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With the whole outfit put together—the classic jewellery round her neck, the perilously high shoes adding a further four inches to her frame, the dress which clung in all the right places—she felt like a million dollars. And she felt even better when she saw the expression in his eyes as he stood watching her descend the staircase.
‘Stop that,’ he said unsteadily, and Megan gathered herself sufficiently to answer.
‘Stop what?’
‘Looking so damned sexy. An outing to the theatre doesn’t stand a chance when your mouth is begging to be kissed… along with every other part of your body. Maybe,’ he growled, taking her in his arms, ‘we should just keep the taxi waiting a few minutes.’
Megan laughed and touched the extravagant string of diamonds at her neck. ‘I’m not missing a minute of this play, Alessandro Caretti!’
‘Are you telling me that I take second place in your life to a bunch of actors on a stage?’
She sighed. ‘I’m not your property, Alessandro.’
‘When it comes to my women, I don’t do sharing.’
Cathy Williams is originally from Trinidad, but has lived in England for a number of years. She currently has a house in Warwickshire, which she shares with her husband, Richard, her three daughters, Charlotte, Olivia and Emma, and their pet cat, Salem. She adores writing romantic fiction, and would love one of her girls to become a writer—although at the moment she is happy enough if they do their homework and agree not to bicker with one another!
Recent titles by the same author:
RUTHLESS TYCOON, INEXPERIENCED MISTRESS
RAFAEL’S SUITABLE BRIDE
BEDDED AT THE BILLIONAIRE’S CONVENIENCE
THE ITALIAN BILLIONAIRE’S SECRET LOVE-CHILD
BY
CATHY WILLIAMS
MILLS & BOON
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PROLOGUE
‘WHAT the hell did you think you were playing at?’
Alessandro had stormed into the bedroom. There was no other way to put it. He had stormed into the bedroom. The beautiful, angular lines of his face were tight with anger and Megan didn’t know why. Well, she sort of knew why. She just couldn’t quite understand the depth of his fury.
‘Playing at?’ she asked weakly, hands clasped behind her back as she leant against the wall.
Having been practically shoved into the bedroom an hour before, like a stray bug that had inadvertently wandered into his bedsit, necessitating immediate quarantine, she had been on the verge of dozing off when the sound of his footsteps heading towards the room had seen her springing off the bed and virtually standing to attention by the window. Of course she had known that he wouldn’t be sunshine and light, not after his reaction to her perfectly innocent and well-intentioned birthday surprise. She just hadn’t reckoned on this backlash of anger.
‘You heard me! That ridiculous stunt of yours!’
The voice that could make her weak with love and longing, that could drive her mad with desire, was cold and cutting.
‘It wasn’t a ridiculous stunt. It was a birthday surprise. I thought you’d like it.’
‘Like you barging in unannounced and bursting out of a birthday cake? When I’m in the process of having a meeting with people who could change the direction of my life?’
Megan chewed her lip and stared at him. God, he was so beautiful. Even now, when he looked as though he would happily throttle her given half a chance, he was still sinfully sexy. Six foot two inches of gorgeous, head-turning masculinity, and all she wanted to do was coax him out of this black humour—because it was his birthday, after all, even if he had no desire to celebrate it.
She risked a little smile. ‘You have no idea how strenuous it is being a birthday cake! I have the scars to prove it!’ No exaggeration there, she thought. Her amazing plan had involved her friend Charlotte rigging up two boxes into something that resembled a cake—a piece of engineering which, Megan had been assured, would work like clockwork. One spring, and bingo! She would be revealed in all her glory! Her blonde curls had been tamed into a Marilyn Monroe format of soft waves, a mole had been perfectly positioned on one cheekbone, her full lips had been primed to scarlet, pouting perfection.
Needless to say they had not bargained on the full hour it had taken to be delivered in rush-hour traffic. Nor had they foreseen the possibility that the cunning contraption might prove to have a mind of its own, refusing to oblige a swift and easy exit, so that once in Alessandro’s poky front room she had found herself having to do battle with masking tape when her legs were numb and her blood circulation virtually non-existent.
It had all added up to an inglorious, fairly shambolic situation, which had seen her crawling out of the box amidst a mass of screwed-up tape and crunched-up pink tissue paper—at which point she had been confronted by the embarrassing sight of three men in pinstriped suits and one very, very angry boyfriend.
‘I was supposed to be Marilyn Monroe,’ she expanded, when her smile failed to make headway.
She gestured to her outfit, which had started off in much better condition. Three hours before it had been a glamorous black swimsuit, revealing a tantalising amount of cleavage. She also wore high, black shoes, long black gloves and fishnet stockings. The swimsuit was still intact, but one glove was currently residing somewhere in said birthday cake, the shoes had been kicked off, and the fishnet tights now sported a long, unattractive rip down one leg. Not so much Marilyn-of-the-Happy-Birthday-Song as Marilyn-on-Tour-of-War-duty.
