Her Passionate Italian

THE PASSION BARGAIN

by

Michelle Reid

A SICILIAN HUSBAND

by

Kate Walker

THE ITALIAN’S MARRIAGE BARGAIN

by

Carol Marinelli

www.millsandboon.co.uk

THE PASSION BARGAIN

by

Michelle Reid

Michelle Reid grew up on the southern edges of Manchester, the youngest in a family of five lively children. But now she lives in the beautiful county of Cheshire with her busy executive husband and two grown-up daughters. She loves reading, the ballet, and playing tennis when she gets the chance. She hates cooking, cleaning, and despises ironing! Sleep she can do without and produces some of her best written work during the early hours of the morning.

Don’t miss Michelle Reid’s exciting new novel, The De Santis Marriage, out in September from Mills & Boon® Modern™.

CHAPTER ONE

FRANCESCA used gentle pressure on the brake pedal to bring the Vespa to a smooth stop at a set of red traffic lights then stretched out a long golden leg and placed a strappy sandalled foot on the ground to maintain the motor scooter’s balance while she waited for the lights to change.

It was a gorgeous morning, still early enough for the traffic on the Corso to be so light that she actually seemed to have the road almost entirely to herself.

A rare occurrence in this mad, bad, traffic-clogged city, she mused with a smile as she tossed back her head to send her tawny brown hair streaming down her back then closed her warm hazel eyes and lifted her face up to the sun to enjoy the feel of its silky warmth caressing her skin.

The air was exquisite today, clear and sharp and drenched in that unique golden light that gave Italy its famous sensual glow.

Her smile widened, her smooth rather generous mouth stretching to enhance the sheen of clear lip-gloss that along with a quick flick of mascara was the only make-up she wore.

Life, she decided, could not be more perfect. For here she was, living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world and only days away from becoming formally betrothed to the most wonderful man in the world. One very short month from now she and Angelo would be exchanging their marriage vows in a sweet little church overlooking Lake Alba before taking off for Venice to honeymoon in the most romantic city in the world.

And she was happy, happy, happy. She even sighed that happiness up at the sun while she waited for the lights to change, too engrossed in the warmth of her own sublime contentment to be aware of the sleek red sports car drawing up at her side. It was only when the driver decided to send the car’s convertible top floating into its neat rear housing and the sultry sound of Puccini suddenly filled the air that she took note of his presence.

Then immediately wished that she hadn’t when she took a glance sideways and saw why the driver had sent the car hood floating back. Her skin gave a sharp warning prickle, her soft hazel eyes quickly lost their smile—none of which had anything to do with the way she was being thoroughly scrutinised from the tips of her extended toes to the shiny flow of her freshly washed hair. Heck, it was almost obligatory for any warm-blooded Italian male to check out the female form when presented with the opportunity. No, her prickling response was due to the fact that she knew this particular Italian male. Or, to be more accurate, she had made his acquaintance once or twice when they had been thrown into the same company.

‘Buon giorno, Signorina Bernard,’ he greeted, the beautifully polite tones of this supremely cultured male completely belying the lazy sweep his dark eyes had just enjoyed.

‘Signor,’ she returned with a small acknowledging dip of her head.

If he noticed the chill she was giving off then he chose to ignore it, preferring to divert his attention away from her to guide one of his long-fingered hands out towards the car dashboard. Puccini died into a slumberous murmur. As he moved, sunlight shot across the raven’s-wing quality of his satiny black hair. Signor Carlo Carlucci was a man that most people would describe as truly handsome, Francesca acknowledged with a complicated pinch of her stomach muscles that forced her to twitch restlessly. Skin the shade of ripened dark olives hugged the most superbly balanced bone structure she had ever seen on a man. Every one of his lean features quite simply fitted, even the nose that was so Roman you could not mistake his heritage. His jaw-line was square, his chin cleft, his cheekbones ever so slightly chiselled, and the firmly moulded shape of his slender mouth was—well—perfect, she admitted with yet another restless twitch.

Dark brown eyes were set beneath a pair of almost straight, satiny black eyebrows and were shaded by eyelashes that were almost a sin they were so long, and silky black. And as he shifted his long lean torso in the seat so he could give her his full attention Francesca would have had to be immune to the whole male species to resist noticing the leashed power in his muscles as they flexed beneath the bright white cloth of his shirt.

He oozed class and style and an unyielding self-possession. Everything about him was polished and smooth. He disturbed her when he shouldn’t. He antagonised her when she knew she shouldn’t let him.

Even the strictly polite smile he offered her set her nerve-ends singing as he remarked pleasantly, ‘You were looking the essence of happiness as I drove up. I suppose credit for this must go to the fine weather we are enjoying today.’

If it was, now it’s gone, Francesca thought resentfully. And wished she understood why she always suffered this itchy suspicion that he was taunting her whenever he spoke to her. He had been making her feel like this from the first time they’d been introduced at a party given by Angelo’s parents. Even the way he had of looking at her always gave her the uncomfortable impression that he knew things about her that she did not and was amused by that.

He was doing it now, holding her gaze with his velvet dark eyes that pretended to be friendly but really were not. He mocked her—he did.

‘Summer has arrived at last,’ she agreed, willing to play the weather game that was what it took to keep this unwantedinterlude neutralised long enough for the lights to change.

‘Which is why you are out and about so early.’ He nodded gravely, mocking her—again?

‘I’m out and about early, as you put it, because this is my day off and I have things to do before I can hit the shops before the crowds arrive.’

‘Ah.’ He nodded. ‘Now I understand the happy essence. Shopping has to be the preferred option to herding weary tourists through the Sistine Chapel or encouraging them to squat upon the Spanish Steps.’

He really had this taunting stuff down to a fine art, Francesca acknowledged as he put her right on the defensive. She had been guiding British tourists round the historical sites of Rome for months now and had learned early on that, though the city’s economy might enjoy the healthy fruits of its tourist industry, the true residents of Rome did not always treat this point with the respect it deserved. They despaired of tourists, could be gruff and curt and sometimes downright rude. Especially in the high season, when they couldn’t walk anywhere without bumping into cameratoting groups.

‘You should be proud of your heritage,’ she censured stiffly.

‘Oh, I am—very proud. Why should you think that I am not? I simply object to sharing,’ he said. ‘It is not in my nature.’

‘Which sounds very selfish.’

‘Not selfish but possessive of what I believe belongs to me.’

‘That still adds up to being selfish,’ she insisted.

‘You think so?’ He took a second or two to contemplate that declaration. As he did so he shifted his body again, drawing her gaze to the white-shirted arm he lifted to rest across the black leather back of his seat. Long brown fingers with blunted fingernails uncoiled from a loose clench then rose upwards, tugging her trapped gaze with them as he brought them to rest against the smooth golden sheen of his freshly shaved cheek. He was gorgeous. Her mouth ran dry. Her tummy muscles pinched again and she became suddenly very aware of the Vespa’s little engine vibrating between her spread thighs.

‘No, I cannot agreed with you, cara.’ He began speaking again, making her eyelashes flicker as her attention shifted to his moving lips. ‘When I am involved in a deeply serious relationship with someone, would you still think it selfish of me to expect my lover to remain completely faithful only to me?’

Was he involved in a deeply serious relationship? For some mad reason her skin began to heat. Oh, stop it, she thought crossly. What was the matter with her? She had absolutely no excuse to get so hot and bothered over a man she didn’t even like. She hardly knew him—didn’t want to know him. The Carlo Carluccis of this world were way out of her league and she was happy to keep it that way.

‘We were talking about Rome,’ she pointed out curtly and flipped her eyes towards the set of traffic lights, willing the stupid things to hurry up and change.

‘We were? I thought we had moved on to discuss my objection to sharing,’ he murmured lazily. Teasing her—taunting her, she was sure—but why? ‘Are you prepared to share your lovers, Francesca?’ he dared to ask her. ‘If I was your lover, for instance, would you expect me to be faithful only to you?’

This was stupid—stupid! I hate you, she told the stubborn red traffic light. ‘Since there is no chance of that happening, signor, I don’t see the use in discussing it,’ she announced in her coldest, primmest English voice.

‘Shame,’ he sighed. ‘And here I was, about to test my luck by suggesting that we continue this discussion in more congenial surroundings…’

Congenial…?

It was a clear come-on. Francesca was shocked enough to slew her widened eyes back to his face. It was a mistake. Her breath caught. Those warning prickles began racing up her spine because those dark, hooded eyes were travelling the length of her outstretched leg again. The sun-drenched air was suddenly charging up with sense-invading atoms that made the inner layers of skin covering her leg tingle as if he’d reached out with one of those hands and stroked right along its smooth golden length.

She almost gasped out loud at the electric sensation. The urge to whip her leg out of sight was almost too strong to stop. It took all of her control to keep the leg exactly where it was as she became stiflingly aware of the way her white cotton skirt was stretched taut across her slender long thighs.

Stop it! she wanted to shout at him. Stop trying to do this to me! But she found she couldn’t manage a single stuttered word and those eyes were moving on; heavy-lidded, darkly lashed, they began slowly skimming her little blue sun top where her rounded breasts pushed at the finely woven cloth. Her nipples responded, tightening with piercing speed. The shock of it held her utterly transfixed as those dark eyes lifted higher until—shockingly—their gazes clashed.

He wanted her. The realisation hit her like a violent blow to the chest. Heat enveloped her from feet to hairline. Those eyes told her he knew what was happening to her and, worse, they were doing nothing to hide the fact that the same thing was happening to him. She could feel the sexual tension in his body, could see it burning in his now blacker than black eyes. Messages began leaping across the tarmac road and to her horror that place between her thighs feathered a ripple of pleasure across the sex-sensitive tissue.

It was so awful she shifted her hips with an uncontrollable jerk. In all of her twenty-four years she had never experienced anything as sexually acute as this. For a few more terrible seconds the world seemed to be closing in on her. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t—

‘Have coffee with me,’ he murmured suddenly. ‘Meet with me at Café Milan…’

Have coffee with me, she repeated slowly to herself, her brain so sluggish that the invitation made no sense. Then it did make sense with all of its hot and spicy meaning. She grabbed at some oxygen. A car horn sounded. The real world came crashing back in. Dragging her eyes away from his, she looked blankly at the traffic lights, saw they’d turned to green and gunned the Vespa’s little engine and took off down the Corso like a terrified pigeon in flight.

A top-of-the-range Lamborghini could outstrip a Vespa without any effort but, ignoring the protesting car horns behind him, Carlo remained exactly where he was.

His eyes were narrowed and fixed on the racing scooter and its beautiful rider, whose silky hair was blowing out behind her as she fled. He’d scared her out of her wits, Carlo acknowledged. Had he meant to do that? He was not entirely sure what his real motives had been, only that he had been presented with an opportunity and had used it—ruthlessly. Now pretend that I barely exist, signorina, he thought grimly.

The muted sound of Puccini rising to a crescendo began to infiltrate his consciousness. Reaching out, he hit the volume control to fill the air with the music then set the powerful car into motion again. There was a fine film of sweat bathing his torso beneath the fine cloth of his crisp white shirt and he grimaced. Francesca Bernard was the most excitingly sensual woman he had ever encountered and there was no way he was going to let all of that sensuality be laid to waste on a crass, mercenary fool like Angelo Batiste.

As the car built up speed along the Corso the Vespa had already turned off at a junction and by the time Carlo passed that junction neither bike nor rider were anywhere to be seen.

Francesca had pulled into a small piazza, cut the engine then climbed off the machine. She was feeling so shaken up inside that her legs felt like jelly, and she headed for the nearest café so she could sit down. A waiter appeared and she ordered fresh orange juice. She desperately needed a cup of strong coffee to calm her shattered senses but the very idea of drinking coffee was out of the question now that Carlo Carlucci had given the simple pleasure a whole new twist.

She shivered, still gripped by the shock of what had just happened. The whole incident had turned her into such a mess inside she could still feel those hot little frissons chasing across her skin. If he’d actually reached out and touched her she had a horrible feeling she would have gone up in a flaming orgasm. She had no idea where it had all come from. How it had gone from a simple tit-for-tat conversation at a red traffic light to—to what it did!

Her throat felt ravaged. She didn’t think she’d managed to take a single breath all the way from those wretched lights until she sat down on this seat. Her hands were trembling, her legs, her arms—the tips of her stinging breasts!

It wasn’t as if they even knew each other well enough to be anything more than polite nodding acquaintances! They’d met—what—twice before, maybe three times at most? And she didn’t even like him. He had a way of antagonising her with that smoothly sardonic manner of his. Her orange juice arrived. She nodded her thanks to the waiter then picked it up and gulped at it. The cool drink helped to soothe her throat but the rest of her didn’t feel any relief.

Putting the glass down on the table, she hunched forward to sit there frowning into it. It was just beginning to dawn on her how easily she had let him get away with what he’d done. Usually she would know exactly how to deal with a teasing Italian who was only out to fill in a few empty seconds by having a bit of fun with her.

But Carlo Carlucci was no ordinary teasing Italian. He was the thirty-five-year-old head of the famous Carlucci Electronics. That placed him more than a decade ahead of her in years and eons ahead of her in every other way she could think of. Women adored him. He was rarely seen out without some acknowledged beauty hanging on his expensive arm. Put him in a room packed full of his tall, dark, handsome peers and he still managed to overshadow them all.

He was special. Even here in super-sophisticated Rome he was the man other men wanted to emulate. In the way these things should work, a lowly tour-guide like herself should never have come into contact with him at all. But Angelo was the son of one of Signor Carlucci’s business associates, which meant they’d happened to find themselves in the same company while attending the same parties over the last few weeks. Not that this placed them in the same circles because it didn’t, she reminded herself with a frown. Even Angelo only received a cool nod in acknowledgement from Carlo Carlucci’s sleek, dark, sophisticated head. Angelo’s father’s company relied on Carlucci’s for the main thrust of its business and Angelo was only a few years older than herself, which made him very junior and insignificant in the pecking order at these bright and sparklingly sophisticated social events.

But at least Angelo was warm and gentle and easy-going. He preferred fun to passion. It was years since a man like Carlo Carlucci had weaned himself off anything so juvenile as fun.

He was way out of her league, and anyway, she loved Angelo.

Yet when it really came down to the bottom line of it, she hadn’t given a single thought to Angelo while she’d been thinking of Carlo Carlucci at that wretched traffic stop sign.

‘Oh.’ She choked on a fresh wave of frissons, which were quickly doused by a heavy blanket of guilt. How could she—how could she have forgotten about Angelo at that wretched set of lights?

On impulse she reached into her tote bag to fish out her cellphone with the intention of calling up the man she loved. She needed to reassure herself that what Carlo Carlucci had just made her feel was nothing more than a blip on her hormonal calendar. She needed desperately to hear his warm, loving voice!

His cellphone was switched off. It was then that she remembered that he had business in Milan today. He was catching the early flight and had predicted he would be unreachable all day.

Then,’ Milan,’ she repeated and shuddered as the name conjured up a whole new meaning that placed it like coffee in the realms of sin.

Oh, stop it, she thought and tossed her cellphone onto the table then sat back in her seat and closed her eyes to work very hard at building Angelo’s beloved golden image over the top of the darker one that should not have found a way into her head at all!

Angelo didn’t have a dark corner in him. He was all sunlight. Golden skin, golden eyes and fine golden strands streaking in his tawny hair that she so loved to trail her fingers through. When he walked into a room he didn’t cast a long shadow over everyone else, he lit it up with his warm golden temperament that had not yet become hidden beneath a hard, sophisticated shell. When he looked at her she felt warm and loved and beautiful, not—invaded by dark, untrammelled lusts.

Oh, all right, so she admitted it. Sometimes she’d wondered why their relationship wasn’t more passionate. In fact, they had yet to actually make love.

‘Time for that when you’re ready,’ she could hear his gentle voice saying.

And he was right because she wasn’t ready. He’d understoodfrom the beginning that she needed time to get used to the idea of full physical love. It wasn’t that she was frigid, she quickly assured herself, just—wary of the unknown.

It came from being brought up by a deeply religious and straight-laced mother who’d instilled in her daughter standards by which she expected Francesca to live her life. Those standards included the sanctity of marriage coming before any pleasures of the flesh.

Outmoded principles? Yes, of course, principles like those were so out of fashion they could appear almost laughable to some. Indeed Sonya, her best friend and flatmate, did laugh at her—often. Sonya couldn’t believe that a gorgeous masculine specimen like Angelo put up with a shrinking violet from a different century.

‘You must be mad to play Russian roulette with a man like him,’ she’d told her. ‘Aren’t you terrified that he might take his sexual requirements somewhere else?’

Well, yes, sometimes. She’d even confided those concerns to Angelo. He’d just smiled and kissed her, said Sonya was jealous and she wouldn’t recognise a principle if she was staring at one.

Angelo didn’t like Sonya. Sonya could not stand him. They provoked each other like two enemies across a neutral zone. Francesca was the neutral zone. The old-fashioned girl with the old-fashioned principles who loved them both but—more to the point—they loved her.

A smile crossed her mouth again. It wasn’t quite as sunny as the smile she had been wearing before she ran into Carlo Carlucci but at least it was a smile.

Her telephone beeped, she twisted it around to check who was calling and the smile became a rueful grin. ‘Were your ears burning?’ she quizzed.

‘Meaning what?’ Sonya demanded, then sourly before Francesca could offer an answer, ‘I suppose by that you’re somewhere with darling Angelo and he’s slandering my character again.’

‘No,’ Francesca denied. ‘Angelo’s in Milan today so put your claws away and tell me what you’re ringing me for.’

‘Do I only ring you when I want something?’

‘The honest answer to that is—yes,’ Francesca answered drily.

‘Well, not this time,’ her flatmate countered. ‘I got up this morning to find you’d already left the flat. Why are you out so early? This is supposed to be your day off.’

‘And you should be on your way to work by now.’ Francesca took a quick glance at her watch. ‘What time did you crawl into bed this morning?’ It was definitely long after she had fallen fast asleep.

Her answer was a mind-your-own-business tut. ‘Stick to the point,’ Sonya snapped. ‘Where are you going and how long will you be gone for?’

‘I decided to come into town and do my shopping before it gets too hot and sticky to try on clothes.’

‘Oh, I forgot. It’s find-the-right-dress-to-knock-dear-Angelo’s-eyes-out day.’

She really was obsessing on the man. ‘Oh, do stop it, Sonya,’ she sighed impatiently. ‘Have you any idea how wearing this war between you and Angelo is? I hope you’re going to call a truce before the party on Saturday night or I might just knock your heads together in front of Rome’s best.’

‘Maybe you would prefer it if I stayed away altogether—then you won’t have to worry.’

She was offended now. Francesca uttered another sigh. ‘Now, that’s plain childish.’

‘And you are beginning to sound like my mother. Don’t do this, don’t do that. At least try to behave yourself,’ Sonya chanted deridingly. ‘I hoped when I came to Rome that I would leave all of that stuff behind me in London.’

She was right, Francesca realised with a start—she sounded like her own mother. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured heavily.

‘Forget it,’ Sonya said and it was her turn to sigh. ‘I’m a bitch in the mornings. You know I am. Go and buy your knockout dress and I’ll crawl into work like a good girl.’

The call ended a few seconds later, leaving Francesca sitting there frowning and wondering what the heck had happened to her beautiful day.

The answer to that came in the form of a pair of dark eyes and a sensually husky voice saying, ‘Have coffee with me at the Café Milan.’

A sudden breeze whipped up, swirling its way around the square, flipping tablecloths and shifting lightweight chairs. Francesca’s hair was whipped backwards, her skin hit by a shivery chill. Then it was gone, leaving waiters hurrying to make good the disarray the breeze had left behind it and Francesca feeling as if she had just been touched by an ill wind.

She got up, took some money from her tote bag and placed it on the table to pay for her drink. As she walked back across the square to where she’d left the Vespa her skin was still covered in goose pimples yet she was trembling not shivering. She felt the difference so deeply it was almost an omen in itself.

CHAPTER TWO

IT WAS gone lunchtime by the time she arrived back at the apartment. As she stepped in through the door she then stood for a moment just looking around her in frowning puzzlement. The place had been quite tidy when she’d left here this morning but it didn’t look like that now. The cushions on the sofa were crushed and tumbled. There were two half-drunk coffee-cups sitting on the low table and an empty bottle of wine with two glasses lying on their sides on the floor. She could see through the open door to Sonya’s bedroom that it looked pretty much in the same tumbled state.

She was still frowning at the mess when her cellphone beeped and, placing her shopping bags on the floor, she fished out her phone to discover the caller was Bianca, the office manager of the tour group she and Sonya worked for.

She was looking for Sonya. ‘She didn’t turn up to work today,’ Bianca announced. ‘Have you any idea where she is? She isn’t answering her mobile or the phone at your flat.’

Looking around at the evidence, Francesca could only assume that Sonya had been entertaining an unexpected visitor, though her loyalty to Sonya was not going to let her tell Bianca that.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I left the flat before Sonya was up this morning so I’ve no idea where she is,’ which wasn’t a lie. ‘Didn’t she call in to warn you she wasn’t going to make it?’

‘No.’ The manager’s voice was tight. ‘And she’s left me a guide short. It really isn’t on, Francesca. This is the third time in two weeks she’s let me down like this.’

It was? Francesca’s eyes widened at this surprise piece of information. She hadn’t been aware that Sonya had been skipping off work. ‘I know she’s been suffering with a troublesome wisdom tooth lately,’ which was true. Sonya complained about it a lot but was terror-struck at the mere mention of the word dentist. ‘Maybe she couldn’t stand the pain any more and went to get treatment.’

‘And pigs might fly,’ Bianca snapped. ‘It’s this man she has been seeing.’

Man? ‘What man?’ As far as she was aware, Sonya wasn’t seeing anyone special at the moment.

