‘You will need a working wardrobe commensurate with your position,’ Raphael informed her.

Charley looked at him. ‘I have plenty of clothes at home that my sisters can send out to me.’

Raphael raised one eyebrow in a way that made her face burn. ‘Let me guess: these clothes that you have at home are dull, plain garments that are two sizes too big for you? Si? They will not be suitable for your new role. You will be dealing with artists and craftsmen who value beauty,’ he emphasised. ‘Why does the thought of wearing beautiful clothes fill you with such panic? Most women—’

‘I am not most women, and it does not fill me with panic,’ Charley denied. But of course he was right. She couldn’t tell him that she was afraid of beautiful clothes because she knew they would only underline how unworthy she was of wearing them.

‘You have already agreed to work under my direction and to abide by my conditions,’ Raphael reminded her.

‘As your project manager, not with you telling me what to wear,’ Charley retorted. ‘Work clothes for me mean a sturdy pair of boots and a properly fitting hard hat.’

‘You shall have those, of course, but I hardly think that even you would want to dress in such things for dinner.’

Best-selling Modern Romance™ author Penny Jordan brings you an exciting new trilogy…

NEEDED: THE WORLD’S MOST ELIGIBLE BILLIONAIRES

Three penniless sisters, pure and proud…but about to be purchased!

With bills that need to be paid, a house about to be repossessed and little twin boys to feed, sisters Lizzie, Charley and Ruby refuse to drown in their debts. They will hold their heads up high and fight to feed their family!

But three of the richest, most ruthless men in the world are about to enter their lives…

Pure, proud, but penniless, how far will the sisters go to save the ones they love?

Lizzie’s story—

THE WEALTHY GREEK’S CONTRACT WIFE

Ilios Manos is Greek and ruthless. A dangerous combination! Lizzie owes him thousands, but he’ll take her as his wife in payment.

Charley’s story—

THE ITALIAN DUKE’S VIRGIN MISTRESS

When project manager Charley is hired by demanding Raphael Della Striozzi, he’s adamant she must have a makeover! Now the dowdy frump has been transformed, she’s sexy enough for another role: his mistress!

Look out for Ruby’s story, coming soon!

The
Italian Duke’s
Virgin Mistress

By

Penny Jordan

MILLS & BOON®

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Penny Jordan has been writing for more than twenty years and has an outstanding record: over 175 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Penny Jordan was born in Preston, Lancashire, and now lives in rural Cheshire.

Recent titles by the same author:

A BRIDE FOR HIS MAJESTY’S PLEASURE

THE SICILIAN BOSS’S MISTRESS*

THE SICILIAN’S BABY BARGAIN*

CAPTIVE AT THE SICILIAN BILLIONAIRE’S COMMAND*

TAKEN BY THE SHEIKH

THE SHEIKH’S BLACKMAILED MISTRESS

VIRGIN FOR THE BILLIONAIRE’S TAKING

* The Leopardi Brothers

CHAPTER ONE

‘ARE you Charlotte Wareham, the project manager from Kentham Brothers?’

Charlotte—Charley—Wareham looked up from her laptop, blinking in the strong Italian spring sunshine. She had only just returned from a snatched, very late lunch—a sandwich and a cup of delicious cappuccino in a local café. Her meeting with the two civic dignitaries responsible for the restoration project on a derelict public garden, to be completed for the five hundredth anniversary of the garden’s creation, which she would be overseeing, had overrun badly.

The man now towering over her, whom she hadn’t met before, and who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, was plainly angry—very angry indeed—as he gestured towards the cheap faux stone urns and other replica samples she had shipped over for client inspection.

‘And what, may I ask, are these vile abominations?’ he demanded.

It wasn’t his anger, though, that had a coil of shocked disbelief tightening her whole body. Dimly she recognised that the sharp, swift pang of sensation possessing her was instinctive female recognition of a man so alpha that no woman could or would even want to deny him.

This was a man born to stand head and shoulders above his peers—a man born to produce strong sons in his own image—a man born to take the woman of his choice to his bed and to give her such pleasure there that she would be bound to him by the mere memory for the rest of her life.

She must have been sitting in the sun for too long, Charley decided shakily. Such thoughts were certainly not something she was normally prone to—quite the opposite.

She made a determined effort to pull herself together, putting her laptop down, rising from the faux stone bench on which she had been sitting, and standing up to confront her interrogator.

He was tall and dark and as filled with furious rage as a volcano about to erupt. He was also, as her senses had already recognised, extraordinarily good-looking. His olive-toned skin was drawn smoothly over the tautly masculine bone structure of his face, and he was tall, dark-haired, with the kind of arrogantly proud chiselled features that spoke of patrician forebears. His unexpectedly steely grey-eyed gaze swept over her with open contempt, his look like a sculptor’s chisel, seeking the exact spot in a piece of marble where it was most vulnerable.

Charley tried to look away from him and found instead that her gaze had somehow slipped to his mouth. Shocked by her own behaviour, she tried to drag her gaze away, but it refused to move. Prickles of warning quivered over her skin, but it was already too late. An unwanted jolt of awareness of him as a man had already struck through her like forked lightning coming out of a still, calm sky, and was all the more frightening for that unexpectedness. Her mouth had gone dry; a thousand tiny nerve-endings were pulsing beneath her skin. She could feel her lips softening and swelling as though in preparation for a lover’s kiss, and he was looking at them now, his gaze narrowed and unreadable, but no doubt filled with arrogant disdain for her weakness. A man like this one would never look at her mouth the way she had looked at his. He would never be caught off guard by the sudden shock of knowing that his senses had torn free of his mind and were imagining what it would be like to feel her mouth against his.

Jerkily, her fingers trembling as she fought for self-control, Charley pulled down the sunglasses perched on top of her head to cover her eyes, in an attempt to conceal the effect he was having on her. But it was too late. He had seen it—and the contempt she could see hardening his expression told her what he thought of her reaction to him. Her face, her whole body was burning with a mixture of shocked disbelief and humiliation as she battled to rationalise and understand what had happened to her. She simply didn’t ever react to men like that, and it shocked her that she had done so now—and to this man of all men. She had an unnerving need to touch her own lips, to see if they actually were as softly swollen as they felt.

