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Last night she’d made a fool of herself with him. This morning she’d been awoken by hysterics and accusations from Bianca’s parents that still rang in her head. Now this—this deeply unsettling man she’d been sent to face because Bianca’s parents couldn’t bring themselves to do it—and he was looking her over as if he couldn’t believe she would dare to walk out of her room looking as she did.
Well, you try applying make-up when your fingers won’t stop shaking, she told him silently as she suffered his cool appraisal that was so spiked by the glint of contempt. You try wondering what clothes to wear for an audience with a jilted man when your nerves were shot to death at the very prospect.
‘During the week you have been here in my country I’ve watched you play the straight man to Bianca’s high-strung and volatile temperament,’ he said so suddenly it made Lizzy blink. ‘I’ve watched you soothe her, calm her and even humour her. But I do not recall seeing you threaten to lose your temper with her even when she took it upon herself to mock or embarrass you, so why do you feel the need to lose your temper with me?’
‘Y-you attacked my family.’
‘I attacked your brother,’ he amended. ‘You don’t believe I have the right?’
Of course he had the right. This time yesterday he had been one half of a glittering couple, his marriage to Bianca only a short week away. It was supposed to be the wedding of the year here in Italy, now it was about to become juicy fodder for every media outlet and it was her very own brother who’d turned it into that.
Lizzy moved jerkily, offering a small conciliatory flip of one hand despite feeling as though she were being whipped by his smooth cutting tone. ‘I give you the right to despise my brother,’ she acknowledged. ‘I will even give you the right to be angry with me because I’m the sister of the man who ran off with your bride. But I will not—’ and her chin came up, eyes sparking with challenge ‘—stand here and let you deride the fact that we are not rich like you.’
‘I did that?’
Lizzy pressed her lips together and nodded. He wasn’t the only one around her who’d had his pride battered today. She’d had to put up with some pretty mean observations from Bianca’s parents about her brother that had been difficult to swallow down.
‘Then I apologise.’
Lizzy didn’t believe him. Facing up to him like this, she didn’t see or hear so much as a hint of apology in his tone. But, ‘Thank you,’ she responded politely anyway. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you to—’
‘How did you get here?’
Once again she was about to turn away when he stopped her. ‘By water taxi across the lake from Bellagio,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Then it seems to me that you’re stuck here until I arrange your return across the lake.’
‘Y-your man on the jetty said he would see to—’
‘It’s a case of priorities, Miss Hadley,’ he cut in. ‘My instructions take precedence around here, you see.’
He was pulling rank, Lizzy recognised, lips parting to say something then snapping shut again when it suddenly struck her that he was burning for a fight.
Did she take him on? The question lit up her brain while her common sense told her to just get the heck out of here because she wasn’t up to his weight. He lived in this fabulous villa on the banks of Lake Como, he owned a beautiful apartment in Milan, which was why she’d been so surprised to find he’d taken a suite at the hotel last night, and at least three more fabulous homes Bianca had mentioned set in different parts of the world. He lived the high-powered jet setting lifestyle of the world’s business heavyweights. He even flew the world in comfort in his very own executive jet.
And just out there tied to his private jetty floated his sleek glinting white private power boat that could spin her back across the lake in ten minutes—but he was refusing to give the order because he felt the need to kick someone around a bit and she happened to be conveniently there.
Lizzy looked away from him then back again, not at all sure what to do next. ‘You do know you’re being petty,’ she sighed out finally.
‘Green,’ he murmured.
‘Green—what?’ she flicked out, completely thrown by the comment.
‘Your eyes when you’re angry,’ he provided. ‘Most of the time they are a soft placid grey.’
‘They can spit pretty sharp daggers too when I’m cornered,’ she reacted.
‘Let me test that,’ he offered. ‘You have known all along what they were planning.’
It was not a question. ‘No,’ Lizzy insisted. ‘I told you I did not know.’
But even as she said it her insides were creasing guiltily because perhaps she had seen it coming only it had been so much simpler to just block it out.
‘I did not have you down as a liar, Elizabeth,’ he said coolly.