‘Don’t pull the innocent, Francesca,’ Bianca scolded. ‘You know all about the married man she’s lost her head over. If she’s any sense she will drop him before this company drops her. I can’t have my guides not turning up when they should. It makes an absolute mess of my…’

Francesca stopped listening, so stunned by the turn of this conversation that she had to sit down. She’d known Sonya since they’d been at university together and—OK, she acknowledged, so she was a bit of a rebel and tended to let her heart rule her head. But she confided most things to Francesca and she did not recall her saying a thing about a new man.

A married man?

Bianca had to be mistaken, she decided, only to look at the evidence laid out in front of her eyes that told her Sonya was up to something clandestine if she was resorting to skipping work so she could entertain her man here, where there was little chance of them being seen together.

‘I’ll come in and cover for her if you need me.’ She cut across whatever it was Bianca was saying. She glanced at her watch. ‘I still have time to get there if it will help you out.’

‘Are you sure you don’t mind? You were supposed to be shopping for your dress today. It doesn’t seem fair that you should—’

‘The dress is bought,’ Francesca assured, glancing across the room to where she’d placed the elegant dress box that she’d ridden back here safely trapped between her legs. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can make it.’

‘You truly are an angel, Francesca,’ Bianca said in relief. ‘Unlike your wretched friend!’

The phone call ended. Francesca continued to sit there wondering what the heck had got into today. It had begun so well. She’d been happy—everything had been perfect!

Then Carlo Carlucci had happened, she recalled with a small shiver. Since her run-in with him nothing had gone right. She’d had phone calls that irritated, ill winds blowing chills across her skin and a tiring trudge through Rome’s finest fashion boutiques, looking for a dress she still wasn’t sure about even though she’d bought it. Now Sonya had gone missing and it was just beginning to dawn on her that, true to her flatmate’s nature, she had rung her this morning to ask if she would cover for her at work. Only she’d then chickened out when they’d got into an argument over Angelo.

And now she had discovered that Sonya had been lying to her! Or keeping secrets was probably a fairer way of putting it.

But she didn’t want to be fair. She didn’t want to be an angel or have her best friend sniping at Angelo and then likening her to her mother because she happened to lose her patience.

More irritation struck, slicing right down her backbone and bringing her to her feet. She bent to pick up the used coffee-cups then stopped herself. Tidying up after Sonya was something her mother would do. So was tutting and sighing all over the place, as she’d been about to do.

‘Oh, damn it!’ she shouted at the tiny apartment. And she never swore!

Because her mother would have been appalled.

‘Damn it,’ she said again out of sheer black cussedness and went to put her purchases away.

Then she went still, listening to herself and not liking what she heard. Her mother was gone now and she did not want to think ill of her. She didn’t want to be sniping at her inside her head! There had been too much ill feeling in Maria Bernard’s life while she had been alive, she thought bleakly as she went to unpack and hang up her dress.

Her mother had once been the beautiful Maria Gianni—only child of Rinaldo Gianni, a man who ran his household with a rod of iron. He’d woven plans around his only daughter that had mapped out her entire future from the day she had been born. Then Maria had thwarted those plans by falling in love with a thankless English rake called Vincent Bernard, who had his eye firmly fixed on Maria’s inheritance. It had taken a month for him to make her pregnant and another month to get her father’s permission to marry her—before Rinaldo Gianni threw them out. Vincent had taken her mother to England. He’d been so sure that his father-in-law would relent and forgive once Maria produced the grandson the old man wanted so much that he was prepared to wait the whole nine months for the event to take place. A girl had not fitted either man’s criteria. Vincent Bernard had cut his losses and left Maria holding a baby girl that nobody wanted by then. A year after that Vincent had divorced her to marry his next rich fool of a wife. Divorce had been the ultimate humiliation and sin in her mother’s eyes. She’d never acknowledged that legal slip of paper ending her Roman Catholic marriage. She’d never forgiven her father for refusing to forgive her for going against his wishes. All three had never spoken again.

Rinaldo Gianni had died when Francesca was ten years old, having never acknowledged that he had a granddaughter. She’d never met him, just as she had never met her own father, who—and here was the irony—died around the same time. It wasn’t until a year after her mother’s death that she’d given in to a long-suppressed yearning to come to Rome and meet with her only surviving blood relative. And even as she’d taken that first step onto Italian soil she had still been struggling with her conscience because she’d known her mother would not approve. But it was lonely being on her own yet knowing she had a great-uncle living here who might—just might—be prepared to welcome Maria’s child.

She’d wanted nothing else from Bruno Gianni. Not his money or even his love. She hadn’t got them either, she mused with a wry little smile as she dried herself after a quick shower. Her great-uncle Bruno, she’d discovered, was a very old man living the life of a near recluse in his draughty old palazzo tucked away in the Albany Hills south of Rome. He did not receive visitors. He did not have a great-niece, she was informed by return letter when she’d made her first tentative approach. It had taken determined persistence on her part before the old man eventually gave in and reluctantly granted her an audience.

It was a strange meeting, she recalled, pausing for a moment to look back to that one and only time she’d met Bruno Gianni. He was nice. She’d liked him on sight even though he had told her straight off that if she was after his money then there was none to be had. The crumbling palazzo belonged to the bank, he’d said, and what bit of money he had left would go to the tax collector when he was dead.

But she’d been able to see her mother’s eyes in his eyes—her own hazel eyes looking curiously at her even as he’d labelled her a fortune-hunter. She recalled how badly she’d wanted to touch him but didn’t dare, how his skin wasn’t at all wrinkly despite his great age and he might live in a near ruin but his grooming had been immaculate. Quite dapper.

She smiled as she began dressing again, slipping into her uniform red dress with its flashes of bright yellow and green.

She’d told him about her life and her mother’s life in London, the schools she’d attended and her university degree. She’d told him that she was working as a tour guide in Rome and that she was sharing an apartment with a friend she’d met in university. He’d listened without attempting to put a stop on her eager flow. When she’d finally slithered to a stop, he’d nodded as if in approval then rung the bell. When the housekeeper arrived to see her out all he’d said was, ‘Enjoy the rest of your life, signorina,’ and she’d nodded, knowing by those words that he had no wish to see her again.

That didn’t mean she’d stopped corresponding though. She’d continued to send him little notes every week, letting him know what she was doing. When she’d met and fallen in love with Angelo, besides Sonya, Great-Uncle Bruno was the first person to know. He’d never replied to a single letter and she hadn’t a clue if he even bothered to read her silly, light, chatty notes. When she confided in Angelo about him he was shocked and disbelieving at first, then he’d laughed and called their first meeting fate because Bruno Gianni lived only a couple of miles away from his parents’ country house.

‘If your mama had been allowed to live there with you, we would have grown up together—been childhood sweethearts maybe.’

She liked that idea. It gave their love a sense of inevitability and belonging that her unforgiving grandfather could not beat.

On the few occasions she had been invited to spend the weekend at the Villa Batiste in the Frascati area of Castelli Romani she always made a point of walking the few miles to her great-uncle’s palazzo to leave a note to let him know where she was staying—just in case he might relent and asked her to visit him while she was there. It had never happened. He hadn’t even bothered to reply to the formal invitation to her betrothal party this weekend, she reminded herself.

Did that hurt? A little, she confessed. But—as Angelo said—persistence could often win in the end. ‘Maybe he will relent and come to our wedding.’

And maybe he would, she thought hopefully as she shut up the apartment and stepped back out into the sunlit street.

However disappointed she was with her great-uncle, she had never regretted coming to Rome. Her Italian was fluent, her knowledge of the city’s history something she’d drenched herself in from the time she had been able to read. She loved her job, loved her life and she loved—loved Angelo.

The ride down the Corso was a mad, bad bustle this time around. Francesca skimmed deftly between tight lines of traffic. The afternoon was a long one. The city was beginning to throb with people now the tourist season was in full flow—not that it eased by a huge amount at any time of the year. By the time she arrived back at the apartment she was so tired all she wanted to do was dive beneath the shower then put up her aching feet.

The first thing she noticed was the tidied apartment, the next was Sonya, curled up on the sofa wrapped in her bathrobe, looking very defiant.

‘Before you start, it was the toothache,’ she jumped in before Francesca could say anything. ‘It flared up after I spoke to you this morning and I just had to find a dentist to do something about it.’

‘Makes house-calls, does he?’ Francesca didn’t believe her. It took only a flick of her eyes to the empty coffee-table for Sonya to know what she meant.

‘Of course not,’ she snapped then winced, pushing a hand up to cover the side of her face. ‘God, it’s hurting more now that the anaesthetic’s worn off than it did before I let him touch it!’ she groaned.

‘Who touched it?’

‘The dentist, you sarcastic witch,’ Sonya sliced. Then she sighed when she realised she wasn’t about to get any sympathy, her gentian-blue eyes moving over Francesca’s clothes. ‘Sorry I spoilt your day off,’ she mumbled contritely.

‘You meant to do that a whole lot earlier this morning,’ she drawled.

‘Mm.’ Sonya didn’t even bother to deny it; her fingertips were now carefully testing the slight puffiness Francesca could see at her jaw.

‘You look grotty,’ she observed, yielding slightly. ‘How bad is it?’

‘Really bad.’ Tears even swam into her eyes. ‘He drilled it then dressed it with—something.’ She dismissed that something with a flick of her hand. ‘I’m to go back next week—ouch.’ She winced again. ‘I also got the full lecture on the cause and effect of neglect.’

Francesca couldn’t help but smile at the last dry comment. Sonya didn’t like lectures especially when she had no defence. ‘Did you punch him?’ she asked.

‘Not likely! He had me pinned down with all these contraptions sticking out of my mouth and was holding a drill in his hand at the time.’

‘Poor you,’ she commiserated.

‘Mm.’ Sonya was in complete sympathy with that comment. ‘Did you get your dress?’ she then thought to enquire.

‘Mm,’ Francesca mimicked. ‘Did you get your intriguing new man to hold your hand while you sat in the dentist’s chair?’

Sonya looked up then quickly away again, a definite flush mounting her delicately pale cheeks. ‘Don’t ask because I’m not going to tell you,’ she muttered.

‘So he is married,’ Francesca concluded.

‘Who told you that?’ Sonya was shocked.

‘Bianca,’ she supplied. ‘Who seems to know a whole lot more than I do about your love-life.’

That still hurt, and she turned away to walk towards her bedroom.

‘I’m sorry, Francesca, but I can’t talk about him!’ she threw after her. ‘It’s—complicated,’ she added awkwardly. ‘And Bianca only knows the bit she gleaned out of me when she caught me rowing with him on the phone in the office the other day. ‘

‘So he is married?’ She turned to look at her.

Sonya looked down and stubbornly closed her mouth.

The urge to tell her what a fool she was being leapt to the edge of her tongue—then was stopped when she remembered the ‘you sound like my mother’ stab from this morning. So she changed her mind about saying anything at all and turned back to her bedroom.

‘I’m going to change,’ she said. ‘I’m meeting Angelo in a hour—’

‘No, you’re not.’

Once again she stopped and swung round. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘He rang here—a few minutes ago—to say he’s still in Milan and won’t be coming back until tomorrow.’ For some reason relaying all of that also poured hot colour into her cheeks.

Francesca’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘Have you two been fighting again?’

‘No,’ Sonya denied.

‘Then why the guilty face?’

‘OK, so we fought a little bit,’ Sonya snapped. ‘Stop getting at me, Francesca! I can’t help it if—’

‘So, why didn’t he call me on my mobile to tell me this?’ Francesca cut in. She was not going to let Sonya start one of her character-assassination jobs on Angelo again. One a day of those was enough.

‘He said you weren’t answering.’

Francesca glanced at her bag then went to recover it. The moment she fished inside the uniform brown leather satchel she knew why he couldn’t reach her. In her rush that lunchtime she must have left the phone in her tote bag.

‘Idiot,’ she muttered and went into the bedroom to get it so she could return his call—only to find Sonya had followed her and was standing in the doorway, wearing the oddest expression on her face. Francesca couldn’t quite read it—anxiety, pleading? Or was it pain from the tooth?

‘Are you feeling all right, cara?’ she probed gently. ‘You look terribly flushed.’ She put a cool palm against Sonya’s cheek and was surprised just how hot she felt. ‘At the risk of being accused of mothering you, would you like me to tuck you into bed and bring you a nice hot chocolate drink?’

The tears arrived then, turning gentian-blue into midnight pools in a face that was so classically beautiful it was no wonder she’d been screen tested by a film director once. ‘Don’t be nice to me, Francesca,’ she murmured.

‘I love you,’ she smiled, moving her fingers into the straight, glossy pelt of her friend’s long, flaxen hair. ‘Why shouldn’t I be nice?’

‘Because I don’t deserve it.’ Sonya stepped away from her so she could use the sleeve of her bathrobe to wipe her eyes with. ‘I use your friendship dreadfully.’

‘Only because I let you.’

‘Yes…’ Sonya agreed and looked momentarily devastated. The phone went then, breaking the moment. Sonya went into the sitting room to answer it and a few seconds later was calling Francesca to come to the phone.

’Ciao, mi amore.’ It was Angelo, his voice sounding weary and flat. ‘You don’t answer your cellphone because you don’t want to speak to me and I cannot blame you.’

‘I didn’t have my phone with me so I couldn’t answer it, you sweet idiot,’ she chided, her eyes flickering sideways to watch Sonya disappearing into her bedroom. The moment the door shut behind her Francesca lowered her voice into soft, loving tones. ‘I’m sorry you’re stuck in Milan.’

‘So am I,’ he agreed. ‘I am about to get ready to take dinner with some business colleagues when I should be on my way to share a romantic dinner with you. Ah, misero,’ he declared feelingly.

‘Poor caro,’ she commiserated.

Angelo heaved out a sigh. ‘But enough of this.’ He firmly pulled his mood out of the doldrums. ‘Tell me about your day.’

‘Well, my plans fell to pieces much as yours did…’ She went to explain, leaving out the incident at the traffic lights and editing some of the more contentious events involving Sonya so she didn’t invite him to vent his frustrations on the one person guaranteed to earn his wrath. ‘But I did manage to find a dress for Saturday,’ she finished on a high note.

To her surprise he made no cruel remarks about Sonya’s toothache. In fact he skimmed right over the fact that she’d even been mentioned at all and asked about her dress instead. She refused to tell him and there followed a few minutes of soft teasing that was much more like the man she loved. Then he had to go and the call ended, leaving Francesca feeling loved and filled with that golden warmth that was her Angelo.

Sonya didn’t come out of her bedroom again that evening. Francesca went in to check on her a couple of times but all she could see was the crown of her head peeping out from beneath a mound of duvet and eventually left her to sleep off the ordeal with the dentist.

By the next morning she was herself again and ready to face Bianca’s wrath head-on. They rode down the Corso side by side on similar Vespas and dressed in the same red uniforms. Their day was busy as always.

Angelo called at lunchtime to break the news that he was going to be stuck in Milan for another night. The next day was Saturday and they were supposed to be driving into the Alban Hills together but that plan had to be shelved. ‘I have arranged with my parents for you to travel with them,’ he told her.

It wasn’t a prospect that filled her with delight. She had discovered quite early on in her relationship with Angelo that his parents were not the kind of people who were ever going to welcome her with open arms. She harboured a suspicion that she was not what they’d been hoping for as a wife for their precious only son and if it wasn’t for her very loose connection to the Gianni name they would have been actively against Angelo marrying her. As it was, Mrs Batiste had grilled her once about her mother, then surprised her by confessing that she and Maria Gianni had attended the same convent school. ‘You look very like her—apart from the hair,’ she’d said, Maria’s hair having been as glossy Latin black as hair could be. ‘I’m sorry she had such a difficult life, Francesca. I hope your marrying my son will give you a happier one—for Maria’s sake—and that Bruno Gianni relents his foolish stubbornness one day for your sake. But until then I think we will not mention him again.’

And that had basically been it. The Gianni connection was smoothly sidelined, which suited Francesca because she didn’t like talking about it and was happy to keep it that way.

The journey to Frascati wasn’t too bad. Angelo’s parents’ manner towards her might be cool but it wasn’t frigid. She loved Angelo, they loved Angelo, so that was their line of communication. They were almost at their destination when Angelo’s mother voiced her annoyance that her son should have been held up in Milan this week of all weeks.

‘It is his own fault,’ her husband returned without any sympathy. ‘Angelo knows it is not good business practice to keep busy people kicking their heels while they await his late arrival.’

‘It wasn’t as if he intended to be late. He overslept and missed the flight,’ Angelo’s mama defended loyally.

He did? thought Francesca. It was the first she’d heard of it.

‘No one else missed the flight,’ the father made the succinct distinction. ‘Whatever they had been doing the night before, they still managed to get to the airport on time.’

In the back of the car Francesca shifted slightly, catching the attention of Mr Batiste via his rear-view mirror. ‘My apologies, Francesca,’ he said, ‘I was not being critical of the late hours you young people keep, only Angelo’s failure to rise from his bed when he should,’ bringing a flush of heat into her face when she realised what he was assuming.

But it wasn’t true. She hadn’t seen Angelo the night before he went to Milan. Because of the early time of his flight he’d told her he was going to get an early night.

‘We cannot afford to offend a man like Carlo Carlucci. His business is too important to us,’ Mr Batiste went on, his attention back on the road ahead so he didn’t see the way Francesca’s face went from hot to pale at the mention of Carlo Carlucci’s name. ‘Being stuck in Milan while Carlo puts him through business hoops is a better punishment than to have Carlo take his business somewhere else.’

Mrs Batiste demanded her husband’s attention then, with a comment that was spoken too low for Francesca to hear. It didn’t matter because she had stopped listening anyway. She was thinking about Carlo Carlucci and that awful morning she had met him at a set of traffic lights. He must have been on his way to meet with Angelo at the airport yet he hadn’t bothered to mention it—nor had it stopped him from making a play for her.

She shifted restlessly again, feeling the same hostile prickles attacking her skin as she replayed the ease with which he’d conducted that little scene.

What made the man tick that he felt he could do that to her, knowing what he knew? Arrogance? A supreme belief in his right to toy with another man’s woman simply because it had amused him to do so? If she’d said yes to the coffee thing, would he have just laughed in her face and driven off, having got all the kicks he’d been looking for from the interlude by successfully seducing another man’s woman? Or would he have been willing to miss his flight in favour of coffee with her at Café Milan?

Oh, don’t go there, she told herself, frowning out of the car window as something low in her abdomen began to stir.

What about Angelo? She considered, firmly fixing her attention on what should be important here. Why hadn’t he told her that he was stuck in Milan because he’d overslept and annoyed an important business client? Did he think that confessing he’d messed up would lose him his hero status with her?

A smile touched her mouth, amusement softening the frown from her face. He ought to know that nothing could do that. He was and always would be the wildly handsome superhero to her.

They arrived at their destination, driving between a colonnade of tall cypress trees towards the stunning white and gold frontage of Villa Batiste. It wasn’t a big house by Castelli Romani standards but, standing as it did on its own raised plateau, neither the house nor its amazing gardens skimped on a single detail when it came to Renaissance extravagance.

As they climbed out of the car at the bottom of wide white marbled steps, Francesca could almost feel the Batistes filling with pride of ownership and wondered wryly—not for the first time—how that pride really dealt with Angelo wanting to marry a little nobody like her. He would inherit all of this one day, which would make her its chatelaine and her children its future heirs.

The house was already under the occupation of an army of professional caterers. A quick cup of coffee after their journey was all they had time for before they were busily helping out. Mr Batiste went off to check his wine cellar. Mrs Batiste made for the kitchen. Francesca became a willing dogsbody, helping out wherever she could. By two o’clock there was nothing more for her to do that she could see. Angelo was still stuck in Milan and his parents were resting before the next wave of activity began.

On a sudden impulse, she decided to write a note to her great-uncle then go and deliver it. You never know, she told herself as she set off, she might just catch him at a weak moment.

Her walk took her along narrow, winding country lanes with blossom trees shedding petals on the ground and the golden sunlight dappling through their gently waving branches. It was a beautiful place and she took her time, taking in the hills and the rolling wine-growing countryside that gave such a classic postcard image of Italy.

Half an hour later and she was standing by a pair of rustic old gates, gazing on a house and a garden that would make Angelo’s mother shudder in dismay. There was nothing formal or neat about her great-uncle’s garden, she mused with a smile. The whole thing seemed to merge in a rambling mix of untended creepers with the old palazzo struggling to hang on to some pride as its ochre-painted face peeled and its roof sagged.

She lingered for a few minutes, just looking at it all like a child forbidden to enter. She didn’t think of opening the gate and stepping inside. She never intruded past this point when she came here because she knew it was only right that she respect her uncle’s wishes. After a little while she heaved out a sigh then took her sealed note out of her jacket pocket and fed it into the rusted metal letter slot set into one of the stone pillars that supported the gates. As she listened to it drop she had the sorry image of the note landing on top of all the others she’d posted and a sad little smile touched the corners of her mouth as she turned slowly away.

Head down, shoulders hunched inside her fitted little denim jacket that matched the jeans she was wearing, she was about to begin the walk back to Villa Batiste when a flash of bright red caught her eye. Her chin came up then all movement was stalled on a stifled gasp of surprise and undisguised dismay when she saw an all too familiar red sports car parked up on the other side of the lane with its driver leaning casually against shiny red bodywork.

Oh, no, not him, was her first gut response as they stared at each other across the few metres of tarmac.

He was dressed in dark blue denims and cloud-blue cashmere that skimmed his tapered body like a second skin. The way he had arms folded across his chest ruched up the lip of the long-sleeved, round-necked sweater, exposing the bronze button that held his jeans in place and almost—almost—offered her a glimpse of the lean flesh beneath.

On a sharp flick of shock as to where her thoughts were taking her she dragged her eyes upwards to look at his face. He was smiling—or allowing his attractive mouth to adopt a sardonic lift. His chin was slightly lowered, his eyelashes glossing those chiselled bones in his cheeks. And he was checking her out in much the same way that she was guilty of checking him out, viewing the length of her legs encased in faded denim, then the fitted denim jacket and finally her face.