What had happened must be some kind of reaction to all the pressure and stress she had been under, Charley tried to rationalise. Why else would she be reacting in this uncharacteristic and dangerous way? Her senses, though, refused to be controlled. The artist’s eye within her recognised the raw male power of the body that was cloaked by his undoubtedly expensive charcoal-grey suit. Beneath his clothes he would have the kind of torso, and everything that went with it, that the medieval artists for which Florence was so justly famous had so loved to sculpt and paint.

Too late she recognised that he was still waiting for her to respond to his question. In a bid to regain the ground she felt she had lost, Charley lifted her small pointed chin and told him, ‘I do work for Kentham Brothers, yes.’ She paused, trying not to wince as she looked at the haphazard line of pots and statues, their shoddiness laid bare by the stranger’s disdain, and then continued, ‘And the “vile abominations”, as you call them, are in fact very good value for money.’

The look of contempt that twisted his mouth into bitter cynicism—not just at the samples but also at her—confirmed everything Charley already knew about herself. The truth was that she was as lacking in true beauty, style and elegance, and every other female attribute there was that a man might admire as the samples were lacking in anything truly artistic. And it was that knowledge—the knowledge that she had been judged and found wanting by a man who was no doubt a true connoisseur of her sex—that prompted her to tell him defiantly, ‘Not that it is really any of your business…’ She paused deliberately before adding a questioning, ‘Signor…?’

The dark eyebrows snapped towards the bridge of his arrogant, aquiline nose, the grey eyes turning molten platinum as he gave her an arrogantly lofty look and told her, ‘It is not Signor anything, Ms Wareham. I am Raphael Della Striozzi—Duce di Raverno. Il Duce is the form of address most people of the town use to address me—as they have addressed my father and his father before him, going back for many centuries.’

Il Duce? He was a duke? Well, she wasn’t going to let herself be impressed, Charley told herself, especially since he was obviously expecting her to be.

‘Really?’ Charley stuck her chin out determinedly—a habit she had developed as a child, to defend herself from parental criticism. ‘Well, I should point out to you that this whole area is strictly off-limits to the general public, titled or untitled, for their own safety. There are notices in place. If you have issues with the restoration work which Kentham Brothers has been commissioned to do, I suggest that you take them up with the authorities,’ she told him briskly.

Raphael stared at her in furious disbelief. She, this Englishwoman, was daring to attempt to deny him access to this garden?

‘I am not the general public. It was a member of my family who originally bequeathed this garden to the town.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ Charley agreed. She had done her research on the garden very thoroughly when she had first been told about the contract. ‘The garden was a gift to the townspeople from the wife of the first duke, in thanks to them for praying for the birth of a son after four daughters.’

Raphael’s mouth hardened into a grim line, as he returned, ‘Thank you, I am well aware of the history of my family.’

But it was only when he had looked into the matter more thoroughly that he had discovered the ornamentation this woman intended to replace with hideous examples of modern mass production had originally been created by some of the Renaissance’s most gifted artists. Now abandoned, damaged and forgotten, the garden had been designed by a foremost landscaper of the day.

The realisation of how magnificent the garden must have been had stirred within him a sense of responsibility towards the current project. A responsibility he should have been aware of earlier, and which he now blamed himself for not shouldering before. The town might own the garden, but they carried the name of his family, and next year, when it was reopened to the public in celebration of its five hundredth year of existence, that connection was bound to be publicly referred to. Raphael took pride in the proper artistic maintenance of all the historic buildings and art treasures that had come down to him through his family, and the thought of the garden to which his family was connected being given a makeover more suited to an English suburban plot owned by people with dubious taste filled him with an anger that was currently directed towards Charlotte Wareham—with her make-up-less face, her sun-streaked mud-brown hair, and her obvious lack of interest or pride in her appearance. She was as ill equipped to match the fabled beauty of her renaissance peers as her revolting statues were of matching the magnificence of the originals that had once graced this garden.

He looked again at Charley, frowning as a second look forced him to revise his earlier assessment of her. Now he could see that her pink, lipstick-free mouth was soft, her lips full and well shaped, her nose and jaw delicately sculpted. He had initially thought her eyes, with their thick dark lashes, above cheekbones currently stained with angry colour, a light plain blue, but now, with her anger aroused, he could see they had become the extraordinarily brilliant blue-green of the Adriatic at its most turbulent.

It didn’t matter what she looked like, Raphael told himself grimly.

Charley could feel her face starting to burn with memories of her parents warning her about thinking before she spoke or acted, and the unfeminine hastiness of her desire to answer back when challenged. She had believed that she had learned to control that aspect of her personality, but this man—this…this duke—had somehow or other managed to get under her skin and prove her wrong. Now she felt as though he had wrongfooted her, but she wasn’t going to let him see that.

‘Well, you may be the Duke of Raverno, but it says nothing in the paperwork I have seen about a duke having any involvement in this project. As I understand it, no matter what part your ancestors may have played in the garden in the past, it is the town that is now responsible for them and their restoration. You have no right to be here.’

She wasn’t going to let him bully her, not for one minute—title or no title. She had had enough of that over these last few weeks, with her employer making her life such a misery that she longed to be able to hand in her notice. But she had to grin and bear it in the current financial climate. Her small household, which included her elder sister, her younger sister and her twin sons, desperately needed the money she earned—all the more so since her elder sister’s interior design business was on the verge of collapse.

With so many people unemployed, she was lucky just to have a job—something her employer continually pointed out to her. She knew why he was doing that, of course. Times were hard; he wanted to cut back on his staff, and he had a daughter fresh out of university, working as an intern within the business, who’d thrown a complete hissy fit when she’d learned that Charley was going to be overseeing this new Italian contract.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that she spoke Italian, and her boss’s daughter did not, Charley knew she would already have lost her job. She would probably lose it anyway once this contract had been completed. So, she might have to let her employer treat her appallingly, because she desperately needed to keep her job, but she wasn’t going to let this arrogant Italian do the same thing. Not when it was the town council she was answerable to and not him. And besides, challenging him made her feel much better about her unwanted awareness of him.

Raphael could feel the fury building up inside him—burning and boiling inside him like molten lava.

