In paradise—as his prisoner!

One of Lucas Cipriani’s employees has information which could ruin a vital takeover—and he’s furious! The only way to handle temptress Katy Brennan is to hold her captive on his yacht for a fortnight, cut off from the world until the deal is complete...

Katy is infuriated by her billionaire boss’s high-handed behavior—but also unwillingly intrigued by the gorgeous CEO. Once she’s alone and at his mercy, Lucas begins to let Katy see past his steely exterior. Soon she’s shockingly tempted to indulge in a forbidden fling...and relinquish her innocence!

‘You can’t just…just kidnap me for weeks on end because you have a deal to complete! That’s a crime!’

‘Incendiary words, Miss Brennan.’

Lucas leaned over and placed both hands on either side of her chair, caging her in so that she automatically cringed back. The power of his personality was so suffocating that she had to make an effort to remember how to breathe.

‘I won’t be kidnapping you. Far from it. You can walk out of here, but you know the consequences if you do. I am an extremely powerful man, for my sins. Please do us both a favour by not crossing me.’

‘Arrogant!’ Katy’s green eyes narrowed in a display of bravado she was inwardly far from feeling. ‘That’s what you are, Mr Cipriani! You’re an arrogant, domineering bully!’ She collided with eyes that burned with the heat of molten lava.

Lucas’s eyes drifted to her full lips and for a second he was overwhelmed by a powerful, crazy urge to crush them under his mouth. He drew back, straightened and resumed his seat behind his desk.

‘I can’t just be kept under watch for two weeks. How is it going to work?’

‘It’s simple.’ He leaned forward, the very essence of practicality. ‘You will be accommodated, without benefit of your phone or personal computer, for a fortnight. You can consider it a pleasant holiday without the nuisance of having your time interrupted by gadgets.’

‘A pleasant holiday?’ Her breathing was ragged and her imagination, released to run wild, was coming up with all sorts of giddying scenarios…

CATHY WILLIAMS can remember reading Mills & Boon books as a teenager, and now that she is writing them she remains an avid fan. For her, there is nothing like creating romantic stories and engaging plots, and each and every book is a new adventure. Cathy lives in London. Her three daughters—Charlotte, Olivia and Emma—have always been, and continue to be, the greatest inspirations in her life.

Books by Cathy Williams

Mills & Boon Modern Romance

The Secret Sanchez Heir

Bought to Wear the Billionaire’s Ring

Snowbound with His Innocent Temptation

A Virgin for Vasquez

Seduced into Her Boss’s Service

The Wedding Night Debt

A Pawn in the Playboy’s Game

At Her Boss’s Pleasure

The Real Romero

The Uncompromising Italian

The Argentinian’s Demand

Secrets of a Ruthless Tycoon

The Italian Titans

Wearing the De Angelis Ring

The Surprise De Angelis Baby

One Night With Consequences

Bound by the Billionaire’s Baby

Seven Sexy Sins

To Sin with the Tycoon

Visit the Author Profile page

at millsandboon.co.uk for more titles.

Cipriani’s Innocent Captive

Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘MR CIPRIANI IS ready for you now.’

Katy Brennan looked up at the middle-aged, angular woman who had earlier met her in the foyer of Cipriani Head Office and ushered her to the directors’ floor, where she had now been waiting for over twenty minutes.

She didn’t want to feel nervous but she did. She had been summoned from her office in Shoreditch, where she worked as an IT specialist in a small team of four, and informed that Lucas Cipriani, the ultimate god to whom everyone answered, requested her presence.

She had no idea why he might want to talk to her, but she suspected that it concerned the complex job she was currently working on and, whilst she told herself that he probably only wanted to go through some of the finer details with her, she was still...nervous.

Katy stood up, wishing that she had had some kind of advance warning of this meeting, because if she had she would have dressed in something more in keeping with the über-plush surroundings in which she now found herself.

As it was, she was in her usual casual uniform of jeans and a tee-shirt, with her backpack and a lightweight bomber jacket, perfect for the cool spring weather, but utterly inappropriate for this high-tech, eight-storey glasshouse.

She took a deep breath and looked neither left nor right as she followed his PA along the carpeted corridor, past the hushed offices of executives and the many boardrooms where deals worth millions were closed, until the corridor ballooned out into a seating area. At the back of this was a closed eight-foot wooden door which was enough to send a chill through any person who had been arbitrarily summoned by the head of her company—a man whose ability to make deals and turn straw into gold was legendary.

Katy took a deep breath and stood back as his PA pushed open the door.

* * *

Staring absently through the floor-to-ceiling pane of reinforced glass that separated him from the streets below, Lucas Cipriani thought that this meeting was the last thing he needed to kick off the day.

But it could not be avoided. Security had been breached on the deal he had been working on for the past eight months, and this woman was going to have to take the consequences—pure and simple.

This was the deal of a lifetime and there was no way he was going to allow it to be jeopardised.

As his PA knocked and entered his office, Lucas slowly turned round, hand in trouser pocket, and looked at the woman whose job was a thing of the past, if only she knew it.

Eyes narrowed, it hit him that he really should catch up on the people who actually worked for him, because he hadn’t expected this. He’d expected a nerd with heavy spectacles and an earnest manner, whilst the girl in front of him looked less like a computer whizz-kid and more like a hippy. Her clothes were generic: faded jeans and a tee-shirt with the name of a band he had never heard of. Her shoes were masculine black boots, suitable for heavy-duty construction work. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder, and stuffed into the top of it was some kind of jacket, which she had clearly just removed. Her entire dress code contradicted every single thing he associated with a woman, but she had the sort of multi-coloured coppery hair that would have had artists queuing up to commit it to canvas, and an elfin face with enormous bright-green eyes that held his gaze for reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom.

‘Miss Brennan.’ He strolled towards his desk as Vicky, his secretary, clicked the heavy door to his office shut behind her. ‘Sit, please.’

At the sound of that deep, dark, velvety voice, Katy started and realised that she had been holding her breath. When she had entered the office she’d thought that she more or less knew what to expect. She vaguely knew what her boss looked like because she had seen pictures of him in the company magazines that occasionally landed on her desk in Shoreditch, far away from the cutting-edge glass building that housed the great and the good in the company: from Lucas Cipriani, who sat at the very top like a god atop Mount Olympus, to his team of powerful executives who made sure that his empire ran without a hitch.

