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‘You want to buy me dinner?’ He didn’t even attempt to keep the surprise from his voice. Women didn’t ask him out on dates. It just didn’t happen. For certain, they thought nothing of cajoling him into taking them out to expensive restaurants and lavishing them with expensive clothes and jewellery—something he was happy to oblige them in, enjoying having beautiful women on his arm. But taking the initiative and offering him a night out...?
In Francesco’s world, man was king. Women were very much pretty trinkets adorning the arm and keeping the bed warm. Men did the running, initially at least, following the traps set by the women so the outcome was assured.
She nodded, cradling her coffee. ‘It’s the least I can do.’
He studied her a touch longer, gazing into soft hazel eyes that didn’t waver from his stare.
Was there an agenda to her surprising offer of dinner?
No. He did not believe so. But Francesco was an expert on female body language and there was no doubt in his mind that she was interested in him.
He was tempted. Very tempted.
He’d thought about her numerous times since her accident. There had even been occasions when he’d found his hand on the phone ready to call the hospital to see how she was. Each time he had dismissed the notion. The woman was a stranger. All the same, he’d been enraged to learn the police had failed to track down the man who’d so callously knocked her down. The driver had gone into hiding. Unfortunately for the driver, Francesco had a photographic memory.
It had taken Francesco’s vast network precisely two hours to track the driver down. It had taken Francesco less than five minutes to convince the man to hand himself in. By the time he’d finished his ‘little chat’ with him, the man had been begging to be taken to the police station. Francesco had been happy to oblige.
And now she had come to him.
And he was tempted to take her up on her offer of a meal—not that he would let her pay. It went against everything he believed in. Men took care of their women. The end.
If it was any other woman he wouldn’t think twice. But this one was different. For a start, she was a doctor. She was a force for good in a world that was cruel and ugly.
Despite her age and profession, Hannah had an air of innocence about her. Or it could just be that she was totally without artifice. Either way, she had no business getting involved with the likes of him.
If he was a lesser man he would take advantage of her obvious interest, just like his father would have done if he’d been alive.
But he would not be that man. This woman was too...pure was the word that came to mind. If she were the usual kind of woman who frequented his world, he would have no hesitation in spelling out how she could repay her so-called debt to him. Naked. And horizontal.
‘You owe me nothing,’ he stated flatly.
‘I do...’
‘No.’ He cut her off. ‘What you consider to be your debt is not redeemable. I did what I did without any thought of payback—consider the fact you are alive and healthy and able to do the job you love to be my payment.’
The animation on her face dimmed a little. ‘So you won’t let me buy you dinner?’
‘Look around you. You don’t belong in this seedy world, Dr Chapman. I thank you for taking the time to visit me, but now I have business to attend to.’
‘That sounds like a dismissal.’
‘I am a busy man.’
Those hazel eyes held his for the longest time before she cast him the most beautiful smile he’d ever been the recipient of, lighting her face into something dazzling.
Then, to his utter shock, Hannah levered herself so her torso was on the bar and pressed her lips to his.
They were the softest of lips, a gentle touch that sent tiny darts fizzing through his blood.
He caught a faint whiff of coffee before she pulled away.
‘Thank you. For everything,’ she said, slipping back down onto her stool then getting to her feet. Her cheeks glowing, she finished her coffee and reached for her bag, her eyes never leaving his. ‘I will never forget what you’ve done for me, Francesco. You have my undying gratitude.’
As she turned to leave, he called out after her, ‘Your sister—she has the same family name as you?’
She nodded.
‘I’ll leave word that Melanie Chapman’s hen party is to be given priority at the door on Friday.’
A groove appeared in her forehead. ‘Okay,’ she said slowly, clearly not having the faintest idea what he was talking about.
‘Your sister will know what it means.’ A half smile stole over his face. ‘Tell her she’ll be on the list.’
‘Ah—on the list!’ The groove disappeared. Somehow the sparkle in her eyes glittered even stronger. ‘I know what that means. That’s incredibly lovely of you.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ he dismissed, already regretting his impulsive offer, which had come from where he knew not, but which unsettled him almost as much as her kiss.
