is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon® reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

The Heat of Passion

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

EBONY-BLACK hair against a crisp linen pillow, brown skin against a blindingly white sheet, and tiger’s eyes burning with blatant cruelty and triumph into hers. In horrified rejection of the imagery that had sprung into her mind, Jessica shuddered violently, dimly aware that she was still in the grip of severe shock.

Abruptly, she was dredged from her turmoil by the insistent shrill of the telephone in the hall. Reluctantly she answered the summons, carefully shutting the lounge door behind her so that her father was not disturbed.

‘Jessica...?’

She froze, her stunningly beautiful face white as snow between the silken wings of her silver-blonde hair. Her breath caught in her throat in a strangled gasp. The receiver dropped from her nerveless fingers and swung towards the floor.

That voice, that truly unforgettable voice...deep, dark and rich as golden honey. He said her name as no one else had ever said it. She hadn’t heard him speak in six long years and yet recognition was instantaneous and terrifying. Her throat closing over, she bent down to retrieve the phone.

‘I am so sorry to have startled you,’ Carlo Saracini purred, lying between his even white teeth.

Her own teeth clenched. She wanted to reach down the telephone line and slap him stupid. And feeling that way again...feeling that alien surge of raw violent hatred which he alone invoked ... scared her rigid. Her mouth went dry. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m in a very generous mood,’ he imparted with a husky edge to his slow slightly accented drawl. ‘I’m prepared to offer you a meeting—’

Her fingers clenched like talons round the receiver. ‘A meeting ... why?’

‘Can it be that you haven’t seen your father yet?’ he murmured.

She went white. ‘I’ve seen him,’ she whispered, not troubling to add that Gerald Amory was still in the room next door.

‘Embezzlement is a very serious offence.’

‘He had gambling debts,’ Jessica protested in a feverish undertone. ‘He panicked...he didn’t mean to take the money from the firm! He was borrowing it—’

‘Euphemistically speaking,’ Carlo inserted with more than an edge of mockery.

‘Amory’s used to belong to him,’ Jessica reminded him with helpless bitterness.

‘But it doesn’t now,’ Carlo traded softly. ‘Now it belongs to me.’

Jessica’s teeth gritted. Six years ago, burdened by the demands of a wife with expensive tastes, ageing machinery and falling profits, Gerald Amory had allowed Carlo to buy the family firm. Duly reinstalled as chief executive, her father had seemed content and, with new equipment and unparalleled export opportunities through the parent conglomerate, Amory Engineering had thrived.

Guilt stabbed like a knife into Jessica. If it had not been for her, Carlo Saracini would never have come into their lives. If it had not been for her the firm would still have belonged to her father. If it had not been for her, Gerald Amory would not now be facing criminal charges for embezzlement. Nausea stirred in her stomach, churned up by a current of raw loathing so powerful, she could taste it.

‘Dad intended to repay the money... if it hadn’t have been for the audit, you wouldn’t even have found out!’ she said in desperation.

‘Why do you think I spring occasional surprise audits on my companies?’ Carlo enquired gently. ‘Employees like your father get greedy and sometimes they get caught as he has with their hands trapped in the till.’

Jessica trembled, her heartbeat thundering deafeningly in her eardrums. His deliberate cruelty appalled her. ‘He wasn’t greedy... he was desperate!’

‘I’m willing to meet you tonight. I’m staying at the Deangate Hall. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you which suite I’ll be occupying. Eight,’ he specified. ‘I will wait one minute past the hour, no more. If you’re not there, there’ll be no second chance, cara.’

Aghast at the site he had specified and absolutely enraged by his instinctive sadism, Jessica gasped, ‘Don’t waste your time! I’ll see you in hell before I set foot inside that hotel again!’

‘You must have been quite a sight limping out on one shoe that afternoon,’ Carlo mused provocatively. ‘The chambermaid found the other one under the bed. I still have it. Cinderella’s slipper—’

‘How dare you?’ she seethed down the phone in outrage.

‘And as I recall it, you damned near left something far more intimate behind,’ Carlo breathed reflectively.

Scarlet to her hairline, Jessica slammed down the receiver before she could be further reminded of her own appalling, inexcusable weakness that day. No, the very last thing she wanted to think about right now was that day at the Deangate, six years ago.

No more, she wanted to scream, no more. But of course, she wouldn’t. Jessica didn’t scream. Jessica hated to lose control. She had grown up sobbing silently behind closed doors, covering her ears from the sound of her mother screaming at her poor father. And she had sworn then that she would be different and that her own fiery temper would be subdued by every means within her power. She would be strong without passion. And if she stayed away from the passion, she would not be hurt.

The worst thing of all now had to be looking back, seeing how she had broken her own rules and how she had suffered accordingly. Struggling to escape those frightening echoes from the past, Jessica returned to her father.

Grey with strain, he glanced up and began talking again, not even acknowledging that she had been out of the room, so cocooned in his own problems that he might as well have been on another planet.

‘I had to hand over all my keys ... even my car keys. I wasn’t allowed to enter my own office again,’ Gerald Amory relived painfully. “Then I was escorted out of the building by two security guards... it was a nightmare!’

Those must have been Carlo’s instructions. Hadn’t her father deserved just a little bit more consideration? Couldn’t he have been allowed to retain even a tiny sliver of dignity?

*Dad...’ Her voice suspended by choking tears, Jessica darted across the room to offer comfort but her father pulled away from her.

‘I would have treated a thief the same way—’ The admission was stark.

‘You’re not a thief!’

But Gerald Amory made no response.

