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Dante took a sip of his beer and waited. The world was small, yes—but it was also fractured. There were whole groups of people who lived parallel existences to him and it was possible that this well-spoken young Englishwoman who blushed like a maiden aunt wouldn’t have heard of his notorious family. She’d probably never slept with his twin brother or bumped into any of his other screwed-up siblings along the way. His heart grew cold as he thought about his twin, but he pushed the feeling away with a ruthlessness which came easily to him. And still he waited, in case the soft grey eyes of his companion suddenly widened in recognition. But they didn’t. She was just looking at him in a way which made him want to lean over and kiss her.
‘I’m trying to imagine what you’re expecting my response to be,’ she said, a smile nudging the edges of her lips. ‘So I’m not going to do the obvious thing of asking if your name is Italian when clearly it is. I’m just going to remark on what a lovely name it is. And it is. Di Sione. It makes me think of blue seas and terracotta roofs and those dark cypress trees which don’t seem to grow anywhere else in the world except in Italy,’ she said, her grey eyes filling with mischief. ‘There. Is that a satisfactory response—or was it predictable?’
There was a heartbeat of a pause before Dante answered. She was so unexpected, he thought. Like finding a shaded space in the middle of a sizzling courtyard. Like running cool water over your hot and dirty hands and seeing all the grime trickle away. ‘No, not especially predictable,’ he said. ‘But not satisfactory either.’
He leaned forward and as he did he could smell the tang of salt on her skin and wondered if she’d been swimming earlier that morning. He wondered what her body looked like beneath that all-enveloping shawl. What that blond hair would look like if it fell down over her bare skin. ‘The only satisfactory response I can think of right now is that I think you should lean forward and part your lips so that I can kiss you.’
Willow stared at him—shocked—as she felt the whisper of something unfamiliar sliding over her skin. Something which beckoned her with a tantalising finger. And before she had time to consider the wisdom of her action, she did exactly as he suggested. She extended her neck by a fraction and slowly parted her lips so that he could lean in to kiss her. She felt the brush of his mouth against hers as the tip of his tongue edged its way over her lips.
Was it the champagne she’d drunk, or just some bone-deep yearning which made her open her mouth a little wider? Or just the feeling of someone who’d been locked away from normal stuff for so long that she wanted to break free. She wanted to toss aside convention and not be treated like some delicate flower, as she had been all her life. She didn’t want to be Willow Hamilton right then. She wanted the famous fairy godmother to blast into the Caribbean airport in a cloud of glitter and to wave her wand and transform her, just as Willow had been transforming models for the past week.
She wanted her hair to stream like buttery silk down her back and for her skin to be instantly tanned, shown to advantage by some feminine yet sexy little dress whose apparent simplicity would be confounded by its astronomical price tag. She wanted her feet to be crammed into sky-high stilettos which still wouldn’t be enough to allow her to see eye to eye with this spectacular man, if they were both standing. But she didn’t want to be standing—and she didn’t want to be sitting on a bar stool either. She wanted to be lying on a big bed wearing very sexy underwear and for those olive fingers to be touching her flesh again—only this time in far more intimate spots as he slowly unclothed her.
All those thoughts rushed through her mind in just the time it took for her own tongue to flicker against his and Willow’s eyes suddenly snapped open—less in horror at the public spectacle she was making of herself with a man she’d only just met than with the realisation of what was echoing over the loudspeaker. It took a full five seconds before her befuddled brain could take in what the robotic voice was actually saying, and when it did, her heart sank.
‘That’s me. They’re calling my flight,’ she said breathlessly, reluctantly drawing her mouth away from his, still hypnotised by the blazing blue of his eyes. With an effort she got off the stool, registering the momentary weakness of her knees as she automatically patted her shoulder bag to check her passport and purse. She screwed up her face, trying to act like what had happened was no big deal. Trying to pretend that her breasts weren’t tingling beneath her pashmina and that she kissed total strangers in airports every day of the week. Trying not to hope that he’d spring to his feet and tell her he didn’t want her to go. But he didn’t.