‘I thought you’d be pleased.’ Her voice was growing less confident by the second. ‘Or at least find it funny.’
‘Megan…’ Alessandro sighed. ‘We need to…to talk…’
She relaxed a little. Yes, she could do talking. He was the most fascinating man she had ever met, and she could talk to him until the cows came home—especially now, when he was no longer glaring at her with eyes that were like chips of dark, glacial ice.
‘I guess we could…’ she said, taking a couple steps towards him. ‘Talk. Although…’ a few more steps and she was standing directly in front of him, looking up at him ‘…I can think of more interesting things to do…’ She splayed her hand across his chest, loving the feel of its rippling hardness. ‘I prefer it when you wear shirts, Alessandro. I like unbuttoning them. Have I ever told you that? Tee shirts just aren’t the same. Not that this black tee shirt doesn’t look very nice on you.’ It did. It wasn’t baggy and shapeless, but clung in a very masculine way.
Alessandro reached out and caught her wandering hand in his. ‘I said talk, Megan. And we can’t talk in here.’
‘Have your friends gone?’
‘They weren’t my friends.’
He dropped her hand and turned away, walking out of the bedroom so that she was obliged to follow him. He couldn’t think straight when Megan was anywhere near the vicinity of a bed—especially when she was wearing an outfit that revealed every single curve of her fabulous, sexy little body.
‘And put something on,’ he commanded, without looking round.
‘Oh, right. They’re the people who are going to change the direction of your life.’
En route, she grabbed one of his shirts. He only wore white shirts, which she had told him was a very boring trait indeed. She had tried to even the balance by buying him a garishly coloured Hawaiian shirt, with a pattern of lurid coconut trees against a brilliant blue background, but he had yet to wear it. She suspected that it had been shoved at the bottom of his wardrobe somewhere.
She sensed him stiffen at her throwaway remark, but he didn’t say anything. Just flung himself on the sofa that occupied one side of the space in his modest student accommodation, which only someone massively optimistic could call a sitting room.
It was literally a poky box, as he had told her on more than one occasion. But he had worked like a slave, he said, to put himself through university, and his destiny was to become master. Master of all he surveyed. Once he left, he would never look back
Megan didn’t like to think too hard about where all of this mastery and conquering of the universe stuff was going to take him. Out of her life, she guessed. But who knew? Eternally optimistic, and madly in love for the very first time in her life, she was happy to put any thoughts about an uncertain future on hold. She was nineteen. She had her own college life to think about. She didn’t want to foresee a day when her life wasn’t going to be joined up with his.
‘So who were they, anyway?’ she asked now, settling on the sofa next to him and tucking her legs underneath her. She had to stop herself from reaching out and touching his face.
It still surprised and delighted her that she had been lucky enough to fall in love for the very first time with a man so absolutely perfect in every way. Her friends all led chaotic love-lives, constantly euphoric or depressed, or else hanging on the end of the line waiting for some guy to call. Alessandro had never done that. He had taken her virginity and cherished the gift she had given him, never taking her for granted or making promises he had no intention of fulfilling.
‘They were…some fairly important people, Megan.’
He turned to look at her. Her hair was all over the place—soft, blonde hair, the colour of vanilla. Her cheeks were flushed, because he had obviously surprised her dozing. Only Megan could fall asleep in the space of seconds. Whilst wearing a ridiculous outfit. And after having made a complete fool of herself.
‘Sorry,’ she said in a contrite voice. Then, because she just couldn’t help herself, she leaned towards him and stroked the side of his face with the back of his hand. ‘I can understand why you were a bit put out when I appeared unannounced. Or should I say when I was brought in? Would have given anyone a shock. Especially an old man like you, Alessandro. Twenty-five years old! Practically over the hill! Do you realise it’s just a matter of time before you’re collecting your pension?’
She laughed, a rich, warm laugh which he had found infectious from the very first minute he had heard it across a crowded room, in a club to which he had been dragged by one of his colleagues at university who’d seemed to think he needed a break from his books. Every time he heard that laugh, which was often, he wanted to smile. Not, however, now.
‘Here’s how it was supposed to go. In an ideal world I would have made a dramatic entrance…or at least the cake would have made a dramatic entrance…and I would have leapt out of it, like the Marilyn Monroe equivalent of a Jack in the Box, stunning you with my wonderful outfit. Then I would have sung you ‘Happy Birthday’, even though I’ll be the first to admit that my voice is pretty average…’
‘Unfortunately…’ He edged away and looked at her with a shuttered expression. ‘Unfortunately you couldn’t have chosen a worse moment for your little surprise.’