Every which way Jessica looked, she felt responsible. She should have been there for her father, should have seen that he was in trouble. A week after Carlo had bought Amory Engineering, Jessica’s mother had walked out and started a divorce. The amount of cash from the sale had proved too severe a temptation for Carole Amory. Bad as the marriage had been, Gerald Amory had been utterly devastated. Her father had adored her mother. He had been terrifyingly loyal and forgiving through her every extra-marital affair. He would have done anything to keep her ... he had crawled, begged, pleaded. The only person relieved by Carole’s departure had been her daughter.

But she should have seen the immense vacuum that had opened up in her father’s life. She had watched him turn into a workaholic, living and breathing business and profit because that was all he had left. Why hadn’t it occurred to her that, as the firm thrived and made all the money her greedy mother could ever have wanted, her father must have bitterly resented the fact that the firm was no longer his and that those healthy profits had come too late to sustain his shaky marriage?

But gambling ... ?

‘It was somewhere to go, something to do,’ he proffered while she stared back at him aghast. ‘And then I started losing and I thought I couldn’t go on losing forever...’

The silence went on and on and then abruptly and without any warning, Gerald Amory rose heavily from his seat and moved with the shambling gait of a much older man towards the front door.

‘Where are you going?’ Jessica demanded, her violet eyes almost purple with the strength of her distress.

‘Home ... I need to be on my own, Jess ... please understand that.’

In despair, she hurried down the path after him, ‘Dad, we can cope better with this together! Please stay,’ she pleaded.

‘I’m sorry. Not now, Jess,’ he breathed tightly, unable to look at her.

Cope with the shame, the publicity, the court case? With the loss of his home, his job, his self-respect? Would he be able to cope? It was a tall order, she registered dully, especially for a man of his age. But what alternative was there? You coped, you survived. If Jessica had learnt anything in recent years, it was that truth. Yet struggle as she did she could no longer keep her mind fully focused on her father’s problems. The past was surging back to her, the past she had buried six years ago...

The day she had met Carlo Saracini she had been in London, shopping for her trousseau in the company of a friend. It had been less than two months before her wedding to Simon. She hadn’t been wearing her engagement ring. One of the stones had worked loose and it had been in the jeweller’s for repair.

She had been standing chatting to Leah at a busy intersection, waiting on the lights changing so they could cross. Somebody behind her in the crowd had pushed her and she had fallen into the road, practically beneath the wheels of Carlo’s chauffeur-driven limousine.

She didn’t remember falling. She had knocked herself out. What she did remember was coming dizzily back to consciousness before the ambulance arrived and focusing on the most extraordinary golden eyes above hers. She had been suffering from concussion. As a child she had had a story-book about a tiger with eyes that were pools of brilliant gold. So, naturally she had stared. She had never before seen eyes that shade.

‘Stay still... don’t speak.’ Carlo had been rapping out autocratic instructions in every direction, including hers.

‘I’m fine—’

‘Keep quiet,’ she had been told.

‘It’s only my head and I want to get up...’ She had begun trying to move.

A brown hand like a giant weight had forestalled such daring.

‘Look...I want to get up,’ she had said again, embarrassed eyes flickering over the gathering crowd of onlookers.

‘You are not getting up... you could have injured your spine.’

Her temper had begun to spark. ‘My spine is OK...I’m OK—’

‘We will have a doctor tell us that.’ He had continued to stare down at her with the most phenomenal intensity and then he had run a forefinger almost caressingly along her delicate jawbone. ‘I shall never forgive myself for hurting something so incredibly beautiful...’

Leah had been totally useless, having hysterics somewhere in the background. Jessica had found herself in a private ambulance, accompanied not by her friend but by Carlo.

‘She will follow in my car,’ he had asserted, getting in the way of the paramedics while simultaneously telling them what to do.

She just hadn’t had the strength to fight Carlo Saracini off that day. Her head had been aching fit to burst and her stomach churning with nausea. She had shut her eyes to escape, telling herself that this volatile and domineering foreigner was simply attempting to make amends for an accident which hadn’t been his fault in the first place.

She had been taken to a clinic, subjected to an alarmingly thorough examination against her will and tucked into a bed in a very expensively decorated room.

‘I want to go home,’ she had protested to the nurse. ‘This is so unnecessary.’

Carlo had strode through the door, splintering waves of vibrant physical energy that seemed to charge the very atmosphere and drive out all tranquility.

‘Where’s Leah?’ she had whispered, shaken that he was still around.

‘I had her taken home. She was too distressed to be of any assistance. I understand that your parents are abroad and will not be home until tomorrow. Do you wish me to contact them?’

‘I don’t even know your name,’ she had begun through clenched teeth.

‘Carlo Saracini,’ he had murmured with a slashing and brilliant smile. ‘How do you feel?’

‘I just want to go home... don’t you ever listen to anything people say?’

‘Not if I don’t want to hear it,’ Carlo had admitted.

‘Look, all this...’ She had indicated the fancy room with embarrassment. ‘It’s not necessary. I fell into the road. Your car didn’t touch me. It’s not as if I’m going to sue you or anything, and all this fuss—’.

‘Is my wish,’ he had inserted silkily, scanning her slender shape beneath the bedclothes with blatant appreciation, making her cheeks ignite into sudden colour and sweeping up to her face with yet another smile. ‘I can’t take my eyes off you. You may have noticed that. Then, you must be accustomed to a great deal of male attention.’

‘Not since I got engaged,’ she had muttered stiffly, infuriated by the fashion in which he was openly looking her over as if she were an object on a supermarket shelf there for the taking.