‘Oh, heck,’ she croaked. ‘It’s the last call. I can’t believe I didn’t hear it.’
‘I think we both know very well why you didn’t hear it,’ he drawled.
But although his eyes glinted, Willow sensed that already he was mentally taking his leave of her and she told herself it was better this way. He was just a gorgeous man she’d flirted with at the airport—and there was no reason why she couldn’t do this kind of thing in the future, if she wanted to. It could be the springboard to a new and exciting life if she let it. That is, if she walked away now with her dignity and dreams intact. Better that than the inevitable alternative. The fumbled exchange of business cards and the insincere promises to call. Her waiting anxiously by the phone when she got back to England. Making excuses for why he hadn’t rung but unable—for several weeks at least—to acknowledge the reason he hadn’t. The reason she’d known all along—that he was way out of her league and had just been playing games with her.
Still flustered, she bent down to grab her carry-on and straightened up to drink in his stunning features and hard blue eyes one last time. She tried her best to keep her voice steady. To not give him any sense of the regret which was already sitting on the horizon, waiting to greet her. ‘Goodbye, Dante. It was lovely meeting you. Not a very original thing to say, I know—but it’s true. Safe journey—wherever you’re going. I’d better dash.’
She nearly extended her hand to shake his before realising how stupid that would look and she turned away before she could make even more of a fool of herself. She ended up running for the plane but told herself that was a good thing, because it distracted her from her teeming thoughts. Her heart was pounding as she strapped herself into her seat, but she was determined not to allow her mind to start meandering down all those pointless what if paths. She knew that in life you had to concentrate on what you had, and not what you really wanted.
So every time she thought about those sensual features and amazing eyes, she forced herself to concentrate on the family wedding which was getting closer and the horrible bridesmaid dress she was being made to wear.
She read the in-flight magazines and slept soundly for most of the journey back to England, and it wasn’t until she touched down at Heathrow and reached into the overhead locker that she realised the carry-on bag she’d placed in the overhead locker wasn’t actually her bag at all. Yes, it was brown, and yes, it was made of leather—but there all similarities ended. Her hands began to tremble. Because this was of the softest leather imaginable and there were three glowing gold initials discreetly embossed against the expensive skin. She stared at it with a growing sense of disbelief as she matched the initials in her head to the only name they could stand for, and her heart began to pound with a mixture of excitement and fear.
D.D.S.
Dante Di Sione.
CHAPTER TWO
DANTE’S PLANE WAS halfway over northern Spain when he made the grim discovery which sent his already bad mood shooting into the stratosphere. He’d spent much of the journey with an erection he couldn’t get rid of—snapping at the stewardesses who were fussing and flirting around him in such an outrageous way that he wondered whether they’d picked up on the fact that he was sexually excited, and some hormonal instinct was making them hit on him even more than usual.
But he wasn’t interested in those women in too-tight uniforms with dollar signs flashing in their eyes when they looked at him. He kept thinking about the understated Englishwoman and wondered why he hadn’t insisted she miss her flight, so that he could have taken her on board his plane and made love to her. Most women couldn’t resist sex on a private jet, and there was no reason she would be any different.
His mouth dried as he remembered the way she had jumped up from the bar stool like a scalded cat and run off to catch her flight as if she couldn’t wait to get away from him. Had that ever happened to him before? He thought not.
She hadn’t even asked for his business card!
Pushing her stubbornly persistent image from his mind, he decided to check on his grandfather’s precious tiara, reaching for his bag and wondering why the old man wanted the valuable and mysterious piece of jewellery so much. Because time was fast running out for him? Dante felt the sudden painful twist of his heart as he tried to imagine a future without Giovanni, but he couldn’t get his head around it. It was almost impossible to envisage a life without the once strong but still powerful figure who had stepped in to look after him and his siblings after fate had dealt them all the cruellest of blows.
Distracted by the turbulent nature of his thoughts, he tugged at the zip of the bag and frowned. He couldn’t remember it being so full because he liked to travel light. He tugged again and the zip slid open. But instead of a small leather case surrounded by boxer shorts, an unread novel and some photos of a Spanish castle he really needed to look at for a client before his next meeting—it was stuffed full of what looked suspiciously like...