Those were people whose names appeared on letterheads and whose voices were occasionally heard down the end of phone lines, but who were never, ever seen. At least, not in Shoreditch, which was reserved for the small cogs in the machine.

But she still hadn’t expected this. Lucas Cipriani was, simply put, beautiful. There was no other word to describe him. It wasn’t just the arrangement of perfect features, or the burnished bronze of his skin, or even the dramatic masculinity of his physique: Lucas Cipriani’s good looks went far beyond the physical. He exuded a certain power and charisma that made the breath catch in your throat and scrambled your ability to think in straight lines.

Which was why Katy was here now, in his office, drawing a blank where her thoughts should be and with her mouth so dry that she wouldn’t have been able to say a word if she’d wanted to.

She vaguely recalled him saying something about sitting down, which she badly wanted to do, and she shuffled her way to the enormous leather chair that faced his desk and sank into it with some relief.

‘You’ve been working on the Chinese deal,’ Lucas stated without preamble.

‘Yes.’ She could talk about work, she could answer any question he might have, but she was unsettled by a dark, brooding, in-your-face sensuality she hadn’t expected, and when she spoke her voice was jerky and nervous. ‘I’ve been working on the legal side of the deal, dedicating all the details to a programme that will enable instant access to whatever is required, without having to sift through reams of documentation. I hope there isn’t a problem. I’m running ahead of schedule, in actual fact. I’ll be honest with you, Mr Cipriani, it’s one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever worked on. Complex, but really challenging.’

She cleared her throat and hazarded a smile, which was met with stony silence, and her already frayed nerves took a further battering. Stunning dark eyes, fringed with inky black, luxuriant lashes, pierced through the thin veneer of her self-confidence, leaving her breathless and red-faced.

Lucas positioned himself at his desk, an enormous chrome-and-glass affair that housed a computer with an over-sized screen, a metallic lamp and a small, very artfully designed bank of clocks that made sure he knew, at any given moment, what time it was in all the major cities in which his companies were located.

He lowered his eyes now and, saying nothing, swivelled his computer so that it was facing her.

‘Recognise that man?’

Katy blanched. Her mouth fell open as she found herself staring at Duncan Powell, the guy she had fallen for three years previously. Floppy blond hair, blue eyes that crinkled when he grinned and boyish charm had combined to hook an innocent young girl barely out of her teens.

She had not expected this. Not in a million years. Confused, flustered and with a thousand alarm bells suddenly ringing in her head, Katy fixed bewildered green eyes on Lucas.

‘I don’t understand...’

‘I’m not asking you to understand. I’m asking you whether you know this man.’

‘Y-yes,’ she stammered. ‘I... Well, I knew him a few years ago...’

‘And it would seem that you bypassed certain security systems and discovered that he is, these days, employed by the Chinese company I am in the process of finalising a deal with. Correct? No, don’t bother answering that. I have a series of alerts on my computer and what I’m saying does not require verification.’

She felt dazed. Katy’s thoughts had zoomed back in time to her disastrous relationship with Duncan.

She’d met him shortly after she had returned home to her parents’ house in Yorkshire. Torn between staying where she was and facing the big, brave world of London, where the lights were bright and the job prospects were decidedly better, she had taken up a temporary post as an assistant teacher at one of the local schools to give herself some thinking time and to plan a strategy.

Duncan had worked at the bank on the high street, a stone’s throw from the primary school.

In fairness, it had not been love at first sight. She had always liked a quirky guy; Duncan had been just the opposite. A snappy dresser, he had homed in on her with the single-minded focus of a heat-seeking missile with a pre-set target. Before she’d even decided whether she liked him or not, they had had coffee, then a meal, and then they were going out.

He’d been persistent and funny, and she’d started rethinking her London agenda when the whole thing had fallen apart because she’d discovered that the man who had stolen her heart wasn’t the honest, sincere, single guy he had made himself out to be.

Nor had he even been a permanent resident in the little village where her parents lived. He’d been there on a one-year secondment, which was a minor detail he had cleverly kept under wraps. He had a wife and twin daughters keeping the fires warm in the house in Milton Keynes he shared with them.

She had been a diversion and, once she had discovered the truth about him, he had shrugged and held his hands up in rueful surrender and she had known, in a flash of pure gut instinct, that he had done that because she had refused to sleep with him. Duncan Powell had planned to have fun on his year out and, whilst he had been content to chase her for a few months, he hadn’t been prepared to take the chase to a church and up an aisle, because he had been a fully committed family man.

‘I don’t understand.’ Katy looked away from the reminder of her steep learning curve staring out at her from Lucas’s computer screen. ‘So Duncan works for their company. I honestly didn’t go hunting for that information.’ Although, she had done some basic background checks, just out of sheer curiosity, to see whether it was the same creep once she’d stumbled upon him. A couple of clicks of a button was all it had taken to confirm her suspicion.

Lucas leaned forward, his body language darkly, dangerously menacing. ‘That’s as may be,’ he told her, ‘but it does present certain problems.’

With cool, clear precision he presented those certain problems to her and she listened to him in ever-increasing alarm. A deal done in complete secrecy...a family company rooted in strong values of tradition...a variable stock market that hinged on nothing being leaked and the threat her connection to Duncan posed at a delicate time in the negotiations.

Katy was brilliant with computers, but the mysteries of high finance were lost on her. The race for money had never interested her. From an early age, her parents had impressed upon her the importance of recognising value in the things that money couldn’t buy. Her father was a parish priest and both her parents lived a life that was rooted in the fundamental importance of putting the needs of other people first. Katy didn’t care who earned what or how much money anyone had. She had been brought up with a different set of values. For better or for worse, she occasionally thought.

‘I don’t care about any of that,’ she said unevenly, when there was a brief lull in his cold tabulation of her transgressions. It seemed a good moment to set him straight because she was beginning to have a nasty feeling that he was circling her like a predator, preparing to attack.

Was he going to sack her? She would survive. The bottom line was that that was the very worst he could do. He wasn’t some kind of mediaeval war lord who could have her hung, drawn and quartered because she’d disobeyed him.