‘I’m not lying!’ Frowning—annoyed with herself as well as with him and this horrible position she’d been put in, ‘I did not see it coming,’ she insisted a second time, ‘but I admit I feel some responsibility because I think I should have done.’
‘Because you knew they were lovers?’
Did he have to put it as calmly as that? Shifting her tense stance, ‘Yes,’ she answered, deciding to be blunt with him since he didn’t seem to possess a single sensitive nerve in his body. ‘For a while, several years ago.’
‘Childhood sweethearts.’ His hard mouth flicked out the semblance of a smile.
A bit more than that, she thought as she pinned her lips together and made no comment at all. Then, because she couldn’t take the probing glint in his eyes, she let out a sigh. ‘You were right about the wealth difference meaning something. He’s never going to be good enough for her you know.’
‘Whereas I hit all the right criteria for a Moreno?’
Lizzy offered a shrug this time—what else could she do? He did hit all the right criteria. He was everything the Morenos expected their beautiful daughter to marry. Matthew wasn’t. Matthew came right out of middle class England. He’d enjoyed the necessary public-school education to give him a great kick-start in life but that was about it. Until this recent financial crisis her family had survived comfortably on its small business income—no more, no less. Matthew was expected to take over the business from their father one day and to marry some nice middle class Englishwoman who would not demand more from him than he was able to provide.
Bianca on the other hand was always going to expect more. She was always going to have what she wanted in life even if it meant providing it herself. Matthew wouldn’t be able to cope with that. His ego would take such a hard knocking he’d never be happy, whereas this man had so much money of his own he wouldn’t give a toss as to how his beautiful wife spent her own money, and his ego would stay firmly intact.
‘She will come back,’ she promised. ‘She just needs time to—sort her head out.’
‘Not her heart?’ The dry distinction made Lizzy wince.
‘I’m sure she loves you,’ she persisted. ‘She’s just not ready to commit to marriage. If you just give her time, then I—’
Black eyebrows with a fascinating silken gloss arched her a curious look. ‘Are you actually standing there, Miss Hadley, suggesting that I should wait for Bianca to sort her head out?’
Well, was she? Lifting her chin, ‘If you love her—yes,’ she insisted.
‘Then you are a romantic fool because it is not going to happen.’ He moved suddenly, straightening away from the desk. ‘There is a wedding arranged for next Saturday morning and I intend to make sure that it goes ahead.’
Without a bride? Lizzy stared at him. ‘You mean—you’re going to find her and drag her back to marry you?’ A silly kind of laugh left her throat at the very image of Bianca being dragged by this man down the church aisle kicking and screaming.
‘No.’ Reaching behind him, his long fingers picked Bianca’s letter up again—this time to fold it with slow, neat precision. ‘I mean to replace her with someone else.’
She was pretty much held in his thrall by now. ‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’ He nodded and made her gasp as he ripped the letter into small pieces, then calmly dropped them into the waste-paper basket standing by the desk.
It was such a cold act of dismissal of Bianca and everything she should mean to him that Lizzy began to feel slightly sick.
‘You will have to move quickly to put your life in order, of course, but with my assistance I think it can be achieved in time.’
She dragged her eyes up from the discarded pieces of paper. It took a few seconds for his words to actually sink in—then they did sink in and Lizzy took a jerky step backwards.
‘M-my life is fine as it is.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ he acknowledged. ‘But will it be fine by tomorrow when I inform the authorities that your brother has emptied your company bank account?’
CHAPTER THREE
‘TH-THAT was not in the least bit funny,’ Lizzy husked out, her heart beginning to thump heavily against her ribs because this conversation had just taken a sinister turn for the bad. ‘I know you’re hurt and angry, and I accept you feel the need to kick someone around in response. But that doesn’t give you the right to lie about my family!’
‘Your brother.’ Once again Luc made the distinction. ‘I restrict my accusations to only one member of your family. The rest I will honour with the benefit of the doubt—for now.’
He was losing her with every cool word he threw at her. ‘You suspect my father of being a crook? Where do you get off believing you can say something like that?’
‘I “get off”, as you so nicely describe it, by being a banker,’ he responded. ‘And being a banker I am not prone to let my heart rule my head.’