He had stilled, golden eyes narrowing and flaring. ‘You belong to another man?’

‘I belong to no man, Mr Saracini!’ Jessica had snapped.

‘You will belong to me,’ he had murmured with utter conviction.

She had honestly thought he was nuts. Nobody had ever talked to her like that before. Mind you, she had been to Greece once on holiday and had noted that radical feminism had yet to find a foothold there. But that a male dressed with such apparent sophistication in a superbly tailored mohair and silk blend suit, a male who spoke with an air of culture and education, should make such primitive statements had astonished her.

‘I’m getting married in six weeks,’ she had informed him flatly, involuntarily studying his strikingly male features before she realised what she was doing and hurriedly looked away again.

‘We’ll see...’ And Carlo had laughed indulgently, the way you laughed when a child said something innocently amusing.

Jessica sank back to the present and discovered that she was shivering. Her first thought was for her father. No matter what he said, he shouldn’t be alone. Grabbing up a coat, she let herself out of the tiny cottage she rented and climbed into her car to drive over to his house.

‘But your father’s at work, Mrs Turner. What would he be doing home at this time of the day?’ Her father’s housekeeper studied her with a questioning frown.

Jessica swallowed hard, fighting to keep her face unconcerned. ‘I thought he was finishing early.’

‘Well, he didn’t mention it to me.’

‘I’ll catch him later.’ Jessica climbed back into her car.

Dear God, where had her father gone? She must have been out of her mind to let him wander off like that in the state he was in! Another little voice asked her what she was doing. Her father had said he needed time on his own. She was not his keeper. Shouldn’t she respect his wishes? But the nagging sense of urgency nibbling at her nerve-endings wouldn’t leave her alone.

Reluctantly she went home again. Carlo... she couldn’t get Carlo out of her mind. Would she go to the Deangate Hall Hotel to crawl and beg and plead as once her father had done with her mother? Her stomach gave a sensitive heave. What would be the point? She knew Carlo Saracini. There was no way he would let her father off the hook. Carlo wanted revenge. He couldn’t touch Jessica but he knew just how deep the bond was between father and daughter. It would be a sweeter revenge than any that dark Machiavellian intellect might have calculated.

‘Some day you will come to me on your knees and beg me to take you... and I will break you.’

,As she remembered, perspiration dampened her short upper lip.

Carlo Saracini had destroyed her life. He had hacked to pieces everything she held dear. Her love for Simon, her happiness, her tranquillity... and in the end her self-respect. She had fought him to the very last shred of her endurance and then had learnt the secret of her own frailty in a shattering hour of self-discovery. Shuddering with disgust, she shut out the memories but the humiliation and the shame lived on as strongly as ever.

Carlo was one hundred per cent predator. Ruthless, unforgiving, utterly intolerant of those weaker than himself. She would never ever forget the way he had looked at her on her wedding-day. With smouldering incredulous fury and naked hatred. The Alpha male, fabulously rich, indecently successful and stunningly hand some...rejected. Right up until the very last moment Carlo had expected her to change her mind and fling herself at his feet.

‘I will never forgive you.’

Carlo Saracini’s parting assurance outside the church door. She had been shaking so badly by that stage, Simon had practically been holding her upright. She looked like a ghost in the wedding photographs. Simon had assured her that he had forgiven her but as she lived day in, day out with the farce of her marriage, she had never been able to forgive herself.

Jessica raised an unsteady hand to her pounding temples, struggling with the greatest of difficulty to retain her concentration. Why on earth hadn’t she realised before now that her father was in trouble? She had been too involved in her own problems, she acknowledged wretchedly.

Simon bad been ill for a long time before his death. His business had crashed in the recession, leaving nothing but debts. Her father had urged her to come home but she had refused. She hadn’t wanted to turn into the Daddy’s little girl she had been before her marriage. She hadn’t even had a job in those days. All she had ever thought about as a teenager was marrying Simon and having children. She shoved that particular recollection away with helpless bitterness.

Carlo had invited her to the Deangate to gloat over her father’s downfall. A sadist to the backbone, he wanted to experience her pain personally. Why should she give him the satisfaction when she knew that he would not allow her father to go unpunished? No way was she going to keep that appointment at the Deangate Hotel!

Jessica climbed out of her car. It was dark and cold and wet, just like that other day long ago, that day she couldn’t bear to remember. She straightened slight shoulders, tightened the sash on her serviceable beige raincoat and lifted her head high as she crossed the car park. This was for her father. This was her duty. So what if she felt physically sick at the prospect of seeing Carlo Saracini again? She owed this meeting to her father.

If the opportunity to watch her squirm gave Carlo a kick, maybe...just maybe it might be possible to persuade him to mitigate the severity of the punishment he was doubtless planning. Naturally the money would have to be repaid. And the only way that could be done would be by the sale of her father’s home. And since houses didn’t sell overnight, Carlo would have to be prepared to allow time for that sale to take place. All that she would ask would be that he did not drag her father through court and utterly destroy him.

Was that so much to ask? she wondered tautly as she approached the reception desk of the Deangate Hotel. Yes, it was a great deal to ask of a male of Carlo’s ilk.

‘Can I help you?’ a smiling receptionist asked, jolting her out of her reverie.

‘My name is Turner. I have an appointment with Mr Saracini at eight,’ Jessica advanced with all the appearance of a job-hunter, mentioning an interview.

‘I’ll call up... Mrs Turner.’ The young woman’s eyes flicked over the wedding-ring on Jessica’s hand.

Jessica moved away a step or two, a nervous hand brushing up to check the sleek severity of the French pleat she had employed to confine her eye-catching hair.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Turner...’