When the town council had announced that they planned to restore the dangerously dilapidated pleasure garden just outside the town walls, he had instituted a search of the ducal archives for copies of the original plans for the garden, initially simply out of curiosity, thinking they might assist with the renovation. However, when he had returned from Rome to discover that for financial reasons the town had decided to replace the statues and other features originally designed and created by some of Florence’s greatest renaissance artists he had been appalled—and his temper had been left on edge by the council’s assertion that the garden would either have to be restored within the small budget available or the site completely flattened, because in its present state it constituted a danger to the public. And now here was this Englishwoman, whose challenge to him was igniting his fury to near uncontrollable levels.

Raphael might not welcome what was planned for the restoration of the garden, but he welcomed even less the effect this young woman responsible for managing the restoration was having on him. Such was the intensity of his anger that it was fostering within him a desire to punish her for daring to provoke it in him. And that could not be allowed. Not now or ever.

Anger and cruelty were the twin demons that together created men whose savage legacy could never be forgotten or forgiven. And the propensity to exhibit them flowed as surely through his veins as it had done through the ancestors who had passed down that legacy to him—but with him that inheritance would end. He had vowed that as a thirteen-year-old, watching as his mother’s coffin was placed in the family vault in Rome to join that of his father.

Raphael looked unseeingly towards the padlocked entrance to the gardens. He could feel the heavy, threatening shadow of those twin emotions at his back, following him, out of sight but always there, over his shoulder…

They ran through his family like a dark curse, waiting to escape. He had taught himself to imprison them with reason and ethical awareness, to deny them the arrogance and pride that were their life blood, but now, out of nowhere, simply by being here this Englishwoman had brought him to such a pitch of fierce passion, with her tawdry, ugly replicas, her lack of awareness of what the garden should be, that the key to freeing them was now in the lock without him even being aware of putting it there. Forcing back his urge to physically take hold of her and force her to study the original plans of the garden, to see the damage she would be doing to such a historical asset, was like trying to stem a river in full flood, straining every emotional and mental sinew he had.

The walls of his self-control had already been tested by his meeting with the town council as he had studied the plans they had so proudly showed him, while telling him what a bargain they had secured. And now here was this…this woman, so slender that he could have broken her with his bare hands, daring to deny him access to the garden his ancestor had originally created, expecting him to accept the shoddy, tawdry mockery of the artistic elegance and beauty that had once been.

‘You have no right…’ she had said. Well, he would make it his right—he would make the garden what it should be, and he would make her…

Make her what? A sacrifice to the darkness within his genes?

No! Never that. Nothing and no one would be allowed to threaten his control over that dark, dangerous capacity for savagely violent anger that ran through his veins and was patterned in his DNA.

He needed to speak to the local authorities and put before them the plan he was now formulating—for him to take control of the restoration project, so that it could be placed in more appropriate hands, and the sooner the better.

Unaware of what Raphael was thinking, Charley was both surprised and relieved when he started to stride away from her, moving to climb into a sleek, expensive-looking car parked several yards away, its bodywork the same steel-grey colour as his eyes.

CHAPTER TWO

CHARLEY looked worriedly at her watch. Where was the haulier the town officials had assured her would arrive to collect the supplier’s samples? In another fifteen minutes the taxi booked to take her to the airport in Florence would be here, and Charley was far too conscientious to simply get into it without ensuring the samples were safely on their way back to the suppliers. She was beginning to wish now that she had spoken with the carriers herself, instead of accepting the city official’s offer to do so for her.

Her earlier run-in with ‘The Duke’ had left her feeling far more unsettled and on edge than she wanted to admit. It had been a long couple of days, filled with meetings and site inspections, and the realisation of the enormity of the task of restoring the garden. Privately, it had saddened her to examine the overgrown, brokendown site and recognise how beautiful it must once have been, knowing that the budget they had been given could not possibly allow them to return it to anything like its former glory. And now, instead of being able to indulge in a few days of relaxing in Florence, soaking up everything it had to offer, she had to fly straight back to Manchester because there was no way her boss would allow her any time off. Not that she could have afforded to stay in Florence, even if he had been willing to let her take some leave. Every penny was precious in their small household, and Charley wasn’t about to waste money on herself when they were struggling just to keep a roof over their heads.

A van came round the corner of the dusty road and pulled up virtually alongside her with a screech of tyres. The doors of the van were thrown open and two young men got out, one of them going to the rear of the vehicle to open the doors and the other heading for the samples.

This was the freight authority that had been organised? Charley watched anxiously, her anxiety turning to dismay when she saw the rough manner in which the young men were handling the samples.

But worse was to come. When they reached the open rear doors of the van, to Charley’s disbelief they simply threw two of the samples into it, causing both of them to break.

‘Stop it! Stop what you are doing,’ Charley demanded in Italian, rushing to stand in front of the remaining samples.

‘We have orders to remove this rubbish,’ one of them told her, his manner polite, but quite obviously determined.

‘Orders? Who from?’

‘Il Duce,’ he answered, edging past her to pick up another of the samples.

Il Duce! How dared he? Hard on the heels of her outraged anger came the knowledge that she must stop them—or face the wrath of both the supplier who had entrusted the samples to her and her employer.

‘No. You can’t do this. You must stop,’ Charley protested frantically. There was close on a thousand pounds’ worth of goods here, and the damage would be laid at her door. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a familiar grey car speed towards them, throwing up clouds of dust as its driver brought it to a halt on the roadside several yards away and then got out.

As soon as he was within earshot, Charley demanded, ‘What’s going on? Why are these men destroying the samples? The damage will have to be paid for, and—’

‘They are acting on my orders, since I am now in charge of the restoration project, and it is my wish that they are disposed of.’

He was now in charge? It was his wish that they were disposed of? And would it also be his wish that she was disposed of—or rather that her services were dispensed with? Did she really need to ask herself that question?

Helplessly Charley watched as the final sample was loaded into the van.