Dante’s brows knitted together in disbelief.
Swimwear?
He looked at the bag more closely and saw that instead of softest brown leather embossed with his initials, this carry-on was older and more battered and had clearly seen better days.
Disbelievingly, he began to burrow through the bikinis and swimsuits, throwing them aside with a growing sense of urgency, but instantly he knew he was just going through the motions and that his search was going to be fruitless. His heart gave a leap in his chest as a series of disastrous possibilities occurred to him. How ironic it would be if he’d flown halfway across the globe to purchase a piece of jewellery which had cost a king’s ransom, only to find that he’d been hoodwinked by the man who had sold it to him.
But no. He remembered packing the tiara himself, and although he was no gem expert, Dante had bought enough trinkets as pay-offs for women over the years to know when something was genuine. And the tiara had been genuine—of that he’d been certain. A complex and intricate weaving of diamonds and emeralds which had dazzled even him—a man usually far too cynical to be dazzled.
So where the hell was it now?
And suddenly Dante realised what must have happened. Willow—what the hell had been her surname?—must have picked up his bag by mistake. The blonde he’d been so busy flirting with at the airport, that he’d completely forgotten that he was carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of precious stones in his hand luggage. He’d been distracted by her misty eyes. He’d read in them a strange kind of longing and he’d fed her fantasy—and his own—by kissing her. It had been one of those instant-chemistry moments, when the combustion of sexual attraction had been impossible to ignore, until the last call for her flight had sounded over the loudspeaker and broken the spell. She’d jumped up and grabbed her bag. Only she hadn’t, had she? She’d grabbed his bag!
He drummed his fingers on the armrest as he considered his options. Should he ask his pilot to divert the plane to London? He thought about his meeting with the Italian billionaire scheduled for later that evening and knew it would be both insulting and damaging to cancel it.
He scowled as he rang for a stewardess, one of whom almost fell over herself in her eagerness to reach him first.
‘What can I get for you, sir?’ she questioned, her eyes nearly popping out of her head as she looked at the haphazard collection of swimwear piled in the centre of the table.
Dante quickly shoved all the bikinis back into the bag, but as he did so, his finger hooked on to a particularly tiny pair of bottoms. He felt his body grow hard as he felt the soft silk of the gusset and thought about Willow wearing it. His voice grew husky. ‘I want you to get hold of my assistant and ask him to track down a woman for me.’
The stewardess did her best to conceal it, but the look of disappointment on her face was almost comical.
‘Certainly, sir,’ she said gamely. ‘And the woman is?’
‘Her name is Willow Hamilton,’ Dante ground out. ‘I need her number and her address. And I need that information by the time this plane lands.’
* * *
There were four missed calls on her phone by the time Willow left the Tube station in central London, blinking as she emerged into the bright July sunshine. She stepped into the shadow of a doorway and looked at the screen. All from the same unknown number and whoever it was hadn’t bothered to leave a voicemail. But she knew who the caller must be. The sexy stranger. The man she’d kissed. The blue-eyed man whose carry-on she had picked up by mistake.
She felt the race of her heart. She would go home first and then she would ring him. She wasn’t going to have a complicated conversation on a busy pavement on a hot day when she was tired and jet-lagged.
She had already made a tentative foray inside, but the bag contained no contact number, just some photos of an amazing Spanish castle, a book which had won a big literary prize last year and—rather distractingly—several pairs of silk boxer shorts which were wrapped around a leather box. She’d found her fingertips sliding over the slippery black material of the shorts and had imagined them clinging to Dante Di Sione’s flesh and that’s when her cheeks had started doing that Scarlet Pimpernel thing again, and she’d hastily stuffed them back before anyone on the Heathrow Express started wondering why she was ogling a pair of men’s underpants.