Jessica turned back. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘Mr Saracini...’ The brunette cleared her throat awkwardly.

‘Yes?’ Jessica pressed tightly.

‘He says that he does not recognise your name—’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Jessica breathed in deeply, hot pink abruptly washing her ivory pale complexion as she belatedly understood. Carlo had taken exception to her marital name. One slim hand braced on the edge of the desk. She swallowed hard on her fury. ‘Try Amory,’ she suggested thinly.

‘Amory?’ the receptionist repeated with a perplexed look.

‘Just tell Mr Saracini that a Miss Amory is here,’ Jessica enunciated between gritted teeth.

‘You can go up,’ she was told ten seconds later.

The lift disgorged two couples in full evening dress. She walked in, her heart in her throat. The Deangate Hotel was one of the most expensive country house establishments in Britain. It lay five miles out of Barton and few locals had the income required to avail themselves of such unashamed luxury. Jessica had always hated the place. This was where her mother had come to meet men. This was where she had trysted with her lovers. And there was a peculiar agony to Jessica’s awareness that it was in this very same establishment that she had forever lost her claim to the moral high ground.

Had she been smug and pious in those days? Her mother had once accused her of that...

‘You’re just like your father,’ Carole had condemned with bitter resentment. ‘You’re so bloody virtuous, you ought to be wearing a halo! So smug, you make me sick! But you won’t get through life like that. Some day you’re going to fall off your pedestal and fall flat on your pious little face and it’ll serve you damned well right!’

And she had fallen, boy, had she fallen. With an inner shudder of distaste, Jessica stepped out of the lift, outraged by the direction of her thoughts. She had come here without allowing herself to think of what she had to face at journey’s end but the eerie familiarity of her surroundings was like a razor twisting inside her.

Six years ago, she had stalked along this corridor in a rage to tackle Carlo Saracini. And even this length of time after the event it was quite impossible for her to explain how she had very nearly ended up in his bed. The two of them ... like animals, her clothing half off, his hands on her body, her hands on his. Obscene, she reflected with a stab of revulsion. And had it not been for the noisy entrance of the chambermaid into the lounge next door to the bedroom, that disgusting incident might have gone considerably further than it had.

Youth had given her an edge, she appreciated now. Youth often knew no fear. That had been her strength at the beginning. She really hadn’trealised what she was up against. Carlo Saracini, a shark in a sleepy backwater. Superbly clever, insidiously calculating and terrifyingly dangerous. Fear might have protected her, but she hadn’t learnt to fear him until it was far too late.

But she was scared now, scared enough to please even the most merciless sadist. Not scared for herself ... but for her father. An old-fashioned gentleman, who had grown up in a far different world from Carlo Saracini’s.

She came to a halt in front of the door and briefly closed her eyes. Crawl, she told herself. That’s what he wants. And if he gets what he wants, maybe destroying her father would seem less appealing. She knocked the door and braced herself. It was opened almost immediately by a young man.

‘Come in, Miss Amory,’ he said gravely.

The lounge of the suite was unchanged. Her fluttering gaze fell on an overstuffed lemon brocade sofa and helplessly she thought, It started there. Her skin burned.

She heard Carlo say something in Greek. The product of a marriage between an Italian and a Greek, Carlo was . equally at home in either language. Her spine stiffened. He strolled into view and the door slid softly shut behind her.

Jessica couldn’t take her eyes off him. He repelled her. Every earthy, oversexed inch of him absolutely repelled her and there was a certain deadly attraction to that amount of revulsion, she told herself. He moved with the grace of a prowling tiger. He had the face of a dark fallen angel and the stunning magnetism of a very physical male.

She studied the dark planes of his impassive features, the clear golden eyes set beneath winged black brows and the savagely high cheekbones which lent such fierce strength to his face. Her gaze glossed over the stubborn jut of a decidedly Greek nose and the wide perfection of his narrow mouth before hurriedly falling away.

‘I bet he’s a voracious lover,’ her mother had murmured throatily the first time she met him. ‘He has an incredible sexual charge. I could feel it fifty feet away... any woman with red blood in her veins would. What’s wrong with you?’

Jessica shivered. The red blood in her veins was chilling fast. Carlo was so cold. Although he betrayed nothing visually, she could feel that. And for some reason she couldn’t understand that made her feel physically cold and threatened.

Suddenly the silence was something she might drown in and she leapt into speech. ‘Why did you invite me here?’

‘Take off your coat.’

Her tongue crept out and moistened her dry lower lip. ‘I’m not staying—’

‘Go, then,’ he murmured with a dismissive flick of one lean hand. ‘You waste my time—’

Her teeth clenched. She undid her sash, dropped the coat off her shoulders and cast it aside. ‘I asked you why you invited me here.’

‘I wanted to look at you.’ Burnished golden eyes skimmed over her slender figure, resting on the surprisingly full thrust of her breasts above her tiny waist and sliding with insulting cool down over the feminine swell of her hips.

Jessica had never been at ease with her own body. Her voluptuous curves and her silver-blonde hair drew male eyes like beacons. Both attracted the wrong kind of male attention. She looked like her mother and she despised that awareness. If she hadn’t possessed a distressingly opulent shape and unnaturally bright hair which ironically was entirely natural, she would never have caught Carlo Saracini’s attention six years ago.

Her eyes glittered like brilliant amethysts as she withstood his inspection with her chin as high as she could hold it.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he drawled.

‘No, thank you.’

He poured himself a glass of champagne. ‘I hate to celebrate alone but I understand that you’re afraid of touching alcohol around me. I’m surprised you’re still that naive,’ he remarked softly.