’Ciao,’ he greeted softly—intimately—causing her next response to him, which was a shower of prickly resentment that raced across her skin.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, not even trying to sound polite.

‘We do seem to meet in the oddest of places,’ he mused drily. ‘Do you think, cara,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘that we might be the victims of fate?’

CHAPTER THREE

FATE, Francesca repeated to herself. She knew about the power of fate. Fate was what Angelo maintained had brought them together. She refused to accept that this… force she was being hit with here had any familiarity with Angelo’s fate.

It was then that she remembered tonight’s party and that this man had been invited. She’d even written the invitation herself. Carlo Carlucci and Guest, she’d scribed in Italian.

Which brought up another thought that sent her eyes slewing sideways to glance inside the open-top car expecting to see some raving dark beauty sitting in the passenger seat. To think of Carlo Carlucci without his usual female appendage was impossible, so she was puzzled to discover the seat was empty.

When she looked back at him he’d lifted those lashes higher and was watching her. ‘I do travel light on occasion,’ he said lazily, reading her like a gauche open book.

‘Does the fact that you’re here and not in Milan mean that you’ve tired of making Angelo’s life a misery and let him come back too?’ she threw back.

He smiled at this attempt on her part at acid sarcasm but his reply when it came was deadly serious. ‘Angelo deserved everything he got from me, Francesca, and don’t let him tell you otherwise.’

‘I suppose you’ve never overslept and missed a meeting.’

‘Not even after a heavy night with a beautiful woman in my bed,’ he replied. ‘Although…’ his eyes moved over her ‘… I can appreciate that the cause in this case was worth the consequences…’

He was inferring that she was what had caused Angelo to oversleep that morning, Francesca realised, and opened her mouth to deny the charge only to close it again when she realised that Angelo must have used her as his excuse for missing his flight. A frown creased her brow and she lowered her eyes to the ground while she tried to decide how she felt about that. She didn’t think she liked it. It smacked too hard at the male ego conjuring up a night of erotic sex with his lover as a way of getting himself out of an awkward situation. Her mind even threw up a picture of Angelo standing in some faceless office in Milan, casually boasting to this man of all men about something that should remain private to themselves—if it had happened at all, which it hadn’t.

‘I’ve got to go.’ She spun away, not wanting to continue this line of discussion. Not wanting to be here at all. She was cross now with Angelo—cross with Carlo Carlucci for placing a cloud across her golden image of the man she loved.

There was a hiss of impatience, a scraping of shoe leather on the road surface. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, and began striding towards her across the lane.

Her shoulders tensed, her clenched hands jerking out of her pockets as those now familiar prickles began really asserting themselves the closer he came. A hand curved around her arm, long fingers gently crushing sun-warmed denim against the skin beneath that began to burn like a flame. She jumped in response to it, her breathing snagged. He turned her to face him and she found herself fascinated by the discovery that her eyes came level with his smooth brown throat.

‘I embarrassed you. I apologise,’ he murmured huskily, and she watched his throat muscles move with the words. ‘It was unforgivably crass and insensitive of me to say what I just said.’

Yes, Francesca agreed. It had been crass and insensitive—but which man had been the most crass and insensitive?

‘Forget it,’ she said, but both of them knew she was only mouthing words she did not mean.

‘If it helps, he did not mention you by name,’ he offered.

‘Meaning what?’ she flashed. ‘That he left it open to interpretation as to whether he was sleeping around or not? Great. Thanks.’ She gave an angry tug at her arm.

He refused to let go. She could feel his anger, the pulse of his frustration because his bit of light teasing had gone so wrong.

‘I apologise—again,’ he bit out finally.

Francesca glared daggers at his chest. ‘I suppose you think it’s all just jolly good fun to swap sexual experiences across some office desk,’ she said shakily. ‘Men being men,’ with lots of phews and wows and you’d have overslept too if you’d been there. She’d heard the men at work talking like that, having no idea how cheap they made their lovers sound. ‘Egotistic cockerels crowing about their prowess,’ she muttered, not realising she’d said the words out loud until he laughed as if he couldn’t help himself.

‘Don’t laugh at me!’ she snapped out hotly.

‘Then don’t say such comical things,’ he threw back. ‘You sound like some outraged virgin.’

But she was an outraged virgin—that was the whole point! ‘Did you tell him all about the way you propositioned me on the Corso just to even up the score a bit?’

‘No,’ he denied. ‘But the interesting point here is—did you tell him?’

‘Why, are you worried that he might damage your famed sexual ego by telling him how you made a play for his woman and got turned down flat?’

It was reckless. She shouldn’t have said it. His eyes turned as black as bottomless caverns and his other hand came up to capture her other arm. Hard fingers crushed the denim fabric as he drew her closer.

‘Did you turn me down?’ he prompted. ‘Or did you run like a frightened rabbit because you were already so turned on you didn’t know how to cope with it?’

‘That’s not true!’ she gasped in shocked horror.

‘Shall we test that?’

She saw in the dark glitter of his eyes what he meant to do next and drew in a sharp breath. Suddenly something dangerous was dancing in the air, spinning silver spider webs of tension into the golden sunlight.

Then a twig snapped somewhere, bringing the whole episode clattering down as both heads turned to stare across the top of her great-uncle’s wooden gates. Trapped in a trembling force field that held her breathless, Francesca searched the wilderness in some wild, weak, pathetic hope that her great-uncle was about to appear to rescue her from this.

It didn’t happen. No dapper old gentleman wearing a wine-red velvet smoking jacket appeared on the twig-strewn driveway. The dappling light from the afternoon sun quivered amongst the heavily leafed branches of the tangled trees and vines and played with peeling ochre paint, but otherwise the wilderness garden remained at peace.

She sighed as she thought that, the action parting her lips to release the sad sound. He moved, she looked back at him without thinking and met head-on with a pair of dark, brooding eyes that told her things she didn’t want to know—or feel the way she was feeling them.

It was better to look away. ‘Please let me go,’ she whispered shakily.

His fingers flexed against the denim and for a horrible moment she thought he was going to ignore her plea and just continue from where he’d been interrupted. Her throat ran dry. She tried to swallow. The promise of tears bloomed across her eyes.

Then his grip eased and slowly lifted. She stepped back—went to turn her back, desperate now to get away.

‘You are acquainted with Bruno Gianni?’ he asked.

‘What…?’ She blinked, lifting slightly unfocused eyes back to his face. ‘Oh, n-no,’ she denied, and quickly lowered her eyes again—not because of the lie she’d just uttered but because she didn’t want him to see the threatening tears.

She shoved her hands back in her pockets, swung away and made another attempt to leave.

‘Strange …’ he murmured. ‘I could have sworn I saw you posting a note in the letter box as I drove up.’

And she froze all over again. ‘Y-you mistook what you saw,’ she said stiffly. ‘I was admiring the garden, that’s all.’

‘The garden,’ he repeated and uttered a soft laugh. ‘Cara, that isn’t a garden, it is a neglected mess!’

‘And what would you know about a real garden?’ she swung round to slice at him, not sure if she was responding to his derision or the near kiss she had just escaped. ‘I bet your idea of a beautiful garden has to be something filled with straight lines and must be manicured to within an inch of its life!’

‘Bruno Gianni obviously doesn’t feel like that,’ he pointed out.

He was laughing—still laughing at her! He’d even leant a shoulder against one of the gateposts—right next to her letter box! And he’d folded those wretched arms again, tugging that jumper up over the bronze stud at his waist. She hated him, really hated every hard, mocking inch of his sardonic, handsome—sexy stance!

‘Well, neither do I,’ she declared, uttering this next halflie as she tried very hard to put her temper back under wraps. ‘And I like this garden,’ she added within a tightly suppressed breath. ‘I like the way it’s been left to do its own thing. It has soul and atmosphere and—and—’

‘An irresistible hint of romance about it,’ he inserted when she stammered then stalled. ‘We could even say it possesses a kind of lost-in-time mystique about it that some may love to weave secret fantasies around. We could even imagine Sleeping Beauty lying in one of the cobweb-strewn rooms inside waiting for her prince to come and waken her with the all-important kiss.’

‘Oh, very droll,’ she derided. ‘Next you will be telling me you believe in fairies.’

‘Why not?’ he quizzed. ‘We should all believe there is magic out there or we would stop bothering to look for it and that would be sad, don’t you think? Oh, come on, Francesca,’ he sighed out impatiently when she stiffened up in offence. ‘I was teasing you. Stop prickling.’

‘I’m not prickling,’ she snapped, prickling even as she denied it.

He uttered a short laugh. ‘You remind me of a very beautiful but temperamental tabby cat,’ he told her. ‘Every time I look at you I can almost see the hairs on the back of your neck standing up.’

‘You don’t know me well enough to know anything of the sort,’ she hit back, saw the amusement lurking behind those glossy eyelashes, went to stiffen up some more—then sighed heavily instead. ‘You enjoy winding me up.’

’Sì,’ he acknowledged.

So she was a game, Francesca concluded. An easy game.

Carlo studied her beautiful face as she stood in her own pool of sunlight and wondered grimly if she had any idea how hurt she looked by his last comment. Anger gripped him, along with a hot and bloody frustrated urge to grab for her again and impress on her why his barbs could hurt so much.

Easy, he thought inwardly in grinding contempt and flicked a hard glance at the crumbling Palazzo Gianni hiding inside its romantic wilderness. Sleeping Beauty she was not; Cinderella more like, so damn starved of ordinary love and affection that she left herself wide open for any no-good adventurer to take advantage of.

Damn it, he cursed to himself and straightened away from the gatepost. ‘I suppose,’ he started, ‘if I offer you a lift, you will throw the offer back in my face.’

He was right and she would. ‘Take no offence but I will enjoy the walk.’

The sound of his dry laughter brought her reluctant gaze back to his face again. ‘That was so beautifully English and polite, cara.’ The mocking man was back, she saw.

‘I am English.’

‘Mm,’ he murmured as if even that amused him now. Then he surprised her by abruptly striding back to his car. ‘Like a cool breeze on a hot summer’s day,’ he threw over his shoulder as he opened the door then swung his long body into the seat. ‘Very—contradictory.’

‘Thank you—I think.’ She frowned.

Carlo just grimaced and gunned the car engine. ‘I will see you later,’ he said by way of a farewell.

Francesca sent him a perfectly blank look.

‘Your engagement to the mistreated Angelo?’ he prompted and was truly rewarded when the blank look changed to one of dismay because that look told him she had not given a thought to her wonderful Angelo beyond those first few seconds of this encounter.

Having to be satisfied with achieving that much, he put the car into gear and sped off down the lane, leaving her to stew alone on his final heart-ruthless barb.

Francesca watched him go with the sunlight clinging to his satin black hair again and his last sardonic punch making her eyes blink. How could she have become so drawn in by him that she’d completely forgotten the most important event in her life was about to take place tonight?

Another twig snapped somewhere behind her and she turned to glare at her great-uncle’s wilderness as if all of this confusion she was feeling was his fault. And maybe it was, she thought as she turned away again. If he’d been a kinder man he would have accepted her hand of friendship and her pathetic need to maintain contact with him would not have driven her to walk here to post him silly little notes. Then she would not have been standing here like a prime target for Carlo Carlucci to amuse himself with—again.

Easy, he’d called her. And she flinched, ashamed of herself—disgusted with him for playing with her as if she was a toy.

Well, she wasn’t anyone’s toy. She wasn’t easy either—and it was about time that she remembered that! Her chin came up, her hazel eyes glazing over with contempt for the hateful Carlo Carlucci. What was he after all but just one man among many that believed all women were fair prey?

She began to walk, feeling better now she’d managed to snatch her shaken pride back from the brink.

Villa Batiste came into view, its white marble walls drenched in the coral warmth of the late-afternoon sun. The contrast between it and Palazzo Gianni was so pronounced that Francesca pulled to a stop for a moment, struck by the sudden realisation that she did not like this beautiful place. It was all too neat, too shiny and pampered; even the elegant gardens had been groomed to within the tips of their hard edges.

But what the heck? It was a great place to throw a party, she decided, and with a lighter step she began walking up the long, straight driveway with its ceremonial guard of cedar-tree soldiers flanking her approach. She was just walking around the circular courtyard in front of the house when she saw Angelo come through the front door and a light came on inside her that quite simply lit her up. He was wearing jeans and a loose-fitting white sweatshirt and his hair shone golden in the sun.

She began to run to him, and he opened his arms and grinned as she raced up the shallow flight of steps. She fell into those open arms—and fell into his warm, familiar kiss. Oh, she loved—loved—loved this beautiful man, she thought happily.

‘You’ve no idea how much I’ve missed you,’ she sighed when the kiss eventually ended.

‘I think I got the message,’ he grinned.

It was then that she noticed the tiredness around his eyes and the hint of strain tugging at his mouth. ‘Bad day?’ she asked softly, running a gentle finger along a newly arrived groove at the corner of his mouth.

‘Bad week,’ he grimaced, then added with feeling, ‘I never want to get on the wrong side of Carlo Carlucci again.’

Oh, Francesca could sympathise with that. Then she remembered to be annoyed with him for what he’d said to Carlo Carlucci and was just about to tackle him about it when the sound of a car horn grabbed their attention and the embrace was broken so they could turn to watch a minibus come hurtling up the drive.

She smiled in recognition, relaxing into the warmth of Angelo’s circling arms as she watched the minibus pull to a stop at the bottom of the steps. Doors were flung open. People began piling out. Francesca’s friends and work colleagues had arrived, having commandeered one of the company tour buses so they could travel here en masse. They were staying overnight in a hotel in the town but they’d stopped here first to drop off Sonya, who, like Bianca and several others, had had to work today or she would have travelled here with Francesca and Angelo’s parents.

There were fifteen people in all, and every one of them had eyes round like saucers as they scanned the magnificence of Villa Batiste, making suitably impressed comments to each other and tossing teasing ones at Francesca and Angelo.

Sonya was the last one to climb out of the bus. She was wearing a simple white shift-dress that clung to her slender figure and left a good portion of her long legs on show. As she took her time turning a full circle to view her surroundings the late-afternoon sun placed a pale copper gloss on her flaxen hair. She really was beautiful. Everyone said so—except Angelo. He said that her looks were spoiled by her own vanity. That too many compliments had given her a hard edge. The fact that Sonya held much the same views on Angelo was a classic sign that they were two people whose strong characters just did not mix.

When Sonya finally lifted that delicate, heart-shaped face to look at them, Francesca felt an instant pang of irritable despair as she read the sardonic expression in her wide-spaced baby-blue eyes because she knew Sonya was mocking the overt display of wealth here.

Angelo must have seen it too because his arms tightened around her and he uttered something nasty beneath his breath.

‘Oh, wow, this place is amazing!’ one of the others exclaimed. ‘Why isn’t it on our tour list?’

‘Don’t let my mother hear you say that,’ Angelo responded drily. ‘She will send you all back the way you have come before you have a chance to do more than gasp.’

Group laughter rippled into the late-afternoon sunlight. One of the many things Francesca loved about Angelo was his willingness to send up. He might be a fully paid-up member of Rome’s wealthy set but he had never allowed that to tarnish his attitude to her less advantaged friends. He was easy-going and warm and generous. He liked to be liked.

Unlike someone Francesca knew who did not give a care what anyone thought of him. He simply strolled through his life, upsetting anyone he wanted to upset and to heck with the consequences. But then, Carlo Carlucci was a fully paid-up member of the very upper echelons of Rome’s wealthy set. A cut above the rest in other words—a very large cut.

Oh, stop thinking about him, she told herself crossly and was glad to have her thoughts diverted when a mass migration back into the minibus began to take place. Angelo strode down the steps to take Sonya’s overnight bag for her, and the two exchanged stiff if polite words then came to join Francesca to wave the minibus off.

A silence fell. Sonya was pretending a deep interest in the garden while Angelo became engrossed in his shoes. Standing between them, Francesca glanced from one to the other then uttered a heavy sigh. She’d never managed to find out exactly what it was that had started hostilities between the two of them but she did know that it was getting worse.

Angelo shifted, his square chin rising. ‘Shall we go in?’ he said politely then he turned and strode into the house with Sonya’s bag. The atmosphere cloyed as they followed him into the sheer grandeur of the green and white marble reception hall and walked together up the imposing curve of the white marble staircase. Pushing open a door to one of the bedroom suites, Angelo stood back to allow the two women to enter a place fit for visiting royalty.

Sonya walked forward and stood with her back to them. Angelo remained standing stiffly by the door. ‘If I plead very hard, will you please be nice to each other for tonight?’ Francesca burst out.

‘Excuse me,’ Angelo said. ‘My father is expecting me in his study.’ Then he left, closing the door behind him with a quiet click.

Sonya turned to look at Francesca. ‘Don’t blame me for that,’ she said. ‘I never did a single thing!’

‘I know you didn’t,’ Francesca agreed with her. ‘I apologise for him.’

‘You don’t have to do that,’ Sonya said irritably. ‘He’s just…’

Mad at me, Francesca found herself finishing the sentence and then began to frown because she didn’t understand why she would think like that unless…

It hit her then, just what this war between Sonya and Angelo was all about. ‘It’s the married man you’re seeing,’ she declared suddenly. ‘Angelo knows who it is, doesn’t he?’

To her grim satisfaction Sonya gasped out a choking responsethen spun away from her in a way that all but confirmed her accusation. Things suddenly began to fit. Their barbed comments to each other, the heated exchanges they had in quiet corners that lasted less than thirty seconds but always managed to destroy a pleasant atmosphere. And more relevant was that the hostilities had only started two weeks ago, which, according to Bianca, was when Sonya’s new affair began. Two weeks ago Angelo had asked her to marry him. When she said yes, he’d arranged a celebration dinner at one of his favourite restaurants. It was the first time that Sonya had come into contact with Angelo’s family. She cast her mind back, searching that sea of new faces, hunting out the married ones and trying to decide which one might be willing to cheat on his wife.

How did I miss all of this before? she asked herself. But she knew how. She had spent the last two weeks so engrossed in her love for Angelo that she hadn’t been able to see anything beyond it.

But there was worse to come as yet another thought hit. ‘He’s going to be here tonight, isn’t he?’ she challenged. ‘He’ll be coming here with his wife and you’re going to think you can sneak off with him somewhere for a little while!’

‘That’s so much rubbish,’ Sonya denied.

No, it wasn’t. ‘I know you, Sonya,’ she said. ‘I know how common sense shoots right out of the window when a new man comes into your life.’

‘You sound like my mother again.’

She did, Francesca acknowledged and this time didn’t care. ‘Angelo is worried that you’re both going to risk causing a scene tonight. I bet he even asked you both not to come.’

‘You’re so way off the mark, it’s sad to listen to you.’ Sonya bent to collect her bag.

‘Then why is Angelo mad at you?’ she demanded outright.

Sonya didn’t answer but just walked across the room and threw open the first door that she came to. The fact that it happened to be the bathroom was due to luck more than anything, but as she went to slam the door shut so she didn’t have to have this discussion, Francesca got in one final plea.

‘Promise me you won’t do anything stupid tonight, cara,’ she begged anxiously. ‘I need your assurance—please.’

For a moment she thought Sonya was going to go on protesting her innocence, then it was as if all the fight just trickled out of her and she released a heavy sigh. ‘So long as you promise to keep Angelo away from me,’ she bartered. ‘And don’t try to get out of me who the man is!’

The bathroom door swung shut. Francesca winced as she turned back to the main door. She was just stepping out onto the landing when she heard the sound of raised voices echoing in the hall below. She paused, her heart beginning to beat faster when she recognised Angelo’s angry tones.

‘Do you think I am a fool? Of course I am not going to risk everything now! Your business is safe, Papa, take my word for it,’ he said bitterly. ‘And don’t forget which of us is paying the price for it!’

Angelo’s father spoke then but she couldn’t hear what he was saying because he wasn’t as angry as his son. Then a door closed and she could hear nothing else, but she was left wondering if the Batiste business was in trouble.

Had Carlo Carlucci lived up to Alessandro Batiste’s worst fears and threatened to remove his business and take it elsewhere?

The wretched man was beginning to cast a very long shadow over almost everything that was important in her life, she mused grimly as she stepped into her own room next to Sonya’s and closed the door. If he was a married man she would have to start wondering if he was Sonya’s new lover! Sonya’s reed-slender beauty being most definitely his type!

And on that truly caustic note she took herself off to the bathroom to indulge in a long, hot, tension-relieving soak before she had to present herself downstairs to help welcome the other guests that Angelo’s parents had invited to stay overnight at the villa.

‘I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this.’ She frowned at the mirror.

‘Do what?’ Sonya was standing behind her, busily fixing a beaded comb into the twisted knot she’d fashioned with Francesca’s hair that now felt as if it had left her creamy shoulders and neck vulnerably exposed.

‘Buy something that moulded.’

She was no raving beauty and had never pretended otherwise to herself. She might be tall and slender with passably attractive legs, but she possessed curves—oldfashioned curves like a waist and hips and full, firm breasts that sort of pouted whatever she wore. They were doing it now, pushing up above the straight edge of the bodice as if they were trying to escape.

‘Oh, dear,’ she sighed, and with a shimmy and a tug tried to pull the bodice up a bit.

‘You’re too critical of yourself,’ Sonya mumbled from behind her. ‘Have you any idea how many women shell out thousands to get C cups like yours?

‘They can have mine for free,’ Francesca muttered.

She’d gone shopping for classic black sophistication that would put her on a par with her super-elegant guests tonight and come back with this sultry dark red creation that was supposed to skim not cling to all those places she did not want to accentuate. The silk organza skirt was its saving grace with its ankle-length handkerchief edge. It was singularly the most expensive item of clothing she had ever bought, and, ‘I look like a lush.’