‘Whether you care about a deal that isn’t going to impact on you or not is immaterial. Either by design or incompetence, you’re now in possession of information that could unravel nearly a year and a half of intense negotiation.’

‘To start with, I’m obviously very sorry about what happened. It’s been a very complex job and, if I accidentally happened upon information I shouldn’t have, then I apologise. I didn’t mean to. In fact, I’m not at all interested in your deal, Mr Cipriani. You gave me a job to do and I was doing it to the best of my ability.’

‘Which clearly wasn’t up to the promised standard, because an error of the magnitude of the one you made is inexcusable.’

‘But that’s not fair!’

‘Remind me to give you a life lesson about what’s fair and what isn’t. I’m not interested in your excuses, Miss Brennan. I’m interested in working out a solution to bypass the headache you created.’

Katy’s mind had stung at his criticism of her ability. She was good at what she did. Brilliant, even. To have her competence called into question attacked the very heart of her.

‘If you look at the quality of what I’ve done, sir, you’ll find that I’ve done an excellent job. I realise that I may have stumbled upon information that should have not been available to me, but you have my word that anything I’ve uncovered stays right here with me.’

‘And I’m to believe you because...?’

‘Because I’m telling you the truth!’

‘I’m sorry to drag you into the world of reality, Miss Brennan, but taking things at face value, including other people’s sincerely meant promises, is something I don’t do.’ He leaned back into his chair and looked at her.

Without trying, Lucas was capable of exuding the sort of lethal cool that made grown men quake in their shoes. A chit of a girl who was destined for the scrapheap should have been a breeze but for some reason he was finding some of his formidable focus diluted by her arresting good looks.

He went for tall, career-driven brunettes who were rarely seen without their armour of high-end designer suits and killer heels. He enjoyed the back and forth of intellectual repartee and had oftentimes found himself embroiled in heated debates about work-related issues.

His women knew the difference between a bear market and a bull market and would have sneered at anyone who didn’t.

They were alpha females and that was the way he liked it.

He had seen the damage caused to rich men by airheads and bimbos. His fun-loving, amiable father had had ten good years of marriage to Lucas’s mother and then, when Annabel Cipriani had died, he had promptly lost himself in a succession of stunningly sexy blondes, intelligence not a prerequisite.

He had been taken to the cleaners three times and it was a miracle that any family money, of which there had been a considerable sum at the starting block, had been left in the coffers.

But far worse than the nuisance of having his bank accounts bled by rapacious gold-diggers was the hope his father stupidly had always invested in the women he ended up marrying. Hope that they would be there for him, would somehow give him the emotional support he had had with his first wife. He had been looking for love and that weakness had opened him up to being used over and over again.

Lucas had absorbed all this from the side lines and had learned the necessary lessons: avoid emotional investment and you’d never end up getting hurt. Indeed, bimbos he could handle, though they repulsed him. At least they were a known quantity. What he really didn’t do were women who demanded anything from him he knew he was incapable of giving, which was why he always went for women as emotionally and financially independent as him. They obeyed the same rules that he did and were as dismissive of emotional, overblown scenes as he was.

The fact was that, if you didn’t let anyone in, then you were protected from disappointment, and not just the superficial disappointment of discovering that some replaceable woman was more interested in your bank account than she was in you.

He had learned more valuable lessons about the sort of weaknesses that could permanently scar and so he had locked his heart away and thrown away the key and, in truth, he had never had a moment’s doubt that he had done the right thing.

‘Are you still in contact with the man?’ he murmured, watching her like a hawk.

‘No! I am not!’ Heated colour made her face burn. She found that she was gripping the arms of the chair for dear life, her whole body rigid with affront that he would even ask her such a personal question. ‘Are you going to sack me, Mr Cipriani? Because, if you are, then perhaps you could just get on with it.’

Her temples were beginning to throb painfully. Of course she was going to be sacked. This wasn’t going to be a ticking off before being dismissed back to Shoreditch to resume her duties as normal, nor was she simply going to be removed from the task at which inadvertently she had blundered.

She had been hauled in here like a common criminal so that she could be fired. No one-month’s notice, no final warning, and there was no way that she could even consider a plea of unfair dismissal. She would be left without her main source of income and that was something she would just have to deal with.

And the guy sitting in front of her having fun being judge, jury and executioner didn’t give a hoot as to whether she was telling the truth or not, or whether her life would be affected by an abrupt sacking or not.

‘Regrettably, it’s not quite so straightforward—’

‘Why not?’ Katy interrupted feverishly. ‘You obviously don’t believe a word I’ve told you and I know I certainly wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the project again. If you just wanted me off it, you would have probably told Tim, my manager, and let him pass the message on to me. The fact that I’ve been summoned here tells me that you’re going to give me the boot, but not before you make sure I know why. Will you at the very least give me a reference, Mr Cipriani? I’ve worked extremely hard for your company for the past year and a half and I’ve had nothing but glowing reports on the work I’ve done. I think I deserve some credit for that.’

Lucas marvelled that she could think, for a minute, that he had so much time on his hands that he would personally call her in just to sack her. She was looking at him with an urgent expression, her green eyes defiant.

Again distracted, he found himself saying, ‘I noticed on your file that you only work two days a week for my company. Why is that?’

‘Sorry?’ Katy’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

‘It’s unusual for someone of your age to be a part-time employee. That’s generally the domain of women with children of school age who want to earn a little money but can’t afford the demands of a full-time job.’

‘I... I have another job,’ she admitted, wondering where this was heading and whether she needed to be on her guard. ‘I work as an IT teacher at one of the secondary schools near where I live.’

Lucas was reluctantly fascinated by the ebb and flow of colour that stained her cheeks. Her face was as transparent as glass and that in itself was an unusual enough quality to hold his attention. The tough career women he dated knew how to school their expressions because, the higher up the ladder they climbed, the faster they learned that blushing like virginal maidens did nothing when it came to career advancement.

‘Can’t pay well,’ he murmured.

‘That’s not the point!’

Lucas had turned his attention to his computer and was very quickly pulling up the file he had on her, which he had only briefly scanned before he had scheduled his meeting with her. The list of favourable references was impressively long.

‘So,’ he mused, sitting back and giving her his undivided attention. ‘You work for me for the pay and you work as a teacher for the enjoyment.’