‘You’ve lost me.’ Lizzy stared at him in bewilderment.
‘Then let me explain. Bianca is a very wealthy woman.’
‘I know that,’ she snapped out.
‘A little—shall we call it family ingenuity?—and she could be misled into believing that her childhood sweetheart had hit it rich.’
‘I think you need time on your own for some quiet contemplation,’ Lizzy told him curtly, and did what she should have done minutes before and turned on her heel to leave.
‘Your—close relationship to her made me curious,’ he continued smoothly as she walked. ‘So I decided it would be wise to have you and your family checked out.’
‘Checked out?’ Once again she swung round to stare at him. ‘So where the heck do you get off now thinking you have the right to do that?’
‘The right of Bianca’s future husband who was—er—puzzled by your close friendship to her. You’re not her type, Miss Hadley,’ he stated bluntly. ‘Anyone with eyes can see that Bianca comes from a different side of the fence, yet here you are, staying in the best hotel in Milan paid for with her family’s money, wearing clothes she has bought for you so you would not look out of place in the company of her rich friends, and about to play the honoured role at her wedding as her chief bridesmaid.’
’ Was about to,’ she hit back, infuriated by the nasty slant he was putting on everything.
‘Was,’ he acknowledged with a cool dip of his dark head. ‘So I decided to do some checking, and guess what I found out? Hadley’s is not merely enjoying a temporary cash crisis as I was given to believe, it is about to go under altogether. Your father is in debt up to his neck. Your brother hates the whole engineering scenario and resents the fact that he is expected to stay in the business.’
Lizzy flushed. ‘Matthew wanted to be an artist.’
‘Oh, how romantically right for him,’ her persecutor mocked. ‘With his golden good looks and his ravaged sensibilities he makes the perfect rescue for an impressionable thing like Bianca—whereas you,’ he went on before Lizzy could say anything, ‘you make the perfect level-headed foil to keep Bianca’s starry eyes blinded to what your brother is really about.’
Lizzy straightened her trembling tense shoulders. ‘Have you quite finished slaughtering my family?’ she demanded, wanting to slap his face.
‘Haughty,’ he remarked. ‘I like it.’
‘Well, I don’t like you!’ she hit back. ‘Bianca and I have been friends since we were twelve years old—her wealth or my lack of it has never been an issue between us because that’s not what true friendship is about! My family works hard for its living, signor,’ she defended proudly. ‘All of us work hard! My father did not waste his life swanning around the world enjoying the useless life of an overindulged playboy from a filthy rich but totally dysfunctional family from which you, sadly, were the cynical end result! And if my brother is different from the rest of us at least he knows he is loved! Whereas you, signor, with your untold wealth and your inherited arrogance, can’t ever have been loved to be so cold and suspicious of everything and everyone that you have to dig into their lives behind their backs!’
‘Dysfunctional?’ His glinting gold eyes narrowed on her. ‘You have a very cynical view of my family history, Miss Hadley. It makes me curious as to where you collected your information and, more interestingly, why you did.’
Lizzy tensed as if he’d shot her. She’d walked herself right into that prickly trap. ‘I…Bianca,’ she said, hating the hot rush of colour that mounted her cheeks because she knew she’d been guilty of spending hours looking him up on the internet. ‘She described marrying you as joining a dynasty because she had the right name and the right genetic fingerprint,’ she crashed on. ‘It sounded so cold and businesslike to me that I thought she was joking at the time, but now I see that she wasn’t joking at all or you would be standing there too overwhelmed by your broken heart to even think of putting such a cold suggestion to me!’
‘Finished?’ he asked when she finally ran down to a breathless choke.
Shaking all over now, Lizzy pressed her trembling lips together and nodded.
So did he, and straightened from the desk. ‘Then with the character assassination over we will return to the subject of our wedding,’ he said.
‘I am not marrying you!’ Lizzy all but shrieked at him. Was he mad?
He moved round the desk. ‘You kissed me last night.’
The reminder forced her into dragging in a sharp intake of breath. She’d hoped he’d forgotten it. She’d prayed all night long that she’d just dreamt up that awful, shocking stolen kiss.