Francesco never acted on impulse.
That same serene smile that had curved her cheeks when she’d lain on the road spread on her face. ‘I would.’
He watched her walk away, his finger absently tracing the mark on his lips where she’d kissed him.
For the first time in his life he’d done an unselfish act. He didn’t know if it made him feel good or bad.
CHAPTER TWO
HANNAH STARED AT the queue snaking all the way round the corner from the door of Calvetti’s and sighed. Maybe the queue was an omen to stay away.
No. It couldn’t be. Even if it was, she would ignore it. Just being this close to his sanctum was enough to send her pulse careering.
Meeting Francesco in the flesh had done something to her...
‘Come on, Han,’ her sister said, tugging at her wrist and breaking Hannah’s reverie. ‘We’re on the list.’
‘But this is the queue,’ Hannah pointed out.
‘Yes, but we’re on the list.’ Melanie rolled her eyes. ‘If you’re on the list you don’t have to queue.’
‘Really? How fabulous.’ She’d thought it meant getting in for free—she had no idea it also encompassed queue jumping.
Giggling, the party of twelve women dressed in black leotards over black leggings, bright pink tutus and matching bunny ears hurried past the queue.
Three men in long black trench coats guarded the door.
Melanie went up to them. ‘We’re on the list,’ she said with as much pride as anyone with a pink veil and bunny ears on her head and the words Mucky Mel ironed onto the back of her leotard could muster.
Hannah had guessed Calvetti’s was popular but, judging by Melanie’s reaction, she could have said she’d got VIP backstage passes to Glastonbury. Her sister had squealed with excitement and promptly set about rearranging the entire evening. Apparently Calvetti’s was ‘the hottest club in the country’, with twice as many people being turned away at the door than being admitted.
Luckily, Melanie had been so excited about it all that she’d totally failed to pump Hannah for information on the man himself. The last thing Hannah wanted was for her sister to think she had a crush on him. It was bad enough knowing her entire family thought she was a closet lesbian without giving them proof of her heterosexuality—one sniff and they’d start trying to marry her off to any man with a pulse.
The bouncer scanned his clipboard before taking a step to one side and unclipping the red cordon acting as a barrier.
‘Enjoy your evening, ladies,’ he said as they filed past, actually smiling at them.
Another doorman led them straight through to the club, which heaved with bodies and pulsated with loud music, leading them up a cordoned-off set of sparkling stairs.
Her heart lifted to see one of the man mountains who’d been guarding the club the other afternoon standing to attention by a door marked ‘Private’.
Surely that meant Francesco was here?
A young hunk dressed in black approached them and led them to a large round corner table. Six iced buckets of champagne were already placed on it.
‘Oh, wow,’ said Melanie. ‘Is this for us?’
‘It is,’ he confirmed, opening the first bottle. ‘With the compliments of the management. If you need anything, holler—your night is on the house.’
‘Can I have a glass of lemonade, please?’ Hannah asked, her request immediately drowned out by the hens all badgering her to have one glass of champagne.
About to refuse, she remembered the promise she’d made to herself that it was time to start living.
She, more than anyone, knew how precarious life could be, but it had taken an accident on her bike for her to realise that all she had been doing since the age of twelve was existing. Meeting Francesco in the flesh had only made those feelings stronger.
If heaven was real, what stories would she have to tell Beth other than medical anecdotes? She would have nothing of real life to share.
That was something she’d felt in Francesco, that sense of vitality and spontaneity, of a life being lived.
Settling down at the table, she took a glass of champagne, her eyes widening as the bubbles played on her tongue. All the same, she stopped after a few sips.
To her immense surprise, Hannah soon found she was enjoying herself. Although she didn’t know any of them well, Melanie’s friends were a nice bunch. Overjoyed to be given the VIP treatment, they made sure to include her in everything, including what they called Talent Spotting.
