The Boss's Christmas Seduction: Unlocking her Innocence / Million Dollar Christmas Proposal / Not Just the Boss's Plaything

He was asking her to divorce the past from the present and she wasn’t sure she could do that. ‘I just want you,’ Ava said gruffly, shorn of her usual cool. ‘But I assure you that I got over my obsession with you at eighteen.’

‘I don’t like the idea that I’m taking advantage of you,’ Vito admitted grimly. ‘Here I am, I’m not drunk but I’m not sober either, and I’m not even thinking about what I’m doing.’

‘That’s OK, no big deal,’ Ava soothed softly, patently unaware of how rare it was for Vito to do anything without thinking it through first. ‘It’s not important.’

‘I’m not about to fall in love with you and marry you or anything like that!’ Vito warned her, derision at the idea giving his mouth a sardonic twist. ‘This is an affair, nothing more complex. Don’t overthink it.’

‘I never thought I would say it but you talk too much,’ Ava told him with sudden amusement. ‘I’m not that daft dreaming teenager you remember—I grew up and I’m not even twenty-two yet. I don’t want to get married for years and years and years!’

‘I don’t ever want to get married,’ Vito traded, throwing himself back against the pillows while wondering how he could possibly be irritated by her total lack of interest in marrying him. Naturally that was good news and she was blessedly free of the carefully presented hypocrisies with which his more usual style of lover sought to set him at his ease. Of course she was ten years younger than he was and that was a fair gap, he acknowledged, tension filtering through his momentary relaxation. In fact it was almost cradle-snatching.

Ava leant over him, her hair brushing a big shoulder while she marvelled at the conversation they were having. ‘I don’t want to marry you. I want to play the field and have fun first.’

‘If Damien Skeel comes on to you, you tell me,’ Vito spelt out rawly in a knee-jerk reaction that shook him because it seemed to come from some strange place inside him he didn’t recognise. ‘And you’re not going to be playing the field and having fun with anyone but me until we’re over. Is that understood?’

A pang pierced Ava. She didn’t like to hear him talk of their affair being over before it had even really begun. It hurt, just as breaking up would hurt, she reminded herself impatiently. She wasn’t a kid any more. She didn’t cherish a little soap bubble fantasy of Vito falling madly in love with her and sweeping her down the aisle to an altar. Even as a teenager she had not been that naïve.

‘Do you always lay down the law in bed like you’re in the boardroom?’ Ava teased.

‘I need to with you. You’re a new and very original box of tricks, cara mia,’ Vito contended, pushing her playfully flat against the pillows to extract a long, drugging kiss that sent her heartbeat into overdrive.

She felt tiny beneath him, crushed by his broad chest and the hair-roughened thigh that had slid between hers. She was madly aware of her nipples tightening into tingling buds and of the hard press of his arousal against her. He wanted her. For a split second she simply luxuriated in that sweet wonderful knowledge. She wanted him and he wanted her. Finally, the time was right. And then in dismay she recalled the rather childish tattoo on her hip and resolved to buy some large plasters as soon as she could to conceal that revealing marking before he could see it. He wouldn’t think of her as an adult for long if he caught a glimpse of that.

Vito sat up and tossed back the duvet. ‘What on earth are you wearing?’ he demanded.

‘My PJs.’

‘Gingham just isn’t sexy,’ Vito pronounced with authority and embarked on the buttons.

Ava lay there stiff with embarrassment while he stripped off her pyjamas and reminded herself that he had seen it all before and that it was silly to feel so self-conscious. ‘Put the light out,’ she still urged him.

‘No … you’re a work of art and I want to savour you,’ Vito countered without hesitation, studying the long svelte line of her pale body. ‘I was in far too much of a hurry yesterday.’

‘I’m cold,’ she told him, hauling up the duvet at speed again.

‘No, you’re shy and I never realised that before. Ava Fitzgerald … shy,’ Vito commented with rich amusement. ‘Wow … you’ve turned as pink as a lobster.’

‘If you refer to lobsters and me in the same sentence again you can go back to your own room!’ Ava hissed vitriolically, blue eyes sparkling like sapphires in her elfin face.

