The Italian's Summer Seduction
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‘Are you hurt?’
Milly gulped for much needed oxygen and shook her head. Two displaced tears trickled down her pale-with-shock cheeks. He actually sounded as if he cared, his eyes narrowing with what looked suspiciously like concern as his gaze swept down the length of her shaken body.
His hands were on her slender shoulders now. They felt reassuring, comforting. She had the insane impulse to move closer to that strong, lean body, lay her troubled head against his broad chest and seek solace.
Hurriedly, she brushed the wimpy tears away and with them the weak need to be held by him. He was her sister’s enemy; therefore he was her enemy too.
In similar circumstances Jilly would swear like a trooper, brush herself down and make a joke of it. In the impersonation stakes she wasn’t doing too well.
She was going to have to try harder. Much harder. At least until he discovered that she wasn’t who she was pretending to be.
‘I’m fine.’ She forced a smile. ‘I wasn’t looking where I was going.’ She lifted her chin, wondering what Jilly would say next, and hit on, ‘How much further? Isn’t there any transport on the island?’
Her sister hadn’t been known to walk if she could take a cab and rarely put herself in a situation where there wasn’t one within hailing distance. But at her most Jilly-like comment to date Cesare’s wickedly sexy mouth turned down at one corner as he drawled, ‘There is nothing on the island but one stone cottage. No people, no roads and no bright lights.
His hands dropped from her shoulders and he turned away, striding along the rough track to where he’d dropped the luggage, then waited until she joined him. ‘My father had it built when he bought the island many years ago. By all accounts he was a workaholic and came here at least once a year to recharge his batteries.’
‘You must have happy memories of childhood holidays,’ Milly responded to his totally unexpected mention of anything remotely personal, trying to act as normally as possible under difficult circumstances, doing her level best not to get too het up over the possibility of him leaving her here with no way of returning to the mainland once her deception had been uncovered. She certainly wouldn’t put that kind of action past him!
For a moment she thought he wouldn’t respond to her innocuous remark. She glanced up at his tanned, extravagantly handsome features and saw his mouth tighten with what she could only translate as scorn. ‘My mother never came here. She was a metropolitan creature. My father brought his mistresses here, he didn’t want me around. I only learned of the existence of this hideaway after his death.’
Biting back instinctive words of sympathy because she knew he wouldn’t want them, Milly concentrated on getting up the increasingly steep track that traversed the sun-baked hillside where herbs and wild flowers merged their perfume with the tang of the sea and the scent of the pines she could see ahead of them. Breathless with heat and effort—neither of which seemed to affect him in the slightest—her mind was busy.
If his father had taken mistresses openly enough for him to know about them then that would explain why, given such an immoral role model, Cesare took it as the norm to take a woman to his bed and throw her out of it when he got tired of her.
Poor Jilly!
Glancing up at him, Milly noted with a peculiar twisting sensation in her tummy that the slight breeze from the sea had ruffled his short, dark as night hair. It made him look more approachable, less the hard-nosed, ultra sophisticated business tycoon, and it was again impressed on her exactly why her up-until-now inconstant sister had at last fallen truly, deeply in love. Very few women would be able to resist his potent brand of sexual charisma.
‘Almost there.’
The effect of his voice rippled through her like a mild electric shock. Smooth as silk, consoling? Her heart pattering she narrowed her eyes against the sun. They had crested the brow of the hill and a shallow wooded valley lay before them. On the opposite side, its back to the hill, beyond which she could glimpse the sea and the sand of a small cove, was a sturdy stone house facing the green valley. A quiet, secluded place, ideal for lovers.
‘Why have you brought me here?’ She didn’t want to know the answer because she knew she wouldn’t like it but she had to ask because not knowing was getting to her. And his reply made her feel giddy.
‘Why do you think, Jilly?’
The slanting smile on his shamelesly sexy mouth and the glinting, terrifyingly intimate light in those stunning eyes made her tummy loop over, forcing her to recall why this secluded hideaway on an uninhabited island had been built by his womanising father. Had he given her that snippet of information to make sure she made the connection?
