—it was just jutting, formidable bone. ‘Dio! I know perfectly well what I need! Come in and close the door!’
Kate obeyed, unable to disregard his harsh-voiced command even if she’d wanted to. Inhabiting the same electrically charged space as this man was like being swept along by a powerful current she couldn’t fight, and for a moment the sensation of vulnerability this instigated was too real to combat. She’d had no idea he worked in London…none. But then what she did know about the provoking specimen of masculinity glaring at her from across the room she could probably commit to just a single sentence. In the breathtaking few hours they had spent together in Milan three months ago, they hadn’t exactly immersed themselves in personal biographies. They had been held in thrall by other, far more distracting discoveries about each other instead.
‘Sit down.’
His authoritative command ricocheted through the tensely strung atmosphere like a velvet gunshot. Swallowing hard, Kate pulled out the chair on the opposite side of the huge modern desk and sat. She was glad to. Her legs were suddenly about as substantial as flimsy threads of cotton.
The huge plate-glass window behind her interrogator reflected a stunning vista that included Big Ben and the London Eye, but the imposing landmarks didn’t distract her. How could they when they were in unfair competition with the artfully sculpted male visage before her? Kate’s heart soared and her insides fluttered as she recalled that she knew intimately that his incredible body was equally as artfully designed. And there had been an altogether shocking and unexpected price to pay for that intimate knowledge, she reflected soberly, and her stomach executed an unsettling cartwheel at the fact.
‘Why did you leave without saying goodbye in Milan? Do you usually treat your lovers so casually? Leaving them in the morning without so much as the good manners to at least wait until they are awake? Do you get some kind of strange satisfaction out of such behaviour?’
Dumbstruck, Kate stared, feeling her cheeks burn in indignation and shock. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Last time we met your hearing was not impaired in any way, as far as I can recall.’ His disdain was clearly intended to sting.
‘I’m just a little taken aback that you would believe I do that sort of thing regularly. Let me assure you that I don’t!’
‘The fact of the matter is that you did it to me, Katherine… For some reason I expected better from you…but you disappointed me.’
Powerful regret washed over Kate. If she could have had that time back again would she act differently? Maybe. Hindsight was a wonderful thing.
Studying the handsome, disapproving face before her, Kate knew a sudden great desire to have him smile at her. So consuming was it that she could almost have wept in frustration, knowing that her wish was in vain. An icy chill shuddered through her. Thinking back to the party at some big-wig architect’s mansion that her friend Melissa had dragged her to, courtesy of the swish property developer she worked for, Kate had considered it a mistake right from the off. It had been the last evening of her holiday, and all she had really wanted to do was spend time in quiet reflection on how she was going to rebuild her life when she got back to the UK.
How did a person learn to trust again when they had been betrayed as brutally as Kate had?
Her plans had been hijacked by her friend’s insistence that she needed to ‘get out and have some fun,’ and instead of the quiet evening she’d had in mind she had had to endure the uncomfortable proximity of a bunch of strangers in a glamorous setting that had no power to lift her out of the despondency she’d been in. That was until the man now in front of her had appeared, cast his eyes round the room as though already bored with the faces that glanced back at him, and then shockingly rested his far too disturbing gaze on her.
Mel had been off hobnobbing somewhere else, and Kate had sensed her legs turn as weak as a newborn foal’s beneath the charismatic stranger’s sizzling observation. He had turned his back on several guests clearly eager to speak to him to cross the room and talk to her instead, introducing himself as ‘Luca,’ she recalled. Just Luca. There had been no mention of Gianluca De Rossi. And Kate had offered her name as Katherine. It was her full name, but she rarely used it, so why it had slipped out so naturally beneath his unsettling gaze was a mystery. Except that maybe a person couldn’t be expected to be totally in control of their responses when they were confronted by an aura of wealth, confidence and breathtaking good looks such as Luca was so commandingly in possession of? And maybe at that moment she had also succumbed to feeling small and insecure, and had needed the bolster of a name that sounded a bit classier than just plain Kate?