Alas, no matter how discreetly she craned her neck, Hannah couldn’t see Francesco anywhere. She did, however, spot a couple of minor members of the royal family and was reliably informed that a number of Premier League football players and a world-championship boxer were on the table next to theirs, and that the glamorous women and men with shiny white teeth who sat around another table were all Hollywood stars and their beaus.
‘Thank you so much for getting knocked off your bike,’ Melanie said whilst on a quick champagne break from the dance floor, flinging her arms around Hannah. ‘And thank you for coming out with us tonight and for coming here—I was convinced you were going to go home after the meal.’
Hannah hugged her in return, holding back her confession that she had originally planned on slipping away after their Chinese, but that the lure of seeing Francesco again had been too great. It had almost made up for the fact Beth wasn’t there to share Melanie’s hen night. She wouldn’t be there to share the wedding, either.
The wedding. An event Hannah dreaded.
She felt a huge rush of affection for her little sister along with an accompanying pang of guilt. Poor Melanie. She deserved better than Hannah. Since Beth’s death, Hannah had tried so hard to be the best big sister they both wished she could be, but she simply wasn’t up to the job. It was impossible. How could she be anything to anyone when such a huge part of herself was missing? All she had been able to do was throw herself into her studies, something over which she had always had total control.
But now her drive and focus had been compromised.
Never had she experienced anything like this.
Hannah was a woman of practicality, not a woman to be taken in with flights of fancy. Medicine was her life. From the age of twelve she’d known exactly what she wanted to be and had been single-minded in her pursuit of it. She would dedicate her life to medicine and saving children, doing her utmost to keep them alive so she could spare as many families from the gaping hole that lived in her own heart as she could.
At least, she had been single-minded until a car knocked her off her bike and the most beautiful man in the universe had stepped in to save her.
Now the hole in her heart didn’t feel so hollow.
Since that fateful cold morning, her mind had not just been full of medicine. It had been full of him, her knight in shining armour, and meeting him in the flesh had only compounded this. She wasn’t stupid. She knew she would never fit into his world. His reputation preceded him. Francesco Calvetti was a dangerous man to know and an exceptionally dangerous man to get on the wrong side of. But knowing this had done nothing to eradicate him from her mind.
That moment when she’d been lying on the cold concrete and opened her eyes, she had looked at him and felt such warmth.... Someone who could evoke that in her couldn’t be all bad. He just couldn’t.
‘Come on, Han,’ said Melanie, tugging at her hand. ‘Come and dance with me.’
‘I can’t dance.’ What she really wanted to do was search every nook and cranny of Calvetti’s until she found him. Because he was there. She just knew it.
Melanie pointed at the dance floor, where a group of twenty-something men with more money than taste were strutting their stuff. ‘Nor can they.’
* * *
Francesco watched the images from the security cameras on a range of monitors on his office wall. Through them, he could see everything taking place in his club. The same feeds were piped into the office where his security guys sat holed up, watching the same live images—but the only eyes Francesco trusted were his own. Tomorrow he would head back to Palermo to spot-check his nightclub and casino there, and then he would fly on to Madrid for the same.
A couple of men he suspected of being drug dealers had been invited by a group of city money men into the VIP area. He watched them closely, debating whether to have them dealt with now or wait until he had actual proof of their nefarious dealings.
A sweep of thick blonde hair with pink bunny ears caught his attention in one of the central feeds. He watched Hannah get dragged onto the dance floor by another pink-tutued blonde he assumed was the hen of said hen party, Melanie.
Not for the first time, he asked himself what the hell Hannah was doing there.
She looked more than a little awkward. His lips curved upwards as he watched her try valiantly to move her body in time to the beat of the music. He’d seen more rhythm from the stray cats that congregated round the vast veranda of his Sicilian villa.
The half smile faded and compressed into a tight line when he read the slogan on her back: Horny Hannah.
That all the hen party had similar personalised slogans did nothing to break the compression of his lips.
It bothered him. Hannah was too...classy to have something so cheap written about her, even if it was in jest.
He downed his coffee and absently wiped away the residue on the corner of his lips with his thumb.
