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The following morning, after a disturbed night of sleep, Jess went into the surgery, where she checked on the sole resident patient, a cat with liver disease. After carrying out routine tasks, she took care of the emergency clinic, which encompassed everything from a goldfish in a bowl that was as dead as a doornail, to a dog she had to muzzle to treat and a moulting but healthy parrot.
That night she lay awake worrying about her father until almost dawn. Her mother, Sharon, had not phoned, which she knew meant that Robert had not yet summoned up the courage to tell his wife that he was in trouble. Jess’s heart bled at the prospect of her mother’s pain and anxiety once she understood the situation. Mother and daughter had always been very close.
Jess had little hope that a personal appeal to Cesario di Silvestri would help her father’s cause. After all, why would anything she had to say carry any influence with him? On the other hand, if there was even the smallest chance that she could make a difference she knew she owed it to her family to at least try. Already painfully aware that Cesario had arrived the previous evening in the UK, she accepted that she needed to make her approach to him as soon as possible.
On Tuesday she was scheduled to make a regular check on the brood mares at the Halston stud and she planned to make her move then. With her travelled half of her little tribe of dogs, for she routinely divided them into two groups and took one out with her on alternate days. Today there was Johnson, a collie with three legs and one eye after a nasty accident with farm machinery, Dozy, a former racing greyhound who suffered from narcolepsy and fell sleep everywhere she went, and Hugs, a giant wolfhound, who became excessively anxious when Jess vanished from his view.
Cesario knew Jessica Martin was on his land the instant he saw the three scruffy dogs outside the archway that led into the big stable yard. He smiled at the familiar sight, while idly wondering why she burdened herself with other people’s rejects; a less appealing collection of misfits would have been hard to find. The tatty hound was whining and fussing like an overgrown, fractious toddler, the greyhound was fast asleep in a puddle, while the collie was plastered fearfully against the wall, shrinking in terror from the noise of a car that was nowhere near him.
As his head groom, Perkins, hurried to greet him, Cesario glanced straight past the middle aged man to rest his dark, deep-set gaze intently on the slight figure of the woman engaged in rifling her veterinary bag for a vaccination shot. A glimpse of the sheer classic purity of Jessica Martin’s profile gave Cesario as much pleasure as the image of a Madonna in a fine Renaissance painting. Blessed with skin as rich and fine in texture as whipped cream, she had delicate but strong features and a luscious Cupid’s-bow mouth worthy of a starring role in any red-blooded male’s fantasies. And the footnote to that list of attributes was amazing eyes that were a luminous pale grey, as bright as silver in certain lights, and a foaming torrent of long black curly hair that she always kept tied back. She never used cosmetics or indeed wore anything the slightest bit feminine if she could help it, yet no matter how she dressed her diminutive height, beautiful bone structure and slender and subtle curves gave her an exceptionally arresting appearance.
Clad in faded riding breeches, workmanlike boots and a waxed jacket that should have been thrown out years ago, she was the living, breathing antithesis of Cesario’s usual taste in women. Cesario had always been a perfectionist and great wealth and success had only increased that natural inclination. He liked his women sophisticated, exquisitely groomed and clothed. Every time he saw Jess Martin he reminded himself of those facts and questioned the depth of her apparent appeal for him. Was it simply because she had once said no and sentenced him to a cold shower rather than the pleasure of slaking their mutual attraction? For, although she denied it and did what she could to hide the fact, the attraction was mutual. He had known it when she looked at him over the dinner table and, since then, every time she went out of her way to avoid his eyes or keep him at arm’s length. Either some man had done a very good job of souring her attitude to his sex or she had a problem with intimacy.
But his suspicions about her had not the smallest cooling effect on him while those breeches clung to every line of her slender toned thighs and the gloriously pert swell of her behind. Strip off the clothes and she would be pure perfection. As the familiar stirring heaviness at his groin afflicted him, Cesario’s perfect white teeth gritted behind his firmly modelled mouth. Per l’amor di Dio! He went from enjoying the view to exasperation because he had never been a guy happy to look without the right to touch. Lust from afar was not his style. She was not at all his type, he reminded himself brutally, recalling the dinner engagement from hell when she had turned up wearing a black tent dress and had barely talked. She didn’t even know how to speak to him. Look at her now, pretending that she hadn’t yet noticed him to put off the moment of having to acknowledge him for as long as she possibly could!