‘That’s right.’ She was disconcerted at how quickly he had reached the right conclusions.

‘So the loss of your job at my company would presumably have a serious impact on your finances.’

‘I would find another job to take its place.’

‘Look around the market, Miss Brennan. Well paid part-time work is thin on the ground. I make it my duty to pay my employees over the odds. I find that tends to engender commitment and loyalty to the company. You’d be hard pressed to find the equivalent anywhere in London.’

Lucas had planned on a simple solution to this unexpected problem. Now, he was pressed to find out a bit more about her. As a part-time worker, it seemed she contributed beyond the call of duty, and both the people she answered to within the company and external clients couldn’t praise her enough. She’d pleaded her innocence, and he wasn’t gullible enough to wipe the slate clean, but a more detailed hearing might be in order. His initial impressions weren’t of a thief who might be attracted to the lure of insider trading but, on the other hand, someone with a part-time job might find it irresistible to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity, and Duncan Powell represented that unexpected opportunity.

‘Money doesn’t mean that much to me, Mr Cipriani.’ Katy was confused as to how a man whose values were so different from hers could make her go hot and cold and draw her attention in a way that left her feeling helpless and exposed. She was finding it hard to string simple sentences together. ‘I have a place to myself but, if I had to share with other people, then it wouldn’t be the end of the world.’

The thought of sharing space with a bunch of strangers was only slightly less appalling to Lucas than incarceration with the key thrown away.

Besides, how much did she mean that? he wondered with grim practicality, dark eyes drifting over her full, stubborn mouth and challenging angle of her head. What had been behind that situation with Powell, a married man? It wasn’t often that Lucas found himself questioning his own judgements but in this instance he did wonder whether it was just a simple tale of a woman who had been prepared to overlook the fact that her lover was a married man because of the financial benefits he could bring to the table. Although, he’d seen enough of that to know that it was the oldest story in the world.

Maybe he would test the waters and see what came out in the wash. If this had been a case of hire and fire, then she would have been clearing out her desk eighteen hours ago, but it wasn’t, because he couldn’t sack her just yet, and it paid to know your quarry. He would not allow any misjudgements to wreck his deal.

‘You never thought about packing in the teaching and taking up the job at my company full time?’

‘No.’ The silence stretched between them while Katy frantically tried to work out where this sudden interest was leading. ‘Some people aren’t motivated by money.’ She finally broke the silence because she was beginning to perspire with discomfort. ‘I wasn’t raised to put any value on material things.’

‘Interesting. Unique.’

‘Maybe in your world, Mr Cipriani.’

‘Money, Miss Brennan, is the engine that makes everything go, and not just in my world. In everyone’s world. The best things in life are not, as rumour would have it, free.’

‘Maybe not for you,’ Katy said with frank disapproval. She knew that she was treading on thin ice. She sensed that Lucas Cipriani was not a man who enjoyed other people airing too many contradictory opinions. He’d hauled her in to sack her and was now subjecting her to the Spanish Inquisition because he was cold, arrogant and because he could.

But what was the point of tiptoeing around him when she was on her way out for a crime she hadn’t committed?

‘That’s why you don’t believe what I’m saying,’ she expanded. ‘That’s why you don’t trust me. You probably don’t trust anyone, which is sad, when you think about it. I’d hate to go through life never knowing my friends from my enemies. When your whole world is about money, then you lose sight of the things that really matter.’

Lucas’s lips thinned disapprovingly at her directness. She was right when she said that he didn’t trust anyone but that was exactly the way he liked it.

‘Let me be perfectly clear with you, Miss Brennan.’ He leaned forward and looked at her coolly. ‘You haven’t been brought here for a candid exchange of views. I appreciate you are probably tense and nervous, which is doubtless why you’re cavalier about overstepping the mark, but I suggest it’s time to get down from your moral high ground and take a long, hard look at the choices you have made that have landed you in my office.’

Katy flushed. ‘I made a mistake with Duncan,’ she muttered. ‘We all make mistakes.’

‘You slept with a married man,’ Lucas corrected her bluntly, startling her with the revelation that he’d discovered what he clearly thought was the whole, shameful truth. ‘So, while you’re waxing lyrical about my tragic, money-orientated life, you might want to consider that, whatever the extent of my greed and arrogance, I would no more sleep with a married woman than I would jump into the ocean with anchors secured to my feet.’

‘I...’

Lucas held up one hand. ‘No one speaks to me the way you do.’ He felt a twinge of discomfort because that one sentence seemed to prove the arrogance of which he had been accused. Since when had he become so pompous? He scowled. ‘I’ve done the maths, Miss Brennan and, however much you look at me with those big, green eyes, I should tell you that taking the word of an adulterer is something of a tall order.’

Buffeted by Lucas’s freezing contempt and outrageous accusations, Katy rose on shaky legs to direct the full force of her anger at him.

‘How dare you?’ But even in the midst of her anger she was swamped by the oddest sensation of vulnerability as his dark eyes swept coolly over her, electrifying every inch of her heated body.

‘With remarkable ease.’ Lucas didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘I’m staring the facts in the face and the facts are telling me a very clear story. You want me to believe that you have nothing to do with the man. Unfortunately, your lack of principles in having anything to do with him in the first place tells a tale of its own.’

The colour had drained away from her face. She hated this man. She didn’t think it would be possible to hate anyone more.

‘I don’t have to stay here and listen to this.’ But uneasily she was aware that, without her laying bare her sex life, understandably he would have jumped to the wrong conclusions. Without her confession that she had never slept with Duncan, he would have assumed the obvious. Girls her age had flings and slept with men. Maybe he would be persuaded into believing her if she told him the truth, which was that she had ended their brief relationship as soon as she had found out about his wife and kids. But even if he believed that he certainly wouldn’t believe that she hadn’t slept with the man.

Which would lead to a whole other conversation and it was one she had no intention of having. How would a man like Lucas Cipriani believe that the hussy who slept with married guys was in fact a virgin?

Even Katy didn’t like thinking about that. She had never had the urge to rush into sex. Her parents hadn’t stamped their values on her but the drip, drip, drip of their gentle advice, and the example she had seen on the doorstep of the vicarage of broken-hearted, often pregnant young girls abandoned by men they had fallen for, had made her realise that when it came to love it paid to be careful.