‘Where are they taking them? What you’re doing is theft, you know.’ She tried valiantly to protect the supplier’s goods, but The Duke didn’t deign to answer her, going to speak to the two young men instead. Charley looked at her watch again. She could do nothing about the samples now. But where was her taxi? If it didn’t arrive soon not only would she be responsible for the loss of the samples, she would also miss her flight. She could just imagine how her boss was going to react. Only her fluency in Italian had prevented him from sacking her already, so that he could give his daughter her job.

She reached into her bag for her mobile. She would have to ring the council official who had organised the taxi for her.

The white van was speeding away, and The Duke had come back to her.

‘There are matters we need to discuss,’ he told her peremptorily.

‘I’m waiting for a taxi to pick me up and take me to the airport.’

‘The taxi has been cancelled.’

Cancelled? Charley was feeling sick with anxiety now, but she wasn’t going to let it show—not to this man of all men.

‘Follow me,’ he commanded.

Follow him? Charley opened her mouth to object, and then closed it again as out of nowhere the knowledge came to her that this was a man who had the power to make a woman lose so much sense of herself that following him would be all she wanted to do. But not her, Charley assured herself—and yet wasn’t that exactly what she was doing? Something about him compelled her to obey him, to follow him, as though…as though she was commanded by something outside her own rational control. Her whole body shuddered as immediately and physically as though he had actually touched her, and had found a reaction to that touch that she herself had not wanted to give. What was she thinking?

He was striding towards the car, leaving her with no option than to do as he had instructed her. He was opening the passenger door of the car for her.

He was taking her to the airport? And what had he meant when he had said that he was taking over the project?

She could all too easily picture him in Florence at the time of the Medicis, manipulating politics to suit his own purposes, with the aid of his sword if necessary, claiming whatever he wanted, be it wealth or a woman, and making it his possession. He had that air of darkness and danger about him. She shivered again, but this time not with angry resentment. This time the frisson of sensation that stroked her body was making her aware of him as a man, unnerving and alarming her.

He was not someone who would have any compassion for those weaker than him—especially if they were in his way, or if he had marked them out as his prey, Charley warned herself. Let him do his worst—think the worst of her. She didn’t care. She had far more important things to worry about, like keeping her job and keeping her all-important salary flowing into the family bank account; like doing her bit and following the example of selfless sacrifice her elder sister Lizzie had set. Her sister always managed to make light of all that she had done for them, never revealing that she felt any hint of the shameful misery that Charley sometimes had to fight off because she had been forced to give up her private dreams of working in the world of fine art. Sometimes Charley admitted she felt desperately constricted, her artistic nature cruelly confined by the circumstances of her life.

Raphael slid into the driver’s seat of the car, closing the door and then starting the engine.

The town council had been only too delighted to allow him to finance the restoration work on the garden, and to hand the whole project over to him. Had there been a trace of fear in their response to him as well as delighted gratitude? They knew his family history as well as he did himself. They knew that it involved broken lives and bodies, and the inheritance of blood that belonged to a name that still today caused shudders amongst those who whispered it in secret with fear and loathing. Beccelli! Who, knowing the history of that name, would not shrink from it?

He could not do so, however, Raphael reminded himself as he drove. He was forced every day of his life to face what he was, what he carried within him and its capacity for cruelty and evil. It was an inheritance that tortured and tormented those not strong enough to carry it. Those who, like his mother, had ended up taking their own life out of the despair that knowing they carried such genes had brought. Raphael stiffened against the unwanted emotional intrusion of his own thoughts. He had decided a long time ago that no one would ever be allowed to know how he felt about his blood inheritance or the ghosts of his past. Let others judge him as they wished; he would never allow himself to be vulnerable enough to let them see what he really felt. He would never seek their advice or acknowledge their criticism. He had been left alone to carry the burden of what he was, his father having drowned in a sailing accident and his mother dead by her own hand—both of them gone within a year of one another just as he had entered his teens.

Until he had come of age trustees had managed the complex intricacies of his inheritance and its wealth. A succession of relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins—had made room for him under their roofs whilst he was growing up. After all, he was the head of the family whether they liked it or not. Its wealth and status, like its patronage, belonged to him alone.

In the way of such things, his great-aunt’s death and the consequent gathering of the family had given his relatives an opportunity to bring up the subject of his marriage and the subsequent production of the next heir—a favourite subject for all Italian matriarchs with unmarried offspring.

It was no secret to Raphael that his father’s cousin wanted him to marry her daughter, nor that the wife of his only male cousin, Carlo, often wondered if one day her husband or her son might stand in Raphael’s shoes, should he not have a son.

Raphael, though, had no intention of enlightening either of them with regard to his plans. And they knew better than to press him too much.

The Beccelli family had been notorious for their cruelty and their temper. Raphael’s own fear, however, lay not only with what he might have inherited himself but, even more importantly, with the genes that he would pass on, and those who might inherit them. In this modern world it might be possible to screen out those elements that combined to lead to a new life inheriting physical conditions that might damage it, but as yet there was no test that could pinpoint the inheritance of a mental and emotional mindset that would revel in cruelty, or protect a new life from the inner burden that came from knowing one’s history.

They were travelling through the gathering darkness of the spring evening, and it was minutes before Charley caught a glimpse of a road sign that sent her heart thudding with renewed anxiety. She realised that they were going in the opposite direction from her expected destination.

This isn’t the way to the airport,’ she protested

‘No.’

‘Stop this car immediately. I want to get out.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I am not being ridiculous. You have as good as kidnapped me, and my boss is expecting me to be back in England tomorrow.’

‘Not any more,’ Raphael informed her. ‘When I spoke to him earlier he was most anxious that you should remain here—in fact he begged me to keep you and use you for whatever purpose I wished.’

Charley opened her mouth to object to the offensive connotations of his choice of words, and then closed it again when she saw the gleam in his eyes. He wanted to upset and humiliate her. Well, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him think that he had done so.

Instead she said firmly, ‘You said that you have taken over the project?’

‘Yes. I have decided to fund the restoration myself rather than allow my family’s name to be connected with the kind of cheap, tawdry restoration you had in mind.’

‘So you’ll be cancelling our contract, then?’

‘I would certainly like to do so,’ Raphael agreed. ‘But unfortunately it won’t be possible for me to do that and find someone else to complete the work in time for next year’s formal re-opening of the garden. However, I do have some concerns about your suitability to manage the project.’