‘It’s not happening.’ With a sudden laugh, Vito crushed her mouth beneath his again, his tongue delving deep in a devouring kiss that sent erotic thrills coursing through her all too ready body. When he discarded his rigid self-discipline and reserve, there was so much passion pent-up inside him, Ava thought, thrilled by his approach.

His mouth closed over the swollen peak of her breast and she shivered as he tasted and teased her with his tongue. The glide of his teeth followed and she moaned, startled and aroused, the heat at the heart of her beginning to build. Her hips arched and he stilled her.

‘We’re going to do this right this time, bella mia,’ Vito informed her, his exotically handsome features taut with determination.

‘Right?’ Ava repeated in disbelief. ‘Keep the control freakiness for the office.’

‘I am not a control freak,’ Vito growled.

He so was. Ava cupped his face and connected with smouldering golden eyes that made her heartbeat hammer. He was beautiful. She just loved looking at him, and then he kissed her again with that sensual full mouth and the ability to think fell away. As he began to lick and kiss his way down over her body her hands dug into his shoulders and suddenly it was a challenge to breathe. She thought he might be going to do … that, not something she could imagine doing with anyone, not even him. She tried to urge him back up again but either he failed to take the hint or he deliberately put himself out of reach.

‘Vito … I don’t think I want that,’ Ava muttered tightly.

‘Give me a one-minute trial,’ Vito purred, settling hot, hungry eyes on her. ‘While you think about it.’

Already pink, Ava could feel herself turn hot red and she just closed her eyes, not wanting to be inhibited and a turn-off. His hands smoothed over her thighs and eased them apart. I’m not going to like this but I’ll put up with it, she decided, and then he touched her with his tongue on the most super-sensitive part of her body and she almost leapt in the air at the sensation. He made a soothing sound deep in his throat that she found incredibly sexy. Slow-burning pleasure turned to raw ecstasy incredibly fast and she went wild, gasping and rising off the bed as an explosive climax engulfed her. Dazed by it, she felt limp as he shifted over her and sank into her hard and fast. Nothing had ever felt as intense. Her body had discovered a new level of sensitivity and in its already heightened state, his rapid powerful movements swiftly awakened the throbbing heat and hunger of need again.

‘Porca miseria! You make me wild!’ Vito panted.

Her every sense was on hyper alert and excitement as she had never known was clawing at her. She didn’t have the breath to respond. Her fingers raked down his back over his flexing muscles as she reacted to sensations as close to pleasure as torment, wanting more, wanting, her entire body reaching as her back arched and the glorious splintering high peak of blinding pleasure engulfed her again as a shrill cry was wrenched from her.

‘On a scale of one to ten that was a twenty,’ Vito husked in her ear. ‘I’m sorry, I was rough—’

‘I liked it,’ Ava mumbled in a forgiving mood, both arms wrapped round him, happiness dancing and leaping through her limp, satiated body like sunlight on a dull wintry day.

‘You’re miraculous, gioia mia,’ Vito said thickly, an almost bemused look in his stunning dark eyes as he bent down awkwardly and dropped a kiss on her nose. But he then freed her from his weight and proximity so fast that her hands literally trailed off him and she half sat up in surprise as he strode into the bathroom. He had used contraception, she reminded herself dizzily. Miraculous? Was that good? Her mind was full of words like, ‘astonishing, magnificent, unbelievable’. Even so, she wished he hadn’t left her so suddenly. As that thought occurred to her Vito reappeared and swept up his robe to put it on. Ava blinked. He wasn’t coming back to bed? Perhaps he was hungry.

Vito had got halfway to the door before Ava spoke. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To bed.’ Vito half turned back to her, a brow slightly quirked as though he wondered why she was asking such an obvious question of him.

Such fury shot through Ava that she felt light-headed with it. ‘Oh, so that’s it for tonight, is it? Having got what you wanted, you just walk out on me?’

Vito swung all the way round and levelled stunned dark eyes on her. ‘I always sleep in my own bed … it is not meant as an insult or any kind of statement.’

‘You mean you never spend the night with anyone?’ Ava prompted, utterly disconcerted by the news.

‘I like my privacy,’ Vito admitted a shade curtly, unable to understand why she was complaining when no other woman ever had.

‘Well, you can have all the privacy you want from me,’ Ava snapped back at him. ‘But let me make one thing clear—if you walk through that door you don’t get back in again on any pretext!’