In fairness, had temptation knocked on the door, then perhaps she might have questioned her old-fashioned take on sex but, whilst she had always got along just fine with the opposite sex, no one had ever grabbed her attention until Duncan had come along with his charm, his overblown flattery and his persistence. She had been unsure of where her future lay, and in that brief window of uncertainty and apprehension he had burrowed in and stolen her heart. She had been ripe for the picking and his betrayal had been devastating.

Her virginity was a millstone now, a reminder of the biggest mistake she had ever made. Whilst she hoped that one day she would find the guy for her, she was resigned to the possibility that she might never do so, because somehow she was just out of sync with men and what they wanted.

They wanted sex, first and foremost. To get to the prince, you seemed to have to sleep with hundreds of frogs, and there was no way she would do that. The thought that she might have slept with one frog was bad enough.

So what would Lucas Cipriani make of her story?

She pictured the sneer on his face and shuddered.

Disturbed at the direction of her thoughts, she tilted her chin and looked at him with equal cool. ‘I expect, after all this, I’m being given the sack and that Personnel will be in touch—so there can’t be any reason for me to still be here. And you can’t stop me leaving. You’ll just have to trust me that I won’t be saying anything to anyone about your deal.’

CHAPTER TWO

SHE DIDN’T GET FAR.

‘You leave this office, Miss Brennan, and regrettably I will have to commence legal proceedings against you on the assumption that you have used insider information to adversely influence the outcome of my company’s business dealings.’

Katy stopped and slowly turned to look at him.

His dark eyes were flat, hard and expressionless and he was looking right back at her with just the mildest of interest. His absolute calm was what informed her that he wasn’t cracking some kind of sick joke at her expense.

Katy knew a lot about the workings of computers. She could create programs that no one else could and was downright gifted when it came to sorting out the nuts and bolts of intricate problems when those programs began to get a little temperamental. It was why she had been carefully headhunted by Lucas’s company and why they’d so willingly accommodated her request for a part-time job only.

In the field of advanced technology, she was reasonably well-known.

She didn’t, however, know a thing about law. What was he going on about? She didn’t really understand what he was saying but she understood enough to know that it was a threat.

Lucas watched the colour flood her face. Her skin was satiny smooth and flawless. She had the burnished copper-coloured hair of a redhead, yet her creamy complexion was free of any corresponding freckles. The net result was an unusual, absurdly striking prettiness that was all the more dramatic because she seemed so unaware of it.

But then, his cynical brain told him, she was hardly a shrinking violet with no clue of her pulling power, because she had had an affair with a married guy with kids.

He wondered whether she thought that she could turn those wide, emerald-green eyes on him and get away scot-free.

If she did, then she had no idea with whom she was dealing. He’d had a lifetime’s worth of training when it came to spotting women who felt that their looks were a passport to getting whatever they wanted. He’d spent his formative years watching them do their numbers on his father. This woman might not be an airhead like them, but she was still driven by the sort of emotionalism he steered well clear of.

‘Of course—’ he shrugged ‘—my deal would be blown sky-high out of the water, but have you any idea how much damage you would do to yourself in the process? Litigation is something that takes its time. Naturally, your services would be no longer required at my company and your pay would cease immediately. And then there would be the small question of your legal costs. Considerable.’

Her expression was easy to read and Lucas found that he was enjoying the show.

‘That’s—that’s ridiculous,’ Katy stuttered. ‘You’d find out that I haven’t been in touch with...with Duncan for years. In fact, since we broke up. Plus, you’d also find out that I haven’t breathed a word about the Chinese deal to...well, to anybody.’

‘I only have your word for it. Like I said, discovering whether you’re telling the truth or not would take time, and all the while you would naturally be without a penny to your name, defending your reputation against the juggernaut of my company’s legal department.’

‘I have another job.’

‘And we’ve already established that teaching won’t pay the rent. And who knows how willing a school would be to employ someone with a potential criminal record?’

Katy flushed. Bit by bit, he was trapping her in a corner and, with a feeling of surrendering to the inexorable advance of a steamroller, she finally said, ‘What do you want me to do?’

Lucas stood up and strolled towards the wall of glass that separated him from the city below, before turning to look at her thoughtfully.

‘I told you that this was not a straightforward situation, Miss Brennan. I meant it. It isn’t a simple case of throwing you out of my company when you can hurt me with privileged information.’ He paced the enormous office, obliging her to follow his progress, and all the time she found herself thinking, he’s almost too beautiful to bear looking at. He was very tall and very lean, and somehow the finely cut, expensive suit did little to conceal something raw and elemental in his physique.

She had to keep dragging her brain back to what he was telling her. She had to keep frowning so that she could give the appearance of not looking like a complete nitwit. She didn’t like the man, but did he have this effect on all the women he met?

She wondered what sort of women he met anyway, and then chastised herself for losing the thread when her future was at stake.

‘The deal is near completion and a fortnight at most should see a satisfactory conclusion. Now, let’s just say that I believe you when you tell me that you haven’t been gossiping with your boyfriend...’

‘I told you that Duncan and I haven’t spoken for years! And, for your information, we broke up because I found out that he was married. I’m not the sort of person who would ever dream of going out with a married guy—!’

Lucas stopped her in mid-speech. ‘Not interested. All I’m interested in is how this situation is dealt with satisfactorily for me. As far as I am concerned, you could spend all your free time hopping in and out of beds with married men.’

Katy opened her mouth and then thought better of defending herself, because it wasn’t going to get her anywhere. He seemed ready to hand down her sentence.

‘It is imperative that any sensitive information you may have acquired is not shared, and the only way that that can be achieved is if you are incommunicado to the outside world. Ergo that is how it is going to be for the next fortnight, until my deal is concluded.’

‘Sorry, Mr Cipriani, but I’m not following you.’

‘Which bit, exactly, Miss Brennan, are you not following?’

‘The fortnight bit. What are you talking about?’

‘It’s crystal clear, Miss Brennan. You’re not going to be talking to anyone, and I mean anyone, for the next two weeks until I have all the signatures right where I want them, at which point you may or may not return to your desk in Shoreditch and we can both forget that this unfortunate business ever happened. Can I get any clearer than that? And by “incommunicado”, I mean no mobile phone and no computer. To be blunt, you will be under watch until you can no longer be a danger to me.’