She was going to be sacked.

‘It seems to me that someone who gave up her Fine Arts degree halfway through to study accountancy instead is not the person to manage this project in the way I wish to have it managed.’

‘My career choices have nothing to do with you,’ Charley defended herself. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him that after the deaths of their parents and the financial problems that had followed she had felt morally obliged to train for something that would enable her to earn enough to help her elder sister provide a home for them all.

‘On the contrary, since I am now in effect employing you they have a very great deal to do with me. From now on you will work directly under my control and you will be answerable directly to me. Should I find that you are not able to satisfy me and meet the standards I set, then you will be dismissed. Your employer has already assured me that he has someone in mind to replace you, should that prove necessary.’

‘His daughter,’ Charley was unable to stop herself from saying furiously, ‘who can’t speak a word of Italian.’

Ignoring her outburst, Raphael continued, ‘It is my intention that the garden will be restored as exactly as possible to its original design.’

Charley stared at him in the darkness of the car, the light from the moon revealing the harsh pride of his profile, etching it with silver instead of charcoal.

‘But that will cost a fortune,’ she protested, ‘and that’s just for starters. Finding craftsmen to undertake the work—’

‘You can leave that to me. I have connections with a committee in Florence that is responsible for much of the work on its heritage buildings; it owes me favours.’

And she could just bet that calling in ‘favours’ was something he was very, very good at doing, Charley recognised.

‘Your work begins tomorrow, when we will visit the site together. I have in my possession the original plans.’

‘Tomorrow? But I was only supposed to be here for the day. I haven’t got anywhere to stay, or…’

‘That will not be a problem. You will stay at the palazzo, so that I can monitor your work and ensure that the garden is restored exactly as I wish. That is where we are going now—unless, of course, it is your wish that I ask your employer to send someone else to take over from you?’

Was that secretly what he was hoping? Well, he was going to be disappointed, Charley decided proudly. She was as equally capable of managing a high-budget project as she was of managing a lowbudget one, and in truth there was nothing she would have enjoyed more than seeing the garden come to life as it had once been, if only he was not involved. More important than any of that, though, was her need to keep on earning the money they all so desperately needed right now. She could not afford the luxury of pride, no matter how much it irked her.

The road began to climb up ahead of them, and on the hilltop, caught in the full beam of the rising moon, Charley could see the vast bulk of an imposing building dominating the landscape.

‘That is the Palazzo Raverno up ahead,’ Raphael informed her.

The façade of the building was illuminated by floodlights, and when they had finally came to a halt outside it Charley could see it was Baroque in style, with curved pediments and intricate mouldings displaying the deliberate interplay between curvaceous forms and straight lines that was so much a part of the Baroque style of architecture.

Despite her determination not to betray what she was feeling, when Raphael got out of the car and then came round to the passenger door to open it for her she was totally unable to stop herself from saying in disbelief, as she followed him up the marble steps, ‘You live here? In this?’

Her awed gaze took in the magnificence of the building in front of her. It looked like something that should have belonged to the National Trust, or whatever the Italian equivalent of that organisation was.

‘Since it is the main residence of the Duke of Raverno, and has been since it was first remodelled and designated as such in the seventeenth century, yes, I do live here—although sometimes I find it more convenient to stay in my apartments in Rome or Florence, depending on what business I am conducting.’ He shrugged dismissively, making Charley even more aware of the vast gulf that lay between their ways of life.

‘My nephews would envy you having somewhere so large to play in,’ was all she could manage to say. ‘They complain that there isn’t enough room in the house we all share for them to play properly with their toys.’

‘You all share? Does that mean that you live with your sister and her husband?’

Raphael didn’t know why he was bothering to ask her such a question, nor why the thought that she might share her day-to-day life with a man, even if he was her own sister’s husband, should fill him with such immediate and illogical hostility. What did it matter to him who she lived with?

‘Ruby isn’t married. The three of us—my eldest sister Lizzie, Ruby and I and the twins—all live together. It was Lizzie’s idea. She wanted to keep the family together after our parents died, so she gave up her career in London to come back to Cheshire.’

‘And what did you give up?’

The question had Charley looking at him in shock. She hadn’t expected it, and had no defences against it.

‘Nothing,’ she lied, and quickly changed the subject to ask uncertainly, ‘Will your wife not mind you bringing me here into her home like this?’

‘My wife?’

Raphael had been moving up the marble steps ahead of her, but now he stopped and turned to look at her.

‘I do not have a wife,’ he informed her, ‘and nor do I ever intend to have one.’

Charley was too surprised to stop herself from saying, ‘But you’re a duke—you must want to have a son, an heir…I mean that’s what being someone like a duke is all about, isn’t it?’

Something—not merely anger, nor even pride, but something that went beyond both of those things and was darker and scarred with bitterness—was fleetingly visible in his expression before he controlled it. She had seen it, though, and it aroused Charley’s curiosity, making her wonder what had been responsible for it.

‘You think my whole purpose, the whole focus of my life, my very existence, is to ensure the continuation of my genes?’ The grey eyes were burning as hot as molten mercury now. ‘Well, I dare say there are plenty of others who share your view, but I certainly do not. I have no intention of marrying—ever—and even less of producing a son or any child, for that matter.’

Charley was too astonished to say anything. It seemed so out of character for the kind of man she had assumed he must be that he should not consider marriage and the production of an heir as the prime reason for his own being. That, surely, was how the aristocracy thought? It was the mindset that had made them what they were—the need, the determination to continue their male line in order to secure and continue their right to enjoy the status and the wealth that had been built up by previous generations. To hear one of their number state otherwise so unequivocally seemed so strange that it immediately made Charley wonder why Raphael felt the way he did. Not, of course, that she was ever likely to get the opportunity to ask him. That would require a degree of intimacy and trust between them that could never exist. He was obviously very angry with her—again—and as he took a step towards her Charley took one step back, forgetting that she was standing on a step and immediately losing her balance.

Raphael’s reaction was swift, his hands gripping hold of her upper arms punishingly. Not to protect her from any hurt or harm, Charley recognised, but to protect himself from coming into unwanted contact with her. That knowledge burned her pride and her heart, reminding her of all those other times when men had dismissed her as being unworthy of their interest.