She let herself into her apartment, which felt blessedly cool and quiet after the heat of the busy London day. She rented the basement from a friend of her father’s—a diplomat in some far-flung region whose return visits to the UK were brief and infrequent. Unfortunately one of the conditions of Willow being there was that she wasn’t allowed to change the decor, which meant she was stuck with lots of very masculine colour. The walls were painted bottle-green and dark red and there was lots of heavy-looking furniture dotted around the place. But it was affordable, close to work and—more importantly—it got her away from the cloying grip of her family.
She picked up some mail from the mat and went straight over to the computer where she tapped in Dante Di Sione’s name, reeling a little to discover that her search had yielded over two hundred thousand entries.
She squinted at the screen, her heart beginning to pound as she stared into an image which showed his haunting blue eyes to perfection. It seemed he was some sort of mega entrepreneur, heading up a company which catered exclusively for the super-rich. She looked at the company’s website.
We don’t believe in the word impossible.
Whatever it is you want—we can deliver.
Quite a big promise to make, she thought as she stared dreamily at photos of a circus tent set up in somebody’s huge garden, and some flower-decked gondolas which had been provided to celebrate a tenth wedding anniversary party in Venice.
She scrolled down. There was quite a lot of stuff about his family. Lots of siblings. Snap, she thought. And there was money. Lots of that. A big estate somewhere in America. Property in Manhattan. Although according to this, Dante Di Sione lived in Paris—which might explain why his accent was an intriguing mix of transatlantic and Mediterranean. And yet some of the detail about his life was vague—though she couldn’t quite put her finger on why. She hadn’t realised precisely what she’d been looking for until the word single flashed up on the screen and a feeling of satisfaction washed over her.
She sat back and stared out at the pavement, where from this basement-level window she could see the bottom halves of people’s legs as they walked by. A pair of stilettos tapped into view, followed by some bare feet in a pair of flip-flops. Was she really imagining that she was in with a chance with a sexy billionaire like Dante Di Sione, just because he’d briefly kissed her in a foreign airport terminal? Surely she couldn’t be that naive?
She was startled from her daydream by the sound of her mobile phone and her heart started beating out a primitive tattoo as she saw it was the same number as before. She picked it up with fingers which were shaking so much that she almost declined the call instead of accepting it.
Stay calm, she told herself. This is the new you. The person who kisses strangers at airports and is about to start embracing life, instead of letting it pass her by.
‘Hello?’
‘Is that you, Willow?’
Her heart raced and her skin felt clammy. On the phone, his transatlantic/Mediterranean twang sounded even more sexy, if such a thing was possible. ‘Yes,’ she said, a little breathlessly. ‘It’s me.’
‘You’ve got my bag,’ he clipped out.
‘I know.’
The tone of his voice seemed to change. ‘So how the hell did that happen?’
‘How do you think it happened?’ Stung into defence by the note of irritation in his voice, Willow gripped the phone tightly. ‘I picked it up by mistake...obviously.’
There was a split-second pause. ‘So it wasn’t deliberate?’
‘Deliberate?’ Willow frowned. ‘Are you serious? Do you think I’m some sort of thief who hangs around airports targeting rich men?’
There was another pause and this time when he spoke the irritation had completely vanished and his voice sounded almost unnaturally composed. ‘Have you opened it?’
A little uncomfortably, Willow rubbed her espadrille toe over the ancient Persian rug beneath the desk. ‘Obviously I had to open it, to see if there was any address or phone number inside.’
His voice sounded strained now. ‘And you found, what?’
Years of sparring with her sisters made Willow’s response automatic. ‘Don’t you even remember what you were carrying in your own bag?’
‘You found, what?’ he repeated dangerously.
‘A book. Some glossy photos of a Spanish castle. And some underpants,’ she added on a mumble.
‘But nothing else?’
‘There’s a leather case. But it’s locked.’