‘But you can’t be serious!’

‘Do I look as though I’m doing a stand-up routine?’

No, he didn’t. In fact, without her even realising it, he had been pacing the office in ever decreasing circles and he was now towering right in front of her; the last thing he resembled was a man doing a stand-up routine.

Indeed, he looked about as humorous as an executioner; she quailed inside.

Mentally, she added ‘bully’ to the growing list of things she loathed about him.

‘Under watch? What does that even mean? You can’t just...just kidnap me for weeks on end because you have a deal to complete! That’s a crime!’

‘Incendiary words, Miss Brennan.’ He leaned over and placed both hands on either side of her chair, caging her in so that she automatically cringed back. The power of his personality was so suffocating that she had to make an effort to remember how to breathe. ‘I won’t be kidnapping you. Far from it. You can walk out of here, but you know the consequences of that if you do. The simple process of consulting a lawyer would start racking up bills you could ill afford, I’m sure. Not to mention the whiff of unemployability that would be attached to you at the end of the long-winded and costly business. I am an extremely powerful man, for my sins. Please do us both a favour by not crossing me.’

‘Arrogant.’ Katy’s green eyes narrowed in a display of bravado she was inwardly far from feeling. ‘That’s what you are, Mr Cipriani! You’re an arrogant, domineering bully!’ She collided with eyes that burned with the heat of molten lava, and for a terrifying moment her anger was eclipsed by a dragging sensation that made her breathing sluggish and laborious.

Lucas’s eyes drifted to her full lips and for a second he was overwhelmed by a powerful, crazy urge to crush them under his mouth. He drew back, straightened and resumed his seat behind his desk.

‘I’m guessing that you’re beginning to see sense,’ he commented drily.

‘It’s not ethical,’ Katy muttered under her breath. She eyed him with mutinous hostility.

‘It’s perfectly ethical, if a little unusual, but then again I’ve never been in the position of harbouring suspicions about the loyalties of any of my employees before. I pay them way above market price and that usually works. This is a first for me, Miss Brennan.’

‘I can’t just be kept under watch for two weeks. I’m not a specimen in a jam jar! Plus, I have responsibilities at the school!’

‘And a simple phone call should sort that out. If you want, I can handle the call myself. You just need to inform them that personal circumstances will prevent you from attending for the next fortnight. Same goes for any relatives, boyfriends and random pets that might need sorting out.’

‘I can’t believe this is happening. How is it going to work?’

‘It’s simple.’ He leaned forward, the very essence of practicality. ‘You will be accommodated without benefit of your phone or personal computer for a fortnight. You can consider it a pleasant holiday without the nuisance of having your time interrupted by gadgets.’

‘A pleasant holiday?’ Her breathing was ragged and her imagination, released to run wild, was coming up with all sorts of giddying scenarios.

Lucas had the grace to flush before shrugging. ‘I assure you that your accommodation will be of the highest quality. All you need bring with you are your clothes. You will be permitted to return to your house or flat, or wherever it is you live, so that you can pack what you need.’

‘Where on earth will I be going? This is mad.’

‘I’ve put the alternative on the table.’ Lucas shrugged elegantly.

‘But where will I be put?’

‘To be decided. There are a number of options. Suffice to say that you won’t need to bring winter gear.’ In truth, he hadn’t given this a great deal of thought. His plan had been to delegate to someone else the responsibility of babysitting the headache that had arisen.

Now, however, babysitting her himself was looking good.

Why send a boy to do a man’s job? She was lippy, argumentative, stubborn, in short as unpredictable as a keg of dynamite, and he couldn’t trust any of his guys to know how to handle her.

She was also dangerously pretty and had no qualms when it came to having fun with a married guy. She said otherwise, but the jury was out on that one.

Dangerously pretty, rebellious and lacking in a moral compass was a recipe for disaster. Lucas looked at her with veiled, brooding speculation. He frankly couldn’t think of anyone who would be able to handle this. He had planned to disappear for a week or so to consolidate the finer details of the deal, without fear of constant interruption, and this had become even more pressing since the breach in security. He could easily kill two birds with one stone, rather than delegating the job and then wasting his time wondering whether the task would go belly up.

‘So, to cut to the chase, Miss Brennan...’ He buzzed and was connected through to his PA. In a fog of sick confusion, and with the distinct feeling of being chucked into a tumble drier with the cycle turned to maximum spin, Katy was aware of him instructing the woman who had escorted her to his office to join them in fifteen minutes.

‘Yes?’ she said weakly.

‘Vicky, my secretary, is going to accompany you back to...wherever you live...and she will supervise your immediate packing of clothes to take with you. Likewise, she will oversee whatever phone calls you feel you have to make to your friends. Needless to say, these will have to be cleared with her.’

‘This is ridiculous. I feel as though I’m starring in a low-grade spy movie.’

‘Don’t be dramatic, Miss Brennan. I’m taking some simple precautions to safeguard my business interests. Carrying on; once you have your bags packed and you’ve made a couple of calls, you will be chauffeured back here.’

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Feel free.’

‘Are you always this...cold?’

‘Are you always this outspoken?’ Eyes as black as night clashed with emerald-green. Katy felt something shiver inside her and suddenly, inexplicably, she was aware of her body in a way she had never been in her life before. It felt heavy yet acutely sensitive, tingly and hot, aching as though her limbs had turned to lead.

Her mouth went dry and for a few seconds her mind actually went completely blank. ‘I think that, if I have something to say, then why shouldn’t I? As long as I’m not being offensive to anyone, we’re all entitled to our opinions.’ She paused and tilted her chin at a challenging angle. ‘To answer your question.’

Lucas grunted. Not even the high-powered women who entered and exited his life made a habit of disagreeing with him, and they certainly never criticised. No one did.

‘And to answer yours,’ he said coolly, ‘I’m cold when the occasion demands. You’re not here on a social visit. You’re here because a situation has arisen that requires to be dealt with and you’re the root cause of the situation. Trust me, Miss Brennan, I’m the opposite of cold, given the right circumstances.’