‘Idiot,’ Sonya chided. ‘You look like the lovely belle at your own ball, which is how it should be.’ She finished securing the hair comb then stepped back to study the overall look. ‘Gosh, that colour suits you.’

‘It reminded me of the ruby setting in my ring,’ she explained, which was why she’d bought it instead of nice, safe black. ‘Do you think Angelo will like it?’

‘I think Angelo will adore it,’ Sonya replied without a single hint of her usual caustic spoiling her tone. Then she turned away to pick up the fine chiffon scarf that came with the dress. ‘Here, let’s drape this around your shoulders just so and—presto, we have a princess.’

‘We have an overdressed Barbie doll.’

‘No.’ Sonya appeared beside her in the mirror wearing a short skimpy blue satin slip dress that matched the colour of her eyes. ‘I’m the Barbie doll around here, cara,’ she pronounced. ‘Complete with twenty-four-inch spiked shoes.’

They both fell into a fit of the giggles, which was nice because they hadn’t done much laughing recently—not since Sonya and Angelo fell out. ‘I’m going to miss having you around when I’m married,’ Francesca confided softly once they’d both calmed down again.

There was a silence—a stillness, both short, both tight. Then Sonya uttered a different kind of laugh. ‘You must be joking. You’ll be too busy doing something else to miss me.’

She was talking about making love but the moment that Francesca tried to visualise that Rubicon moment all she saw was a deeply sardonic dark, handsome face. It shook her so badly that she actually gasped.

‘What?’ Sonya demanded sharply, staring at her suddenly whitened face.

‘Nothing,’ she dismissed because how could she confess to Sonya what she had just seen? She would laugh—and why not? To her it would be one in the eye to her favourite enemy, Angelo, to learn that another man could arouse hot visions of lust inside his sex-shy fiancée.

She frowned again. It was beginning to worry her that she could feel like this about another man when she was about to commit herself to Angelo.

There was a knock at the door then. Sonya went to answer it. It was Angelo, come to escort Francesca downstairs. With a stiff smile and a mumbled, ‘See you down there,’ Sonya left them alone, pulling the door shut behind her as Francesca was turning from the mirror.

The moment she looked at him all her worries faded. He was wearing a formal black dinner suit and bow-tie and he looked so handsome that she felt herself melting inside. He was smiling at her, he was warm, he was all sunlight not mocking darkness. I’m just suffering from pre-betrothal nerves, she told herself and found her own smile when he sighed and said, ‘Ah, bella—bella, mi amore. You take my breath away.’

And that was all that she wanted, she told herself as she moved towards him. She wanted to take Angelo’s breath away. She wanted to bask in the warmth of his love.

Which was exactly what she did for the next few hours, as the villa slowly filled with people and Angelo rarely left her side. The official announcement of their engagement was to take place at midnight and until then everyone was encouraged to sample the banquet buffet laid out in one of the grand salons or dance to the music provided by a group of live musicians in another grand salon. By ten the villa was throbbing with music and laughter and the more elegant hum of conversation.

She noted Carlo Carlucci’s arrival at around ten o’clock. Who didn’t note it? she thought sourly as she watched surreptitiously the way he drew people to him without him having to do more than stand by the main salon doors. He’d arrived without the usual beauty hanging on his arm, which surprised her. And he also made no effort to come anywhere near her, which was also a surprise since it wasn’t very polite of him to keep his distance.

But it was an even bigger relief. She didn’t want him using one of his mocking smiles on her, or worse—letting it drop that they’d met by accident a couple of times and exposing the fact that she hadn’t mentioned those meetings to Angelo.

She would do, she promised herself. Tomorrow maybe when this was all over. But for now she was happy—happy—happy again and wanted to keep it that way.

Sonya, she saw, was behaving herself and sticking close to their own friends and work colleagues. If her new lover was here tonight—and Francesca was certain that he was here somewhere—she couldn’t tell from Sonya’s manner who the man was.

And foolishly she relaxed enough to drop her watchful guard on her friend. She was too busy being passed from one partner to another to be whirled beneath glittering crystal chandeliers. She was showered with beautiful compliments and teased and flirted with as only the Italians could do with such stylish panache. It was such a novelty to be the centre of everyone’s attention like this that she began to feel intoxicated by it—or was it the champagne?

Each time she paused for breath someone placed a long, fluted glass in her fingers and bid her a toast that demanded she sip. Her cheeks had discovered a permanent rosy hue and her eyes sparkled beneath the overhead lights. Angelo was being treated to the same kind of attention. They would whirl by each other occasionally and share a laughing comment, but that was all they were allowed.

It was as if there was a conspiracy afoot to keep the two lovers apart until the bewitching hour and when she challenged one of her partners with the suspicion he laughed and whirled her away. No one would know from observing this glitter-bright gaiety that the whole thing was about to shatter with the same spectacular force you would get if one of the huge chandeliers suddenly dropped to the floor.

Francesca was taking a moment to catch her breath when she happened to see Sonya quietly slipping away behind one of the gold-embossed curtains that had been drawn across a wall of French windows that led outside. Her antennae began to sing, sending her eyes flickering quickly around the room to see if anyone was going to follow her out.

It had to be her misfortune that her eyes clashed with those belonging to Carlo Carlucci. He was still holding court by the salon doors, standing with his dark head slightly tilted to one side as he listened to whatever the person with him was saying to him.

But his dark eyes were fixed on her.

That prickling sensation arrived, scoring tight frissons down her back, and she quickly dragged her eyes away from him and began weaving her way towards the French windows, determined to put a stop to the clandestine meeting she was now absolutely certain Sonya had arranged.

Sonya had left one of the doors slightly ajar. Slipping quietly through the gap, she walked across the wide marble terrace towards the stone balustrade beyond which the garden began to drop in a series of stylised tiers. It was cold out here, the late-spring chill in the air sending her hands up to rub at her bare arms as she paused to scan the darkened gardens in search of Sonya and her new man.

She heard them before she saw them, her slender body twisting towards the sound of scuffling feet and hushed voices filtering up from the terrace below. They were standing by the lower balustrade, and she was surprised to see that it was Angelo who was gripping one of Sonya’s arms while she was trying to tug herself free.

‘Let go of me!’ she heard Sonya hiss out angrily.

‘No,’ Angelo rasped. ‘I won’t let you ruin this, Sonya—’

‘I’m still going to tell her,’ Sonya lashed back. ‘She deserves to know the truth before this charade goes any further. I will be doing her a favour.’

She was threatening to confess her affair to her lover’s wife! Oh, dear God, Francesca thought. She couldn’t let her do that! She was about to move towards the steps to go down there to add her own pleas to Angelo’s—when Angelo’s harsh reply stalled her feet.

‘You think she will be grateful to you for your big confession, heh, cara? Do you think she will fall on your neck and forgive you, her closest friend, for sleeping with me, the man she is heart and soul in love with…?’

And that was the point where everything shattered, sprinkling around her like fine crystal shards that lacerated her flesh as they fell.

CHAPTER FOUR

FRANCESCA began to shake so badly she could barely stay upright, even her heart trembling, clawing at the walls of her chest as if it was trying to escape from what she was being made to face. She struggled to believe it, didn’t want to believe it. She even closed her eyes and replayed Angelo’s words inside her head in a silly, stupid, desperate attempt to find out where she had misunderstood what he’d said.

But there was no misunderstanding, Sonya’s next shrill claim made it too sickeningly clear. ‘You don’t want her! You don’t even like her that much!’

‘What I want and I what I am to have are two different issues.’

‘Money,’ Sonya sliced at him. ‘As if the Batistes haven’t got enough of it locked up in this place, you’re willing to marry a woman you have no feelings for just to lay your hands on the Gianni fortune! It’s disgusting. ‘

‘And none of your damn business,’ Angelo rasped.

‘While you can’t keep your hands off me, it’s my damn business.’

There was a groan—an agonised groan that brought Francesca’s eyelids flickering upwards to watch as Angelo pulled Sonya against him then buried his mouth in her throat. ‘I cannot get you out of my head,’ he muttered. ‘I close my eyes and all I see is you, naked, on top of me.’

‘When your little heiress is naked on top of you, will you close your eyes and think of me then?’

The vile taunt brought Angelo’s head up, set his hands moving in a tense, urgent, restless sweep over Sonya’s slippery blue satin dress. ‘Yes,’ he said thickly.

Francesca swayed, her whole world tilting sideways as if it was trying to tip her off. A pair of arms came around her from behind and covered her shivering arms where they still folded like clamps across her front. Long brown fingers closed over her icy fingers, a solid male torso became a supporting wall to her trembling back. A dark head lowered, a pair of lips came to rest on her ear.

‘Heard enough?’ Carlo asked in a soft, rough voice that scraped over her cold flesh like sand across silk.

She wasn’t even surprised that it was him who was holding her. In some mad, tortuous way it seemed fitting that he would be the one to witness this—as if the two of them had been building towards this devastating moment for days.

She was about to attempt a nod in answer to his question when Angelo uttered a thick groan and took fierce possession of Sonya’s lips. Sonya didn’t even try to stop him. The way they kissed, open-mouthed, deep and frantic, their two blond heads locked together. The way they touched, hands moving over each other in hot, tight, convulsive movements that stripped clean to the bone any lingering doubts she might have had that they’d done this many times before. A long, silken thigh was exposed to the hip bone, a small, pale breast was uncovered to receive the hungry clamp of Angelo’s mouth. It only took eyes to see that Sonya was wearing nothing at all beneath the skimpy scrap of silk. She’d come prepared for this, despite all the angry threats and protests she’d just uttered, she’d had no intention of missing out on the sex.

Sickened, Francesca began to shudder. Carlo responded with a swiftness that caught her breath. The soft hiss of his anger stung her icy, quivering face as he twisted her around then tugged her against him and held her there for a moment while she shivered and shook.

Then Angelo’s voice came, raw with pleasure. ‘Yes, do that again,’ he groaned.

For a horrible moment Francesca thought she was going to faint. Carlo Carlucci must have thought so too because the next thing she knew one of his arms had hit the backs of her knees and she was being lifted off the ground.

‘I’m all right,’ she choked.

His lips arrived at her ear again to utter the harsh rasp, ‘Be quiet or they will hear you.’

The very thought of that happening had her curling into him. He started moving, long, swift strides taking them the full length of that side of the villa. A stunning silence arrived as they turned the corner and it was only then Francesca realised that the whole ugly thing had taken place to a background of music and laughter filtering out from the house.

He kept on going further and further down this wing, which housed the more private apartments that were not being used for the party tonight. All the windows were shrouded in darkness, the only light coming from the hazed moon hanging in the night sky. He pulled to a stop beside yet another set of French doors. The villa was ringed with them; elegantly styled and evenly spaced, they gave every room on the ground floor its own access onto the wide terraces that flanked all four sides of the house.

She felt tensile muscles flex as he reached down to try a handle. A door slid open and he swung her inside. It was dark in here too, but she did manage to register that he’d brought her to Mr Batiste’s private study with its heavy, dark pieces of furniture that didn’t blend in with the rest of the house.

Then she was being dumped on a leather chair by the fireplace with logs neatly laid in the grate ready to light. Still shivering, she instantly wrapped her arms back round her body as Carlo moved to close the door they’d just used. She heard a key turn and quivered, though she didn’t know why she did. Then he was moving swiftly in the other direction and a second later another key turned in the door leading out to the hall.

‘Don’t,’ she said when she saw him raise a hand towards the light switch.

The hand dropped to his side and she tried to relax some of the screaming tension from her body. It didn’t happen. Too many muscles had locked and knotted and she’d never felt so cold in her entire life.

Still without comment he began to move again. He was nothing more than a shifting shadow in the darkness, and right now she was happy to keep him like that. She didn’t want to see his face—she didn’t want him to look into her own. She felt stripped and raped and bruised and battered.

This time she heard the chink of glass on glass.

Angelo and Sonya—Sonya and Angelo. Her eyes drifted shut as that dreadful little litany began playing itself over and over inside her head alongside frame-by-frame images of what she had just seen.

The open-mouthed kiss that devoured greedily, the slippery blue satin that was so willing to slide away from a silken thigh and hip. She heard the gasps, the groans of passionate agony, and felt sick to her stomach because all she’d ever got was quietly, calmly—briefly wrapped in a light-hearted affection, not the raging fires and animal lust.

What a perfectly choreographed act they’d put on for her benefit, she thought painfully. What a smooth blinding mask they’d pulled over her eyes as they snipped and sniped at each other the way that they had.

And what a sick—sick joke the two of them had been enjoying at her expense.

Humiliation poured through her bloodstream, the power of it grinding her bruised heart against her ribs. Dragging up her eyelids, she stared down at her dress. Angelo had not felt compelled to drag down this bodice and lay bare one of her breasts. He’d never once so much as stroked her thigh. The light touches she’d received that she’d believed were offered with love and tenderness and respect now became touches of idle contempt wrapped up in calculation and necessity.

He’d intended to marry her and take her to bed only when he had to do it and even then he was going to impose Sonya’s sylph-like image over her to help him get through the ordeal.

She quivered again, despising him for doing this to her—despising herself for being so gullible and blind.

A sound reached into her consciousness—people laughing as they walked past the closed study door. The party, she remembered. Her engagement party. Hers and Angelo’s.

The Gianni heiress and the fortune-hunter, she then thought bitterly.

But she was no heiress. There was no fortune to be had if she was. And she could not understand why Angelo could believe otherwise when she’d already told him the hard truth about her connection to the Gianni name.

‘Here, drink some of this…’

She hadn’t realised her eyes had closed again until she was forced to open them. The dark shadow was squatting in front of her, she realised, though she hadn’t noticed him arrive there. Only he wasn’t quite a dark shadow any more because her eyes had adjusted to the darkness. So she could see the way he was studying her narrowly, the way he was holding his mouth thin and flat. The bright white of his shirt stood out, casting reflected light along the grim set of his chiselled jaw bone as he placed the rim of a glass to her mouth. She sipped without protest. The brandy trickled across her tongue and she forced herself to swallow, leaving warm vapours behind in her mouth.

He sipped too. She watched with unblinking absorption as he lifted the glass away from her lips to place it against his own. His throat moved as he swallowed, shifting the butterfly collar to his shirt. He held the glass between long brown fingers while her own pale fingers still clutched at her arms, her nails scoring crescents into the icy bare skin.

‘H-how much did you overhear?’ she whispered unsteadily.

For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer, his mouth compressing. Then, ‘Most if it,’ he admitted, and rose to his full height.

She looked away from him—at the logs piled in the grate—on a sinking sense of dismay that robbed a bit more of her ravaged pride. This tall, dark, sophisticated man of Rome had stood there in the background witnessing the brutal murder of everything she cared about.

She felt stripped bare again and flayed this time.

‘Why were you out there?’ No one else had been out there—or at least she hoped no one else had been there!

The laughter came again, echoing around the marble hallway and sounding cruelly mocking to her oversensitised ears. It was then that a sudden thought hit that was so horrible it feathered her breathing. How many of those people out there knew the real motives behind Angelo’s engagement to her? Did they all know? Did all her friends know about Sonya’s affair with Angelo?

Had Carlo Carlucci known it all even before he stepped outside tonight? Her breath feathered again as she shifted her gaze back to his tense profile.

‘You weren’t there by accident, were you?’ she charged shakily. ‘You suspected that something was going to happen so you followed me outside then s-stood there like some—s-sleazy voyeur—’

His dark head turned to lance her an amused look. ‘You see me as sleazy?’

No, she didn’t, but… ‘Don’t laugh at me!’ she bit out painfully. ‘None of this is funny!’

‘You’re right.’ The laughter died. ‘It isn’t.’

The threat of tears came then. She dragged in a deep breath, fighting to stop them, fighting to keep her mind fixed on what had started her travelling along this thread. ‘H-how much of it did you know before you followed me?’

Without answering her he turned abruptly and walked away, disappearing back into the shadows at the other end of the room as if the darkness could save him from having to offer a reply.

But she needed to know. ‘How much?’ she launched shrilly after him.

‘All of it.’

The answer hit her like a blow. Her breasts heaved behind her crossed arms, and for a moment she felt dizzy again. Then she pulled herself together and asked the next wretched question burning a hole inside her head. ‘And—everyone else out there?’

She heard the fresh chink of glass on glass before the words came, felt the angry tension in him as he poured another drink. ‘Your true identity became an open secret within days of you meeting Angelo,’ he told her. ‘The fact that you were not announcing that you are the heiress to the huge Gianni fortune only helped to fuel the fires of intrigue and speculation as to why you wanted to play the ordinary working girl and keep your identity such a closed secret.’

‘I’m not the Gianni heiress,’ she denied. ‘There is no fortune to be had.’

He laughed like a cynic. ‘You are worth so much money, Francesca, cara, that the figure can make Rome’s wealthiest blanch.’

Which was all so much rubbish her brows snapped together. ‘Stupid rumour and speculation,’ she dismissed. ‘Bruno Gianni lives in a ruin. He has no money to leave to anyone, never mind a great-niece he won’t even see!’

‘Well, you’re right about Bruno’s money,’ Carlo drawled as he strode back into view. ‘But we’re not talking about Bruno Gianni’s money. We are talking about Rinaldo Gianni’s money. Your grandfather,’ he extended as if she needed that clarified, and bent to prise a set of cold fingers away from her arm so he could slot a fresh glass of brandy between them. ‘The fortune is his,’ he continued. ‘Rinaldo left everything to you. Bruno only lives in the palazzo at your behest because it, like everything else, belongs to you—or it will do when you marry,’ he then amended, ‘a man from a good Italian family, I think is near as damn it to the official working of his will. The lot to be held in a trust to be solely administered by his surviving brother until you comply. Angelo thought he’d hit gold when he seduced you into falling in love with him,’ he added. ‘He’s the real hero of the party tonight, cara. The man who pulled off the perfect coup.’

She was beginning to think she was dreaming all of this. ‘I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,’ she said.

‘I know.’ He used that laugh again. ‘And that is the real irony of it.’

He went to lean a shoulder against the mantel, pushed his hands into his trouser pockets then studied her ashen face as he continued.

‘While everyone else thinks you’re being intriguingly clever and infuriatingly devious, you are merely oblivious to it all. It took me weeks to suss you out,’ he confessed as if that was some kind of shock in itself. ‘You are not pretending to be the wide-eyed and beautiful, naïve innocent—you are her. And Bruno Gianni has a lot to answer for—which he will do when I get my hands round his wicked old throat.’

‘You won’t go near my uncle Bruno,’ she muttered dimly, feeling swamped by words that didn’t make any sense.

‘What—protecting the hand that robs you, Francesca?’ he mocked. ‘What were you—ten years old when your grandfather died? For the last fourteen years he’s been sitting on your inheritance and probably praying that you never show your face in Rome.’

‘Stop it,’ she jerked out. ‘There’s just been a dreadful misunderstanding, that’s all!’ she cried. ‘Angelo knows the truth. He knows I’m—’

His hiss of impatience snapped her lips shut. ‘Get real, Francesca,’ he derided. ‘You heard what that mercenary bastard said out there! To start trying to defend him is bloody pathetic! He wants your money,’ he lanced down at her. ‘He needs your money! Get that into your lovesick head and deal with it!’

He was angry—why was he angry? That was her prerogative! She was the one being used and abused and talked about as if she was some kind of juicy commodity!

‘There is no money!’ She launched herself to her feet to spit the denial at him. ‘And what makes you any better than Angelo when you actually believe all that stuff you just threw at me?’

There was a glinting flash behind narrowed eyelids, a glimpse of angry white teeth. A hand snaked out and she released a choked cry as he clamped his fingers round her wrist.

‘Don’t compare me with Batiste—ever,’ he bit out from between those white teeth.

‘I w-wasn’t…’ The confused words disintegrated when she began trembling all over again, shocked by the sudden eruption of violence in him. His dark face had changed out of all recognition, the clenched bones, the narrowed eyes glinting with a danger she could actually taste. Her heart was pounding, her wrist hurting where he held it in a vice-like grip.

He hated Angelo, she realised—despised him with a ferocity that had turned him primitive.

She tugged at her wrist. He held it fast. The next thing she was drawing in a sharp breath when the other hand came up. She thought he was going to slap her. Her eyes widened as the cold sweat of fear broke out on her skin. ‘No…’ she husked.

And was dragged even deeper into the mud of confusion when he began carefully easing the brandy glass she had forgotten she was holding out of her clenched fingers and she realised with new horror that it was aimed to empty its contents into his face.

Not just his violence but her violence. Her head began to swim. She wasn’t a violent person, so how had she reached the point of wanting to throw brandy into someone’s face?

The glass was removed. The wrist released. She took it in her other hand and began absently rubbing it while her insides were so shaken up she had the hysterical impression she was going to fall into little pieces any minute.

‘There is no money,’ she repeated, trying desperately to cling to this one safe thread.

The hard angles in his face didn’t soften, the eyes still glittered in the chiselled set of his face. And his voice when it came was like cold steel slicing through silk. ‘Whether there is or there isn’t money, is not actually the important issue—not when you manage to remember what your friend and Batiste were doing out there, that is…’

And just like that she was devastated, the steel-like thrust of his point cutting right to the core of everything because she had been concentrating on the money thing instead of what really mattered here.

She’d been used and betrayed by two people she loved most. Duped like a fool because she’d been too blinded by trust to see what was happening beneath her nose.

It all came crashing down again, coiling like a tight band around her aching chest, and fresh tears began to build in her throat.

The rows, the passion it required to generate so much hostility. Sonya’s guilty looks, the lies that had tripped so defiantly from her tongue. Money had nothing to do with Sonya’s part in her betrayal. She’d just wanted Angelo with a fever that had raged out of control. So she’d had him, because the wanting had been more powerful than her loyalty to a close friend!

And the money had nothing to do with the sexual part of Angelo’s betrayal because he must have known he was putting everything at risk when he gave in to his desire for Sonya. For who else was more likely to confess all in a fit of conscience than the closest friend to his future wife?