‘You should take more care, Charlotte Wareham.’

‘It’s not Charlotte, it’s Charley,’ she corrected him, tilting her chin defiantly as she did so.

He was still holding her, and once again out of nowhere she was having to fight against the shock of suddenly experiencing an awareness of him that was totally alien to her nature. How could it have happened? she wondered dizzily. She just didn’t feel like this ever—going hot and then cold, trembling with awareness, burning with the heat of sensation surging through her body as it reacted to his maleness.

She had taught herself years ago not to be interested in men, because she had always known that they were not interested in her.

She wasn’t sure when she had first realised that in her parents’ eyes she wasn’t as pretty as either of her siblings. Once she had realised it, though, she had quickly learned to play up to the role of tomboy that they had given her, pretending not to mind when her mother bought pretty dresses for her sisters and jeans for her, pretending that being the family tomboy was what she actually wanted, telling herself that it would be silly for her to try to mimic her sisters when she was so much plainer than they were. It had been her father who had first started calling her ‘Charley’—a name that suited a tomboy far better than Charlotte.

Over the years she had learned that the best way to protect herself from comments about her own lack of femininity and prettiness when compared with her sisters was to ensure that others believed she wanted to be what she was—that she wanted to be Charley and not Charlotte. But now, for some unknown reason, with Raphael’s fingers curling into her flesh, his icecold grey gaze boring into her as though his scrutiny was penetrating her most private thoughts and fears, she felt a sharp stab of pain for what she was—and what she was not. If she had been either her elder sister Lizzie, with her elegance and her classically beautiful features, or her younger sister Ruby, with her mop of thick tousled curls and the piquant beauty of her face, he would not be looking at her as he was—as though he wanted to push her away from him and reject her.

Being so close to him was unnerving her—the sheer solid steel strength of his male body brutally hard against her own unprepared softness. Unwittingly her gaze absorbed the olive warmth of his throat above the collar of his shirt and then lifted upwards, sucked into a vortex of instinct beyond her control, blinding her senses to everything else as she fastened on the angle of his jaw, the pores in his skin, the shadow where a beard would grow if he wasn’t clean-shaven. She wanted to lift her hand and touch him there on his face, to see if she could feel some slight roughness or if his skin was as smooth and polished as it looked. Her gaze lingered and darted across his face with lightning speed, swift as a child let loose in a sweet shop, eager to gather up forbidden pleasures as fast as it could.

How she longed to be set free to draw and paint this man’s image on canvas, to capture the essence of his pride and arrogance so that all that he was, inside and out, was revealed, leaving him as vulnerable as neatly as he had just stripped her of her own defences. That mouth alone said so much about him. It was hard and cruel, the top lip sharply cut. In her mind’s eye Charley was already visualising her own sketch of it, so engrossed in what was going on inside her head that when she looked at his bottom lip to assess its shape it was the artist within her that did that assessing, and not the woman. It was the woman, though, whose breath was dragged into her lungs and whose awareness was not of the lines and structure of flesh and muscle, but instead of the openly sensual curve and fullness of his lips. What must it be like to be kissed by a man with such a mouth? Would he kiss with the cruelty of that harshly cut top lip, demanding and taking his own pleasure? Or would he kiss with the sensual promise of that bottom lip, taking the woman he was kissing to a place where pleasure was a foregone conclusion and all she would need to measure it was the depth to which she allowed that pleasure to take her?

Charley’s throat locked round the betraying sound of her awareness of him that rose in her throat, stifling and suppressing it. She pulled back stiffly within his hold, causing Raphael to immediately want to keep her where she was. Why? Because for a fraction of a second his body had reacted to her with physical desire? That meant nothing. It had been a momentary automatic reaction—that was all; nothing more. Raphael purposely kept his dealings with women confined to relationships in which both people understood certain rules about their intimacy being purely sexual and nothing more. He was committed to remaining single and child-free as a matter of duty and honour, and nothing was ever going to change that. Certainly not this woman.

And yet beneath his grip Raphael could feel the slenderness of her arm, and just registering that was enough to cause his thoughts to turn to how soft her skin would be, how pale and tender, with delicate blue veins running up from her wrist, the pulse of her blood quickening in them as he touched her. Her naked body would look as though it were carved from alabaster: milk-white and silkily warm to the touch.

Furious with himself for the direction his thoughts had taken, Raphael pushed the tempting vision away, ignoring the eager hunger that was beginning to pulse through his body.

It was irrational and impossible that he should desire her. Even her name affronted his aesthetic senses and his love of beauty.

‘Charley. That is a boy’s name and you are a woman,’ he pointed out to her, and then demanded, ‘Why do you reject your womanhood?’

‘I don’t—I’m not,’ Charley protested defensively. Why hadn’t he let go of her? She knew that he wanted to do so. She could see it in his eyes, in the curl of his mouth, so cold and potentially cruel, and yet…A shudder of sensation she couldn’t control swept through her as she looked at his mouth. What would it be like to be kissed by a man like him? To be held, and touched, caressed, wanted…?

A small sound locked her throat, her eyes darkening to such a dense blue-green that the colour reminded Raphael of the deep, clean, untouched waters in the small private bay below the villa he owned on the island of Sicily. The sudden swift hardening of his body before he had time to check its reaction to her caught him off guard, making him deride himself mentally for his reaction. He couldn’t possibly desire her, he told himself grimly. It was unthinkable.

‘No Italian woman would dress herself as you do, nor hold herself as you do, without any pride in her womanhood.’

He was being deliberately cruel to her, Charley decided. He must be able to see, after all, that she did not have the kind of womanhood it was possible to take pride in. She was plain and lanky, unfeminine and undesirable—so much the complete opposite to the beauty her artistic senses admired and longed to create that it hurt her to know how far short she fell of her own standards. Secretly, growing up, she had believed that if she could not be beautiful then she could at least create beauty. But even that had been denied her. It was a sacrifice she had made willingly, for the sake of her sisters. They loved her as she was, and she loved them. That was what mattered—not this man.

And yet when he released her and was no longer touching her, when he looked at her as though he despised her, it did matter, Charley recognised miserably.