‘What are you celebrating?’ She ignored the dig about alcohol, drawing on every scrap of icy dignity she possessed.

‘You’re a widow,’ he delivered with smooth emphasis.

Jessica was shattered by his can dour, brutally reminded that Carlo had no inhibitions and, similarly, little respect for ordinary standards of decent behaviour.

‘My father—’

Carlo straightened to his full six feet three inches and shifted a silencing hand, dark golden eyes gleaming over her pallor. ‘He stole from me and from his employees. We know that. Do we really need to discuss it?’

‘Do you have to be so callous?’ Jessica demanded, abruptly unfreezing from the spot to move forward in unconscious appeal. ‘He made a huge error of judgement—’

‘The prisons are full of people who make huge errors,’ Carlo incised, his nostrils flaring. ‘Theft? Such a sordid crime and yet so personal—’

‘P-personal?’ Involuntarily, she stammered.

‘It was for your sake alone that I bought Amory Engineering at an inflated price. What you might call a gesture of good faith towards your family—’

‘Good faith?’ A choked laugh fell from her lips as she studied him with unhidden loathing and disbelief. ‘You don’t know what good faith is. It was blackmail. You tried to put pressure on me by playing on my family’s financial position—’

‘I was demonstrating that I look after my own,’ Carlo cut in with ruthless precision.

‘Your own?’ she repeated with revulsion. ‘I was never yours!’

A winged ebony brow was elevated. ‘You were mine the first moment our eyes met but you were too stupid and craven to face that reality—’

‘How dare you!’

‘How dare you enter this room where you lay with me and try to deny what happened here between us?’ Carlo demanded with blistering contempt.

She wanted to hit him. She wanted to scream back from the depths of her humiliation. But she wouldn’t allow herself to be drawn. ‘My father—’ she said very deliberately.

‘Was the most cosseted employee I have ever had,’ Carlo interrupted. ‘I allowed him complete autonomy over a company which was no longer his and in return I expected loyalty, not common theft.’

‘He can sell his house and pay back every penny!’ Jessica swore furiously. ‘Isn’t that enough for you?’

‘Your family home carries two mortgages. Why do you think he stole?’ Carlo returned drily. ‘I wish to hear no more on the subject.’

‘He’s desperately ashamed of himself.’ Jessica hadn’t known that the house was mortgaged. She concealed her dismay with difficulty.

‘This subject bores me.’ Carlo sent her a grim glance.

‘I have no interest in your father except as a means to an end. You can’t influence my judgement with sentimental pleas. There is no sentiment in business—’

‘So you simply brought me here to gloat?’ she gathered with flashing eyes and a look of glowing scorn. ‘You make me sick, Carlo. I will stand by my father through whatever you throw at him—’

‘You like weak men, don’t you?’ he said silkily ‘Men who need mothering and support, men who make you feel that you’re the one in the driver’s seat. Maybe if I’d wept and plucked violin strings instead of demanded, you would -have come to me instead...’

‘Don’t be crass.’ Jessica was trembling with a rage that was becoming increasingly hard to control. ‘I would never have come to you. I hated you for your primitive macho outlook and—’

‘I am not primitive.’ The insertion was immensely quiet but the temperature had shot up. ‘I have Greek blood.’

For a split-second she was tempted to laugh. So vast an amount of blatant pride and arrogance dwelt in that assurance. But then she clashed with golden eyes that burned with the ferocity of a tiger about to pounce and all desire to laugh was stolen from her. Instantly the alarm bells rang in a frantic peal inside her head. That ferocious, utterly terrifying temper... She found herself instinctively glancing round to measure the distance to the door.

‘And you are not my equal. You proved that six years ago!’ he shot at her. ‘Most conclusively did you prove your stupidity—’

Her small hands clenched into fists. ‘If you call me stupid just one more time, Carlo, I won’t be responsible for what I do!’

‘Per Dio,’ he murmured with a brilliant, slashing smile. ‘If I push a little more, will you rip off my shirt and beg me to take you the way you did the last time?’

‘Dear God, how can you talk to me like that?’

‘Easily. Then,’ Carlo spread two very expressive hands, ‘I have no respect for you. What did you expect?’

The rage was beginning to gain on her self-control. She was having a very tough time holding it in.

‘You behaved like a whore—’

‘You swine!’ she positively spat at him, powered by a tremendous wave of aggression.

‘You were true neither to me nor to Turner,’ Carlo drawled with caustic bite. ‘He offered marriage. I offered something less secure. You went for the wedding-ring. And you lost.’

‘I married the man I loved ... I didn’t lose anything!’ Jessica slung back hotly, her adrenalin pumping madly through her veins.

Carlo threw his darkly handsome head back and laughed uproariously. ‘Are you telling me that you didn’t think of me in the dark of night? That you didn’t crave the passion I alone could give you? If you’d responded to him the way you responded to me, he’d have run away from you in terror!’

Jessica launched herself at him like a lioness. Two incredibly powerful hands snapped round her wrists and held her back. An insolent smile curved his hard mouth. ‘You dress like a fifty-year-old spinster but you’re a little animal at heart, aren’t you, cara? I scratch the surface of that ladylike exterior and I find teeth and claws. I like that. It excites me—’

‘You filthy swine...shut up!’ she screamed.