He and Jilly had been lovers. Did he mean to take up where they’d left off? Demand her presence in his bed—away from his grandmother’s sharp eyes and knowing smiles—in part payment for the massive debt she had accumulated by, according to his warped and cynical mind, forging those cheques?
Her heart squeezed in a severe contraction and her legs turned into wavering pillars of cotton wool. Surely he couldn’t mean that! And, if he did, what on earth was she to do?
Looking down into her suddenly pale as milk face Cesare bit back a peal of husky laughter. Aside from her looks, her imposter rating would be lower than nought out of ten. She’d obviously got the message loud and clear and it had floored her. Didn’t she know how her twin would have reacted to such a neatly couched invitation? Like a heat seeking missile homing in on a coveted target. All over him like a second skin.
‘Come, I’ll help you. The track’s steep in places.’
Milly shuddered right down to her toes as he took her hand, the warmth of his soft, silky tone, the heat of his skin as his strong lean fingers closed around hers made her heart beat in a frenzy, her lungs struggling painfully because, try as she might, she couldn’t seem to breathe.
Yet, uncaring breaker of hearts as she guessed him to be, he was more than careful as he helped her to negotiate the trickier places, only releasing her hand as they came to the paved area in front of the house.
Windows lay open and the stout wooden door was unlocked; obviously he had no fear of squatters or thieves intent on lifting anything they could carry away.
Mild surprise deepened to bewilderment as he ushered her into a square stone-flagged room that appeared to double as kitchen and informal living area.
Flowers in a terracotta bowl graced the central chunky pine table and near a small but functional looking cooker a fridge hummed gently.
Driven by feminine curiosity, Milly dived to open the fridge door and survey the lavish contents. She turned, her eyes wide. ‘If no one else lives here, how did this stuff get here?’ Had he lied? Were there other people on this island, someone she could turn to for help if he left her here after discovering—as he surely would eventually—that she wasn’t who she claimed to be?
‘By motor launch, not by magic.’ His slight smile registered superior amusement. ‘I have a caretaker on the mainland who, apart from checking up on the property from time to time, sees it is stocked if I phone him to tell him I’m going to be here. He gets the generator working, makes sure the water pump is functioning properly and soon.’ One strongly marked brow elevated mockingly. ‘Did you imagine I brought you here to starve or exist on fish from the sea? If so, you’d have had to do the catching of them. I do not own such patience.’
Face flaming, her chin notched up by several degrees, Milly faced the unwelcome truth that they were indeed alone here.
She ought to have known how the other half lived. Just one word and a minion would be found to carry out orders at a moment’s notice! Silly of her to have overlooked that fact of a life!
And she wasn’t about to ask again exactly why he had brought her here and risk another loaded answer. Instead she said tightly, ‘Show me where I’m supposed to sleep and tell me what you want for lunch. I’m sure you expect me to wait on you!’
Because he wouldn’t know how to boil water. He might be a whiz at doing whatever clever stuff he did to earn a dazzling living, but brought up surrounded by a platoon of servants, anxious to cater to his slightest wish, he wouldn’t have a domesticated bone in his body.
‘Now there’s a thought!’ Slumbrous eyes scorched her, and Milly hastily looked away. He was lethally attractive and she sure as Hades wasn’t going to follow her twin down that fatal track. She heaved a sigh of relief when he picked up her suitcase and led her up the staircase tucked away at the far side of the room.
There were two doors leading off the square landing. The first he flung open revealed a bathroom of almost clinical utility, the second a bedroom that contained the biggest bed she had ever laid eyes on and not much else.
Did Cesare, following his father’s track record, bring his women here? Had he brought Jilly? If so, she had goofed badly when she’d queried the lavish supply of foodstuffs, asked where she would sleep, because there appeared to be only this one bedroom.
So where would he sleep? Her throat closed and her stomach churned with the weirdest sensation she had ever experienced. Whipping round on her sandalled feet, intent on telling him that there was no way she was sharing a bed with him and if he had brought her here with that in mind he was going to have to think again.
But there was just empty space where he had been and from downstairs she could hear his tuneful whistle. She ground her teeth in frustration. He sounded in a good mood, was her ireful thought.
Looking forward to making the woman he’d dragged back to Italy to make reparation for her supposed sins, pay off part of her dues in his bed?