What was she doing here? And why did she keep craning her neck as if she was on the lookout for someone?
Since he’d dismissed her three days ago, he’d been unnerved to find her taking residence in his mind. Now was not the time for distractions of any sort, not when the casino in Mayfair was on the agenda. This particular casino was reputed to be one of the oldest—if not the oldest—in the whole of Europe. It had everything Francesco desired in a casino. Old-school glamour. Wealth. And credibility. This was a casino built by gentlemen for gentlemen, and while the old ‘no women’ rule had been relaxed in modern times, it retained its old-fashioned gentility. More than anything else, though, it was the one business his father had wanted and failed to get. This failure had been a thorn in Salvatore’s side until his dying day, when a life of overindulgence had finally caught up with him.
After almost forty years under the sole ownership of Sir Godfrey Renfrew, a member of the British aristocracy, the casino had been put up for sale.
Francesco wanted it. He coveted it, had spent two months charming Godfrey Renfrew into agreeing the sale of it to him. Such was Godfrey’s hatred of Francesco’s dead father, it had taken a month to even persuade him to meet.
What was more, if Francesco’s spies were correct, Luca Mastrangelo was sniffing around the casino, too.
This news meant he absolutely could not afford to lose focus on the deal, yet still he’d found himself, an hour before opening for the night, giving orders to his hospitality manager to reserve the best table in the club—for a hen party of all things. He’d only ever intended to have Melanie Chapman’s party on the guest list.
Under ordinary circumstances, free tables were given to the most VIP of all VIPs and only then because of the publicity it generated.
He hadn’t expected Hannah to be in attendance, but now she was here he couldn’t seem to stop his eyes from flickering to whichever monitor happened to be fixed on her.
* * *
Hannah tried heroically to get her feet moving in time with the music, aware her dancing was easily the least rhythmic of the whole club. Not that this seemed to put any of the men off. To her chagrin, a few seemed to be suffering from what her sister termed Wandering Hand Syndrome. One in particular kept ‘accidentally’ rubbing against her. When his hand brushed over her bottom the first time she’d been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, and had stepped away from him. The second time, when he’d been bolder and tried to cup her buttocks, she’d flashed him a smile and said in her politest voice, ‘Please don’t do that,’ he’d removed his hand. Which had worked for all of ten seconds. The third time he groped her, she’d ‘accidentally’ trod on his foot. And now the sleaze had ‘accidentally’ palmed her breast and was grinding into her back as if she were some kind of plaything.
Did people actually like this kind of behaviour? Did women really find it attractive?
Just as she was wishing she had worn a pair of stilettoes like all the other women there so she could bruise him properly, a figure emerged on the dance floor.
Such was Francesco’s presence that the crowd parted like the Red Sea to admit him.
Her sister stopped dancing and gazed up at him with a dropped jaw. The other hens also stared, agog, their feet seeming to move in a manner completely detached from their bodies.
And no wonder. A head taller than anyone else on the dance floor, he would have commanded attention even if he’d looked like the back end of a bus. Wearing an immaculately pressed open-necked black shirt and charcoal trousers, his gorgeous face set in a grim mask, he oozed menace.
Even if Hannah had wanted to hide her delight, she would have been unable to, her face breaking into an enormous grin at the sight of him, an outward display of the fizzing that had erupted in her veins.
She’d hoped with a hope bordering on desperation that he would spot her and seek her out, had prepared herself for the worst, but hoped for the best. She’d also promised herself that if he failed to materialise that evening then she would do everything in her power to forget about him. But if he were to appear...
To her disquiet, other than nodding at her without making proper eye contact, his attention was very much focused on the man who’d been harassing her who, despite trying to retain a nonchalant stance, had beads of sweat popping out on his forehead.
Francesco leaned into his face, his nostrils flaring. ‘If you touch this woman again, you will answer to me personally. Capisce?’
Not waiting for a response, he turned back into the crowd.
Hannah watched his retreating figure, her heart in her mouth.