‘And it excites the hell out of you too!’ Long fingers hauled her closer as she attempted to kick him. He caught both flailing hands in one large male hand and pinned them behind her back, forcing her closer, staring with sardonic amusement down into her blazing violet eyes and pressing a long muscular thigh against her stomach as she twisted and tried to apply a well-aimed knee. ‘All that howling sexual frustration just begging to be released. I could take you now here ... up against the wall, on the floor, anywhere and you’d love it!’ he asserted with rawly offensive confidence. ‘Is that what you want?’

CHAPTER TWO

‘NEVER!’ Jessica gasped breathlessly, searing his dark, savage visage with all the tortured fury of her ignominious and powerless position. ‘The very idea of you touching me again makes me feel physically sick!’

‘One lesson wasn’t enough for you, was it?’ Carlo murmured huskily, narrowed eyes raking over her outraged features. ‘Don’t you remember what it was like when I made love to you?’

‘That wasn’t love,’ Jessica vented fiercely. ‘That was lust!’

‘And you have a problem with that... I don’t,’ Carlo confided in a black velvet purr. And then, with a sardonic laugh, he released her when she was least expecting the gesture and thrust her carelessly back from him.

Jessica was trembling and in considerable distress. She had lost control. Physical and mental control. And that terrified her. Six years ago, she had been twenty, barely out of the teen years and considerably more naive and foolish than she considered herself to be now. The last few minutes were like a blackout inside her mind. She didn’t want to examine them. He had made her so angry she had become violent and that knowledge literally filled her with shame and horror.

Her body felt peculiar. Her heartbeat was still madly accelerated. Her breasts were suddenly extraordinarily sensitive. She was maddeningly aware that the lace cup of her bra was chafing her nipples and that her skin felt stretched and tight. Horrified by what had happened to her body, she studied the floor, fighting to relocate her composure.

‘Let’s get down to business,’ Carlo suggested drily. ‘We’ve wasted enough time.’

‘Business?’ Her brow furrowed.

‘I invited you here for one reason only. You could be of use to me. I need a woman to play a role. A woman I can trust to play that role to the best of her ability and do exactly as she’s told. And I think that that woman could be you—’

Her lashes fluttered in bemusement. ‘I don’t think I follow.’

‘If you are prepared to place yourself without question in my hands for a period, not exceeding three months, I will consider treating your father’s offence with sympathy, understanding and forgiveness...’ Carlo stated quietly.

Sympathy, understanding and forgiveness. Alien emotions where Carlo was concerned. Her temples were throbbing. Her concentration was blown. She studied him with perceptible incomprehension, temporarily drained of all emotion. She just didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘This role,’ Carlo selected smoothly, letting champagne froth down into another glass. ‘It would entail considerable intimacy—’

‘Intimacy?’ she whispered shakily.

Carlo slotted the glass into her nerveless fingers. He surveyed her with immense satisfaction. ‘Intimacy,’ he repeated lazily, making a sexual banquet of the word and the long-drawn-out syllables were like a set of taunting fingers on her spine.

‘What... what exactly are you offering me?’ Jessica framed jerkily.

‘You would have to agree before I told you the details.’ Carlo dealt her a cool, steady glance, silky black lashes low over hooded, very dark eyes.

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Unusual.’ Carlo shifted a broad shoulder in a slight shrug. ‘But I don’t trust you. Why should I? And it is not as though you have moral scruples, is it? And even if you had,’ he pointed out, ‘you do have your father to consider.’

She tensed, forcing herself to concentrate. ‘Are you talking about some kind of job?’

Carlo’s mouth curved wryly. ‘You could call it that.’ ‘And would it entail breaking the law?’ she prompter flatly.

‘What do you take me for, cara?’

‘Would it?’ she persisted.

‘No.’

Jessica cleared her throat. ‘You mentioned intimacy... were you talking about sexual intimacy?’ she pursued, tight-lipped and rigid. ‘Or was that just your idea of a joke?’

His strong jawline hardened. ‘There would be nothing remotely humorous about the exercise, that I can assure you. And yes, I was referring to sexual intimacy. The part you would play would not be credible without it.’

Dear heaven, why was she actually standing here listening to this nonsense? Her oval face set with distaste and rejection as her imagination ran absolutely rampant. Was he suggesting that she become some sort of business spy, sleeping with some competitor to gain information? An insane idea, but why else the secrecy? A kind of job that would last no longer than three months which would entail sex. How utterly revolting! A hysterical laugh clogged up her throat though. Her level of sexual experience lifted such a proposition to the heights of a tragicomic black joke...but then Carlo was not to know that.

Jessica threw back her shoulders. ‘Clearly you need a hooker

‘Madre di Dio...what are you saying to me?’ Carlo shot her a black glance of naked hauteur. ‘Are you crazy? I need a woman who can at the very least behave like a lady—’

‘And you don’t know any?’ Jessica cut in. ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me? And how many beds are you expecting this lady to climb into at your request?’

Dark golden eyes narrowed. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Jessica reddened, suddenly uncertain.

‘The only bed you would be expected to warm would be mine,’ Carlo spelt out very drily.

Jessica went white and looked back at him in disbelief. Setting down the untouched champagne, she reached for her coat with an unsteady hand. ‘Quite out of the question,’ she told him with bitter clarity. ‘I have no intention of selling my body to keep my father out of prison! Why the cloak and dagger approach, Carlo? Couldn’t you just have asked me to be your mistress? Well, the answer is no... no, no, no! I’d sooner take to the streets!’

Brilliant dark eyes raked over her impassively. ‘Go, then ... I have nothing more to say to you.’

‘But I’m not finished yet,’ Jessica asserted with venom. ‘Six years ago, you came into my life like a dark shadow and you tried to destroy it. There is no human being alive whom I hate more than you! And why did you set out to wreck my life? Out of nothing more than overweening conceit, selfishness and lust. It didn’t matter to you that I was engaged to another man or that I loved that man. It didn’t matter that you might hurt him as much as you hurt me.’