His future wife. The one he would take to bed only when he had to.

Oh, dear God… ‘I’ve got to get away from here,’ she whispered on a sudden burst of panic and reeled away to take a couple of shaky steps towards the terrace doors.

Everything happened so fast then that she was thrown into shock. There was a muttered curse followed by two hands arriving at her waist and she was being lifted bodily off the floor, turned and dumped unceremoniously back to the floor then clamped to a hard male chest.

‘What are you—?’

‘Shut up,’ he ground out furiously. ‘Someone is coming.’

And she froze like a statue as she heard the sound of Angelo’s voice calling her name from the terrace just outside their door. The door handle rattled. Her heart withered in her chest and her fingers went up to clutch at the lapels to Carlo Carlucci’s dinner jacket.

‘I don’t want to see him,’ she choked. And she didn’t. She never wanted to set eyes on Angelo again!

‘I locked the door,’ his grim voice reminded her.

‘He will see us through the glass.’ She moved even closer to his superior framework as if trying to blend right into him.

His arms accommodated her, a hand gently curving round her slender nape, the other splaying across the low part of her back. ‘He can’t see you,’ he murmured in husky reassurance. ‘It’s dark in here. I am wearing black and my back is to the window. If he sees anything it will be the dark outline of one of his male guests enjoying a snatched moment in his father’s study with one of his female guests.’

‘M-me,’ she pointed out.

There was a short silence. Then he said cynically, ‘Did you tell him about our two meetings, cara? How very loyal of you.’

The cold taunt brought her eyes up to clash with his. The guilty flush that mounted her cheeks said all she needed to say.

‘Well—well,’ he murmured. ‘It seems to me that your whole life is built on dangerous secrets, mi amore.’

‘I don’t have any secrets,’ she snapped. ‘And there was nothing dangerous about our two brief meetings!’ she added, frowning at the sudden quickening she felt in her pulse.

‘Liar,’ he drawled. ‘We connected sexually. I don’t know how you kept your hands off me.’

‘How did you ever get to be so arrogant?’ she gasped, staring at him.

‘It took practice,’ he replied, and the weird thing about this conversation was that it was so deadly serious without a hint of mockery to be heard! In fact she could see that frightening anger simmering in his eyes. ‘You want to be thankful that I am attracted to you or you would be languishing somewhere in the Batiste garden, slowly dying from a broken heart by now.’

It was like being kicked when she was already lying in a battered heap on the ground. On a stifled choke she went to step away from him. Once again he showed his superior strength to keep her still.

‘I hate you,’ she choked.

He didn’t bother to answer. She could feel the strength in his fingers where they pressed into her lower back and the very disturbing presence of his thumbs slowly circling against her stomach wall. Tiny senses began to stir in places she didn’t want them to, low in her abdomen and in the tips of her breasts. It was mad; the whole crazy evening was turning her quietly insane. She hardly knew him, she certainly didn’t like him yet here she was, standing in his arms, letting him tell her that she fancied going to bed with him!

The door handle rattled again. ‘Who is in there?’ Angelo’s glass-muffled voice questioned impatiently.

‘Persistent devil,’ Carlo said. ‘Perhaps we should give him a taste of his own medicine.’

Alarm stiffened her backbone. ‘No!’ was all she could get out before he lowered his dark head.

It was the sheer, heart-stopping shock of it that held her immobile, the unfamiliar touch of his mouth against hers. He was taller than Angelo, darker than Angelo, harder and stronger and more forceful than Angelo had ever been with her. Her startled lips were ruthlessly parted, and his tongue darted through the gap. A tight rush of sensation shot from her mouth to her breasts to low in her abdomen then poured like quicksilver down her legs.

She had never experienced anything like it. A shocked, disorientated whimper clawed at her throat as she was suddenly flung into alien territory, the heat, the intrusion, the flagrant intimacy of that invading tongue exploring the inner tissue of her mouth trapping her inside butterfly tremors of bemused response.

He pulled his head back, glinting her a dark-eyed puzzled frown, saw her wide-eyed startlement, the revealingly shocked tremor of her lips. ‘Did Angelo sexually starve you into submission?’ he uttered with an oddly strained laugh.

She just continued to stare at him, too befuddled to take in the question, and his eyes took on a hard light. He hissed something unrepeatable about Angelo then lowered his head again to return to where he’d left off. Only this time with more heat, more sensual purpose, and his hands joined in, lifting and crushing her into closer contact with his body and holding her there while he ravaged her mouth. She felt the burgeoning power of his passion pressing against her then her own body responded as that place between her thighs began to pulse then grow damp. Sensation was slithering everywhere, in her bloodstream, coiling round muscles to make them writhe into greater contact.

It was shocking, so basic and—and physical! Her crushed breasts swelling and stinging painfully as her nipples grew tight.

The door handle rattled. She jerked her head back against his restraining hand and their lips parted with a disconcerting pop. Electric wires had been attached to every extremity. She was breathless yet panting. Her tongue and lips felt swollen and hot. He was staring down at her with glinting black fixed eyes and a perfect stillness, his expression peculiarly…

She didn’t know what his face was telling her. She only knew she’d just been somewhere very perilous and that she did not like it—but she did.

Sex, she called it. Lust said it better. She’d been kissed with hot and driving passion for the first time in her life by a man who was very good at it.

Heat hit her pale cheeks. She dragged her eyes away from him and became aware of the way the flat of her hands braced painfully against the solid wall of chest. Everything about him was solid, his shoulders, his arms, the bowl of his hips where she could feel the solid column of his—

‘Let me go,’ she demanded hazily.

He did the opposite, pressing her closer then lowering his head again to flick his tongue across her burning lips. She almost detonated on a ball of hot static. A helpless cry keened in her throat.

Footsteps sounded as Angelo moved away from the window, bringing Carlo alive with a jolt. His eyes lost that frightening expression, his brows pushing together on a frown. His grip on her tightened and Francesca found herself being lifted again, swung around then unceremoniously dumped in the chair she had used before.

The wretched brandy glass was slotted back between her fingers. ‘Drink it this time,’ she was tersely instructed as he turned away.

‘I’m dizzy enough,’ she thought and didn’t realise she’d said it out loud until his grim response came back.

‘Think how you’re going to feel in about five minutes. Because that is how long it will take Angelo to walk through the other door.’

Feeling as if she’d been tossed from a storm into a maelstrom, she stared at the solid wooden door which lead out to the main hallway as if it were some brooding dark monster. ‘You locked it,’ she breathed shakily.

He was already striding over there. To her utter consternation he turned the key to unlock the door.

‘What did you do that for?’ she cried out in protest.

Ignoring her, he reached up to flick the light switch next. It was like being bombarded with hot shards of glass. She screwed her eyes shut on a shrill little whimper of agony then dragged them open again almost immediately because she needed to know what he was going to do next. He was already halfway back across the room and bending down to pick something up off the floor. She’d never seen such a change in anyone. His energy levels had shot from virtually somnolent to the other extreme.

The black dinner suit barely rippled as he straightened up again, the butterfly collar to his white dress shirt still looked as crisp as it probably had when he’d first put it on. His skin wore a warm olive sheen and his satiny black hair had the merest hint of a wave that she hadn’t noticed before. His head was bent slightly, eyes hooded, those thick lashes hovering a breath away from his chiselled cheekbones. He was breathtakingly attractive and his mouth wore the bloom of their recent kiss.

Fire pooled between her thighs again and she wrenched her eyes away from him. Everything about him was suddenly so physical, so—sexual!

Oh, dear, she groaned inwardly. What’s happening to me?

Lifting up the glass, she took a large gulp at the brandy. Why not get drunk? she decided wildly. It had to be a better option to feeling like this.

He arrived in front of her, making her jump nervously when he bent to use one hand to take the glass from her so he could take his turn with the drink, while the other hand pulled her to her feet. She felt like a puppet—this man’s puppet! He kept pulling and pushing her, picking her up, putting her down and kissing her.

Oh, dear, she thought again as her insides went haywire. ‘No,’ she husked in muffled protest.

‘No what?’ he asked, discarding the glass.

But she’d already forgotten what when he proceeded to hook long fingers beneath the lip of her bodice as if he had every right to touch her like this!

‘What are you doing?’ she choked out in protest as she felt the smooth backs of his nails stroke her flesh.

His answer was a demonstration. Coolly and very proficiently he gave a tug that resettled the dark fabric across the thrust of her breasts. Glancing down, she gave a gasp of horror when she realised how close she must have been to revealing too much flesh.

Like Sonya.

Like Sonya… Her eyes closed on the next dizzying wave to hit her as reality came crashing back.

He moved his attention elsewhere then, throwing her into a deeper state of confusion when he proceeded to tidy her tumbled hair. She hadn’t even realised the knot had come undone.

‘Now listen,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got much time for this so you are going to have to make some quick decisions as to what happens next,’ he said quietly, deciding to organise her wrecked life for her now, she noted dully.

‘Lock the door again.’ That was a decision.

She watched as his mouth compressed. ‘The way I see it, you have several choices. You can turn a blind eye to what you saw and continue with tonight as if nothing has happened…’ She winced at the word blind. ‘Or you can brave it out and go out there of your own volition to announce that you’re calling off the engagement and why you are.’

Either way she looked the fool. ‘Great choices,’ she muttered.

‘I haven’t finished yet,’ he chided. ‘If you really feel you can’t bear to face him then we can leave through the French windows right now, before he gets here, climb into my car and just disappear.’

She glared at his chest and grimly added coward to fool and shrew.

He was using her hair comb to tame the thick silken swathe into some semblance of tidiness, surprising her with the efficiency he used to secure her hair in yet another neat twist. And her scalp was beginning to tingle—with pleasure. She couldn’t bear it. It was all just too much.

‘Please stop it, Carlo,’ she breathed out anxiously.

‘You do know my name, then,’ he said lightly and she lifted her eyelids to show him dark pools of agony.

‘Please lock the door again,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m not ready to cope with him!’

His fingers dropped to cup her shoulders, his eyes suddenly sober and dark. ‘It is midnight, Francesca,’ he informed her very gently.

Midnight. The witching hour. The time her engagement to Angelo was to be formally announced. Her gaze flicked the room as if a hundred glossy people were already standing here watching and waiting to bear witness as Angelo claimed his mighty prize.

She shuddered in dismay as the full weight of his betrayal returned like a flood. The hands on her shoulders moved in reflex response. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said brusquely. ‘He doesn’t deserve your tears.’

She knew that, but it didn’t stop what was beginning to break up inside. ‘What am I going to do?’ she whispered tragically.

His hands moved again, coming to frame her face so he could tilt it up to receive his next warm kiss. When she responded with a small sob he caught the sound with the lick of his tongue. Each stifled sob after it was gently robbed from her; in between he placed words, low, dark, seductive words that made her want to cling.

‘Leave it to me,’ he said. ‘I will deal with it. Trust me to get you through this.’

‘But why should you want to?’ she asked, realising it was a question she should have asked a whole lot sooner than this. ‘Why should it interest you at all?’

His answering smile was the cynical one. ‘Come on, Francesca, the answer to that one must be perfectly clear,’ he mocked as he moved one of his long thumbs to send it on a sweep of her now pulsing not quivering mouth. ‘I want you for myself,’ he told her grimly. ‘Therefore I will do what it takes to get you.’

Then he was lowering his mouth again to show how much he wanted her with yet another full-blooded mind-blowing kiss.

Everything he did now was laced with intimacy. Every touch, every look, every small gesture was staking claim. And the worst of it was that she let him. She felt so vulnerable and weak and drawn to his passion that she had a terrible suspicion he could spread her out on the desk across the room and have his way with her and she wouldn’t try to stop him.

It was a dreadful admission. It shocked and appalled her but didn’t make her pull away from him. Where was her pride, her dignity?

Not where her mouth was anyway. It clung and encouraged, like her fingers where they lifted and clung to his nape, smoothing, stroking, and her hips as they arched into the masculine bowl of his. And the whole hot, sensuous embrace was so slow and deep and intoxicatingly rousing, she moved with it, soaked in it, and didn’t even hear the door flying open until a stunned voice rasped, ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’

CHAPTER FIVE

SHOCK wired her up to a live cable. She felt its electric fingers frisson her skin. On a choked gasp she tried to break free but Carlo was in no hurry to let that happen. He took his time easing the kiss, lingering long enough for Angelo to be in no doubt as to what he was witnessing here.

‘As you can see, a great deal is going on,’ he then murmured with smooth, slick—diabolical composure. And he said it without moving his eyes from Francesca’s hot, kissed-hazed, dismayed face. He even dared to compound on his statement by shaping yet another warm, excruciatingly possessive kiss to her gaping mouth.

‘Leave her alone!’ Angelo bit out hoarsely. ‘Francesca—come over here. I can’t believe that you are doing this with him while everyone out there is waiting for our announcement!’

That last part really said it all, Francesca thought heavily. For here she stood, caught red-handedly wrapped in a passionate embrace with another man, and all Angelo could think about was getting his ring on her finger.

My God, that hurt.

‘There will be no announcement,’ Carlo declared smoothly. ‘Francesca doesn’t want you any more. You are out, amico, and I am in. You may announce that if you wish.’

It was an unbelievably cut-throat, throwaway comment, and Francesca could only stare up at the smooth, challenging face.

‘I told you I would deal with it,’ Carlo reminded her gently then placed a finger beneath her chin and calmly shut her still gaping mouth.

Angelo seemed incapable of saying anything. She could feel his confusion, his blank, bubbling bewilderment. She turned her head to look at him. He was standing two strides into the room with the door swinging wide open so he was framed by glaring white marble from the hall beyond. People were milling about, moving to or from one of the many rooms that had been opened up for tonight’s party. Some halted and stared when they saw the little trio standing in Alessandro Batiste’s study, making her aware suddenly of other things like the way her slender arms were still coiled around Carlo’s neck and the front of her body resting intimately against his.

Culpable heat flooded up her throat and into her cheeks. ‘Close the door,’ she breathed on a stifled whisper.

Angelo’s blue eyes flared to life and he spun about to see for himself the way they were being stared at. His arm shot out and the door slammed into its housing then he was twisting back to them again to pin her with a furious look.

‘Explain to me what the hell you think you are doing with him,’ he gritted.

It was like looking at a complete stranger. Nothing about him was familiar to her any more. His smooth golden features that had once looked beautiful to her now looked hard and selfish. The glitter in his eyes one of mercenary greed not tender possessiveness. How could she have missed all of that? she wondered painfully. Everything about him, from the contrived streaks in his tawny blond hair to the angrily petulant curl to his mouth, bore no resemblance to the man she’d thought she loved. An ache throbbed in her stomach; she had never felt so deceived—by herself. Blinded by smooth, deliberate lies and a pitiable desire to be loved.

A pair of hands slid around her waist. She looked back at Carlo and saw hardness and toughness and a strength of will in his face that promised to devour her if she let it. But she also saw truth. He was hiding nothing, pretending nothing.I want you, he’d said, nothing more—nothing less than that. But at least it was honest.

‘Tell him, cara,’ he prompted softly.

Her breasts heaved on a tense little breath and she looked back at Angelo. ‘I’m not going to marry you,’ she announced obediently then was shocked by how easily the words came out. ‘You don’t love me. You never even tried to.’

Then she looked back at Carlo. He didn’t love her but at least he didn’t say that he did. He kissed her gently. Maybe he could sense the aching threat of tears still working in her throat.

‘Will you stop kissing her like that?’ Angelo rasped out. ‘Francesca—amore,’ he pleaded huskily, ‘of course I love you. How could you think I do not?’

A picture of an all-consuming open-mouthed kiss and an urgent hand sliding blue silk away from a slender thigh closed her eyes on a wave of thick anguish. She heard the sound of shrill words declaring, You don’t want her! You don’t even like her that much! echoing their bitter poison into her head.

‘Listen,’ Angelo planted into the swirling mists of that fading image, ‘if this is a case of pre-engagement panic, Francesca, I can understand that. Come to me,’ he urged. ‘We will go somewhere private so we can talk about it…’

He was very good, Francesca acknowledged and even felt herself start to tremble inside because she was hearing that other Angelo again, the quiet and tender one she’d fallen in love with. Maybe they should discuss this without a third-party witness. Maybe she—

‘Careful, amore,’ a soft voice cautioned. ‘Seduction can take many formats.’

He was right. She was being seduced by Angelo’s tender charm again. How easy she must have made it all for him, she thought with a self-deprecating dismay that sent her swaying closer to this tall, dark man who was her only truly honest support right now because she certainly could not rely on herself!

Her mouth accidentally brushed the cleft in his chin, sending tight tingles of awareness skittering across her skin. She sucked in a soft gasp, shocked at how sensitised she had become to everything about him. His voice, his touch, she could even taste him—drew greedily on his subtle male scent.

Anger roared at her from across the room.’ Puttana!’

She blinked, too dazed and disorientated by what she was feeling to really take the retort in, and she turned her head to find herself facing a man pulsing with biting contempt for her. The change from bewildered and pleading lover to this was startling. Golden eyes were flashing silver steel. A dark flush had mounted his skin. His teeth were showing, bared as if he were a riled wolf preparing to pounce.

Carlo had turned his head also. In the throes of all of this hostility it struck her that it was the first time he had bothered to look at Angelo. ‘Be very careful whom you insult,’ he warned with a soft-voiced snarl. ‘Or I might decide to bring your house tumbling down like the flimsy pack of cards it is.’

And Francesca’s skin began to prickle because if Angelo was a wolf then he was a mere puppy compared to this very dangerous man. Seeming to recognise that, Angelo instantly backed down, an unsteady sigh hissing from his lips as he ran a shaking set of fingers through his hair. He was floundering in a brain-numbing state of shock, she saw, and knew exactly what it felt like.

‘But she can’t to do this to me,’ Angelo groaned out unsteadily.

‘She can and she is.’ It was so cold and brutal that she shivered, bringing his attention back to her again. Long fingers gently crushed silk chiffon against the sensitive skin at her waist as he lowered his head to brush his lips across the frown-creased bridge of her nose.

There was a sound of disgust as Angelo threw his back to them.

The door flew open. ‘Angelo—Francesca, what are you doing in here? Your guests are …’

The words were cut off when she saw Carlo, her eyelashes flickering when she took in the scene. Angelina Batiste was blond and golden like Angelo but unlike Angelo it didn’t take her more than a few seconds to understand what was really happening here and her face became a perfectly blank page.

‘Leave us, Madre,’ Angelo bit at her. ‘I am dealing with this.’

But his mother was not going to leave. She was too busy seeing a terrible scandal staring her in the face and surprised everyone by turning on her son.

‘What have you done?’ she demanded accusingly.

‘I’ve done nothing,’ he growled, sounding like the puppy wolf again. ‘Look to them for your culprits.’ He tossed a hand out. ‘The way they cannot stop kissing each other speaks for itself.’

‘At least we do it with a lot more finesse than you were using on Francesca’s flatmate, amico. And we sought privacy, not the garden, where anyone who wanted to could view your technique…’

Francesca closed her eyes as the world swayed at this next stark revelation. For a moment she thought she was going to faint. Angelina Batiste almost choked on the shocked gasp that rose in her throat.

Opening her eyes again, she saw Angelo had spun round to stare at them. He looked shattered. He’d had the high ground ripped from beneath him by a man with a lethal penchant for ruthlessness. It left him with no argument to pursue, nothing for him to say in his own defence.

He tried though, eyelashes flickering as he moved his stunned eyes to his mother’s shock-whitened face then on to look at Francesca. ‘Cara…’ he murmured in a huskily pleading, unsteady tone. ‘For goodness’ sake, don’t listen to him. What he’s implying isn’t true.’

‘Perhaps I should have explained that we both observed your lack of finesse,’ Carlo inserted.

Angelo went white then an angry red. ‘Bastardo! Shut up!’ he launched at Carlo. ‘This has nothing to do with you!’

His mother jumped. Francesca blinked. Angelo took a step towards her. ‘Listen to me,’ he said urgently. ‘What you saw tonight was a moment of madness. Your friend—she threw herself at me. She—’

A shrill gasp came from the doorway. None of them had noticed that it had been left open when Mrs Batiste came into the room. Angelo swung round—they all swivelled their eyes to find Sonya standing there with her beautiful face a study of icy anger and burning guilt.

‘You lying son of a bitch,’ she hissed at Angelo, causing his mother to stiffen in personal offence. ‘We’ve been sleeping together for weeks!’

He was being attacked from all angles. He responded to that with violence. One of his arms came up and for a horrible second Francesca thought he was going to slap Sonya’s face. His mother must have thought so too because she darted forward and in a mad scramble she took hold of Sonya’s arm and hustled her from the room. Angelo’s arm diverted to grab the door. It slammed into its housing again.

Silent hit. Singing in the turbulent atmosphere. Francesca was trembling so badly that her teeth were chattering. She tried to clench them into stillness but they just rattled inside her shocked head.

Carlo’s arms folded right around her. ‘It’s OK,’ he said then repeated it soothingly. ‘It’s OK…’

But it wasn’t OK. His voice might be calm but the rest of him wasn’t. Every muscle was clenched, pumped up and ready for whatever Angelo’s anger made him do next.

What Angelo did was swing back to face them, and his face was hard now, locked in a mould of anger and contempt. ‘Let’s cut to the chase,’ he thrust out at Francesca. ‘Looking at this little scene I interrupted, you have been behaving no better than me. So let us stop this foolishness. Come over here, Francesca,’ he commanded but she noticed he didn’t attempt to come and get her. ‘We can talk about this later but for now we have an engagement to announce.’

He just didn’t get it—or refused to get it. ‘Don’t you understand? It’s over between us.’

‘Because you think he is a better bet than me?’ he sliced. ‘Don’t delude yourself. He doesn’t want you. He’s toying with you, cara, just for the hell of it and to get his revenge on me. Look at yourself then look at the women he usually has hanging on his arm. What do you have to compete with them?’