Chapter Six
MILLY HAD STRETCHED her wash and brush up into the best part of an hour she realised guiltily when she finally glanced at her watch. Most of that time had been spent leaning out of the bedroom window, breathing the warm scented air and making herself concentrate on nothing else but the view of the shallow wooded valley, the arc of the blue sky overhead, soaking up the utter tranquility. Anything to take her mind off her decidedly dodgy situation.
In any other circumstances she would have loved being here, especially with the man she loved. It was the perfect place for a romantic idyll.
And where that had come from she had no idea. The wayward thought shocked her. She didn’t have a man to love, here or anywhere else!
Unlike her sister, to whom the male of the species gravitated like moths to a brilliant light, Milly hadn’t had much to do with the opposite sex. Quiet and unsure of herself, always deep in her twin’s shadow, she hadn’t exactly been sought after and had certainly never been in love.
Her first date had been a disaster. Sixteen years old and, compared with Jilly, still wet behind the ears, she’d been hugely flattered when, out of the blue, the local pin-up, Mitch Farraday, had asked her out.
He’d been earthily good-looking, full of himself, pushy. Her girl friends had all drooled over him. But the date had ended up in a scary tussle at the back of the cinema with him calling her vile names. He had taken it for granted that buying her a seat in the stalls fully entitled him to have sex. It had horrified her and she’d fought him off like a wild spitting cat.
It had frightened her, had put her off the male sex for ages. Then she’d met Bruce. Twelve years her senior, an accountant, he’d lived with his widowed mother.
He’d called into the shop to buy a pot plant and they’d got talking. Discovering a mutual interest in visiting local gardens open to the public, he’d returned a week later and invited her to accompany him and his mother to Bassett Hall gardens, an annual pilgrimage for them, apparently. And because she’d heard of the acres of rhododendrons and azaleas—at their best at that time of the year, the lakes and grottos, she’d accepted. Without her own transport she hadn’t been able to get there under her own steam.
And because Bruce was solid and worthy, without a flash bone in his body, and she was comfortable in his company they had seen each other once a week for the last two years.
He was a pleasant companion. He made no sexual demands. It had only been after the death of her mother that things had changed, subtle hints from him and not so subtle ones from his mother about settling down, formalising their relationship.
Sighing, Milly turned away from the window. She liked Bruce—and his mother—but she didn’t love him and never would. She’d been trying to think of a way to tell him, before he decided to come out with a proposal. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings or his pride.
But Cesare had happened. His misconceptions about her twin, his threats.
In the turmoil she hadn’t given poor Bruce a thought. He’d be worried about her and she felt really bad about that. But there was nothing she could do about it until she got back to the mainland. She could phone him and tell him she’d taken a temporary job as a companion. And thinking about Bruce—something she rarely did unless she was actually with him—was, she recognised, a cowardly delaying tactic.
Sooner or later she was going to have to face Cesare, carry on the deception as best she could and hope to discover why exactly he had brought her here. And hope to heaven that it wasn’t what she thought it was!
Sex.
She was pretty sure Jilly had confidently expected marriage. Was as sure as she could be that her twin had taken off, hurting and humiliated, the moment that brute had told her that all he wanted from her was hot sex.
Now he believed he had a hold over his grandmother’s companion. That with his threat to go to the law hanging over her she’d do exactly as he wished. So did he think he could take up where he’d left off? Did the idea of that brand of dominating sexual revenge give him a buzz?
According to his warped mind, Jilly had stolen an as yet unspecified amount of money. Was he now intent on exacting repayment? As Jilly’s stand-in the thought was enough to give her nightmares!
Her tummy muscles tight with nerves, Milly straightened her spine until it was ramrod stiff and made her way downstairs to set about making lunch. Not that she was hungry, but he, conscienceless, would be. And it would give her something to do, maybe even take her mind off the mess she was in for all of two seconds.
To be met by the sight of Cesare confidently dividing the contents of a pan between two plates with the panache of a professional.
‘I was just about to call you.’ A warm smile, lacking guile, then a slight inclination of his far-too-handsome head. ‘I thought we’d eat outside. The wine’s uncorked; perhaps you’d like to pour it.’