His eyes shimmered and narrowed, his face tensing with the surprise and considerable hauteur of a male unaccustomed to any form of rejection from a woman. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘That’s the way it is, Vito. Take it or leave it. I thought the practice of droit de seigneur went out with the Crusades and you’re not going to treat me like a late-night snack and get away with it!’ Ava slung tempestuously as she punched a pillow, doused the light to leave him poised in darkness and lay down again.

Vito opened the door, hesitated—fatally, he later realised. He thought of waking up beside Ava. He shed his robe where he stood.

As Ava felt the mattress give beneath his weight she thought about the power of ‘miraculous’ sex over a male and it made her want to punch him more than ever. He was spoilt by too much money and too many eager-to-please women.

‘Am I expected to cuddle as well?’ Vito enquired with sardonic bite.

‘If you value your life, stay on your own side of the bed,’ Ava advised bluntly.

Silence fell, a silence laden with nerve-racking undertones. Ava grimaced in the darkness and wished she had kept quiet. You could lead a horse to water but you couldn’t make it drink, she reminded herself wryly, a situation not improved by the fact that he was stubborn as a mule. He didn’t do the cuddly sleeping-together stuff but she didn’t think she could do an affair without affection at the very least. Who are you kidding? she asked herself. She was only at the castle for another two weeks and the minute the party was done, she would be history. She needed to learn how to take each day as it came just the way she had done in prison, but there was no way on earth that she would live according to his rules alone.

‘I shouldn’t have lost my temper with you about Olly’s room,’ Vito mused very quietly.

‘I shouldn’t have gone ahead and touched it without speaking to you about it first,’ Ava traded, her stiffness receding a little.

‘I used to go in there and sit in the months after the funeral,’ Vito volunteered curtly. ‘Fortunately I managed to wean myself off that habit, so there was no reason to leave the room the way it was while he was alive.’

Ava gritted her teeth and bit back hasty words because Vito was a stiff-upper-lip kind of male. ‘Why should you have had to wean yourself off going in there?’ she finally asked. ‘There was no harm in it if it gave you comfort.’

‘It was a weird thing to do,’ Vito asserted in a tone that warned her that he expected her to agree with him on that score.

Ava suffered a truly appalling desire to hug him but she imagined him shaking her off and didn’t move a muscle in his direction. ‘No, it wasn’t weird. It was completely natural. He was on your mind. You didn’t need to fight off the urge as if it was wrong. You’re just terrified of feeling emotion, aren’t you? But all you did was make it harder for yourself.’

‘I am not terrified of feeling emotion!’ Vito grated in disbelief.

Ava begged to disagree in silence. Macho man had not been able to cope with the threatening desire to sit in his kid brother’s room occasionally and quite typically he had walled his grief up inside himself, convinced that that was the best way.

‘I’m not,’ Vito repeated doggedly, wondering why he had conversations with her that he never had with anyone else while trying to recall emotional moments without success.

Ava smiled and went to sleep.

CHAPTER SEVEN

FLOWERS would be old-fashioned, Vito reasoned five days later, during a boardroom meeting at his London headquarters that he was finding unbelievably tedious. He had another five hours to put in before he could call it a day. Impatient, he glanced at the wall clock again while his mind wandered to picture Ava clad in sexy lingerie reclining on his bed and then immediately discarded the fantasy. Unlike most of his past lovers, she would hit the roof if he gave her a gift like that. What am I? Your little sex toy? So attuned had he become to Ava’s feisty take on life, he could actually hear her saying it. No, definitely not the lingerie. What did you give a woman who acted as if your millions didn’t exist? Chocolate? Boring, predictable. Exasperation sizzled through his tall, powerful physique. He could not recall ever expending this much mental energy on anything so trivial. What did she need? Clothes. Ava was the proud possessor of the very barest of necessities. But she wouldn’t like him buying her clothes either. His big shoulders squared, his strong jaw line clenched. Dio mio, she would just have to put up with it.

‘Mr Barbieri …?’

Vito focused on the speaker with a blankness of mind he had no prior experience of in a business setting. He wondered if he was ill. Maybe he had the flu, maybe he had allowed himself to get too tired. Yes, that was it, too much sex, not enough rest, he decided, relieved by the explanation but acknowledging that he was not about to change his ways … not with Ava under his roof. He stood up lithely and offered his apologies for his sudden departure while explaining that he had somewhere else to be.