The cruel words flayed her already battered ego. And the contempt in his eyes flayed it some more. He might be lashing out at her in anger, but to hear and to see how much this man she’d believed loved her only an hour before actually openly disliked her was the worst blow of all.

But he was also right. A man like Carlo Carlucci had his pick where beautiful women were concerned. What could he possibly see in her?

‘Don’t listen,’ Carlo advised in a roughened undertone. ‘He wants to draw blood to salve his wounded pride.’

‘He’s after your money, cara.’ Angelo fed her more poison. ‘Don’t kid yourself that his attention means anything more than that.’

The money. She winced. It had to come down to the wretched non-existent money. ‘There isn’t any money,’ she sighed.

He sent her a cynically disbelieving look.

‘I’m telling you the truth,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve always told you the truth about the money,’ she added because that was just another hurt she was having to deal with—the knowledge that he’d smiled all of those careless smiles about her Gianni connection and had been scoffing at her at the same time. ‘There never has been a Gianni fortune languishing in a bank vault somewhere, waiting for me to marry before I make my claim. Whoever started that silly rumour must be rolling on the floor laughing at you by now, Angelo, because my grandfather died virtually penniless, having spent years squandering his wealth on bad investment after bad investment.’ She told it more or less exactly as her great-uncle Bruno had told it to her. ‘What you see at the Palazzo Gianni is basically all that’s left.’

‘You’re lying,’ he said, ‘to punish me.’

‘Punish you?’ Her chin lifted, dusky eyebrows arching above clear hazel eyes. ‘If I wanted to punish you I would be walking out of here without telling you a word of this, knowing I’d left you really festering on your loss.’

His blue eyes flicked a look at the man standing behind her. Whatever he saw in Carlo’s face drained the gold out of his skin. ‘You believe her,’ he breathed.

‘I couldn’t care less if she comes dressed in rags and dragging a mountain of debts along with her so long as she does come to me,’ he answered. ‘And that,’ Carlo added succinctly ‘is the marked difference as to why you are standing where you are right now and I am standing right here…’

You had your chance and blew it, in other words. Carlo might have well said those words the way all the anger drained out of Angelo and he sank into a nearby chair then buried his face in his hands.

‘What am I going to tell everyone out there?’ he groaned.

Francesca could have felt a pang of sympathy for him—until he said that. Selfish to the last, he was still thinking about his own situation and wasn’t showing a hint of guilt or shame for the one he’d put her in.

‘Tell them the truth about your little heiress that isn’t,’ Carlo suggested. ‘But if you can’t bring yourself to do that only to be laughed at then tell them your betrothed jilted you in favour of Carlo Carlucci. At least that should win you the sympathy vote.’

Once again he was revealing his ruthlessly cutting edge. Francesca shivered as she acknowledged it. The hands at her waist tightened their grip. ‘Are you ready to leave now?’ He used that same edge on her next.

She hovered over giving an answer, aware that she could well be making the second biggest mistake in her life by going anywhere with him. He was ruthless to the core, easily as selfish as Angelo. And she was also aware that all that stuff about taking her in rags had been a slick cover-up to what he really believed about the Gianni fortune.

But was Carlo willing to sacrifice his freedom for it? No, the answer came back. He had too much pride in himself, too much inner strength. And he hadn’t offered to marry her in Angelo’s place, she reminded herself quickly. Just to get her away from here and maybe indulge in some hot sex before they parted again.

The kind of sex she’d never felt even mildly tempted to experience until she came into contact with him. That made him dangerous. She’d always known he was dangerous. Say no, she told herself. Do yourself a favour and go out there, find your friends and let them take you safely away from here before you drop yourself into even deeper trouble than you are already in!

‘Stop thinking so much,’ he rasped suddenly. ‘You’re no good at it right now.’

She flinched at the angry flick of his voice. He could feel her hovering indecision—feel the uncertain flutter of her heart beneath the hand he had slid up the wall of her stomach and had settled beneath the curve of her left breast. A thumb dared to move in a single light stroke against its sensitive underside and she responded with a stifled gasp.

Angelo lifted his face out of his hands, picking up the tension in the atmosphere like an animal sniffing sexual scent. ‘How long have you two been two-timing me?’ he demanded harshly.

It was so much like the pot calling the kettle black that she stared at him, a bubble of hysterical laughter threatening to burst in her throat.

‘Not quite as long as your affair with the flatmate but long enough to know what we want.’ It was Carlo who answered. He was so good at this lying business, she thought anxiously. How could she be considering putting her trust in him?

He surprised her then by lifting his hands to her shoulders, the fingers threatening to bite. She dragged her eyes away from Angelo to look into this other, darker face. He was angry, she saw. His eyes were a glitter, his mouth compressed into a grim line—not kissable, definitely not kissable right now.

‘Do we leave quietly by the back way or are you up to running the gauntlet out there so you can pack your bag?’

It was both a question and a hard warning. He’d put his pride on the line here and now she was threatening to make him look a fool by wavering over going with him.

‘How old are you?’ she asked out of nowhere.

‘Old enough to have grown out of playing games,’ he said. Then he kissed her, and she learned that angry or not that mouth was indeed very kissable, hard and demanding and searingly hot—

‘This is sickening.’ On that muffled choke Angelo got to his feet and lurched towards the door.

‘Stay where you are, amico,’ Carlo lifted his head to toss after him. ‘We still have things left to say to each other.’

Angelo froze. So did Francesca. What did they have left to say? Her skin began to prickle. She didn’t like the new dark look in his eyes. ‘Don’t you dare discuss me with him!’ she warned tautly.

‘Frightened he might give your most intimate secrets away?’

She gasped, ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, then on a growl of impatience lowered his mouth to her ear. ‘Stop looking at him as if he’s your preferred option.’

She jerked her head back to stare at him. ‘But I wasn’t—’

‘Do we go by the back or the front?’ he cut over her.

It was decision time, Francesca realised. Did she go with him or did she not? In the end it was pride that made the choice for her. What bit she had left of it was not going to let her kill it by taking the coward’s way out.

So, ‘The front,’ she replied and wondered straight away if there was insanity in her family because, pride or not, she had to be crazy to want to go anywhere with him.

Some of the anger seeped out of him. He nodded his dark head then actually smiled. ‘Brave girl,’ he murmured and even kissed her for it before taking hold of her arm to lead her to the door.

He had to step around Angelo to open it for her and he did it with a smooth shift of his body that blocked the other man off from her behind the width of his wide shoulders and ignored his presence at the same time.

Ruthless, she repeated inwardly, and shivered and knew she didn’t feel brave at all. The door swung open. Heaving in a deep breath, she clutched her hands into two tight fists by her sides then lifted her chin and took that first mammoth step over the threshold.

The first thing she noticed was the lack of music, then the small clutches of people dotted around the vast hall. There was a sudden drop in the hum of conversation as all faces were turned her way. What they thought they knew as fact about what was going on here and what was pure speculation was impossible to judge. That depended on which story had made the biggest impression—the one where some of them had witnessed her standing in Carlo’s arms or the one where Sonya had spat out the truth about her affair with Angelo.

Her stomach muscles knotted, her throat ran sandpaper-dry. Behind her she could feel Carlo standing in the doorway as he took in their audience.

‘Ten minutes long enough?’ she heard him say quietly.

She swallowed and nodded, her cheeks feeling as if they would never cool down again.

‘I will be here.’

It was a promise, issued loud enough for everyone to hear it. And, dangerous man or not, it was a promise she needed to hear right now.

Then she was drawing herself up, lifting her chin that bit higher and walking on legs that did not really want to support her towards the wide and sweeping marble staircase without allowing herself to make eye contact with anyone. She might not know if their expressions were vilifying her for being caught red-handed in another man’s arms or if they were feeling sorry for her because she’d found out the truth about Angelo and her best friend, but one thing was certain—they would be leaning one way or the other.

It really was like walking the gauntlet. By the time she hit the stairs the low hum of conversation had begun to gather pace again. From the corner of her eye she could see Carlo’s tall, dark figure still standing by the study door. No sign of Angelo. He was doing what she had been doing earlier and hiding away while he got himself together enough to face the madding crowd, or should that be buzzing crowd? she thought as she kept herself moving at a steady pace even though she wanted to run.

About halfway up, where the stairs swept around the great central chandelier, she dared to take a final peek down and saw that Angelo’s parents were being ushered into the study by a grim-faced Carlo. He still didn’t move from his firm stance at the door, though, watching her all the way.

Standing guard.

By the time she reached the sanctuary of her room she was almost expiring beneath the stress of it all. Closing the door behind her, she then leant back against it and closed her eyes in relief. She was trembling all over. Stupid hot tears were pricking at her eyes. She was suffering the shock and humiliation from what she had seen and overheard in the garden, she acknowledged. Was desperately confused by her own behaviour with Carlo afterwards and even more shocked by his passionately possessive behaviour towards her.

Now she was leaning here feeling frightened for the future and had the worrying suspicion that she had just committed herself to a torrid affair with the last man on earth any ordinary, sensible woman would want to become tangled up with.

Ordinary, sensible, boring, undesirable to the point where the man you intended to marry needed to supplement his passions with a real woman—a woman he’d also intended to fantasise about when he did get around to making love to her.

‘Francesca…?’ a wary voice murmured as if it was shooting straight out of her last bitter thought. ‘Are you all right?’

She opened her eyes to see Sonya perched tensely on the end of her bed. Blue eyes big, face pale, lush mouth quivering in anxious appeal. Her heart sank like a lead weight to her stomach. ‘Much you care,’ she replied.

‘I do care.’ Sonya scrambled off the bed and began walking towards her. ‘Why do you think I’ve been sitting here waiting for you? I needed to apologise and explain. You have to—’

‘It doesn’t need explaining,’ Francesca cut in. ‘I know what I saw, cara.’

The sarcastically spoken endearment earned itself a painful wince. ‘I know that—don’t you think I don’t know that?’

Did she honestly think Francesca cared? Pushing herself away from the door, she moved at an angle that gave her the widest route around her so-called friend. Her feet took her towards the walk-in wardrobe. Sonya followed, trailing sullenly behind her.

‘I need to explain to you why it happened,’ she said pleadingly. ‘You don’t know the real Angelo, Francesca. He’s selfish and sly. He puts on a special act for you but—’

‘Not any more he doesn’t.’

‘No,’ Sonya huskily conceded and watched as Francesca located her suitcase from where she’d stashed it just inside the room then knelt with it on the floor so she could unzip it. She had been intending to change her clothes for something more appropriate before leaving this room again but now all she wanted to do was pack her things and get out.

‘You’re leaving?’ Sonya asked as if it was some huge surprise.

‘What do you think?’ It was enough to make her let loose with a strangled laugh.

She glanced up at her once closest friend to find her propping up the doorway with her arms folded defensively and looking all guilty and pale.

But she was still wearing that wretched blue satin dress, she noticed. ‘You disgust me,’ she said and looked away again, angry fingers unzipping the suitcase.

‘I know,’ Sonya surprised her by agreeing. ‘I disgust myself. You know how much I hate him! I’ve never tried to make a secret of it but…’

They were back to the but Francesca didn’t want to listen to. ‘So how come you went out of your way to introduce this man you hate to your best friend?’

‘What?’ Sonya blinked her long lashes at her.

Francesca felt like slapping her face. Instead she got to her feet to go tugging clothes off hangers. ‘You were living here in Rome for a whole six months before I came to join you,’ she expanded, tossing clothes haphazardly down into the case. ‘Your friends became my friends. You even got me my job! So how come I got no warning about the real character of this man you say you hate? How come you introduced me to him at all?’

‘What was I supposed to do—ignore him when he was there with the rest?’

She had a point, Francesca conceded, though she didn’t want to. She started emptying drawers. ‘You wanted him for yourself even then,’ she stated and only realised it was the truth as the tight words left her lips. She stopped what she was doing as full clarity began to hit. ‘He wasn’t interested. He already had a girlfriend. A gorgeous, dark-haired creature with amazing brown eyes…’

‘Nicola,’ Sonya mumbled.

Francesca nodded, and turned to look at her again. Sonya was looking at the floor now, her long hair like a heavy silk curtain hiding her face. ‘You wanted to get his attention,’ she went on slowly. ‘So you thought you would impress him by telling him that your friend from England had some Gianni blood.’

Sonya’s chin shot up. ‘I didn’t know he would go apoplectic at the mere mention of the Gianni name!’

‘I told you that in confidence! You had no right to set that hungry wolf on to me! And once he did go apoplectic, why didn’t you warn me then what you’d done?’

Sonya flushed and looked away again. Inside Francesca was beginning to seethe as each veil was scraped from her eyes. ‘He took you out to pump more information out of you, didn’t he? I bet he even took you to bed then!’

‘As I said, I hate him.’

And she did, Francesca accepted as she stood taking in that blunt admission. Sonya hated Angelo with absolute venom but she was also so crazily in love with him she couldn’t say no to him.

‘He’s manipulating and sly. He used me to get at you and used our friendship to stop me from telling you the truth. He said you would never forgive me—and he’s right, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’ Francesca didn’t even need to think about it. Sonya had been deeply instigative from the very beginning in setting her up for all this pain and heartache she’d had to suffer tonight because she was sure of one thing and she would not be standing here in the Batiste villa if Sonya hadn’t mentioned the Gianni name.

You don’t want her; you don’t even like her…! Francesca sucked in a thick breath. Those cruel words were going to be etched on her soul forever now, she predicted painfully.

Bending down, she scooped up the open case with its spilling contents and pushed past Sonya to go and put the case down on the bed.

‘I’m sorry,’ came the husky murmur from somewhere behind her.

‘You call Angelo manipulating and sly but what does that make you, Sonya?’ she asked as she went about gathering up whatever other bits she’d left lying about. ‘We’ve known each other for years. We confided everything.’

‘You kept your affair with Carlo Carlucci a dark secret.’ Sonya got in her own hit. ‘How long has that been going on, cara? Don’t think I missed the way you were wrapped around each other before Angelo’s mother dragged me away! The room was swimming in overactive pheromones. You were both so kiss-drugged you could barely focus on anything else!’

‘But at least I still had my underwear on,’ Francesca retaliated with a withering slide of her eyes down the front of Sonya’s dress.

She was rewarded with a choked gasp and the sight of a hand jerking down to tug guiltily at the hem of the dress. Leaving Sonya to stew on her own sluttish behaviour, she moved into the bathroom and began quickly gathering up her toiletries.

When she re-entered the bedroom she saw that Sonya was ready to go back on the attack. ‘You might like to think of yourself as morally a cut above me, Francesca. But you’re as guilty as I am for playing around with another woman’s man.’

Was she saying that Carlo was committed to some other woman? It stopped her dead in her tracks.

‘And here’s the real nasty little twist, cara,’ Sonya continued, aiming sure with her knives now. ‘Nicola Mauraux—you know, the dark-haired beauty with the brown eyes you were talking about? She’s Carlo Carlucci’s stepsister. It was a bit of a foregone conclusion that she and Angelo would marry one day—until you came along and he turfed her out.’

Carlo was not in another relationship, was the first part of that she grabbed at with relief. Then the rest arrived like a blast, blanching the colour out of her face.

‘Angelo told me it was already over,’ she breathed in a stifled whisper.

‘Since when has he ever spoken the truth?’ Sonya asked. ‘He’s an incurable liar with a greedy eye for the main chance! Nicola isn’t rich like you will be one day, Francesca. She isn’t a Carlucci so has no claim on the Carlucci wealth. She attends this very posh university in Paris at her stepbrother’s expense but that’s about the sum total of what she’s likely to get from him.’

‘You knew all of this and didn’t bother to tell me?’

‘What for? I wasn’t to know that you would start two-timing your beloved Angelo with Carlo Carlucci.’ Oh, the knives were flying thick and fast now. This was Sonya at her cutting best. ‘But if I did happen to be you right now, I would be asking if Signor Carlucci isn’t using you to get back a bit of revenge on Angelo for dumping his stepsister.’

The word revenge hit her first. Angelo had accused Carlo of being out for revenge on him but she had been too confused to pick up on it then. He’d also said that Carlo was using her and she’d let that float right by her too. Then there were Carlo’s displays of contempt towards Angelo and the smooth, slick, cutting way he had demolished him from the very outset—as if he’d been planning to do it—as if the whole kiss thing had been timed and rigged to happen as Angelo walked into the room!

She began to feel sick again—very sick. Her hand had to jerk up to cover her mouth. If it wasn’t enough to be used by one ruthless swine, now another one had come along to do the same thing again!

Talk about being a sucker for it, she thought bitterly, and had to turn her back to Sonya so she wouldn’t see the hurt tears starting in her eyes.

‘I just don’t want you to pile all the blame on me, that’s all!’ Sonya cried out. ‘If you witnessed what Angelo and I were doing out there on the terrace then you must have heard me tell him that I wanted to tell you everything—and I was going to do it this time, Francesca! Only you found out before I could get to you first.’

After the sex, of course, Francesca thought bitterly. After she’d stood there on that wretched terrace and drowned herself in Angelo!

She was never going to trust a single living person, she vowed as she went to throw the last of her things into the suitcase. The tears were blurring her vision. Her fingers had developed a permanent shake. If someone had told her that she was going to spend her engagement night having her life ripped apart she would have laughed in their face!

And she still had to run the gauntlet to get out of here. She still had to face Carlo Carlucci knowing what she now knew about him!

She shut the suitcase, stuffing straggling bits of clothing inside it as she struggled to fasten the zip. Where was she going to go—what was she going to do?

‘Let me come with you,’ Sonya begged suddenly as if she could actually read what was going on inside her head. ‘Wait for me to pack and we’ll go and stay at that hotel where the rest of our group is staying.’

‘Do they know about your affair with Angelo?’ she asked quietly.

Silence met that—one of those stark, thick silences that screamed the answer loud and clear.

She took a final quick glance around her to see if she’d missed anything, then bent to pick up her little denim jacket and pulled it on over her dress. Next she hauled up the suitcase.

This was it. There was nothing left for her here. Mouth tight, eyes hard, she turned to walk towards the door.

‘Please…’ Sonya’s painfully shaken cry followed her. ‘Don’t leave me here to face the music alone, Francesca. You’re my friend—you’re the only real friend I’ve ever had! Let me come with you—please!’

Francesca turned to look at this petite, flaxen-haired, sylph-like friend who was just too beautiful for her own good. Even the tears shining in her anxious blue eyes enhanced that beauty, as did the quiver of her lips.

‘Enjoy the rest of your life, Sonya,’ she said, then left with her great-uncle Bruno’s chilling form of goodbye still ringing behind her like the toll of death.

CHAPTER SIX

SHE must have inherited some of the Gianni genes after all, she thought with a bitter-wry smile. Funny, she mused, but she’d always assumed she missed out on most of them. Her mother had insisted she had.

No thick and glossy raven hair, none of the Gianni bone features that had given her mother’s face such a striking impact. Her mouth was too wide, her skin too pale—but that cold and unforgiving final cut she’d just used to sever her friendship with Sonya had to have come from the Gianni gene stock.

Along with her mother’s propensity for falling in love with the wrong kind of man. Like lightning striking twice, or that nasty thing called fate other people liked talking about. Had it been written at her birth that she was fated to fall in love with a mercenary like Angelo then be seduced by a vengeful rat like Carlo?

She saw him then and had to pause at the top of stairs while she dealt with the way her heart dipped then shrivelled like a dried-up prune in her chest.

He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for her, looking stunning as always. The shockingly perfect profile, the smooth, olive-toned skin, the gorgeous mouth that was a mere shadowy outline from up here but could still tighten muscles all over her body on the knowledge of the way it could kiss. His black hair was making her think of ravens’ wings again as it captured the overhead lights and his curling black eyelashes hovered sensuously against those chiselled cheekbones as he stood looking down at his watch.

In a rush to get this over with, signor? Francesca quizzed. Do you want to get the poor little fool out of here so you can finish what you started in the name of revenge?

He could have heard her for the way his dark head lifted. He smiled the most relaxed, warm smile then began walking up to meet her. ‘I was just coming to get you,’ he murmured in that rich, dark voice of his.

Francesca was contemplating telling him where to put his lying smile—when she noticed the people still gathered in the hall. The gauntlet, she remembered, and snapped her mouth shut again then carefully hooded her cold, glinting eyes. There was no way she was going to show herself up again while she told Carlo Carlucci what she thought of him on the Batiste staircase with the mob listening in.

The mob, she thought again, struck by her own acid turn of phrase and almost—almost found it in her to laugh. If these people were a mob they were a very exclusive kind of mob with their designer clothes and their designer jewels and their designer expressions that made her think of wax.

Carlo stopped two steps down from her and reached for her suitcase. ‘Like the jacket,’ he said in a husky attempt to break the tension laying whip cracks across all of them. ‘It goes with the dress.’

‘Can we go, please?’ she responded in a voice misted with frost.

He stopped smiling, his eyes narrowing on her cold face. ‘Of course,’ he replied without any notable change in his rich voice tones but her senses began to scramble about inside her when they detected a change. It didn’t do to return his warm overtures with ice, she realised. He was used to orchestrating the moods of others not altering his own mood to suit.

His fingers closed around her fingers where they clutched the handle to the suitcase. The suitcase changed hands within a hooded silence. Stepping to one side, he indicated that she should continue down the stairs. As she passed by him he fell into step beside her, his tall, dark bulk trying its best to hide her from most of those curious faces down in the hall.

What were they thinking? How much did they know? Was she the sinner in their eyes, caught by Angelo kissing Carlo Carlucci on the night of his engagement to her, or the one to be pitied for falling for Angelo’s smooth, slick, calculating charm at all?

Angelo—Angelo, she suddenly repeated. And felt a shaft of pain as her love for him exploded right here on this fabulous marble staircase. How could he have done this to her—treated her like this?

How could Sonya?