There were many reasons she’d acted so out of character that unforgettable night, and that was just the first of them… Clasping her hands in front of her now, on the polished surface of the desk, it took every bit of courage she could muster to meet the disapproving gaze Luca was still directing her way and hold it.
‘I hadn’t planned to leave the way I did. I just…I just didn’t want to wake you. It was the last night of my holiday and I had a plane to catch. I should have mentioned it before, but—’ She blushed, certain her cheeks were glowing red as ripe russet apples.
‘But we were otherwise engaged at the time?’ Luca suggested wryly, a visible muscle throbbing at the side of his fascinating cheekbone. ‘Even so…you should have woken me—not just left without so much as leaving a phone number or an address where I could contact you!’
‘I’m sorry.’ Kate meant it, and there was a helpless catch in her voice. Yet part of her was reeling at the idea that a man who moved in the privileged and exclusive circles Luca did even cared that his one-night lover had not left a number or address where he might reach her. Was she wrong to have assumed he would forget her so easily? Had she just convinced herself of that so that she could get over the pain of leaving him and never seeing him again by making the cut quick and clean? Because it had pained her to leave him…
The attraction that had flared between them had smoked white-hot the second their glances had met, and even Kate’s relative inexperience with men hadn’t fooled her into thinking that was a common, everyday thing. And underlying that blistering magnetic pull she’d miraculously sensed the kind of soul-to-soul connection she’d long dreamed of. There had definitely been something special about Luca that Kate had not been able to forget. But at the time she’d been grieving on two counts. Grieving for the loss of her mother as well as for the loss of her fiercely guarded self-esteem—brought about by the other thing that had so devastatingly occurred back home. Both those momentous events had left Kate in no fit state either to think straight or make good decisions. And now she had to contend with the unbelievable twist of fate that had brought her right back into this man’s charismatic sphere again—turning up for a temp assignment that meant she would be his personal assistant for the next couple of weeks, while his permanent PA was on holiday.
‘Well…on reflection, I think it probably best that we simply forget what has happened between us in the past and concentrate on the present. It is unfortunate that this has come about, but we will just have to live with it if we are to work together over the next two weeks.’
Luca sighed, as if weighed down with too much responsibility. Beneath the fluid expensive weave of his faultless Italian tailoring, his hard lean body emitted a palpable sense of weariness, and Kate got the definite impression that work had been driving him to the exclusion of all else lately. It made her want to alleviate the burden for him somehow.
‘Though I have to say,’ he continued, ‘it is a very strange coincidence indeed that you should turn up in my office to stand in as my secretary, is it not? Tell me the truth, Katherine. Has someone put you up to this as some kind of joke? Tell me now, before I have to take the regrettable step of calling Security and getting them to escort you out of the building!’
She gasped. ‘What are you saying? Of course it’s not a joke! The agency I work for sent me and that’s the absolute truth! I had no idea that Gianluca De Rossi was you! How could I? You never told me your full name that night, and neither did you tell me you worked in London! I naturally assumed you worked in Milan.’
‘But you could have asked anyone at the party my full name and they would have enlightened you. It was my house and my party, after all! It would have been easy if you had probed further to discover that I have an office in London as well as Milan, and that I am mainly based here.’
‘For your information, apart from the friend I went with I spoke to hardly anyone else that entire evening but you! And my friend didn’t know who you were. She was given the invitation by someone in her office who couldn’t go, and her only information was the address! Anyway, why would I wait three months if I wanted to see you again? If I’d wanted to stay in touch it would have been far easier to leave you my details back in Milan!’
‘So you are telling me that you purposely did not want to get in touch? How flattering!’ Luca’s mouth pursed, as though he had tasted something disagreeable. ‘And now—if I am to believe what you say is true—it is fate that has conspired to bring us together again! I suppose one could conclude from that that we must have some unfinished business after all. What do you think, Katherine?’
Suddenly feeling quite faint, Kate frowned. What did he mean, exactly? She was doubly perturbed by his words when she considered the potentially explosive secret she was keeping that he didn’t yet know about… She just about held on to her scant breakfast of dry toast when she thought about that.