That same day, Ava made her decision over breakfast: she would go and see her father. It was a Saturday and the older man always liked to stay home and read the papers in the morning.

Fear of rejection, nerves and guilt had kept her from the door of her former family home, she acknowledged ruefully. Her court case and prison sentence along with the newspaper articles written about her fall from grace had seriously embarrassed her family and her father, who worked as a member of Vito’s accounting team, had been convinced that her role in Olly’s death had ensured that he was passed over for promotion. For those reasons, she was certainly not expecting a red carpet rolled out for her but she wanted to say sorry and discover if there was any way of restoring some kind of bond with her relations. If it crossed her mind that there never had seemed to be much of a bond between her and them, she suppressed the thought and concentrated on thinking positively.

The past week had proved incredibly busy but all the party arrangements were running smoothly and she had begun to decorate the house. She tried not to think too much about Vito while she was working. After all, in less than a week’s time she would be leaving and the affair would be over. That was not going to break her heart, she told herself firmly, but the hand in which she held her cup of coffee trembled. Hastily she set the cup down again. If she gave way to stupid feelings, started fancying that she was in love and all that nonsense she would be digging her own descent into despair by the time it ended. And no man was allowed to have that much power over Ava because in her experience, with the single exception of Olly, the people she loved had always hurt her badly. No, just as Vito didn’t do marriage, Ava didn’t do love.

Admittedly she was attached to him in some ways, she acknowledged grudgingly. He kept on trying to take her out to dinner and places which she hadn’t expected, having assumed he would be as keen as her to keep their involvement with each other under wraps. Certainly the staff must have guessed but by the time such rumours spread further afield Ava would be long gone. She had told Vito she had nothing to wear that wouldn’t embarrass them both in public but it was just an excuse to hide the fact that she didn’t want people to know they were involved. Much wiser to stay under the radar, she reflected ruefully, having no desire to attract controversy or see Vito outraged or upset by people who would be appalled that he could have fallen into bed with the woman responsible for his brother’s death. That was life and Ava had learned not to fight it.

Vito and her? It was just sex, she told herself every time he was with her. He couldn’t keep his hands off her but, to be honest, she couldn’t keep her hands off him either and the awareness that they had such a short time together had simply pushed the intensity to a whole new level. He was with her every minute he was at home and, although he was characteristically working on a Saturday, he had gradually started finishing earlier and earlier. They argued at least once a day, being both very strong-willed people. But they never let the sun go down on a row either and he stayed with her every night, dragging her up to breakfast with him at an unforgivably early hour while striding through the castle shouting for her if she wasn’t immediately available when he arrived home. She knew he liked her and that he cared about what happened to her. She respected his fair-mindedness, was even fond of him. But aside of the wild bouts of sex that took place every time they got within touching distance, that was the height of it, she told herself staunchly. With six days of the affair to go, she believed she was handling the upcoming prospect of their separation with logic and restraint rather than with the obsessive depth and despondency that would once have threatened her composure. After all, hadn’t that obsessional passion of hers for Vito once sent her running out of control into that car with tragic consequences? She knew better now.

The neat detached home that Ava’s parents had brought her up in sat behind tall clipped hedges on the outskirts of the village. Even though it was two miles from the castle, Ava walked there. Damien Skeel had been instructed to put a car and driver at her disposal to facilitate the party arrangements but Ava didn’t want an audience to witness her being turned away from her father’s front door. As smartly dressed as she could contrive, she braced herself and rang the doorbell.

She was bewildered when a stranger answered the door and wondered in dismay if her father had moved house after her mother’s death. ‘I’m looking for Thomas Fitzgerald,’ she said to the middle-aged blonde woman. ‘Has he moved?’

‘I’m his wife. Who should I tell him is here?’ the woman responded.

Ava’s eyes widened as she tried to hide her shock that her father had remarried. ‘I’m his youngest daughter, Ava.’

‘Oh.’ The polite smile dropped away and the older woman turned her head hurriedly and called out, ‘It’s … Ava!’

Her father appeared from the direction of the kitchen, a tall thin man with grey hair and rather cold blue eyes. ‘I’ll deal with this, Janet. Ava … you’d better come in,’ he said without any sign of warmth.