Delayed shock to her night of revelation really began to kick in as they made ground level. She was shaking so badly that she had a horrible suspicion she was going to further humiliate herself by falling into a sobbing huddle on the cold marble floor. Beside her, Carlo must have sensed it because his free hand came to rest against her back as if in assurance. She almost jumped out of her skin as the old warning prickles of hostility and self-defence arrived to remind her that he was not her saviour—far from it. He was as guilty as the others for trying to use her for his own ends.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she hissed in a taut, teeth-clenched whisper.

He did the opposite. Shifting the hand until it arrived at the indent to her waist and with a single warning curl of his long fingers, he brought her into full contact with his side. Then he made the ultimate move to subdue her by stopping them walking so he could propel her around to face him, then in front of their audience he bent his dark head.

His lips arrived against her ear lobe, his breath scoring her frozen white cheek. ‘Behave until we get out of here or I will kiss you stupid,’ he warned very grimly.

There wasn’t a split-second when she thought he might be bluffing. This was yet another man on a mission and she was just his disposable pawn. Bitterness welled, the fine tremors of dismay converting themselves into silver-shard tremors of contempt as he set them moving again.

It was then that she saw their farewell party waiting by the open front door. Mr and Mrs Batiste were standing straight-faced and soldier-like, ready to play the perfect hosts to the bitter end even as their glittering party lay in a wreck around their elegant feet. Did they know what their son had done? Had they been in on his deceit? ‘Your business is safe, Papa, and don’t forget who is paying the price for it.’

Yes, they’d known from the beginning, she concluded and shuddered. Did that also mean they knew why she was being escorted from here by Carlo Carlucci?

Of course they did, she derided her own question. Everyone knew. Everyone knew everything but me!

‘I hate you,’ she hissed.

He ignored that one, the hand keeping her moving towards the open door.

‘Carlo, we need to talk—’ Alessandro Batiste jerked into anxious speech as they reached him.

‘Next week,’ Carlo Carlucci cut him off curtly, passing by him without a single pause. ‘And without your son,’ he added abruptly. ‘If you want to hold on to my business, that is…’

‘Y-yes, of course,’ Angelo’s father agreed in gruff obsequious Italian.

Angelina Batiste said absolutely nothing. The whole thing was a real coup détat for Signor Carlucci. He’d effectively cut Angelo adrift from just about everything, including the support of his own parents, it seemed.

The night air had a sharp nip to it. Carlo’s car stood parked at the bottom of the steps. He guided her towards it and opened the passenger door for her and only then allowed his fingers to ease their grip on her waist when he stepped back, his expression a wall of cool politeness as he waited for her to get in the car. As she sank into luxurious black leather the door was closed with a solid click. Her eyes began to sting as she listened to him putting her case in the car boot and she had to bite down hard on her bottom lip in an effort to maintain her icy dignity as he got in beside her, folding his body like a lithe jungle cat with its killer instincts set on full alert.

It was easier to look out of the side-window than to keep him hovering even on the periphery of her vision. What she saw through that window was the door to Villa Batiste drawing shut. It was the last time she would look at that door, she vowed silently.

The car engine came to life. It kicked into gear and with a spin of wide tyres on loose gravel they moved off, the force of the acceleration pushing her back into the seat. Headlights spanned the two lines of cypress trees. They sped between them and barely paused at the junction before they were turning into the lane and accelerating away again.

She had no idea where he was taking her and at that precise moment she didn’t care. Her life was in tatters. If someone had come along with a knife and cut her to ribbons she couldn’t feel worse than she did right now.

Then she found that she could feel a whole lot worse when he brought the car to a sudden neck-jolting halt. She’d barely recovered from the shock of it when he was twisting towards her in his seat.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tell me what your friend said to you to turn you back into the spitting cat.’

Cats and wolves were making a prominent show tonight, she thought ridiculously and almost choked on what she recognised as a lump of hysteria now blocking her throat.

‘What makes you think it was Sonya?’ she flashed.

‘Because she was the only loose cannon out there I couldn’t protect you from,’ he answered.

Protect? Her eyes widened. He called this protection? She twisted her face away again, fizzing inside and refusing to answer. For a long, taut tick in time she continued to sit with her eyes still fixed on the side-window and her lips clamped tightly shut.

‘Francesca!’ he rasped.

‘Nicola Mauraux.’

Silence. That was it. She sat there waiting for some kind of response—a guilty curse would have been enough! But nothing else happened. She wasn’t breathing but he was—in and out with a calmness that set her teeth on edge. Her eyes began to sting again—she so badly wanted to break down and cry like a baby that she didn’t know how much longer she could stop herself from doing it!

When he finally moved she was forced to flick another glance at him, warily unsure as to what was coming next. But all he did was settle himself back in his seat and a moment later and they were moving again as if she hadn’t spoken his stepsister’s wretched name.

Well—fine, she thought burningly. Let’s just ignore I said it. Your silence suits me because it means I won’t have to listen to you talk your slick way around the reasons why I am sitting in this car at all!

The car began to accelerate, moving very fast on the straight parts of the narrow country lane, slow and smooth through the bends with the headlights sweeping the darkness ahead of them as her grim-profiled driver put on a slick display of man versus power versus control. His timing was immaculate. He never missed a gear. The engine growled then purred then roared on acceleration then growled and purred again. And the whole thing took place beneath a heavy blanket of silence that helped to hold Francesca mesmerised even though she didn’t want to be. He was the man with everything—great looks, great body and a great sense of style that utilised both to their optimum. Then there was his wealth and his power and his razor-like intellect. The way he used passion for persuasion, words like clubs to beat his opponents to death. And he drove his car with a ruthless, selfish, utter single-mindedness that dared anyone to get in his way. He reminded her of a dark, sleek, prowling predator, top of the food chain. Nothing or no one could touch him.

They sped by her great-uncle’s palazzo. Recognising it jerked her into impulsive speech. ‘You can—’

‘Shut up,’ he incised and made his first mistake with a gear change as if the sound of her voice was all it took to spoil his immaculate performance. The car lurched then put in a surge of power when he’d corrected the error, eating up the winding country lane with precision timing again.

And Francesca subsided in her seat as another bitter thought hit her: what was the use in demanding he take her to her uncle when the miserable old man was likely to refuse to open his door?

When disillusionment hit it stripped you of everything, she noticed, as Bruno Gianni became another name she added to her hate list. I am never going to contact him again, she vowed. He didn’t care about her, hadn’t even bothered to pretend that he did.

The hot ache of tears that were coming closer to bursting free by the second had her closing her eyes and huddling into her seat. As soon as this stupid journey is over I’m going home to England and I’m never going to step foot in Italy again, she promised herself. No wonder my mother never came back. No wonder she froze up whenever Italy or Rome came up in conversation. She was wise; she knew the score. Why hadn’t she listened to her and saved herself a whole lot of grief?

They couldn’t have gone more than a mile or so when the car made a sudden turn that brought her jolting back to her present situation. Her eyelids flickered upwards; she’d barely managed to focus through the tears before they were coming to another neck-jolting halt.

What now—what next? she wondered tensely.

‘I w-want—’

‘You don’t know what you want,’ he cut in tightly.

Then he was dousing the headlights and shutting down the engine with short, tight flicks of his fingers that told her he was still angry—bubbling with it. There was a click and a slither as his seat belt slid away from his body then he was opening his door and climbing into the dark night.

Her wary eyes slewed frontward, following his dark bulk as he moved around the car’s long bonnet, frissons of uncertainty chasing across her skin. Her heart began to stutter. Was he going to eject her from his car and leave her out here in the middle of nowhere now he didn’t have to bother explaining himself?

Her door came open. A waft of cold air placed a chill on her flesh. He bent down to reach across her to unlock her seat belt, and as his face arrived close to her face she saw the grim determination etched into the flat line of his mouth.

‘I’m not getting out,’ she informed him stubbornly.

‘Does it appear that I am giving you a choice?’ he asked. Then grabbed one of her hands as he straightened up again, and used it to haul her out of the car.

She arrived beside him in a state of numbing panic, sights and sounds hitting her senses at the same time as his body did. His arm came round her waist, arching her into full contact with his lean, hard length at the same time that she heard the car door shut behind her and another sound of whirring that had her twisting her head in time to see a pair of huge, thick wrought-iron gates swinging shut beneath a heavy stone arch she hadn’t even been aware that they’d passed beneath.

Dizzy and disorientated, she became aware of uneven cobblestones beneath her thin-soled shoes and turned her head again in an effort to search the darkness for some hint as to where they were. Her mouth brushed his chin as she moved and his hissed sound of his tense response brought her search to a stop on his face. Then she wasn’t seeing anything but the angry flame of desire leaping in his dark eyes, the savage tautening of his skin and flaring nostrils as he took in a swift breath of air. She felt a sudden tightening in his body, sucked in her own shocked gasp when she realised what the tightening meant. Her gaze dipped lower—to his mouth… his hard, tight, angry mouth that was already advertising what was going to come next.

‘No—’ She managed that one breathlessly weak protest before he made full contact. After that she wasn’t capable of saying or doing a single thing as his mouth moulded hers and his tongue made its first stabbing thrust. She was instantly electrified, fierce heat pouring a hot, tight sting of pleasure right down her front to gather in a sense-energising pool at her thighs.

She groaned and clutched at his shoulders, so shocked by her own response that she tried to push away from him, but it was a wasted effort because he only had to use the flat of his hand against the arching base of her spine to bring her in contact with his hard, muscular front for her to go weak at the knees.

He felt them go, felt her whole body quiver as a helpless little moan of pleasure keened in her throat. If this kiss was meant to be a punishment then it had failed in its mission, she found herself thinking dizzily as she went willingly when he pulled her even tighter up against him and she was kissing him back as she’d never kissed anyone, with a wild, deep, urgent hunger that took her over completely.

A powerful light suddenly drenched the two of them. The kiss broke abruptly, and on a curse Carlo twisted with her still wrapped against him while Francesca buried her face in his dinner jacket and quite simply lost the will to live. Her senses had shattered. She’d thought they’d done that earlier tonight when she’d watched Angelo with Sonya. But even that devastating moment could not compare with how she was dealing with the loss of that unbelievable kiss.

‘My apologies, signor,’ a deeply contrite male voice murmured in Italian from somewhere close by. ‘The security lights are not functioning. I had to come myself to see—’

‘Take that damn torch off my face, Lorenzo,’ Carlo commanded in a harsh, rasping growl.

They were thrown into instant darkness again. Francesca managed to unclip her fingers from where they clung to Carlo’s neck. From feeling virtually incandescent with pleasure she was now slowly sinking into horror and shame.

She hated him! How could she have responded like that to a man she absolutely hated?

She tried to stiffen away from him but he was having none of it, his grip only tightening warningly as he held some kind of intelligent discussion with what she presumed was a security guard though she couldn’t be sure of anything right now. Her feet felt strange, as if they didn’t belong to her, her legs were tingling from ankles to hips. And the dragging sensation taking place between her thighs was desperate enough to tug a thick whimper from her aching throat.

Whatever Carlo thought that whimper meant, he reacted to it with another black curse and suddenly she was being thrust beneath the power of one arm and forced to walk.

‘Let me go,’ she choked out. Being this close to him was beginning to take on the properties of a nightmare—the whole evening was!

‘Not in the near future, cara,’ he responded with dry, grim sarcasm that was so thick with sexual reference that she stumbled.

He kept her upright. He kept her moving over uneven cobblestones. He kept her wrapped so closely to him that she had difficulty trying to take in her surroundings though she did manage to note that they were walking across an enclosed courtyard that made her footsteps echo off the surrounding walls. She could also hear the soft sound of a fountain somewhere, saw dark blue paintwork framing long, narrow windows set into burnt-sienna-painted walls.

Then they were stopping in front of a door. Muscles flexed as he leant forward to grasp the handle, the grasp of his long fingers sliding upwards a small inch that was all it required to let her right breast know they were there. She sucked in a sharp gasp as a fresh wave of heat poured in that direction. If it hadn’t been for the denim jacket helping to conceal what was happening to her she would have folded with embarrassment when she felt the nipple grow excruciatingly tight.

The door swung open with a twist of the handle, and she was being propelled through it into a fully lit long, wide hallway with faded blue walls and gold-leaf plasterwork. He didn’t so much as pause as he began hustling her over a stunning blue mosaic floor towards the other end of the hall. They passed by a pair of staircases that sped off at right angles, one on either side of them, passed beautiful pieces of furniture that were in themselves priceless works of art. Everything she set her dizzy eyes on was stunningly tasteful and elegant, nothing bore so much as a vague resemblance to the Batistes’ white villa with its overt grandeur and style.

Another door was flung open and once again she was being ushered firmly through it into a square-shaped room with more gold-leaf plasterwork, chalk-pale terracotta walls and yet another mosaic floor made up of brown and black marble inlaid with gold.

At last he let her go and she swayed a little as she looked for balance, then instantly spun round as the door was slotted into its frame. Eyes wide, control shot, unsure whether she should be terrified or just plain angry after that shocking kiss and the way he’d hustled her in here, ‘W-what is this place?’ she demanded. ‘Why have you brought me here?’

His smile had a sinister cut to it. The way he folded his arms across his impressive chest, crossed his elegant black shoes at his ankles then leant those broad shoulders back against the door and even the glitter behind his narrowed eyes were displays of arrogant provocation that brought every nerve-end she had left ringing on full alert.

‘Welcome, to the Palazzo del Carlucci,’ he murmured smoothly. ‘Home to my family for the last four centuries and now, mi amore, the venue for your complete ravishment—in the honourable name of revenge, of course.’

As a calculated heart-stopper he had certainly hit the perfect note, Carlo saw as he watched all colour drain from her face. His sarcastic tone had slid right by her and he was angry enough not to care.

No, he was more than angry—he was bloody furious! He’d put his reputation on the line for her tonight. He’d watched over her, been there to catch her when she’d fallen, found her time and the privacy to come to terms with the reality of what Batiste was really like. He’d protected, sup-ported—smiled in the face of a hundred scandalised stares while he got her out of that situation as fast as he could. And what did she do?

She took the word of a lying tramp like her flatmate and turned him into the enemy!

‘Lay a hand on me and I’ll claw your eyes out,’ she responded shakily to his silk-honed threat.

He sent her a smile that mocked and derided. ‘Since we both know that my laying both hands on you is more likely to make you purr than claw, it was a rather wasted threat, don’t you think?’

It was like feeding candy to a baby, he noted. She grabbed every word and swallowed it whole. In some dark corner of his anger he enjoyed watching her squirm in growing alarm. He even shifted his stance as if to come after her, just to see how she would react.

She took a step back. ‘Stay right where you are!’ she jerked out sharply and put out a hand to ward him off.

Some chance, he thought. The ravishment was becoming more appetising by the second. And that kiss-softened quivering mouth was just begging to be ravished again—and again. If her beautiful eyes went any darker they would be the same colour as his own eyes, which made him very curious as to how dark they were going to go in the throes of some very intense passion.

‘I will be no one else’s victim—especially not yours!’

‘Why not mine? When you don’t think twice about playing the willing victim for anyone who wants to beat you up with their lies?’

‘Whose lies are you referring to?’ She threw a puzzled frown at him. It hit him low in his loins like a kick. He’d never known a simple dusky frown could be so damn sexy, it sent his shoulders shifting tensely inside his dinner jacket.

‘Are you saying that Nicola Mauraux isn’t your stepsister?’

‘No,’ he sighed. ‘I am not saying that.’

‘Then what are you saying? Do you think tonight has been a ball of laughter for me, signor? Do you think I want to be standing here listening to you play stupid word-games just for the fun of it?’

He went to answer but wasn’t given the chance to. ‘I am not the one at fault for whatever Angelo did to your stepsister,’ she told him in trembling self-defence. ‘As far as I knew they’d finished their relationship when Nicola returned to her studies in Paris!’ she cried. ‘I do not steal other women’s men from them. And I will not take the blame because your stepsister was hurt! If you want your revenge look to Angelo—and show a little class by moving away from that door so that I can leave!’

Well, well, Carlo thought curiously, narrowing his eyes on her stiff if trembling stance, and had to acknowledge that his tables had just been turned. It came as a surprise because he hadn’t thought she had it in her to take him on with quite so much ego-shredding venom.

Show a little class, he repeated musingly to himself, and almost smiled at the hit that cutting remark had landed on his pride.

‘And here I was, waiting for you to apologise to me for daring to believe the word of some vamped-up little tramp in really deep trouble, who thought she would stick a few knives in by telling you that I was capable of using you for the purposes of revenge!’

His voice had risen in anger; now she was staring at him through huge shocked eyes. ‘I…’ she began.

‘From there I thought we would continue where we left off in the courtyard,’ he continued ruthlessly without letting her speak. ‘With some really deep, passionate sex—preferably in my very big, comfortable bed, where we would work to help clear away your quite understandable blues.’

Her chin shot up at the very deliberate way he had just casually dismissed the devastation she had to be suffering.

‘After the sex we could then discuss Nicola and how the whole Carlucci clan is in your debt for luring Batiste into believing that the Gianni fortune would be more accessible than hers would be.’

At last she was beginning to realise that this conversation had another edge to it. He could see a slow dawning colouring her eyes.

‘However,’ he went on, ‘if you prefer to leave then by all means do so.’ He even straightened from the door to give her safe passage. ‘There is a phone in the hall and a pad lying next to it with the number of a very good taxi service. If I were you I would get the driver to recommend a hotel for the night and avoid going back to your apart-ment—just in case you walk in on your best friend and your ex-fiancé indulging their lusts on the sitting-room carpet.’

Having watched her blanch at his final cut-throat comment, he strode across the room, arrogantly assured that he had recovered his ego—at the expense of hers.

Did that knowledge sit well on him? No, it didn’t, he admitted with a grimace. But one of them had to climb off their high horse and, since he had no intention of doing it, it had to be Francesca.

He was a full-blooded Carlucci after all. She was only half a Gianni.

And anyway, he was still angry despite his smooth, careless speech. There were a million things he could have been doing out there if he hadn’t been devoting his full and undivided attention to Francesca Bernard and her Cinderella plight!

Cinderella, he scathed as he approached the antique French armoire almost dominating one wall. Well, if that made him her Prince Charming then he wasn’t doing a very good job of it, he conceded as he glared at the armoire his stepmother had brought with her from Paris when she married his father.

As he opened the doors he smelled the age of the solid old wood. Inside had been converted into a comprehensive drinks cabinet, which had always seemed a desecration to him but—he offered another grimace. Nanette had been proud of it and in the end that was all that mattered. This single piece of furniture had been her one and only heirloom and she’d loved to see it sitting here in this great house that groaned beneath centuries of Carlucci statements to wealth and good taste. What else she brought into this house had always been far more valuable.

It was called love and happiness. And for those gifts alone the armoire would remain exactly where it stood for as long as he held power of decision over the house.

Reaching for the bottle of cognac and a deep-bowled glass, he was aware that Francesca still hadn’t made that move towards the door. Placing the bowl of the glass in his palm to warm it while he uncapped the bottle of cognac, he dared a sideways glance at her.

She looked like a pale and bewildered ghost, he observed. Her eyes were too wide and rimmed by the stinging threat of tears that placed a fine quiver on her mouth. She was trying to control it, trying her best to maintain some pride and dignity. But she wasn’t standing where he was standing and seeing what he was seeing. She looked vulnerable, exhausted, so damn shattered he was amazed she was still in one piece.

Her skin looked so strained it was waxen. And her hair was trying its best to escape again, the beaded comb barely clinging to the twisted silken knot.

But not for long, he promised himself as he turned away again. He was going to help the hair out in a minute. He was going to remove the silly comb and let the whole tawny mass tumble free. And he was going to heat that waxen flesh until it melted. He was going to remove that silly denim jacket then that silly dress with its romantic layers of chiffon that did nothing for her and yelled ‘bought to please Angelo Batiste!’.

Anger growled like a snarling dog inside him; his lips bit together to stop the sound from coming out.

He was going to strip her down to her wonderful skin and bin the whole bloody outfit. Then he was going to begin the task of rebuilding her from the inside out. He was going to turn her into what he perceived she would be if she hadn’t had her self-confidence beaten to a pulp by inadequate selfish swines like Bruno Gianni and Batiste.

But for now he was going to have to continue to play it tough here, because she also looked like a trapped bird trying to sum up the courage to make a bolt for escape. If she did then he was going to have to stop her—and cornered, trapped birds had a nasty habit of flying at your face.

He poured a generous splash of cognac into the glass then swirled it around while deftly recapping the bottle with his free hand. By the time he turned back to her he was relieved to find that she’d moved at last and was no longer staring vacantly into space but was looking up at the gilt-framed portrait hanging above the huge stone fireplace, in which his father stood with his arms linked around the slender frame of the beautiful dark-haired Nanette. Nanette was looking up, his father was gazing down, and only a blind idiot would miss the wealth of love and affection that poured from every brushstroke.

‘You look like him,’ she said.

‘Mm,’ he acknowledged with a small wry smile. ‘Nanette Mauraux was my father’s second wife,’ he explained as he walked towards her. ‘My mother died when I was—quite young.’

He offered her the glass. Francesca shook her head, her attention still fixed on the portrait. ‘That could be Nicola standing with him,’ she said.

‘Does Nanette look so young?’ Turning to view the portrait for himself, ‘Yes, she does,’ he answered his own question. ‘My father managed to shock all of Rome when he went to Paris on a business trip and came back with a child bride clinging to his arm…’

He took a sip of the brandy, remembering. Then offered a soft laugh. ‘He was fifty-four and she was twenty-three. Nicola was a tiny replica of her mama and I was a brooding, dark, resentful youth of nineteen who was appalled to be presented with a stepmother I would probably have made a play for if I’d met her first.’

‘Did you?’ she looked at him. ‘Make a play for her, I mean.’

It took him a few seconds to understand why she dared think such a thing of him. Then, ‘Ah,’ he smiled. ‘I forgot—I have no scruples.’