Following Raphael into the palazzo, Charley was conscious of how untidy and unattractive she must look, in cheap jeans that had never fitted properly, even when she had first bought them, and the bulky, out-of-shape navy jumper she had thought she might need if she had to visit the site, which she had worn over her tee shirt to allow her more packing space in her backpack. And her shoes were so worn that no amount of polishing could make them look anything other than shabby. But then she forgot her awful clothes as she took in the magnificence of the large entrance hall, with its frescoed wall panels and ceiling, the colours surely as rich and fresh today as they had been when they had first been painted, making her want to reach out and touch them, to feel that richness beneath her fingertips. The scenes were allegorical—relating, she guessed, to Roman mythology rather than Christianity—and had obviously been painted by a master hand. Just looking at them was a feast for her senses, overwhelming them and bringing emotional tears to her eyes that she was quick to blink away, not wanting Raphael to see them. She tried to focus on something else, but even the marble staircase that rose up from the hallway was a work of art in its own right.

Raphael, who had been watching her, saw her eyes widen and change colour, her face lifting towards the frescoes with an awed joy that illuminated her features and revealed the true beauty of the delicate bone structure.

His heart slammed into his ribs with a force for which he was totally unprepared. The fresco was one of his personal favourites, and her silent but open homage to it echoed his own private feelings. But how could it be possible that this woman of all people, whose behaviour said that she had no awareness of or respect for artistic beauty, should look at the fresco and react to it with all that he felt for it himself? It shouldn’t have been possible. It should not have happened. But it had, and he had witnessed it. Raphael watched her lift her hand as she took a step towards the nearest fresco, as though unable to stop herself, and then let it fall back. He hadn’t expected it of her. She hadn’t struck him as someone who was capable of feeling, never mind expressing such an emotion, and yet now he could feel her passion filling the distance between them. If he looked at her now he knew he would see her eyes had darkened to that stormy blue-green that had caught his attention earlier, and her lips would be pressed together—soft, sensual pillows of flesh, too full to form a flat line, tempting any man who looked at them to taste them…

Raphael cursed himself under his breath. He had been without a lover for too long. But he couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone react quite so emotionally to the frescoes other than his mother, who had loved them and passed on that love to him. He could still remember how as a small child she had lifted him and held him so that he could see the frescos at close quarters, her voice filled with emotion as she talked to him about them. His life had been so happy then, so filled with love and security—before he had known about his dark inheritance.

So much beauty, Charley thought achingly. Her heart, indeed the very essence of her had gone hungry for such beauty for so long. In her imagination she tried to comprehend what it must have been like to be the pupil of such an artist, to have the privilege of watching him at work, knowing that one’s own best efforts could never hope to match his smallest brushstrokes, feeding off the joy of witnessing such artistry. Only of course the great masters had never taken on female pupils—not even tomboy female pupils.

Once she had dreamed of working amongst great works of art in one of London’s famous museums, as an art historian, but that dream had come to an end with her parents’ death.

Dragging her gaze from the frescoes, she shook her head like someone coming out of a deep dream and said slowly to Raphael, ‘Giovanni Battista Zelotti, the most famous of all fresco painters of his era. He would never tell anyone the recipe he used for his famous blue paint, and the secret died with him.’

Raphael nodded his head. ‘My ancestor commissioned him after he had seen the fresco he painted for the Medicis in Florence.’

He looked at his watch, his movement catching Charley’s attention. His wrists were muscular, and the dark hairs on his arm underlined his maleness, making her stomach muscles tighten into a slow ache that permeated the whole of her lower body. What would it be like to be touched, held by such a man? To know the polished, controlled expertise of his stroke against her skin…? And he would be an expert at knowing what gave a woman the most pleasure…The slow ache flared into something more intense, causing Charley to catch her breath as she tried to hold her own against her body’s attack on her defences. It must be Italy that was making her feel like this—Italy, and the knowledge that she was so close to the cities she had longed to visit and their wonderful art treasures, not Raphael himself. That could not be—must not be.

CHAPTER THREE

WARMTH, sunshine, a scent on the air coming in through the open balcony windows that was both unfamiliar and enticing, and a large bed with the most wonderful sheets she had ever slept in. And despite everything she had slept, Charley admitted as she luxuriated guiltily in the delicious comfort of the bed and her surroundings, having been woken only minutes earlier by a discreet knock on her bedroom door, followed by the entrance of a smiling young maid with Charley’s breakfast.

When Raphael’s housekeeper had brought her up here last night she had felt slightly daunted, but to her relief Anna, as she had told Charley she must call her, had quickly put her at her ease, organising a light meal for her, and telling her that breakfast would be sent up to her room for her because ‘Il Duce—’ as she had referred to Raphael ‘—takes his breakfast very early when he is here, so that he can go out and speak to the men whilst they are working with the vines.’

Charley was, of course, relieved that she didn’t have to have breakfast with Raphael, and it wasn’t because she was curious about him in any way at all that as she left the bed she was drawn to the balcony windows and the view of the vines she had already seen beyond the gardens that lay immediately below them. Slipping the band she used to tie her hair back off her face over her wrist, Charley padded barefoot to the balcony in her strappy sleep top with matching shorts—a Christmas present from the twins. The outfit was loose on her, due to the weight she had lost over these last anxious weeks.

It was wonderful to feel the warmth of the sun on her bare skin. Charley turned her face up towards it, and then tensed as she heard Raphael’s voice and then saw him appear round the corner of the building, accompanied by another man with whom he was deep in conversation. Both men were dressed casually, in short-sleeved shirts and chinos, but it was to Raphael that her attention was drawn as the two men shook hands and the older man began to walk away, leaving Raphael standing alone. The blue linen of his shirt emphasised the tanned flesh of his bare forearms. A beam of sunlight touched the strong column of his throat. Charley had to curl her fingers in an attempt to quell the longing itching in them—not a desire to pick up a piece of charcoal and sketch his lean, erotically male lines, but instead a desire to touch him, to feel the warmth of the life force that lay beneath his flesh, to experience how it felt to be free to physically explore such a man.