‘No, well…’ Always so comfortable in his presence, Megan could feel stirrings of unease nibbling away inside her, even though really he no longer looked angry. ‘You never told me that you were expecting guests. You said that you would be working, and I just thought that it would be kind of nice to be surprised. You work too hard.’
‘I do what I have to do, Megan. How many times have I told you that?’
‘Yes, I know. You hate this place, and you work hard so that you can get out of it and do something with your life.’
‘I intend to do more than just something with my life.’
His father had done just something with his life. He had left poverty in Italy, hoping to find that the streets of London would be paved with gold. In the event they had been paved with tarmac and cement, just like everywhere else, and his father’s talents, his tremendous mathematical brain which had so enchanted Alessandro as a young boy, had become lost in the mindless boredom of manual work—because he had not been qualified to do anything else, and provincial little England had not been kind to a man whose grasp of English was broken. Never mind that his wife was English. An English rose with as few qualifications as her Italian husband. An English rose whose hands had been prematurely old from the cleaning jobs she had held down so that they could afford a small holiday once a year by the cold British seaside.
Alessandro didn’t like to think of the mother he had only known for the first ten years of his life. He liked even less to think of his father, loyally working for a haulage firm for twenty-five years, only to be made redundant at a time when he had been too old to get another job.
To his dying breath he had continued to tell his son what a wonderful life he had led.
To Alessandro’s way of thinking his father’s talents had been wasted, by lack of opportunity and the cruelty of a world that judged a man’s worth by bits of paper. He would, he had determined from an early age, get those bits of paper, and he would control the world so that it could never control him the way it had his father.
‘Those three men,’ he said, keeping that unaccustomed drift of memory to himself, ‘who were treated to your impromptu performance, are instrumental in my plan for the future.’
‘You mean, the pinstriped crew?’
He paused. ‘You need to grow up, Megan.’
That one statement, delivered with a coldness she had never heard before, was shocking. Yes, they were total opposites. They had laughed about that a million times. But he had always indulged her. She’d drag him away from his books with homemade picnics in the park and he would laugh at the sausage rolls and packets of biscuits and cheap wine. She would make a fool of herself singing karaoke, and he would shake his head in good-natured wonder and tell her never to consider a career in singing. He had never told her to grow up—and certainly never in that tone of voice.
‘It was just meant to be a bit of fun, Alessandro. How was I to know that the instruments of your plan would be here? And why do you have a plan, anyway? Really? Life’s not a chessboard, you know.’
‘That’s exactly what it is, Megan. A chessboard. The life we end up getting depends entirely on the moves we make.’
‘I know you want to do stuff with your life, Alessandro, but…’ Megan shot him a look of bemusement. This wasn’t quite the sort of talk she had been expecting, but it was certainly revealing. ‘You can’t plan everything. I mean, I really hope that I end up being a good teacher…’
‘In a small country school somewhere…’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with it,’ Alessandro told her patiently.
He looked at her expressive, open face and felt like a monster, but this was a conversation that had to be undertaken. His future had unexpectedly come rushing towards him like a freight train, leaving him no choice.
‘Did you ever think about qualifying and going to teach somewhere else?’
‘Somewhere else? Why should I? You know that St Nicks have offered me a post for after I qualify.’
Her face softened as she thought of the pleasing prospect of teaching the children there. She was nothing like the high-flier that Alessandro was, and her future might not be so ruthlessly controlled as his appeared to be, but it was still looking pretty rosy from where she was sitting.
‘Where else should I be going to teach?’
‘What about an inner-city school?’
‘Why are we having this conversation? Is it because you’re still mad at me—because I embarrassed you in front of those people? Don’t be…You wait right here, and I’m going to get us both something to drink. Some wine…’
She didn’t give him time to answer, or to follow up with some more heavy-duty remarks about life choices. Instead, she stood up and did a little sexy shimmy, throwing him a seductive look over one shoulder, before heading for the kitchen and pouring them a large glass of wine each.
She’d kind of hoped that he would be undressed when she returned, because he was always, but always, predictable when it came to being turned on by her, but he wasn’t. In fact, he was standing up, and he had an awkward look on his face that promised more talking.
Whatever those guys had said to him had obviously made him a little too thoughtful, and it was her duty, she told herself mischievously, to take his mind off matters. And at the back of her mind she knew she really didn’t want to hear what Alessandro wanted to say….
A very good place to start would be with his shirt. She placed the glasses on the small, beaten-up round table by the window and pulled off the white shirt, which she casually tossed over a chair.
‘Megan…’ Alessandro turned away and leaned heavily against the wall. ‘This isn’t a good time for this.’ He tensed as he heard her walk towards him. He could picture the teasing smile on her face.