It was the wrong thing to say. He knew it the moment the comment left his sardonic mouth. She stared at him for a second—then on a small choke she turned and ran.

On a thick black curse he went after her, having to pause to divert to the armoire to lose the brandy glass before continuing on. She’d already thrown the door open and was disappearing into the hall. He uttered another terse curse in Italian. His trapped bird had flown but in her eagerness to get away from him she’d turned the wrong way.

CHAPTER SEVEN

FRANCESCA knew what she’d done two flying steps along the hallway but there was no way she was turning around and risking passing that door just as he came out of it.

She’d had enough. She just couldn’t take any more of his cruel sarcasm and anyway, she’d already spied a pair of doors standing shut ahead of her so she just kept going, not caring where those doors led to as long as she managed to put a distance between herself and the hateful Carlo Carlucci before she finally gave in and fell apart.

What she didn’t expect was to drag open those two doors and take two more flying steps, only to come to a perfect standstill, held breathless, feeling as if she’d stepped out of that door and straight into a completely different world.

Lake Alba was floating right in front of her, its smooth surface wearing a moonlit glaze like a sheet of frosted white silk. She had never seen anything quite like it. She forgot she was supposed to be running away from Carlo’s taunting as she stared through a stone archway supported by twin slender pillars that framed the lake like a painting, its base trimmed by a low stone latticework balustrade that seemed to form an edge to the end of the world.

It was the most magical scene she had ever encountered; nothing had prepared her for it on the swift journey here through the winding lanes. Villa Batiste claimed a view of the lake but nothing to compare with this one. They were so close—yet not very close at all. It was a strange very disorientating sensation to stand here and feel as if you could reach out and touch those silver silk waters yet be aware at the same time that acres of layered garden lay in between.

Her feet took her across the wide stone terrace, drawing her like a magnet to stand beneath the arch. She was so enchanted she didn’t notice that she was shivering so badly that her arms had wrapped around her in an instinctive attempt to ward off the cold.

‘The lake changes with every hour,’ a deep voice murmured levelly. ‘She will pull on her shimmering silver cloak in the early morning, a burnished gold one in the late afternoon. In the middle of the day she wears a sensational azure-blue cloak and invites you to come and play…’

‘So you framed it,’ she said softly.

‘One of my ancestors was inspired by that particular vision,’ he replied in a lazy tone that reluctantly refused to take the praise. Then she heard the slow, even pace of his steps bringing him closer as he continued, ‘We are in fact standing in a colonnade of arches, each one carefully placed to form the same framework of the lake whichever door or window you happen to step through in this wing.’

A fleeting glance sideways confirmed that she was indeed standing in the middle of a line of arches that attached to the house by long, gracefully arching ribs on which the moonlight placed more frosted silk.

‘It’s beautiful—the whole thing.’ She turned her head frontward again as he came to a halt directly behind her.

’Gratzi,’ he replied at the same time as his jacket settled across her shoulders and was held there by a pair of hands that curled around her slender upper arms. She shivered compulsively as her chilled flesh grabbed at the warmth the jacket offered. ‘No, cara, don’t prickle.’ He’d misread the shiver. ‘I am not about to renew hostilities.’

Then what does come next—the ravishment? she heard herself thinking. And this time the shiver was a prickle.

‘I’m sorry if I hurt your stepsister,’ she felt compelled to say.

‘You didn’t—he did.’ His grip on her arms altered fractionally so he could turn her round to face him. She found herself staring at the bright white front to his shirt. ‘All I could do was support her through her heartache. While I was doing that I became curious as to who this new woman in his life was, who could make him dare to hurt one of mine.’

‘So whose wounded pride were you out to salve when you went looking for a way to punish him—your stepsister’s or your own?’

This time it was the cleft in his chin that captured her attention when it flexed with his brief, dry smile. ‘Try—both,’ he said and moved his fingers, causing her breathing to feather as he ran them lightly beneath the silk lapel to his jacket, lifting the fabric so it hugged her chilly nape. ‘And you have a novel way of making subtle stabs at a man’s ego, cara,’ he said softly. ‘But I advise you to drop such tactics with me. You see, I like my arrogance. It gives me leave to do anything I want to do even when I know the moment is not appropriate.’

And that was the point when alarm bells began to ring. She managed only to lift wary eyes to his face and note the warning gleam of what was to come before he gave a firm tug on his jacket collar and she was arriving with a breathless gasp against his chest. She felt the heat of him, his sheer physical power, wanted to push away but only found herself raising her chin.

Their eyes connected, almost black consuming anxious hazel with promises that robbed her of the ability to breathe.

‘No,’ she said, ‘don’t…’

And to her hopeless confusion he didn’t do anything but hold her trapped between his body and his jacket and a tense, tingling limbo world between heaven and hell. She couldn’t even tell which the hell belonged to—the kiss or no kiss.

‘Sure?’ he said softly.

She nodded, lips parted and trembling like wicked liars. He was too much—of everything. He overwhelmed in every way there was. ‘I’m out of my depth with you,’ she heard herself whisper and though she wished the words back the moment she’d said them she knew they were telling the utter truth.

His response was one of those sardonic tilts to his mouth. ‘I am wading in pretty deep myself, cara,’ he responded huskily. ‘So don’t let yourself think that those pale cheeks and that frightened expression is going to save you. We will come together sooner or later.’

Then he dropped his head, capturing her lips in a single swift, hard kiss that fused them together with its heat. ‘Again and again and again…’ he murmured with sensual promise as he lifted his mouth away.

Why? Because she’d responded. He knew it. She knew it. She’d even been the one to taste him with the moist, tingling tip of her tongue and placed that gloss on his lips she could see. And the worst of it was she wanted to do it again. She wanted to curl a hand around his nape and bring that mouth back to her. She wanted to…

His chest heaved on a tense intake of air, dark eyes glittering now as he took in the helpless expression colouring her eyes. ‘Come on,’ he said with a low gruffness. ‘It’s too damn cold out here for this…’

This being that she had just committed herself. This being that she couldn’t even pretend to herself that she didn’t want him. Letting go of his jacket lapels, Carlo placed an arm round her shoulders and turned them back to the house.

The door closed behind them; centuries-old blue mosaic caught the tap of her delicate heels. She wanted to say something—anything to break the grim, sexual resolve she could feel pulsing in him. But there wasn’t a single word that came to mind that could halt what was now in flow.

He led her up the left-hand staircase, his arm still keeping her close to his side. They emerged from the stairs into another long corridor flanked by long, narrow windows she saw looked out on the courtyard below. He paused at a door, pushed it open and took her through it. She found herself standing in a bedroom like no other bedroom she had ever been in.

The floor was an ocean of polished dark wood that led her eyes to the huge stone fireplace opposite where logs blazed in a black iron grate. The flames flickered across the floor, the dark terracotta-painted walls and crawled like fingers up the swathes of dark red silk festooning a huge canopied four-poster bed.

The bed dominated the room above everything. It dominated her—grabbed her eyes and fixed the senses exactly where it intended to fix them. If she’d ever wondered what a room designed to pull all the right sensual strings looked like then this would have been it. She even captured an image of herself lying there naked like a wanton on the red silk coverlet. She saw him with his dark golden flesh touched by the flames as he lay at her side.

The vision alone was enough to put her right back into a panic. She turned on him. ‘I don’t…’

Want this, she had been going to say but the words became lost in the feel of his light touch as he plucked the comb from her hair. The heavy twist quivered as it uncoiled its way to her shoulders. He stood observing the effect through dark, unfathomable eyes for a long moment then abruptly turned away.

‘I’ll go and get your case,’ he said. ‘Relax, take a look around, I won’t be more than a few minutes…’

Threat or reassurance? Francesca wondered as she watched him disappear. Then she shivered and turned back to her new surroundings. Her gaze was instantly drawn to the four-poster bed, where those unnerving images still played with her head.

Shame on you, she tried telling herself and tugged her eyes away then moved restlessly across the room towards a long window draped with more red silk. The window showed her a different view of the lake. Its surface wasn’t quite as frosted now, the moon having already continued on its way.

What am I doing here? she asked herself.

An answering tug on certain sensitive folds of flesh made her draw in air on a sharp catch of breath.

‘Oh,’ she choked, and dropped down onto the polished wood window seat, lost her shoes then pulled her knees up to her chin and dragged Carlo’s jacket tightly around her before she lowered her face to her knees.

To hide.

From what she was.

From what she was beginning to turn into.

A betrayed woman with the terrible—terrible desire for another man.

She shuddered, despising herself for feeling like this. Still hurting in so many ways and clearly so darn desperate to prove she was worthy of the title “woman” that she was sitting here having to squeeze her thighs together in an attempt to cut off these tight little tugs that were so much a pleasure as well as a sin.

Sin.

She picked out the word and looked at it. What sin? Whose sin? Where was the sin in wanting to make love?

Her mother’s sin. Her mother’s cold assessment of what sexual desire could do to you. It could turn you into a slave to your own body cravings and the faceless property of the man who took those cravings and used them to slake his own.

Why him though? If she had to turn into this sex-needy person, why did it have to be for Carlo Carlucci of all men? Why couldn’t it have been Angelo? Maybe their relationship could have stood a better chance if she’d been more forthcoming on the physical side. Maybe he would not have gone looking elsewhere and the rest of this dreadful night would only exist in some far-off nightmare and she would be in bed by now—with Angelo—sublimely content in her blindness to what his true character really was like.

Is that what she wanted? she then asked herself. To be lied to so long as she didn’t have to face the miserable truth?

She heard his step in the half-open doorway, felt him pause when he saw the way she was sitting here. Tears burned. Her heart burned. That place between her thighs grew hot on a fresh flurry of excitement because she wanted him.

She wanted him.

Not Angelo. She had never wanted Angelo. Not like this, she groaned silently. Blind didn’t begin to excuse the way she had been behaving around Angelo in the name of that thing called love.

‘I’ve brought your case.’

She nodded. Love was nothing but an illusion anyway, she thought as she listened to his footsteps taking him across to the bed. Love was nothing but a word invented for women to use to justify giving in to this hot sexual ache and for men to use to give them the right to tap into that ache.

Her head twisted at the sound of his footsteps. Heat gathered in her cheeks this time, her eyes glued to him as she followed his approach. Tall, dark, breathtakingly alluring to her newly awoken senses, they drank in the width of broad shoulders and long, lean torso covered in white shirting that did nothing to hide the promise of what she envisioned lurked beneath. The butterfly collar of the shirt had been unfastened and the bow-tie now rested in two loose black strips against the shirt.

He looked relaxed; he even offered her one of his tilted smiles as he bent to take hold of her hands to break the clasp they held on her knees.

‘Come on,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ve had enough. It’s time to go to bed.’

He pulled and she uncoiled to land on her feet in front of him. Removing the jacket from her shoulders, he tossed it onto the window seat then turned his attention to the line of bronze studs holding her denim jacket in place.

The word bed made her throw a hooded glance at him, the way he was casually removing her clothes tingled her spine—and he smiled again at those two very revealing actions. ‘It’s OK. The ravishment of Francesca Bernard has been put on hold for the time being,’ he assured her lazily.

‘Shame,’ she heard herself say—then caught her top lip between her teeth and wished the floor would open up and swallow her when he went perfectly still. She attempted a weak smile. ‘Joke,’ she said.

He went back to what he’d been doing but his mouth had a grim look of disapproval about it now.

Disapproval? she repeated inwardly and uttered a thick laugh. The person who disapproved of her around here was herself!

‘Why the laugh?’

‘Don’t ask,’ she advised a little wildly. Because the cool backs of his fingers were brushing against her breasts and making them tingle and if anyone wanted the ravishment of Francesca Bernard then it was Francesca Bernard!

Denim parted and was eased from her shoulders. She shivered as the fabric trailed down her arms, exposing her flesh to the cooler air seeping in through the window behind. The jacket landed on the window seat on top of his jacket then, with the touch of a master at undressing women, he slid his hand to the side of her ribcage to locate unerringly the concealed zip that held the dress in place.

‘I can do the rest myself,’ she told him stiffly.

‘Why rob me of the pleasure?’ he mocked—silkily—bringing her eyes up to clash with his.

He knew what she was thinking, what was happening to her, what she wanted to happen. And the look in his eyes was daring her to just come out and say it.

Ask! that look challenged.

She looked away again—moved away. His hand pulled her back again. She came into full contact with his full length. Her senses took flight on a mad ride of desire, she shivered and shook and sparked up like a firework. Her breathing fractured, her breasts heaved a gasp. His free hand lifted to burrow beneath her hair and his fingers clenched, imprisoning a thick swathe of her hair to use it to pull her head back.

She couldn’t tell if his eyes were angry or on fire with desire. His mouth still looked hard, his cheekbones taut. ‘What do you want from me, Francesca?’ he demanded on a low, dark growl.

The impact of the question quivered its way right down to her toes because she knew exactly what she wanted from him. She wanted him to give her sensual escape. She wanted to lose herself in him and become that other person she had just seen lying in naked abandon on that bed.

And she wanted to emerge the other end of this dreadful night a completely different woman, a sexually liberated woman who could state with confidence—to hell with you, Angelo, I know what I am now and you will never know what you missed out on!

‘I want everything,’ she whispered.

There, she’d said it. She didn’t even regret saying it, she told herself defiantly as his eyes narrowed on her flushed face. Now it was up to him whether he took what she was offering or rejected it.

He didn’t reject it. He took with a swift, dark passion that blew her apart. Her mouth was taken, its inner recesses invaded by the urgent probe of his tongue. She joined in this electric-charged fire dance with an eagerness that could have suggested she always kissed like this, when the opposite was the truth. It didn’t matter, she was with that kiss all the way—totally committed to it, totally committed to greedily learning anything he could teach her that would fuel the fires of what was happening to her. The side zip to her dress gave suddenly, the tight bodice springing free so the dress fell without stopping to the floor, leaving him free to explore new areas of exposed flesh with one hand while the other maintained its fierce grip on her hair to keep her face turned up to the kiss.

It was a very potent display of masculine domination—she knew that even as she surrendered to it. He stroked her waist, her back, her shoulders, he ran his fingers beneath the thin back strap to her flimsy strapless bra—testing its tension before trailing those fingers down the indent of her spine to the edge of her very brief high-leg panties to test their tension as his hand slid beneath.

She’d never felt a man’s hand against the smooth, rounded flesh of her bottom before. She’d never been touched like this at all. It felt strange but so exquisitely sensual she wriggled. He gripped and lifted her into contact with what was happening to him.

The movement tangled her feet in silk organza. On a curse he released her mouth so he could glance down. She was panting and clinging to his neck, too delirious to notice the way his eyes paused to linger blackly on the rise and fall of her breasts cupped in blood-red silk that was losing the battle to keep the tight thrust of her nipples covered. On a soft growl he clamped an arm around her waist and lifted her off the floor to swing her free of the dress—then he held her there, trapped against him, and closed his mouth around one of her breasts. The hot lick of his tongue sliced an arcing sense of tight pleasure across the tight nipple. She gasped out a thick breath, shaken and shuddering, her fingers clutching at his shoulders, and he tugged on her hair again to arch her backwards to bring the other breast pointing invitingly upwards for the delivery of the same experience.

Then they were kissing again, and he was turning with her still clamped against him as he walked towards the bed. That was not all he did on that short journey. With the strength of his hands he lifted her higher, somehow guiding her legs around his hips. The pulsing centre of all this madness made contact with the bulging hardness of his penis and her hips lurched in shock then writhed as a new pulsing wave of pleasure caught fire.

As he let her slide slowly down his length her bra sprang free. Two full, rounded breasts fell out of their bra cups, and she looked down to watch with a kind of fascination as their stinging tips settled against his shirt front.

He muttered something. She looked up into blazing black eyes and an oddly pale complexion. ‘Are you sure you want this?’

She gave him his answer by capturing his mouth with a reckless hunger. When he broke away from her she felt bereft.

Then not so bereft when he began stripping his clothes off, watching her as she stood watching him with a strange mix of fascination and shyness flickering across her expressive face. His shirt was peeled off and tossed away to reveal broad shoulders that gleamed like satin in the fire glow, and a taut, bronzed torso matted with dark hair. His shoes were heeled off and kicked to one side then his fingers went to deal with the fastener and zip to his trousers—and that was the moment when she had to look away.

Her eyes went straight to the bed with its red silk coverlet and its flame-licking promise of what was to come. She dragged in a breath, her senses fluttering on the beginnings of uncertainty, but that was all the time she was given to doubt this because his hand snaked out to cup her chin and he was making her look back at him. He was naked—naked, and so utterly beautiful it was no wonder he could strip with such ease.

His mouth closed over hers again, not fierce but gentle and soft. His other arm coiled around her waist and slowly drew her in. Nothing had prepared her for what it felt like to be held against a naked man. The warmth of him, the intoxicating differences between smooth and rough textures, the heady power of his scent, the unyielding strength in him, the uncompromising evidence of his manhood pressing against her abdomen and the way he moved against her leaving her in no doubt as to how much he wanted this. She released a shaken little breath in response to that knowledge and he stole it from her with a flick from his tongue.

He kissed the heat burning in her cheeks, her shyly lowered eyelids—he drew her that bit closer to him then pressed moist kisses to her shoulder, her neck, then her mouth again while she stood absorbing each tiny pleasure without being aware of how still she was.

‘If you’ve changed your mind and want to stop, this is the moment to say so,’ he said gently.

She frowned, not understanding why he kept asking that question. ‘I don’t want to stop.’

‘Then why are your hands clenched into fists at your sides?’

They were…?

They were, she realised as she tried to move her fingers, only to find they’d locked in two tension fists.

‘I will not make love to a sacrifice, cara. If you’re standing here like this, hoping to God I will wipe Batiste’s loving into oblivion, then you are wasting your time because neither do I play substitute for another man.’

The fact that she’d believed he’d understood, from what he’d overheard Angelo say to Sonya, that she had never been with Angelo like this made her frown as she stared fixedly at the crisp dark coils of hair on his chest. Now she knew he must have misunderstood, there was no way she was going to expose just how little Angelo had wanted her, by telling him the truth.

‘I w-wasn’t thinking anything of the kind,’ seemed a fair compromise.

‘Then why the tension?’

Her lips quivered; she tugged in a breath. ‘Y-you,’ she told him shakily. ‘You’re so…’ She ran the nervous tip of her tongue around her lips.

If she’d conjured up the excuse just to flatter him she could not have found a better one. He laughed, low and throatily, then moved against her in a way that left her in no doubt as to how her little confession was affecting him.

Then he wasn’t laughing, he was dipping his dark head, and suddenly the whole thing became intense again. The deep, drugging kisses, the caressing sweep of his hands. The gentle, pulsing movement of his hips that slowly—slowly began to draw answering movements from her. When he hooked an arm around her waist and used it so he could feed her onto the bed he did it with such smooth control that she wasn’t even aware of what was happening until she felt cool cotton beneath her and opened her eyes to stare in surprise.

The red coverlet had been tossed aside without her noticing, the rest of the covers folded back. And Carlo’s lean, dark golden length was caught by the fire again as he stretched out beside her, then came to lean above her, his dark eyes languid now, sensually engrossed as he sent a hand stroking the length of her body, then began touching light, soft, tantalising kisses in a delicate line along her mouth then across her cheek to her temple and down along her jaw line before returning to her mouth again. Her tongue made its first shy stab between his teeth, her fingers curling into his hair in an effort to hold him still. He let her keep him, he let her trace the moist inner recesses of his mouth and play with the kiss as she’d never played before.

His hand came to cup her breast, the pad of his thumb gently circling the dusky aureole in a slow, breathtaking caress. His mouth moved on again, planting soft kisses along her throat and across the pale slopes of her breast before it closed a tight pink rosebud nipple inside a warm, moist, gently sucking mouth. Sensation became a low deep throbbing ache that spread its sensual fingers to every part of her, quickening her pulses and dragging on her breath. He gave the other breast the same slow, sensual pleasure, his hand gently kneading in tune with his lips until she groaned in sweet agony to it all.

As if the little sound was a sign that stirred his blood his mouth suddenly was back on hers again, taking with driving, hungry passion at the same time his hand trailed a caressing passage down her ribcage to the flat of her stomach before moving on, smooth fingertips slipping beneath the flimsy triangle of raspberry silk and spearing through the dusky mound of curls on a seeking quest.

Shock turned her limbs to liquid, her shaken choke broke their kiss. She opened her eyes and found herself staring directly into naked desire burning molten in the fire glow as his fingers discovered the heart of her. Alien though it was, she squirmed on a wave of white-hot pleasure, her heart pounding at a thundering pace, her fingers clawing at his shoulders as he dipped, withdrew, caressed then dipped again with the smooth, sure touch of a man who knew exactly how to make a woman feel like this. Wild, she felt wild, caught in a slipstream of scintillating pleasure that flowed through her blood. She arched against him, quivering, her breathing reduced to tight, aching little gasps. He captured one of her breasts and she leapt, she shuddered, she sank beneath the rolling surface of shattering sensation and fought him like a mad woman but clung to him desperately at the same time.

And he was hot, his breathing thick and tense, each lithe movement of his body such a sensual act she didn’t know which part of him was going to inflame her next. He murmured something in Italian but she was way beyond being able to translate. The sensual, soothing sound of his voice impinged, though; the gentle brush of his hand across her cheek.

She opened her eyes to find he was frowning—at her naive lack of control no doubt. ‘I’m not…’ used to this, she was about to confess, but he hushed her into silence with the warm crush of his mouth.

Then she was losing herself again in a world made up of pure feeling. He trailed kisses across her breasts, catching each distended nipple and rolling it with his tongue. He kissed her all over. He explored her like a master and she responded with a writhing and whimpering then groaning in protest when his trailing mouth moved to the singing sensitivity of her groin. He kissed her hip, her waist and finally her breasts again, then recaptured her mouth at the same time as he reached for one of her hands and gently curled it around his sex.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.