Beneath the thin cotton jersey of her top her nipples tightened, the small movement she made instinctively in rejection of her arousal dragging the fabric against their swollen sensitivity, conjuring up inside her head images of a male touch creating—indeed inciting—that sensitivity and then harvesting its sensuality, teasing her with skilled, tormenting caresses that played on her arousal, drawing it from her, making her want a closer intimacy. Behind her closed eyelids Charley could almost see the dark male hands tormenting her, making her yearn for their possession of her breasts. Instinctively she stepped forward—and then gasped, her eyes opening as she came up against the balcony railing.

Down below her Raphael looked up towards the balcony. It was too late for her to step back out of sight. He had seen her, and he would know that she had seen him. Suddenly conscious of how she must look, dressed in her sleepwear and with her hair all over the place, she plucked at the hairband on her wrist, her eyes widening in dismay as it slipped from her fingers and dropped through the railings, landing almost at Raphael’s feet.

When he bent to pick it up Charley could see the fabric of his linen shirt stretch across his shoulders. It was such a male thing that—the breadth of a man’s shoulders, the way his body tapered down in a muscular V-shape towards his hips, his chest hard and packed with muscles where her own was soft with the rounded shape of her breasts.

Raphael was straightening up, putting her hairband in his pocket, looking up at her, at her hair, her mouth, her breasts. Charley’s toes curled into the mosaic-tiled floor of the balcony as she sucked in her stomach against the heat that flooded over her.

A mobile phone began to ring. Raphael’s, she recognised as he removed it from his pocket and began to speak into it, turning his back to her and then beginning to walk away.

It was the warmth of the sun on her sunshinestarved body that had aroused her, not Raphael. He had just happened to be there at the same time—that was all, Charley insisted to herself as she stood under the shower, determinedly not thinking of anything other than the reason she was here in Italy.

Ten minutes later, having searched through her backpack three times, Charley dropped it onto the floor in defeat. How could she not have put in a couple of spare hairbands? She never wore her hair loose. Never. She preferred, needed to have it tied back and under control. She simply wasn’t feminine enough to wear her hair loose in a mass of curls.

His call over, Raphael looked down at the hairband he had removed from his pocket, his body hardening as he studied it. Inside his head he could see Charlotte Wareham standing on the balcony, the bright morning sunshine turning the top and shorts she was wearing virtually transparent so that he could see quite plainly the flesh beneath them—her breasts round and full, shadowed by the dark aureole of flesh from which her nipples rose to push against the fabric covering them. How different she had appeared then, without the concealment of the shapeless clothes she had been wearing the previous day. Raphael tried to dismiss the erotic image from inside his head, but instead his memory produced another picture, this time of Charlotte Wareham pressed against the balcony, her back arched, her eyes closed in a mixture of surrender and enticement, those long, long legs of hers parted, the sunlight revealing the neat covering of hair that protected her sex. How easy it would have been for a man to slide his hand up her thigh and beneath the cuff of her shorts, so that he could stroke that sensual softness and explore what it concealed. What she had been wearing—two small plain items of clothing, not suggestive at all, so one might think—had cloaked her body in such a way that their mere presence and proximity to her body had filled him with a fierce urgency to feast on all the delights her flesh had seemed to offer. He couldn’t accuse her of being deliberately provocative, Raphael knew, and it brought a sharp edge to his irritation with himself to have to admit that against all the odds, and certainly against his normal code of behaviour, his mind had somehow developed a will of its own and had transformed clothes so ordinary into garments filled with sensual promise. Just remembering now the way in which the thin shoulder straps of her top had suggested they could be easily slid down her arms, to reveal the full promise of those dark hard nipples, filled him with angry rejection of his body’s response to her. The soft, unstructured shape of the top itself, which had finished almost on her waist, revealing a glimmer of pale flesh, had urged him to lift it up and push it out of the way, so that he could see and touch the promised soft lushness of her body. And the shorts, baggy and loose-legged…A man could take his pleasure exploring whatever part of her he chose to reveal, knowing that he had the whole of her to access as and when and how he chose to do so.

Cursing himself silently again, Raphael commanded his self-control to dispel both his thoughts and the arousal they were creating. If he needed a woman then there were plenty available to him who would make more suitable bedmates than Charlotte Wareham.

Charley longed to fasten her hair and hold it gripped off her face as she stood in front of the desk behind which Raphael was seated. She had been summoned to his presence like a miscreant about to be punished—which, of course, as far as he was concerned was exactly what she was. She couldn’t touch her hair, no matter how uncomfortable she felt with it tumbling down onto her shoulders, because if she did it might remind Raphael, and would certainly remind her, of the circumstances in which she had lost her hairband.

In an attempt to distract herself she studied her surroundings. The fact that the large room was on the ground floor of the palazzo indicated that its original purpose would have been for business to be conducted: orders given, favours sought and deals made—the administrative centre of the ducal estate.

The ceiling was decorated with painted lozenges depicting various hereditary arms and symbols. The polished wood of the library shelving which held huge leather-covered books, their gold lettering gleaming softly, added to the imposing air of the room. Traditionally it would no doubt have been here where those who administered the estate would come to present their accounts to the duke, to answer his questions and receive his praise—or his wrath.

Charley shivered. There was no doubt which of those things Raphael believed she deserved.

The heavy, ornately carved and inlaid desk, positioned to make the most of the light coming in through the narrow windows, was covered in papers.

Raphael looked briefly at Charley. She was wearing her hair down, and the sight of it, freshly washed, the delicately scented smell of it and of her reawakened the desire he had felt earlier. What was the matter with him? He was no mere hormone-driven boy, to be tempted and tormented by the thought of sliding his hands into those thick wild curls, of lacing his fingers through them as he covered her naked body with his own, arousing her as she had aroused him. Using the determination with which he had always so ruthlessly crushed any challenge or resistance to his self-control, Raphael closed down his unwanted thoughts as firmly as though he had trapped them behind an impregnable steel door. To allow himself to feel desire for Charlotte Wareham would be unacceptably inappropriate behaviour and, more than that, a weakness within himself that he was not prepared to tolerate. He had no idea why she should have such an effect on him. She was neither groomed nor elegant. She was not witty or sophisticated. In short, there was nothing about her that should have had any appeal for him.

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