‘You hurt him, not I,’ Carlo returned without emotion. Jessica shuddered with the force of her own teeming emotions. ‘You set out to ruin our relationship—’

‘If you had truly loved him, I would have been without power. The power I had you gave me...’

Hot pink flushed her slanted cheekbones. ‘I did not!’

‘With every look, every breath you took in my radius. Your hunger drew me,’ Carlo condemned without conscience.

‘No!’ She stared back at him in stark distress and reproach, her father’s plight forgotten as he plunged her back into the past, heaping her with more guilt and an even greater sense-of responsibility for all that had gone wrong.

‘Did it give your ego a kick?’ Carlo sent her a look of blazing contempt. ‘You play with fire, you get burnt, cara:

Jessica’s knees felt like cotton wool. She was shattered by Carlo’s view of what had happened between them. He was accusing her of having encouraged him when she had fought his ruthless pursuit every step of the way. Only at the last when she was at the very end of her strength had she failed.

‘I came here and I shouldn’t have come.’ White and drawn, she turned away. ‘We hate each other, Carlo. I don’t think you realise the extent of the damage you did six years ago and I expect that even if you did you wouldn’t care—’

‘You walked away from me..

And it was still there, an intensity of disbelief and banked-down fury. She couldn’t understand the strength of his emotion after all this time. It wasn’t as though Carlo Saracini had fallen in love with her. Right from the beginning, it had been a rawly sexual wanting on his side. The way he looked at her, the way he touched her, the way he talked to her. Predator and victim. Passion and pain. That was what he had offered her. And she hadn’t walked away... she had run as if the hounds of hell were on her tail.

‘I still don’t think I deserve the offer you just made,’ Jessica breathed not quite steadily. ‘You sit there in your ivory tower, wrapped in all your money, and you have the sensitivity of a butcher where feelings are concerned.’ Tears stung her amethyst eyes but she held her head proudly high.

‘That is a gross untruth,’ Carlo slashed back at her rawly.

‘You walk over people. You manipulate them. You push them around. My father really liked you six years ago. You see, he couldn’t see through you as I could. Oh, yes, he thought you were a hell of a guy!’ she proffered in a choked voice of distaste. ‘But you don’t give a snap of your fingers for what he’s going through now, do you? All you can see is an opportunity to humiliate me further. And I will not give you that weapon, Carlo. You see, I have my pride too.’

He was pale beneath his naturally olive skintone but he wouldn’t give an inch. And she hadn’t expected him to. Censure rarely came his way. In receipt of it, he silently seethed, presumably thinking it beneath his dignity to defend himself against such charges.

Eyes as flaming gold as the heart of a fire burned her face. ‘Were you happy with him?’

On her passage to the door, she froze and slowly turned. He hadn’t absorbed a thing she had said. Pain dug lines of stress into her face. He was asking about Simon. She looked away. ‘He was my best friend,’ she said finally.

‘And this ... this being a best friend is your ideal of marriage?’ Carlo demanded, his usually fluent English curiously letting him down.

No, but it was what she had ended up with, she reflected sadly. Her troubled eyes slid back to him and collided with questioning gold and something twisted tight deep down inside her stomach. The atmosphere fairly throbbed with undertones. She stopped breathing, was sentenced to sudden stillness, every bone in her body pulling taut. For a split-second, she experienced the most extraordinary physical pull in his direction and resisted it with every last remaining drop of self-discipline. But that split-second shook her inside out.

‘I would have been your lover, your soul, your survival,’ Carlo gritted, and the anger was there, the anger she had feared, suddenly flaring up at her without warning in a blazing wall of antagonism that made her step back. Burnished golden eyes alive with derision and fury bit into her with a look as physical as a blow.

‘Get out of here,’ Carlo told her roughly. ‘Get out of here before I lose my temper and show you just how sensitive I can be!’

Jessica required only that one invitation. On unsteady legs, she backed out in haste. Out in the corridor, she closed her eyes and breathed in slowly and deeply. She felt bereft, alone, wretched, and the sensations were intense. Carlo confused her, cast her into turmoil. He always had. They were opposites in every way but just for a moment... for a strange and highly disturbing moment she had recognised an utterly inexplicably pang of empathy. She had wanted to put her arms round him.

Crazy, unbelievable, just one of those mad tricks of the mind when one’s emotions were on a high, she translated inwardly. After all, would she pet a sabre-tooted tiger plotting to put her on his dinner menu? But she could not escape the feeling that she had hurt him. And yet wasn’t that what she had always wanted to do?

When she was with Carlo Saracini she didn’t know herself. It had always been that way. With other people she was introverted and quiet, never bitchy or hot-tempered and certainly not violent. Dear heaven, she thought as she recalled the manner in which she had launched herself at him like a screaming shrew. He drew out everything that was bad in her character. He made her feel as though she could turn into a woman like her mother ... wasn’t that what frightened her the most?

She got into her car without remembering leaving the hotel. She didn’t start the engine. She stared out the windscreen unseeingly. The way she had felt when he touched her six years ago still haunted her. And every so often she made herself draw those memories out to reinforce her own disgust and shame. Not only did she look like her mother, she had found that she could behave like her too. That had been the most devastating discovery of all. That there was this weakness inside her, this ability to forget everything ... loyalty, self-restraint, even love... and lose all control in a man’s arms.