He’d found a small table and two chairs from somewhere, she noted, as she stepped out on to the sun-soaked paved area in front of the cottage. The edges of the white tablecloth moved lazily in the gentle breeze.
Cutlery, glasses, a basket of bread rolls and a slab of creamy butter on a blue earthenware plate. Her hands shook as she poured a little red wine into both glasses and she sank on to one of the chairs because her knees gave way as he appeared.
‘Tell me what you think.’ Cesare slid a plate in front of her and retreated to the chair on the other side of the table. ‘When I cook I like to experiment.’ An eyebrow quirked in rare self-disparagement. ‘Sometimes it goes horribly wrong!’
Against all her expectations the delicate aroma enticed the appetite she thought she’d lost for ever and, struggling with confusion, Milly forked up lemony rice and one of the perfectly cooked succulent prawns. The dish was garnished with mushrooms and roasted peppers and was absolutely delicious.
Suddenly ravenous, she reached for a roll and lavished it with butter and Cesare demanded softly, ‘Well, what’s the verdict?’
‘Fabulous—you can cook for me any time you like!’ Her first real smile for days lit up her features and he returned it with a devastating grin of his own before starting on his meal.
He could actually seem human, Milly marvelled, trying to see through the mists of confusion that were now fogging her brain. And how easily, naturally, she could respond to him was an eye-opener! A tiny frown furrowed her brow. She’d honestly believed that Cesare Saracino wouldn’t know how to boil a kettle and was too arrogant to even want to know how to perform that most mundane of tasks. Yet he’d set to and produced one of the most delicious meals she’d ever eaten.
She’d been proved wrong about that; was she also wrong about believing him to be all bad? And another thought struck her a savage blow. Had she been acting like a brain dead gnat when she’d entered this utterly distasteful deception?
She was trapped here. Once back on the mainland she would be trapped at the villa. With blithe stupidity she’d seen herself tracking Jilly down before Cesare reached her, combing the streets of Florence, calling the contact number her twin had given when she’d worked there, questioning her friends and her former employer in the hope of gaining a clue to her present whereabouts.
Fat chance! She might just as well decide to explore the dark side of the moon. Jumping on a bus or taking a taxi into Florence wasn’t an option when she had no money and, as Cesare had stringently pointed out, she wouldn’t be earning any either!
Reflectively she sipped her wine and Cesare, leaning back against his chair, one arm hooked casually over the back, said softly, ‘A penny for them.’
‘You’d be wasting your money!’ Milly came back abstractedly, fighting uncertainty over what to do.
Carry on in her role as her sister or come clean and confess all, throw herself on his mercy. After all, he thought she was, in his entrenched opinion, the devious Jilly and he’d been nothing but kind and friendly since they’d reached the island. A prelude to getting her to share that huge bed with him? Should she rid herself of this hare-brained deception once and for all?
It was what her conscience told her she wanted but she’d jumped in without thinking back in England, she wouldn’t do it again. She’d have to think it out properly.
‘I wonder. I’m fairly canny when it comes to handing out such vast sums of money!’
Milly’s breath caught in her throat. He looked so relaxed, so spectacularly good to look at; the hand that toyed with the stem of his wineglass was strong yet achingly elegant. Beautiful hands to match the rest of his perfect male physique. And that slight smile, tilted at one corner—the slumbrously wicked gleam in those dark, darkly seductive, eyes as they locked with hers, was more than she could take. Her breath was quickening and, to her deep shame, she could feel her nipples pressing against the silky top, tight, oversensitive buds.
He was lethal! Jilly would have been a pushover. And in all honesty Milly couldn’t blame her!
Unable to prolong what suddenly and shatteringly seemed like a not so subtle form of torture—frantic heartbeat, trembling lower limbs, her skin scorchingly hot—Milly shot to her feet and got out through a throat that had gone suffocatingly tight, ‘I’ll do the dishes.’
‘Leave them.’ His voice was lazy but there was nothing lazy about the inescapable grip of those long beautiful fingers as they closed around her wrist. He rose to his feet, still holding her wrist, and her face flooded with hot pink as his darkly veiled eyes drifted over her body with a blatant lack of inhibition.