At the other end of the phone, Dante stared at the imposing iron structure of the Eiffel Tower and breathed out a slow sigh of relief. Of course it was locked—and he doubted she would have had time to get someone to force it open for her even if she’d had the inclination, which he suspected she didn’t. There had been something almost otherworldly about her...and she seemed the kind of woman who wouldn’t be interested in possessions—even if the possession in question happened to be a stunning diadem, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He could feel the strain bunching up the muscles in his shoulders and he moved them slowly to release some of the tension, realising just how lucky he’d been. Or rather, how lucky she had been. Because he’d been travelling on a private jet with all the protection which came with owning your own plane, but Willow had not. He tried to imagine what could have happened if she’d been stopped going through customs, with an undeclared item like that in her possession.
Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead and for a moment he cursed this mission he’d been sent on—but it was too late to question its legitimacy now. He needed to retrieve the tiara as soon as possible and to get it to the old man, so that he could forget all about it.
‘I need that bag back,’ he said steadily.
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘And you probably want your swimwear.’ He thought about the way his finger had trailed over the gusset of that tiny scarlet bikini bottom and was rewarded with another violent jerk of lust as he thought about her blond hair and grey eyes and the faint taste of champagne on her lips. ‘So why don’t I send someone round to swap bags?’
There was a pause. ‘But you don’t know where I live,’ she said, and then, before he had a chance to reply, she started talking in the thoughtful tone of someone who had just missed a glaringly obvious fact. ‘Come to think of it—how come you’re ringing me? I didn’t give you my phone number.’
Dante thought quickly. Was she naive enough not to realise that someone like him could find out pretty much anything he wanted? He injected a reassuring note into his voice. ‘I had someone who works for me track you down,’ he said smoothly. ‘I was worried that you’d want your bag back.’
‘Actually, you seem to be the one who’s worried, Mr Di Sione.’
Her accurate tease stopped him in his tracks and Dante scowled, curling his free hand into a tight fist before slowly releasing his fingers, one by one. This wasn’t going as he had intended. ‘Am I missing something here?’ he questioned coolly. ‘Are you playing games with me, Willow, or are you prepared to do a bag-swap so that we can just forget all about it and move on?’
In the muted light of the basement apartment, Willow turned to catch a glimpse of her shadowed features in an antique oval mirror and was suddenly filled with a determination she hadn’t felt for a long time. Not since she’d battled illness and defied all the doctors’ gloomy expectations. Not since she’d fought to get herself a job, despite her family’s reluctance to let her start living an independent life in London. She thought about her sister Clover’s wedding, which was due to take place in a few days’ time, when she would be kitted out in the hideous pale peach satin which had been chosen for the bridesmaids and which managed to make her look completely washed out and colourless.
But it wasn’t just that which was bothering her. Her vanity could easily take a knock because she’d never really had the energy or the inclination to make her looks the main focus of her attention. It was all the questions which would inevitably come her way and which would get worse as the day progressed.
So when are we going to see you walking down the aisle, Willow?
And, of course, the old favourite: Still no boyfriend, Willow?
And because she would have been warned to be on her best behaviour, Willow would have to bite back the obvious logic that you couldn’t have one without the other, and that since she’d never had a proper boyfriend, it was unlikely that she would be heading down the aisle any time soon.
Unless...
She stared at her computer screen, which was dominated by the rugged features of Dante Di Sione. And although he might have been toying with her—because perhaps kissing random women turned him on—he had managed to make it feel convincing. As if he’d really wanted to kiss her. And that was all she needed, wasn’t it? A creditable performance from a man who would be perfectly capable of delivering one. Dante Di Sione didn’t have to be her real boyfriend—he just had to look as if he was.
‘Don’t I get a reward for keeping your bag safe?’ she questioned sweetly.
‘I’ll buy you a big bunch of flowers.’
‘Flowers make me sneeze.’
‘Chocolates, then.’
‘I’m allergic to cocoa.’
‘Stop playing games with me, Willow,’ he snapped. ‘And tell me what it is you’re angling for.’
Willow stared at the piercing blue eyes on the computer screen. His thick black hair looked as if he had been running his fingers through it and she remembered how it had felt to have his lips brushing over hers. It was now or never. It was all about seizing the moment and doing something you wouldn’t normally do. Because what was the point of sitting back and moaning about your fate as if it was set in stone, instead of trying to hammer out something new for yourself?