Jess felt almost paralysed by the awareness that Cesario di Silvestri was nearby. Prior to his arrival she had noted the frantic activities of the stable staff, keen to ensure that everything looked good for the boss’s visit, and she could scarcely have missed the throaty roar of his Ferrari, for, while other men might have chosen a four-wheel drive to negotiate the rough estate roads, Cesario travelled everywhere in a jaw-droppingly expensive sports car. Slowly she turned her head and looked at him while he spoke to Donald Perkins and, in that split second of freedom, she took in her fill and more.
Cesario was so gorgeous that, even after a couple of years’ exposure to him, his charismatic good looks still exercised a weird kind of fascination over Jess. With the exception of a tiny scar on his temple he was without flaw, an acknowledgement that only reminded her of her own physical scars, and which chilled her. Cesario stood comfortably over six feet tall and enjoyed the long, lean, powerful build of an athlete. Even in country casuals he looked as elegant as though he had just stepped off a fashion catwalk, as his garments were tailored to a perfect fit, enhancing his broad shoulders, narrow hips and long muscular thighs. He wore his black hair short and cropped and his skin carried the golden hue of the Mediterranean sun. His narrow-bridged arrogant nose, sleek, proud cheekbones and sardonic, sensual mouth were arranged in such a way that you looked at him and then immediately had to look back again. Turning back to her task, she wondered frantically what she was going to say to him about her father. The fact that Robert was still walking around free meant that the older man’s role in the robbery had yet to be identified.
‘Jessica…’ Cesario murmured smoothly, refusing to accept being ignored.
Flustered, her cheeks warming with colour, for he was the only person alive who ignored the diminutive by which she was known and continually employed her baptismal name, Jess twisted back to him. ‘Mr di Silvestri…’
Cesario was reluctantly impressed that she had finally pronounced his name correctly without stumbling over the syllables like a drunk. She’d simply ignored repeated invitations to call him by his first name, keeping him at a distance with her cool reserve. Then Perkins asked her advice about a stallion with a tendon injury that was not responding well to ice packs and bandaging and she accompanied him into the stables to examine the horse. Soldier was a valuable animal and the head groom should have called her in sooner to administer anti-inflammatory drugs, but Jess could not bring herself to criticise his decision to hold fire in front of his employer.
‘Jessica should have been consulted the day the injury occurred,’ Cesario commented, picking up on the oversight with ease.
Jess finished her tasks and moved slowly towards the arch that led out of the courtyard. Sadly when, for once, she would have welcomed an attempt, Cesario made no move to keep her longer by striking up a conversation. Finally steeling herself, with her backbone rigid, she turned back and said without any expression at all and a tightness in the foot of her throat that gave her voice a husky edge, ‘I’d appreciate a word with you, Cesario…’
Cesario settled brilliant dark eyes on her, making no attempt to hide his surprise at her use of his first name. Colour crept into her cheeks again as she gripped her bag between clenched fingers, fiercely uncomfortable below his intent scrutiny. Of course he was staring, one satiric ebony brow slightly quirked like a question mark because he could not imagine what she wanted. After all, she rarely spoke to him if she could help it.
‘I’ll be with you in a moment,’ he responded in his rich, dark, accented drawl.
And no moment had ever stretched longer for Jess as she hovered with her dogs beyond the archway waiting for him. Worst of all she still had no idea at all of what she was planning to say to him.
CHAPTER TWO
‘PERHAPS we could conduct this dialogue over dinner this evening,’ Cesario suggested with rich satisfaction.
The suggestion that she might be fishing for the chance to go out with him again inflamed Jess and stung her pride. She flipped round to face him, light grey eyes bright as silver with antagonism. ‘No, I’m sorry, that wouldn’t be appropriate. I need to talk to you about something relating to my family.’