‘Don’t tell me you’re getting too old for sex,’ she said to his averted back. ‘You’re only a year older!’ She wrapped her arms around his torso and then slipped her hands under the tee shirt, gently rubbing his flattened brown nipples with the tips of her fingers.
Alessandro shuddered, furious with himself for not being able to push her away when he knew that he had to. For both their sakes.
He felt the push of her breasts against him and turned round with a stifled moan, his big body arching back in denial of the primitive instincts he seemed unable to control.
He closed his eyes and shuddered again.
Nine months of seeing her, practically living with her, even though her college was over twenty miles away. Out towards the country because, she had told him often enough, big cities gave her a headache. Something about her was irresistible.
She took his hand and guided it to the strap of the black swimsuit which she was still wearing.
‘At least the cake wasn’t real,’ Megan murmured, already wet and hot for him. ‘Can you imagine if I’d emerged covered in Victoria sponge?’
She stood on tiptoe so that she could kiss his neck, and even though he wasn’t, as he usually was, devouring her with his hunger, he was responding. She could feel it in the tension of his muscles—and… She put her hand on him and shivered with pleasure at the very big, very hard indication of just how much he wanted her—even if, for some weird reason, he was trying to fight it.
‘Mind you,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘you would have had to lick it all off…’
The image was too powerful for Alessandro. He looked at her, at the deep cleavage inviting him to touch, promising him physical satisfaction of the kind he had never known in his life before.
I am, he thought with a strange feeling of helplessness, only a man, dammit!
He hooked his fingers under the straps of the swimsuit and ran them up and down against her smooth skin.
‘A man could lose himself in the thought of that,’ he said roughly, and all thoughts of talk vanished as he pulled down the straps and gazed at her breasts, large in comparison to her small frame, and perfectly formed. Milky-white and succulently heavy, with rose-pink nipples like discs, pouting provocatively at him.
He pulled her shakily towards the sofa and then, kicking off his shoes, lay down. He figured he had damn near found heaven as she moved on top of him, sitting just in the right spot, so that he could feel the friction of his hardness against her through his trousers. She leant forwards, letting her breasts dangle temptingly above his mouth, and with a groan of utter abandonment Alessandro took one of the proffered nipples into his mouth, losing himself in the sensation of tasting her. He suckled on it, then when he was finished lavished the same attention on the other.
He wanted her completely naked. With fierce, driven movements he rid her of the swimsuit, stopping her when she tried to pull the tee shirt over his head.
‘But I want to see you…’ Megan whimpered.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed her back, spreading her legs in one deft motion, and her protest died on her lips as she felt his tongue invade her, sliding and exploring her depths until she was squirming, turned on to the point where thinking became an impossibility.
‘Alessandro!’ She curled her fingers into his dark hair and tugged him up. She was breathing heavily, her eyes closed, and she felt him undo the zipper of his trousers so that he could free himself.
She wasn’t even entirely sure that he had removed his trousers before driving deep into her, his thrusting urgent, taking her by surprise.
It was quick, fierce lovemaking, and afterwards they were both breathless and spent. Alessandro was unusually quiet as he pushed himself away from her, so that he could get back into his jeans and then fetch a bottle of water from the fridge, which he proceeded to drink in one long swallow.
‘You need to get dressed, Megan, and then we’ll talk.’
Megan felt a chill of fear race up and down her spine, obliterating everything in its path.
Talk about what? she was desperate to ask, but his shuttered expression kept that question reined in, and she silently went to the bedroom and rescued the only items of clothing she kept at his place: a pair of jeans and a sweater.
When she returned, it was to find that he had taken up position by the table, so that when she sat down, facing him, it felt like an awkward interview.
‘If it’s about my cake surprise, you have my word I won’t do anything like that again. It’ll take more than one shampoo before my hair recovers from the masking tape. In fact, I’m going to have to sack my production manager.’
Alessandro didn’t return her grin. This was going to be a difficult conversation, made all the worse by the fact that they should never have made love. He had allowed himself a selfish luxury, one which he deeply regretted.
‘This isn’t about your cake surprise, Megan. This is about those three men who were here. I’ve been head-hunted.’ It had come as no great surprise to Alessandro. He was good. He had been head-hunted before, and had turned down all offers. With or without intervention, he was going to go places—although this particular intervention would be helpful in the near future.
‘Wow, Alessandro! That’s fantastic! We should celebrate…’ But it wasn’t a celebrating atmosphere. ‘You don’t look overjoyed.’
Alessandro shrugged. ‘Little do they realise it, but they will discover that they need me more than I need them.’
Megan laughed. ‘Well, no one could ever accuse you of not having a healthy ego, Alessandro.’
That wonderful laugh stirred something inside him which he chose to ignore.
‘I’ve been offered a job.’ He stood up, distancing himself from her. ‘In London.’