And then he smiled, a long, slow, lazy smile and her senses shot into frantic overdrive. She licked her lips and her body stiffened as she leant forward in the chair, clutching the sides like a drowning person clutches a lifebelt.

That smile.

It seemed to insinuate into parts of her that she hadn’t known existed, and it took a lot of effort actually to remember that the man was frankly insulting her and that sexy smile was not directed at her. Whoever he was thinking of—his current girlfriend, no doubt—had instigated that smile.

Were he to direct a smile at her, it would probably turn her to stone.

‘So you stuff me away somewhere...’ She finally found her voice and thankfully sounded as composed as he did. ‘On a two week holiday, probably with those bodyguards of yours who brought me from the office, where I won’t be allowed to do anything at all because I’ll be minus my mobile phone and minus my computer. And, when you’re done with your deal, you might just pop back and collect me, provided I’ve survived the experience.’

Lucas clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘There’s no need to be so dramatic.’ He raked his fingers through his hair and debated whether he should have taken a slightly different approach.

Nope. He had taken the only possible approach. It just so happened that he was dealing with someone whose feet were not planted on the ground the way his were.

‘The bodyguards won’t be there.’

‘No, I suppose it would be a little chancy to stuff me away with men I don’t know. Not that it’ll make a scrap of difference whether your henchmen are male or female. I’ll still be locked away like a prisoner in a cell with the key thrown away.’

Lucas inhaled deeply and slowly, and hung on to a temper that was never, ever lost. ‘No henchmen,’ he intoned through gritted teeth. ‘You’re going to be with me. I wouldn’t trust anyone else to keep an eye on you.’

Not without being mauled to death in the process.

‘With you?’ Shot through with an electrifying awareness of him, her heart sped up, sending the blood pulsing hotly through her veins and making it difficult to catch her breath. Trapped somewhere with him? And yet the thought, which should have filled her with unremitting horror, kick-started a dark, insurgent curiosity that frankly terrified her.

‘I have no intention of having any interaction with you at all. You will simply be my responsibility for a fortnight and I will make sure that no contact is made with any outside parties until the deal is signed, sealed and delivered. And please don’t tell me the prospect of being without a mobile phone or computer for a handful of days amounts to nothing short of torture, an experience which you may or may not survive! It is possible to live without gadgets for a fortnight.’

‘Could you?’ But her rebellious mind was somewhere else, somewhere she felt it shouldn’t be.

‘This isn’t about me. Bring whatever books you want, or embroidery, or whatever you might enjoy doing, and think about it positively as an unexpected time out for which you will continue to be paid. If you’re finding it difficult to kick back and enjoy the experience, then you can always consider the alternative: litigation, legal bills and no job.’

Katy clenched her fists and wanted to say something back in retaliation, even though she was dimly aware of the fact that this was the last person on the planet she wanted to have a scrap with, and not just because he was a man who would have no trouble in making good on his threats. However, the door was opening and through the haze of her anger she heard herself being discussed in a low voice, as if she wasn’t in the room at all.

‘Right.’

She blinked and Lucas was staring down at her, hands shoved in his trouser pockets. Awkwardly she stood up and instinctively smiled politely at his secretary, who smiled back.

He’d rattled off a chain of events, but she’d only been half listening, and now she didn’t honestly know what would happen next.

‘I’ll have to phone my mum and dad,’ she said a little numbly and Lucas inclined his head to one side with a frown.

‘Of course.’

‘I talk with them every evening.’

His frown deepened, because that seemed a little excessive for someone in her twenties. It didn’t tally with the image of a raunchy young woman indulging in a steamy affair with a married man, not that the details of that were his business, unless the steamy affair was ongoing.

‘And I don’t have any pets.’ She gathered her backpack from the ground and headed towards the door in the same daze that had begun settling over her the second his secretary had walked into the room.

‘Miss Brennan...’

‘Huh?’ She blinked and looked up at him.

She was only five-three and wearing flats, so she had to crane her neck up. Her hair tumbled down her back in a riot of colour. Lucas was a big man and he felt as though he could fit her into his pocket. She was delicate, her features fine, her body slender under the oversized white shirt. Was that why he suddenly felt himself soften after the gruelling experience he had put her through? He had never in his life done anything that disturbed his conscience, had always acted fairly and decently towards other people. Yes, undeniably he could be ruthless, but never unjustly so. He felt a little guilty now.

‘Don’t get worked up about this.’ His voice was clipped because this was as close as he was going to get to putting her mind at ease. By nature, he was distrustful, and certainly the situation in which he had encountered her showed all the hallmarks of being dangerous, as she only had to advertise what she knew to her ex. Yet something about her fuelled an unexpected response in him.

Her eyes, he noted as he stared down into them, were a beguiling mix of green and turquoise. ‘This isn’t a trial by torture. It’s just the only way I can deal with a potential problem. You won’t spend the fortnight suffering, nor is there any need to fear that I’m going to be following you around every waking moment like a bad conscience. Indeed, you will hardly notice my presence. I will be working all day and you’ll be free to do as you like. Without the tools for communicating with the outside world, you can’t get up to any mischief.’

‘But I don’t even know where I’m going!’ Katy cried, latching on to that window of empathy before it vanished out of sight.

Lucas raised his eyebrows, and there was that smile again, although the empathy was still there and it was tinged with a certain amount of cool amusement. ‘Consider it a surprise,’ he murmured. ‘A bit like winning the lottery which, incidentally, pretty much sums it up when you think about the alternative.’ He nodded to his secretary and glanced at his watch. ‘Two hours, Vicky. Think that will do it?’

‘I think so.’

‘In that case, I will see you both shortly. And, Miss Brennan...don’t even think about doing a runner.’

* * *

Over the next hour and a half Katy experienced what it felt like to be kidnapped. Oh, he could call it what he liked, but she was going to be held prisoner. She was relieved of her mobile phone by Lucas’s secretary, who was brisk but warm, and seemed to see nothing amiss in following her boss’s high-handed instructions. It would be delivered to Lucas and held in safekeeping for her.

She packed a bunch of clothes, not knowing where she was going. Outside, it was still, but spring was making way for summer, so the clothes she crammed into her duffel bag were light, with one cardigan in case she ended up somewhere cold.

Although how would she know what the weather was up to when she would probably be locked in a room somewhere with views of the outside world through bars?