‘I was drunk—’
‘You appeared to be.’ He was opening a drawer now and taking out a thick folder which he placed on the desk. ‘Of course, you could have been playing with me as diversionary tactics to keep my eyes blinded to what Bianca was up to.’
She was so stunned by that cynical slant on her stupid behaviour, when she opened her mouth nothing came out of it.
He smiled—coolly. ‘Everything is open to misinterpretation, Elizabeth. When you—came on to me like some very tipsy sweet, shy virgin, I was—flattered. Now?’ He flipped open the file. ‘How different things can look in the cool light of day and with common sense re-established. Come and take a look…’
It was not a suggestion. Lizzy felt a tingling prickle spread across the surface of her skin as she forced her shaky legs to move back to the desk. He twisted the file around, then stabbed at it with a long finger to draw her eyes down.
She found herself staring at a bank statement—a bank statement with the Hadley name printed at its head. ‘H-how did you get hold of that?’ she whispered.
‘I’m a banker,’ he reminded her—again. ‘With the right contacts and the right strings to pull I can get anything I want.’
There was a double meaning in that remark that did not pass by Lizzy.
‘Look where I’m pointing,’ he prompted.
She looked, then stilled as if turned to stone.
‘The date shows that your company account received a heavy injection of funds just two days ago,’ he spelled out what she had already seen.
Five and a half million…Lizzy had never seen five and a half million written down in black and white before. To her it was a gasping amount.
‘If you look at the next entry,’ her tormentor persisted, ‘you will see that the five and a half million pounds was withdrawn again on the same day.’
‘No,’ she breathed, refusing to believe what it was he was implying here.
Then she jerked out of her shocked stasis. ‘I need to ring my father.’ White as a sheet now, she turned dizzily and headed for the door.
‘You will not call anyone,’ that ruthlessly calm voice instructed. ‘At this precise moment I have control of this situation and I mean to hold onto it. Bringing someone else into it will risk that control.’
‘Control over what?’ Lizzy swung around to stare at him.
‘You,’ he provided. ‘Until you brought me Bianca’s letter I was still puzzling as to why your father had successfully negotiated the loan he needed to save his company only to instantly remove all the money and put it somewhere else.’
Lizzy suddenly needed to sit down somewhere. The only chair handy was the one placed several feet away from the desk. She sank into it. Her head was swimming, the complicated puzzle of what was really going on here beyond her stunned capabilities right now.
‘Your brother is the only other person besides your father authorised to access this account. Put it all together, Elizabeth,’ he encouraged. ‘It does not take much effort to calculate that your brother has taken the money to fund his romantic elopement with Bianca. If you did play a part in their disappearance then I hope you have taken into account that you have been left here to carry the can.’
At that precise moment Lizzy didn’t care what position she was sitting here in. She was worried about her father. If—when—he found out what Matthew had done he was going to—
‘Of course, I must also point out that if you are genuinely innocent of any role in this, then you are still about to carry the can,’ that oh, so hateful voice injected, ‘because I want reparation for being taken for an idiot, and if that means putting you into Bianca’s wedding dress and marrying you in her place, then that is what is going to happen.’
‘For goodness’ sake!’ She jumped to her feet. ‘Don’t you think this situation is bad enough without you trying to fly to the moon?’
He laughed! Lizzy couldn’t believe she was hearing it! ‘You have a quaint way of expressing yourself.’
If the desk hadn’t been between them she would have thrown herself at him in fury! ‘I am not marrying you!’ she had to make do with shouting out.
‘Why not?’ Throwing himself into the chair behind the desk, he arched her a challenging look. ‘Is there something wrong with me?’
‘Don’t ask me to make a list,’ Lizzy muttered, wrapping her arms around her body and glaring at him while her mind shot off in all directions trying to find the sense in this mad situation. ‘You’ve got the eyes of a lion,’ she then heard herself murmur out of absolutely nowhere!
‘Lions mark their territory, jealously protect their women, but they do not hunt,’ he responded lazily.
‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ Lizzy snapped, wishing she’d kept her silly mouth shut about his eyes.