‘Your…family?’ Lean dark features stamped with a bemused frown, Cesario dealt her an enquiring glance, contriving without effort to look so breathtakingly handsome that he momentarily made it virtually impossible for her to concentrate.
A prickling shimmy of sensation pinched her nipples to tautness and made her spine stiffen defensively, for she recognised that physical response for what it was and loathed it. He was a devastatingly handsome man and she was convinced that no healthy woman with hormones could be fully indifferent to that level of masculine magnetism. Her body was literally programmed to react in what she had long since mentally labelled a ‘knee-jerk response’ to Cesario’s chemical appeal. It was Mother Nature, whose sexual conditioning she could not totally suppress, having the last laugh on her.
Her colour fluctuating in response to her rattled composure, Jess sent her eyes in a meaningful sweep in the direction of the stable staff still within hearing. ‘I’d prefer not to discuss the matter out here.’
His attention locked onto her taut facial muscles and the nervous pulse flickering in a hollow at the base of her slender throat, Cesario was even more curious to find out what she could possibly be so wired up about. He was also noting in a haze of innate sensuality that her skin was so fine that he could see the faint blue tracery of her veins beneath it. That fast he wanted to see her naked, all that creamy skin bare and unadorned for his benefit. Naked and willing, he thought hungrily. ‘Follow me up to the house, then,’ he instructed, irritably shaking free of the sexual spell she could cast to swing into his low-slung sports car.
In the driving mirror he watched her coax the sleeping greyhound from the puddle up into her arms, without worrying about the mess the bedraggled animal would make of her clothes. As she settled the dog into the rear of the old Land Rover she drove her other pets fawned on her as if she had been absent a day rather than an hour. Aware she took in the local homeless animals, he had always been grudgingly impressed by her compassionate nature, even if he could not approve of her indifference to her appearance. Although she was beautiful she did not behave as if she was, and that could only intrigue a man accustomed to finding women superficial and predictable. Somewhere along the line something had happened to Jess Martin that had prevented her from developing the narcissistic outlook of a beauty and the expectation that she should always be the centre of attention.
Jess parked beside the Ferrari at the front of the magnificent rambling Elizabethan house. Built of mellow brick and ornamented by tall elaborate chimneys and rows of symmetrical mullioned windows that reflected the sunshine, Halston Hall had considerable charm and antiquity. Although Dot Smithers had on one memorable occasion entertained Jess and her mother in the kitchen quarters there, Jess had never set foot in the main house. The Dunn-Montgomery family, who had owned the hall for several centuries, and whose male heirs had been often prominent in government, had not held open days at their ancestral home. Dwindling cash resources had forced the family to sell up six years earlier. To the great relief of the staff, who had feared that the property would be broken up and that they would lose their jobs, Cesario di Silvestri had bought the estate in its entirety. He had renovated the house, rescued the failing land with modern farming methods and set up a very successful stud farm.
Dot’s male replacement, following her early retirement, a middle-aged and rotund Italian known as Tommaso, ushered Jess indoors. The splendid hall was dominated by a massive Tudor chimney piece with a seventeenth-century date swirled in the plaster above it. Her nervous tension at an all-time high in the face of such grandeur, Jess defied the urge to satisfy her curiosity and gape at her surroundings. She was shown into a room fitted out like a modern office, in surrealistic contrast to the linen fold panelling on the walls and the picturesque view of an ornate box-bush-edged knot garden beyond the windows.
‘Your family?’ Cesario prompted with a slight warning hint of impatience. Propped up against the edge of what appeared to be his desk in an attitude of relaxation, he was the very epitome of English country-casual style with a twist of elegant designer Italian in his tailored open-necked shirt and beautifully cut trousers.
‘They’re tenants of yours in the village, and my father and my brothers work for you here on the estate,’ Jess volunteered.
‘I was aware of those facts,’ Cesario countered with a wry smile. ‘My estate manager made the connection for me the first time I met you.’