‘Unfinished business or not, I’m here to work as your secretary, and genuinely that’s the only reason I’m here!’
‘Then if you are to work for me, know this! I expect you to be absolutely first-class at what you do. I will not be looking upon you with any leniency because of what happened between us before! Are you up to the task, Katherine? Because if you are not then I will ring the agency now and get them to send somebody else.’
His smile was laced with mistrust as well as a deep cynicism. It wasn’t at all like the one Kate had been acquainted with, that had lit up a room as brightly as a hundred-watt lightbulb. Her stomach churned with misery and shock.
‘You don’t need to get anyone else. I’m good at what I do and completely professional!’
‘Well, then,’ Luca continued, ‘as long as you know that I am hardly accustomed to women treating me as an opportunity for some kind of casual sexual release, and that there will be no chance of a repeat performance, our working together should perhaps not pose too many problems after all.’
‘It wasn’t like that! I never—’
‘You never what, Katherine? You never had a one-night stand before, or you never left a man’s bed the morning after without saying goodbye? How do I know what is the truth? I only have the evidence of my own regrettable experience to go on as far as you are concerned, and the fact is that you did leave the next morning with clearly no intention of ever getting in touch with me again!’
‘It wasn’t like that at all! And it was never my intention to treat you as some kind of casual sexual release, I assure you! There were reasons why I left the way I did.’
‘A plane to catch, you said?’
‘Not just that.’ Feeling as if she was on a rock face, scrabbling for purchase, Kate gave Luca a nervous smile in the hope that she might somehow get through to him. After all, hadn’t they shared something special that momentous night, when they had not been able to ignore the passion and urgency that had driven them into each other’s arms? Something that had fuelled Kate’s sense of something vital having been missing in her life as nothing else had ever done before?
But it took only an instant for her to realise that whatever faint hope she’d nurtured for Luca’s understanding was a waste of time. The look on his face already told her that sympathy from him was in frighteningly short supply.
‘Something had happened at home that I was desperately trying to deal with at the time,’ she started to explain, agitatedly linking and unlinking her hands together. ‘That’s why I’d gone to Italy…to try and sort myself out. I know you might find this hard to believe, but the way I behaved that night was so out of character that the following morning…waking up in your bed…I was— I couldn’t believe I had— I mean—’
‘It sounds like you are making excuses up as you go—and not even very good ones at that!’
Frustrated at her woeful inability to try and explain, and with her stomach cramping in distress, Kate shrugged disconsolately. ‘You’re obviously not going to forgive me, so perhaps it is best if you just ring the agency and get them to send somebody else in my place?’
‘No. I will give you one chance. What I propose to do is give you a one-day trial, and if you do not measure up to the high standards I expect then I will contact the agency for a replacement!’
‘I suppose I can’t argue with that.’
Even if she didn’t like the idea of failing Luca’s one-day trial, Kate breathed a silent prayer of thanks that he was at least going to give her a chance to prove herself, and not simply show her the door as she’d increasingly been expecting him to.
‘Now…I have already wasted enough time this morning and I must get on! We have a busy day ahead, and there are several things on the agenda that must be done. With your assistance I will try to accomplish as much as possible before I have to go to an important appointment at the Dorchester Hotel with a Saudi Arabian client who is also a good friend of mine. He is only in London for two days, and tonight I am throwing a small party for him and some colleagues he wants me to meet. In the meantime you can familiarise yourself with the notes my PA left for you. Her office is just through that door there, and unless I particularly have the need to be private the door between us stays open. Knowing your disconcerting habit for leaving without warning, Katherine, I think that is a sensible precaution under the circumstances—do you not agree?’
Staring at him, and realising that he clearly had very little respect for her because she’d left him the way she had that morning without explanation, Kate knew that she could not make matters even worse by walking out now. Something had happened between them that night they’d spent together in Italy—something that had had dramatic and far-reaching consequences—and Kate owed it to Luca to reveal it to him now that she’d been given the chance. No matter what his reaction to her news, there was simply no way she could or would duck out of telling him the truth. No matter how difficult the telling might be.