He offered a shrug. ‘I am ready to mate. I want—cubs. I did not have to hunt for Bianca because she’s always been there in the background of my life ready to claim once she’d grown up. Now here you are.’ Those damned golden eyes fixed on her face. ‘You don’t need hunting either because I have you caught and shackled by your brother’s stealing tendencies and an attraction for me you find impossible to hide.’
‘I am not attracted to you in any way, shape or form,’ she denied stiffly.
‘Then why the sweet, tender kiss?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’ He was like a dog with a particularly juicy bone to gnaw on. ‘It wasn’t a kiss! I accidentally brushed my mouth against your throat! And I was drunk!’ she added for good measure.
‘Tipsy on months of guilty lusting,’ he taunted. ‘Your attraction for me has been right there in your body language from the first time we met in London and you couldn’t stop yourself from hungrily drinking me in,’ he declared arrogantly. ‘It was there when we met in the lift in Milan. It was definitely there last night when we danced together and I gave in to temptation and waltzed you out onto the terrace. And it was absolutely there in that dizzily irresistible brush you allowed your lips and the tender moist tip of your tongue to make against my throat.’
Feeling as if she were drowning in the hot steam of her own embarrassment, Lizzy struck back. ‘You are more than ten years older than me, and that makes you really old in my eyes, signor.’
‘Thirty-four to twenty-two is a good difference, cara.’ It was the first time he had used that endearment to her and it quivered down her spine like a terrible sin. ‘It means I can offer you experience and fidelity, having worked out my studding period when I was your age. Whereas you will give me your youth, your beauty, your wonderful smooth, tight, creamy white body—and your loyalty when you switch it from your friend and your brother to protect your father from the worst scandal you can possibly imagine if his name gets dragged into this.’
‘How cold you are.’ Arms tightening across her body, she shivered.
‘Not between the sheets.’
‘And that’s it?’ Lizzy flashed. ‘Between the sheets I get your warmer side and your fabulous experience while out of them I get to play the role of your very rich, very pampered, young trophy wife and face—saver? No affection offered, no love?’
‘Love is an overrated fantasy.’
‘Coming from you I expect that it is.’
‘Are you digging at my dysfunctional family again?’
‘I’m digging at the fact that I don’t like you very much.’
‘But you desire me like crazy,’ he confided silkily.
Lizzy made a tense movement of her body, a frown like a dusky cloud settling across her face.
‘You’re turned on just by looking at me,’ he continued relentlessly. ‘You have this instinctive knowledge that the sex is going to be so good between us and it nags at you like a persistent ache. If I stepped round this desk right now and drew you into my arms you would go up like a Roman candle.’
‘Without the bed and the sheets?’ The sarcasm was out before she could stop it. If she’d meant it as a slap at his horrible self-confidence all it did was to make him laugh—softly, deeply, a seriously disturbing, huskily attractive sound that came from somewhere low down in his chest. ‘I can be adaptable, bella mia, if encouraged.’
Hating his lazy, laid-back superior poise and self-assurance, she was riled into taking him on. ‘So if I decided one day to, say, stroll into your office and demand sex with you while you’re busy on the phone making more millions?’ she challenged.
‘Is that one of your fantasies?’ he quizzed, bringing a flush crawling up her throat. ‘Then, of course, I would do my best to accommodate you—just make sure you arrive wearing no tights.’ He ran his eyes down over her. ‘Panties can be dealt with, tights demand a distinct lack of finesse, and if your fantasy forces me to make millions while I accommodate you then, the easier you make it for me, the more pleasure you will get out of it.’
‘God, you’re insufferable.’ Lizzy spun her back to him, barely able to believe the calm insolence with which he’d said all of that and despising herself for giving him the chance.
‘Just more experienced at this game than you are,’ he told her. ‘Though sex across my desk while I talk on the telephone is novel,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe we will try it.’
Her slender shoulders hunched and she lifted up her hands to grab at them as if doing so would keep his outrageous suggestion out. It didn’t matter that she knew she had started it. He was right and he was so much more experienced at this game so all she’d managed to do by taking him on was to walk herself right into his tormenting trap.