Jess lifted her chin and straightened her slight shoulders, wondering if that information had originally been given to emphasise that she hailed from working-class country stock, rather than the snobbish county set. If so, the news of her humble beginnings and lower social standing must have failed to dim his initial interest, for the dinner invitation had followed soon afterwards. Stubbornly refusing to meet those gorgeous dark eyes in a head-on collision and blocking her awareness to him as she had learnt to do to maintain her composure and show of indifference, she breathed in deep. ‘I have something to tell you and it relates to the robbery here…’
With a sudden flashing frown, Cesario leant forward, any hint of relaxation instantly banished by her opening words. ‘The theft of my painting?’
Beneath that daunting stare, the colour in her cheeks steadily drained away. ‘I’m afraid so.’
‘If you have information relating to the robbery, why haven’t you gone to the police with it?’
Jess could feel her ever-rising tension turning her skin clammy with nervous perspiration. Suddenly aware that she was way too warm, she shrugged free of the heavy jacket she wore over her shirt and draped it clumsily over the seat of the chair beside her. ‘Because my father’s involved and I was keen to get the chance to speak to you first.’
Cesario was not slow to grasp essential facts and his keen gaze glimmered as he instantly added two and two. As the estate handyman, who also acted as caretaker when the hall was unoccupied, Robert Martin had long been entrusted with the right to enter the hall at any time to perform maintenance checks and carry out repairs. ‘If your father helped the thieves, you’re wasting your time looking to me for sympathy—’
‘Let me explain what happened first. I only found out about this matter yesterday. Last year my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and it was a very stressful time for my family,’ Jess told him tightly.
‘While I am naturally sympathetic to anyone in your mother’s situation, I fail to see what her ill health has to do with me or the loss of my painting,’ Cesario asserted drily.
‘If you listen, I’ll tell you—’
‘No. I think I am much more inclined in this scenario to call in the police and leave them to ask the questions. It’s their job, not mine,’ Cesario cut across her to declare with derision, his lean, darkly handsome features forbidding as he straightened and began to reach for the phone with a lean, shapely hand. ‘I am not comfortable with this conversation.’
‘Please don’t phone the police yet!’ Jess exclaimed, grey eyes wide with urgency as she moved forward suddenly, appearing as if she was trying to physically impose her slight body between him and the telephone. ‘Please give me the chance to explain things first.’
‘Get on with the explanation, then,’ Cesario advised curtly, leaving the phone untouched, while surveying her with dark eyes flaming bronze with suspicion and anger. Even so, on a primitive masculine level he was already starting to get a kick out of her pleading with him. The tables had been turned with a vengeance, he savoured with satisfaction. She was no longer treating him to frozen silence or looking down that superior little nose of hers at him.
‘Dad was worried sick about Mum and he wanted to take her away for a holiday after she finished her treatment, but he had to borrow the money to do so. Unfortunately he borrowed it from my uncle at an extortionate rate of interest.’ Stumbling in her eagerness to tell the whole story, Jess outlined her father’s efforts to deal with being pressed for his debt, followed by the approach and the offer made by her cousins.
‘This is your family you’re talking about,’ Cesario reminded her dulcetly, marvelling at what she was willing to tell him about her less than scrupulous relations. For the first time it genuinely struck him that, for all her educational achievements, she truly was, unlike him, from the other side of the tracks.
‘My mother’s brother was in and out of prison for much of his life. He doesn’t much care how he makes his money as long as he makes it. But his sons have never been in serious trouble with the police.’ Her cheeks burned red with embarrassment as she filled in the disagreeable facts. ‘My father believed what he was told—that Jason and Mark only wanted to get into this house to take photos which they could sell.’
Cesario dealt her a withering appraisal. ‘This property is full of valuable antiques and art works. Are you seriously expecting me to believe that any man could be that stupid?’
‘I don’t think my father’s stupid, I think he was simply desperate to do what they asked and be free of that debt. He was frantically trying to protect Mum from the distress of finding out how foolish he had been,’ Jess confided ruefully. ‘I don’t believe he thought beyond that and what he did was very wrong. I’m not trying to excuse his behaviour. He’s had access to this house for many years because he was a trusted employee and in acting as he did he betrayed your trust, but I’m convinced that my cousins intentionally targeted him.’