Melanie shouted over the music to her, her face animated, yet Hannah didn’t hear a single syllable.
It was now or never.
Unlike the regularity of her life, where the only minor change to her schedule came in the form of the monthly weekend-night shift, Francesco’s life was full of movement and change, hopping from country to country, always seeing different sunsets. Her life was exactly where she had planned it to be and she didn’t want to change the fundamentals of it, but there was something so intoxicating about both Francesco and the freedom of his life. The freedom to wake up in the morning and just go.
He could go anywhere right now.
Hurrying to catch him, she followed in his wake, weaving through the sweaty bodies and then past the VIP tables.
‘Francesco,’ she called, panic fluttering in her chest as he placed his hand on the handle of the door marked Private.
He stilled.
She hurried to close the gap.
He turned his head, his features unreadable.
The music was so loud she had to incline right into him. He was close enough for her to see the individual hairs in the V of his shirt and smell his gorgeous scent, all oaky manliness, everything converging to send her pulse racing.
‘Why did you just do that?’ she asked.
His eyes narrowed, the pupils ringing with intent, before he turned the handle and held the door open for her.
Hannah stepped into a dimly lit passageway. Francesco closed the door, blocking off the thumping noise of the music.
She shook her head a little to try to clear her ringing ears.
He leaned back against the door, his eyes fixed on her.
‘Why did you do that?’ she repeated, filling the silence with a question she knew he’d heard perfectly well the first time she’d asked it.
‘What? Warn that man off?’
‘Threaten him,’ she corrected softly.
‘I don’t deal in threats, Dr Chapman,’ he said, his voice like ice. ‘Only promises.’
‘But why?’
‘Because he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I will not allow abuse of any form to take place on my premises.’
‘So you make a point of personally dealing with all unwanted attention in your clubs, do you?’
His eyes bored into hers, his lips a tight line.
Far from his forbidding expression making her turn and run away, as it would be likely to make any other sane person do, it emboldened her. ‘And did I really hear you say capisce?’
‘It’s a word that the man will understand.’
‘Very Danny DeVito. And, judging by his reaction to it, very effective.’
Something that could almost pass for amusement curled on his lips. ‘Danny DeVito? Do you mean Al Pacino?’
‘Probably.’ She tried to smile, tried hard to think of a witty remark that would hold his attention for just a little longer, but it was hard to think sensibly when you were caught in a gaze like hot chocolate-fudge cake, especially when it was attached to a man as divine as Francesco Calvetti. If she had to choose, she would say the man was a slightly higher rank on the yummy stakes than the cake. And she liked hot chocolate-fudge cake a lot, as her bottom would testify.
‘Thank you for rescuing me. Again.’
‘You’re welcome.’ He made to turn the door handle. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me...’
‘Dismissing me again?’
‘I’m a very...’
‘Busy man,’ she finished for him. God, but her heart was thundering beneath her ribs, her hands all clammy. ‘Please. I came along tonight because I wanted to see you again. Five minutes of your time. That’s all I ask. If at the end of it you tell me to leave then I will and I promise never to seek you out again.’
She held her breath as she awaited his response.
He eyed her coolly, his features not giving anything away, until, just as she feared she was about to run out of oxygen, he inclined his head and turned the handle of another door, also marked Private.
Hannah followed him into a large room that was perhaps the most orderly office she had ever been in. Along one wall were two dozen monitors, which she gravitated towards. It didn’t take long to spot her sister and fellow hens, all back at their table, talking animatedly.
It occurred to her that she had simply walked away without telling Melanie where she was going.
‘So, Dr Chapman, you wanted five minutes of my time...’
She turned her head to find Francesco staring pointedly at his chunky, expensive-looking watch.
He might look all forbidding but she could sense his curiosity.
How she regretted allowing Melanie to talk her into wearing the ‘hen uniform’, but it would have been churlish to refuse. She had denied her sister too much through the years. Dressing in a ridiculous outfit was the least she could do. Still, it made her self-conscious, and right then she needed every ounce of courage to say what she needed to say.