And yet, for all her frustration and downright anger, she could sort of see why he had reacted the way he had. Obviously the only thing that mattered to Lucas Cipriani was making money and closing deals. If this was to be the biggest deal of his career—and dipping his corporate toes into the Far East would be—then he would be more than happy to do what it took to safeguard his interest.

She was a dispensable little fish in the very big pond in which he was the marauding king of the water.

And the fact that she knew someone at the company he was about to take over, someone who was so far ignorant of what was going on, meant she had the power to pass on highly sensitive and potentially explosive information.

Lucas Cipriani, being the sort of man he was, would never believe that she had no ongoing situation with Duncan Powell because he was suspicious, distrustful, power hungry, arrogant, and would happily feed her to the sharks if it suited him, because he was also ice-cold and utterly emotionless.

‘Where am I being taken?’ she asked Vicky as they stepped back into the chauffeur-driven car that had delivered her to her flat. ‘Or am I going to find myself blindfolded before we get there?’

‘To a field on the outskirts of London.’ She smiled. ‘Mr Cipriani has his own private mode of transport there. And, no, you won’t be blindfolded for any of the journey.’

Katy subsided into silence and stared at the scenery passing by as the silent car left London and expertly took a route with which she was unfamiliar. She seldom left the capital unless it was to take the train up to Yorkshire to see her parents and her friends who still lived in the area. She didn’t own a car, so escaping London was rarely an option, although, on a couple of occasions, she had gone with Tim and some of the others to Brighton for a holiday, five of them crammed like sardines into his second-hand car.

She hadn’t thought about the dynamics of being trapped in a room with just Lucas acting as gaoler outside, but now she did, and she felt that frightening, forbidding tingle again.

Would other people be around? Or would there just be the two of them?

She hated him. She loathed his arrogance and the way he had of assuming that the world should fall in line with whatever he wanted. He was the boss who never made an effort to interact with those employees he felt were beneath him. He paid well not because he was a considerate and fair-minded guy who believed in rewarding hard work, but because he knew that money bought loyalty, and a loyal employee was more likely to do exactly what he demanded without asking questions. Pay an employee enough, and they lost the right to vote.

She hoped that he’d been telling the truth when he’d said that there would be no interaction between them because she couldn’t think that they would have anything to talk about.

Then Katy thought about seeing him away from the confines of office walls. Something inside trembled and she had that whooshing feeling again, as if she had been sitting quietly on a chair, only to find that the chair was attached to a rollercoaster and the switch had suddenly been turned on. Her tummy flipped over; she didn’t get it, because she really and truly didn’t like the guy.

She surfaced from her thoughts to find that they had left the main roads behind and were pulling into a huge parking lot where a long, covered building opened onto an air field.

‘I give you Lucas’s transport...’ Vicky murmured. ‘If you look to the right, you’ll see his private jet. It’s the black one. But today you’ll be taking the helicopter.’

Jet? Helicopter?

Katy did a double-take. Her eyes swivelled from private jet to helicopter and, sure enough, there he was, leaning indolently against a black and silver helicopter, dark shades shielding his eyes from the early-afternoon glare.

Her mouth ran dry. He was watching her from behind those shades. Her breathing picked up and her heart began to beat fast as she wondered what the heck she had got herself into, and all because she had stumbled across information she didn’t even care about.

She didn’t have time to dwell on the quicksand gathering at her feet, however, because with the sort of efficiency that spoke of experience the driver was pulling the car to a stop and she was being offloaded, the driver hurrying towards the helicopter with her bag just as the rotary blades of the aircraft began to whop, whop, whop in preparation for taking off, sending a whirlwind of flying dust beneath it.

Lucas had vanished into the helicopter.

Katy wished that she could vanish to the other side of the world.

She was harried, panic-stricken and grubby, because she hadn’t had a chance to shower, and her jeans and shirt were sticking to her like glue. When she’d spoken to her mother on the phone, under the eagle eye of Vicky, she had waffled on with some lame excuse about being whipped off to a country house to do an important job, where the reception might be a bit dodgy, so they weren’t to worry if contact was sporadic. She had made it sound like an exciting adventure because her parents were prone to worrying about her.

She hadn’t thought that she really would end up being whipped off to anywhere.

She had envisaged a laborious drive to a poky holding pen in the middle of nowhere, with Internet access cruelly denied her. She hadn’t believed him when he had told her to the contrary, and she certainly had not been able to get her head around any concept of an unplanned holiday unless you could call incarceration a holiday.

She was floored by what seemed to be a far bigger than average helicopter, but she was still scowling as she battled against the downdraft from the blades to climb aboard.

Lucas had to shout to be heard. As the small craft spun up, up and away, he called out, ‘Small bag, Miss Brennan. Where have you stashed the books, the sketch pads and the tin of paints?’

Katy gritted her pearly teeth together but didn’t say anything, and he laughed, eyebrows raised.

‘Or did you decide to go down the route of being a good little martyr while being held in captivity against your will? No books...no sketch pads...no tin of paints...and just the slightest temptation to stage a hunger strike to prove a point?’

Clenched fists joined gritted teeth and she glared at him, but he had already looked away and was flicking through the papers on his lap. He only glanced up when, leaning forward and voice raised to be heard above the din, she said, ‘Where are you taking me?’

Aggravatingly seeming to read her mind, privy to every dark leap of imagination that had whirled through her head in a series of colourful images, Lucas replied, ‘I’m sure that you’ve already conjured up dire destinations. So, instead of telling you, I’ll leave you to carry on with your fictitious scenarios because I suspect that where you subsequently end up can only be better than what you’ve wasted your time imagining. But to set your mind at rest...’

He patted the pocket of the linen jacket which was dumped on the seat next to him. ‘Your mobile phone is safe and sound right there. As soon as we land, you can tell me your password so that I can check every so often: make sure there are no urgent messages from the parents you’re in the habit of calling on a daily basis...’

‘Or from a married ex-boyfriend?’ She couldn’t resist prodding the sleeping tiger and he gave her a long, cool look from under the dark fringe of his lashes.

‘Or from a married ex-boyfriend,’ he drawled. ‘Always pays to be careful, in my opinion. Now why don’t you let me work and why don’t you...enjoy the ride?’

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