His handsome mouth taut with angry constraint, Cesario studied her grimly. ‘It is immaterial to me whether your father was deliberately set-up or otherwise. Your mother’s illness, the debt that ensued…those are not my concerns. My sole interest is in the loss of my painting and unless you have information to offer about how it might be recovered and from whom…’
‘I’m afraid that I don’t know anything about that and nor, unfortunately, does my father. His only function that evening was handing over his key card and the codes for the alarm.’
‘Which makes him as guilty as any man who conspires with thieves and provides them with the means of entry to private property,’ Cesario pronounced without hesitation.
‘He honestly didn’t know that anything was going to be stolen! He’s an honest man, not a thief.’
‘An honest man would not have allowed the men you described into my home to do as they liked,’ Cesario derided. ‘Why did you make this approach to me? What response did you expect from me?’
‘I hoped that you would accept that Dad was entirely innocent of the knowledge that a crime was being planned.’
His sardonic mouth curled. ‘I have only your word for that. After all, there was a robbery and it would not have happened had your father proved worthy of the responsibility he’d been given.’
‘Look, please listen to me,’ she urged with passionate vehemence, her pale grey eyes insistent. ‘He’s not a bad man, he’s not dishonest either, and he’s devastated by the loss that his foolishness caused you—’
‘Foolishness is far too kind a description of what I regard as a gross betrayal of trust,’ Cesario interrupted in flat dismissal of her argument and the terms she used. ‘I ask you again: what did you hope to achieve by coming to see me like this?’
Jess settled deeply troubled eyes on him. ‘I wanted to be sure you heard the full facts of the case as they happened.’
Regarding her with hard cynical eyes, Cesario loosed a harsh laugh. ‘And exactly what were you hoping to gain from this meeting? A full pardon for your father just because I find you attractive? Is that what this encounter is all about?’
Her oval face flamed as though he had slapped her, colour running like a live flame below her skin as he made that statement. It had not even crossed her mind that, with the very many options he had, he might still find her attractive. ‘Of course, it’s not—’
Cesario’s handsome mouth curled with scornful disbelief at that claim. ‘Maiala della miseria…at least tell it like it is! While I may lust after your shapely little body, I don’t do it to the extent that I would forgive a crime against me or write off a painting worth more than half a million pounds. You would need to be offering me a great deal more in reparation.’
Jess was gazing back at him in shock, her soft pink lower lip protruding. ‘What sort of a man are you? I wasn’t offering you sex!’ She gasped in horror as she grasped the portent of his words. ‘Of course, I wasn’t!’
‘That’s good, because in spite of the scurrilous rumours the British tabloids like to print about me I don’t pay for sexual favours or associate with the kind of woman who puts a price on her body,’ Cesario declared with an outrageous cool that mocked her seething embarrassment.
‘I really wasn’t offering you sex,’ Jess muttered in repeated rebuttal, shattered by that demeaning suggestion.
A well-shaped ebony brow lifted above heavily lashed dark-as-night eyes that remained resolutely unimpressed. ‘So, I was just supposed to let your father off the hook for nothing? Does that strike you as a likely deal in such a serious situation?’
‘Deal? What deal? You’re talking like my cousins now. You have a sordid mind,’ Jess condemned chokily, her mortification extreme as she snatched up her jacket and began to fight her way into its all-concealing folds. The remainder of her speech emerged in breathless spurts of smarting pride and resentment. ‘For your information, I don’t sleep around and sex isn’t something I would treat like a currency or…or a takeaway meal. In fact…’
Unexpectedly amused by her bristling, blushing fury and the discovery that she was much more of a prude than he had had previous cause to suspect, Cesario was striving not to picture her creamy, curvy little body writhing in ecstasy on his silk sheets because he was well aware that that was most probably a fantasy designed to go unfulfilled. ‘I’m delighted to hear it.’
‘I’m a virgin!’ That admission just leapt off Jess’s heated tongue and she froze, appalled that she had let that little-known fact slip. ‘Not that that has any relevance when I wasn’t offering you sex anyway,’ she continued, striving to bury her too intimate confession in a concealing flood of words. ‘But I admit that I would have offered you virtually anything else to get my father off the hook. I am desperate…’