He couldn’t make his expectations more explicit, she thought wildly, out and out panic warring with the most unnerving sensation of being on a perpetual roller coaster ride.
The strong, imperative physical awareness was something she wasn’t equipped to handle. She most definitely didn’t need it. What type of creature was she to be turned on by a monster, just because he was the most handsome, sexy and wickedly charismatic male she was ever likely to set her eyes on?
And when he stepped round the table, released her wrist, gave her a tap on her curvy backside that lingered that little bit too long and said in a voice like melted chocolate, ‘Put on a pair of walking shoes; I’ll introduce you to my island,’ Milly fled, her haste making her heartbeat race even faster.
As Cesare cleared the decks and made short work of washing the dishes and returning the kitchen to pristine order a small satisfied smile hovered at the corners of his long mouth.
The imposter was running scared! A job well done. His off-the-wall decision to bring her here was completely justified. And he couldn’t believe that she could be so naive. She still believed she was successfully deceiving him.
Santo cielo! How could she be so naive? A deliberately steamy look and she coloured like the sunrise, trembled. Didn’t she know how her twin would have reacted?
The Jilly Lee he knew would have returned that look with interest, parted her glossy lips and lowered her artificially enhanced lashes over sultry green come-bed-me eyes. She would have smouldered, not trembled like a sacrificial virgin!
The imposter, Milly, gave herself away at practically every turn and he was debating how much longer he would wait before he dropped his bombshell when she appeared at the head of the stairs.
She was still wearing the blue top that skimmed her pert and perfect breasts, and the cropped white jeans that clung to her slender, beautifully formed thighs. And on her feet she wore what he supposed she classed as walking shoes. Flat soles and thin straps, gladiator-style.
But the thing that riveted his attention, squeezed his heart, was the way that stress had darkened her clear green eyes, widening them with a mute appeal that pierced him like an arrow, the way her soft unpainted lips hovered between a tremble and a wary smile.
Out of nowhere came the unwelcome feeling that he was behaving badly, married to an intense desire to care for her, protect her, keep her safe, kiss that lovely, vulnerable mouth until it melted into passion until desire and wanting replaced the stress in those beautiful stress filled eyes.
She was descending the stairs now. Slowly, uncertainly. Cesare closed his eyes briefly to shut her out and cursed himself for reacting like a green fool, an immature sucker for an exquisitely feminine face and form.
The vulnerable, little girl lost look had to be an act; he had to remember that or he’d find himself believing he was behaving like a monster! That he was wrong.
He was never wrong!
Like her twin, she would have left innocence and purity behind her soon after she’d first climbed out of the cradle! Despite her perfect, unsullied beauty—the opposite of her twin’s brash in-your-face would-be sexiness—she was just as devious and deceitful as her freeloading, thieving sister, he reminded himself with brutal firmness.
And later this evening—let her stew a little longer, not knowing what he expected of her in her role as Jilly—he would tell her what he knew and shock her into telling him where her twin was.
She would know; of course she would. Back in England she hadn’t corrected his initial belief that she was the absconding Jilly, as she surely would have done had she had an honest bone in her body!
As soon as he’d left she would have contacted her sister—who might even have been skulking in the flat above for all he knew. They would have concocted the plan between them. As long as Milly could keep up the deception Jilly would be free to disappear again, cover her tracks completely. And as soon as she thought her sister was safe from his demands for retribution Milly too would slope away in the night.
As she drew level he forced a light tone, a smile. ‘Let’s go.’ And turned away before she could sense the anger building inside him.
‘Wait.’ Firmly said but inside she was a quaking wreck. At some moment during the time she’d spent searching through her caseful of Jilly’s cast offs for something remotely resembling walking shoes it had hit her that she couldn’t go on with this. With every moment that passed the deception became more distasteful. Intrinsically honest, she hated living a lie and, to be brutally truthful, she wasn’t brave enough to face his formidable anger when she gave herself away—as she surely would. Better to confess first. That way she could show herself to be not all bad in his eyes. Though why his opinion of her should matter one way or the other she brushed aside as being unimportant.