But an invite to enter her former home was still more than Ava had expected after having her existence ignored for three long years, and her tension eased a tiny bit. True, it was a shock that her father had already taken a second wife but she had no resentment of the fact because her parents had never been happy together. The older man showed her into the dining room and positioned himself at the far side of the table, distancing tactics she was accustomed to and which felt dauntingly familiar.

‘I suppose you want to know what I’m doing here.’ Ava spoke first, used to the older man’s power play of always putting her in that position.

‘If you’re hoping for a handout you’ve come to the wrong place,’ Thomas Fitzgerald informed her coldly.

‘That’s not why I came, Dad. I’ve served my sentence—that’s all behind me now and, although I know I caused a lot of trouble for the family, I …’ Ava paled and struggled to find the words to express her feelings in the face of the look of icy distaste that her father wore.

‘I suppose you were sure to turn up like the proverbial bad penny sooner or later,’ he pronounced drily. ‘I’ll keep this short for both our sakes. I’m not your father and I have no obligation towards you.’

Ava felt as if the floor had dropped away below her feet. ‘Not … my father?’ she repeated thickly, incredulous at the statement. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘While your mother was alive it was a secret but thankfully there’s no need for that nonsense now,’ he told her with satisfaction. ‘My wife and your half-sisters are aware of the fact that you’re not a real member of this family. Your mother, Gemma, picked up a man one night and fell pregnant by him. And no, I know nothing about who he was or is and neither did your mother, who was … as usual … drunk.’

‘Picked up a man?’ Ava echoed, her pallor pronounced and a sick feeling curdling in her stomach.

‘Yes, it’s sordid but that’s nothing to do with me. I’m telling you the truth as your mother finally told it to me,’ Thomas Fitzgerald continued with open distaste. ‘You were DNA tested when you were seven years old and my suspicions were proven correct. You are not my child.’

‘But nobody ever said anything, even suggested that …’ Ava began jerkily, trying and failing to get her freefalling thoughts into some kind of order and comprehend the nightmare that seemed to be engulfing her. ‘Why didn’t you divorce my mother?’

‘What would have been the point of a divorce?’ the older man asked with unhidden bitterness. ‘She was an alcoholic and I had two daughters, whom I couldn’t have trusted her to raise alone, and I had my career. I didn’t want people sniggering about me behind my back either. I tried to make a go of the marriage in spite of you. I was a decent man. I fed and clothed you, educated you, did everything a father is expected to do …’

Momentarily, it was as though a veil had fallen from Ava’s perceptive powers as she looked back at her childhood and adolescence. ‘No, you didn’t. You never liked me.’

‘How was I supposed to like you?’ he shouted at her in a sudden eruption of rage. ‘Some stranger’s bastard masquerading as my own daughter? It was intolerable that I should be forced to pretend but I was responsible for your mother because I married her. There was no one else to take care of her and I had to think of Gina and Bella’s needs. I did my duty by you all but it was a lot more than your wretched mother deserved!’

The door behind Ava opened. ‘Thomas, I think you’ve said enough,’ the female voice said quietly. ‘It’s not the girl’s fault that you had to put up with so much.’

It was his wife, Janet, her stepmother … no, not her stepmother. These two people were actually no relation to her at all. The shock of that realisation punched through Ava and left a big hole where she felt her brain should be. She turned in a clumsy circle. ‘I should leave.’

‘I think that would be best, dear. You remind Thomas of a very unhappy time in his life,’ Janet informed Ava in a reproachful tone.

Ava walked straight back out onto the road, feeling as if she had concussion because she couldn’t think straight. The secret was out: she finally knew why her father had never liked her and her mother had always preferred her sisters. Evidently she was ‘some stranger’s bastard’, not a legitimate child of Thomas Fitzgerald’s first marriage, not to mention being a constant galling reminder of his wife’s infidelity. No longer did she need to wonder why the man had persisted in calling her ‘Ginger’, why she had been sent off to school, shunned and excluded from the family when she messed up: she wasn’t a part of the family and was barely entitled to call herself by the name Fitzgerald. All her life she had been a cuckoo in the nest and now she knew why and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. No amends that she could make, no bridges she could possibly build. The family reunion she had prayed for was nothing more than a silly girlish pipe dream.