‘If that’s the way you want it, then that’s fine with me!’ Pushing to her feet and finding that her legs were still as insubstantial as tissue paper, Kate made her way towards the door Luca had indicated, into the office that would possibly be hers for the next fortnight. As she passed him, he struck out his hand and caught her by the elbow.
‘What?’ Her glance was alarmed.
For a moment the glittering intensity of his cerulean blue eyes seem to arrow right down into her soul, and the heat from his hand burned through her clothing, almost sapping her will and her strength with its power to unravel her.
‘Niente…nothing!’
He dropped her arm as though touching it somehow contaminated him and, feeling her stomach plummet like a stone, Kate moved through the opened door and into the stylish, perfectly neat office on the other side.
Driving his hands deep into his trouser pockets, Luca found he needed several moments to compose himself after the volatile encounter with the woman that it had been so hard for him to forget. Madre mia! He had thought he was seeing a ghost when she’d walked into his office! Such had been the dreamlike quality of their scorching but brief encounter in Milan that he could surely be forgiven for starting to believe he had conjured her up from his too-fevered imagination? Even now his heartbeat had still not resumed its regular normal cadence after he had seen her. His nostrils twitched at the evocative scent that lingered in her wake after he’d angrily let go of her arm. It called to mind a rain-washed English country garden, and was more provocative than any other sultry perfume he had ever encountered.
As if to echo his heated thoughts, a forceful, primal longing registered deep in his belly, and Luca pulled out the sumptuous leather chair behind his desk and dropped down into it, tunnelling his fingers with frustration through his thick, dark hair. Even his usually highly reliable photographic memory had not done Katherine justice, he concluded. She was even more bewitching than he recalled, with that soft mane of waving sable hair that no style could or should try to tame, and those glistening raven-dark eyes with their lustrous lashes that even the most artful make-up could not hope to enhance—for how did one enhance perfection? But along with her eyes and her alluring sexy body it was the memory of her passionate, sweetly giving mouth that had the power to keep Luca awake nights. Just one glance at close quarters—as he had experienced just now—was enough to make him want to crush it ravenously beneath his own and once again sample its ripe strawberry and vanilla sweetness with abandon.
Dio! What was he going to do now? Was he crazy even to entertain the idea of allowing Katherine to be his secretary for the next two weeks, given that his body still clearly desired her? And in spite of her casual treatment of their night together? Probably. But then he could be equally casual if he chose. He was certainly not looking for any kind of deep and meaningful relationship with the woman, so what had he to fear?
Sighing heavily, Luca recalled that night three months ago in Milan. There had been something about Katherine that had provoked the strongest reaction in him—and surprisingly it wasn’t all about sex. No…he had intuited an innate goodness about her that had made all his friends appear worryingly shallow in comparison. A man did not brush up against such innocence and goodness often, but when he did he never forgot it. Although right now Luca honestly could not attest to whether fate was on his side or not, delivering Katherine to his door as it apparently had. There was still her inexplicable departure the next morning to contend with, as well as the blow to his pride at hearing that she had not particularly wanted to get in touch with him again. Apart from his inconvenient desire, Luca was still too sceptical to believe unquestioningly that destiny was doing him a favour.
After losing Sophia three years ago in such a bitter and tragic way, he had all but relinquished any hope for future happiness anyway. When Katherine had left him that morning in Milan, after his initial confusion and frustration Luca had told himself to just put it down to experience and forget her. If he had wanted to locate her he could easily have asked friends at the party—the friends he had practically ignored all evening because he’d been so enthralled by her—for more information to help track her down. But at the time Luca had determinedly resisted the impulse. That night of the party he had found something of his wife’s that had stirred up some painful memories, and no doubt that was what had driven him into the arms of a woman he barely knew. Usually he was much more circumspect, and took time to get to know a woman before he took her to bed. It had certainly taught him a valuable lesson about the consequences of giving way to pure lust and emotion!
Once again Luca drove his restless hands through his tousled dark hair and shook his head at his remembered experience of a regrettable loss of control. Whatever reason Katherine had for showing up to work as his PA, from now on he would definitely be judging her on her professional acumen and not his attraction for her, he vowed!