Sometimes, Jessica had even told herself that she ought to be grateful for that sordid incident with Carlo. She had been afraid then that if she didn’t remain constantly on her guard, virtually policing even her thoughts, she too might easily turn into a slut. If it hadn’t been for that noise next door, Carlo wouldn’t have stopped, she knew that. Sex was a terrifyingly powerful force if you knew yourself to be as vulnerable as Jessica felt herself to be. One weak moment in the vicinity of a male like Carlo and that would be that. She had been incredibly lucky to escape unscathed.

Only somehow, she thought now on a tide of bitter pain, it had never occurred to her that she might be just as unscathed six years on, after five years of marriage. Untouched by human hand. A virgin, no less. And wouldn’t Carlo just love to know that, she reflected painfully, shuddering at the very idea. He would find it hilarious.

Jessica drifted out of her thoughts to find herself sitting shivering inside a very cold car with all the windows fogged up. She drove off but somewhere down deep in her mind was an image of Carlo as she had last seen him in the hotel suite. Angry, contemptuous... bitter? What the heck did he have to be bitter about? Had he really imagined she would accept that grossly insulting offer? Three months in Carlo’s bed, working out her penance for daring to marry another man. What a monumental ego he must have! And the utterly peculiar way he had gone about making that offer ... Her head was thumping again, tension twisting through her like a steel wire.

It was too late to go barging in on her father. Tomorrow morning first thing, she would be on his doorstep, and if he hadn’t seen a lawyer yet she would see that he did. It was a crisis and she was good in a crisis. For years it seemed her life had lurched from one crisis to another.

She was about to phone her father when the doorbell went. She peered through the peephole and recognised the broad, weathered features of the heavily built man on the other side of the door.

‘Dr Guthrie ... ?’ Her brow furrowed. Henry Guthrie was one of her father’s oldest friends. He and his wife ran a private nursing home.

‘I tried to ring you earlier but you were out,’ he proffered.

‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded, anxiously scanning his troubled face.

‘Your father’s going to stay with us for a day or two until- I can get him sorted out—’

‘But why... mean, I gather you know what’s happened... but what’s the matter with him?’ Jessica prompted sickly.

Henry Guthrie sighed. ‘Gerald’s been receiving treatment for depression for some months, now—’

She paled. ‘He didn’t tell me...’

‘He’s been quietly going off the rails ever since your mother died.’

She shut her eyes and groaned. Four months ago, they had received news of her mother’s death in a car crash. From the day she walked out until the day she died, neither Jessica nor her father had had any contact with Carole. Her mother hadn’t wanted any contact. She had wiped them both out of her life and had embarked on a new life abroad.

‘But he seemed to take it so well,’ she protested shakily.

‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that he took it too well?’ the older man murmured. ‘I think that he still hoped that she would come back. But when she died, he had to finally face that she was gone. That’s when the depression came and the gambling started. Now I understand he’s got himself in one hell of a mess—’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, tears stinging her eyes.

‘He just can’t cope with it, Jess,’ Dr Guthrie sighed. ‘He took some sleeping tablets this afternoon—’

Jessica gasped at him in horror. ‘He did what?’

‘Not enough to kill him but then, he didn’t have enough. His housekeeper found him lying in the hall and thought he’d had a heart attack...’

Jessica collapsed down on the sofa behind her, sick to her stomach, and bowed her head.

‘She rang me. I saw the tablets and contacted his own doctor, worked out how many he must have taken and between us ... well, we decided the nursing home would be a better choice than the local hospital.’

Tracks of moisture ran unchecked down her cheeks. She wanted to thank the older man for exercising that discretion but she couldn’t find her voice.

‘Now when he came to, he swore he hadn’t been trying to harm himself. He said he was just desperate to stop his mind going round and round and get some sleep and when the first pills didn’t do the trick, he took a few more...’

‘Do you b-believe him?’

‘I’ll know better what to think in a few days when we’ve talked some more,’ he confessed wryly. ‘Well...now I’m here to ask you how to get in touch with this character, Saracini—-’

‘Carlo?’ she gasped.

‘Do you think he’d see me? I want to tell him that Gerald needs criminal charges right now like he needs a hole in the head!’ he delivered grimly.

Jessica was barely thinking straight. But one awareness dominated the morass of emotions tearing her apart. Tonight she might have lost her father. And even if it hadn’t been a suicide attempt, in his current condition, who was to say he mightn’t make such an attempt this week or next week or the week after? If he wasn’t coping now, how could she expect him to cope when the police were involved and the news of his disgrace leaked out? How could he handle all the horrors still to come?

She cleared her throat. ‘There’ aren’t going to be any criminal charges. I... saw Carlo tonight and he was very understanding—’

‘He wasn’t very understanding when he had Gerald tossed out of the building!’

‘I explained how much strain Dad had been under. There won’t be any court case,’ she repeated unsteadily, her slender hands twisting together as she made her decision.

‘But what about the money? I gather that Gerald has no hope of paying all of it back...’

‘Carlo is prepared to write it off—’

‘He must be a very decent sort of man: Dr Guthrie shook his head. ’I honestly thought he would want to nail your father’s hide to the wall as an example to the rest of his employees...’

An inward quaking at that particular image assailed Jessica. She tasted cold fear but this time it was not only for her father, it was for herself as well.

The older man smothered a yawn and stood up. ‘I’ll pass on the good news to Gerald:

‘I’ll come and see him tomorrow.’

Dr Guthrie grimaced. ‘Would you be terribly hurt if I advised you to give him a couple of days to get himself together again?’

‘No,’ she lied.

‘He feels he’s let you down and I don’t think he wants you to see him until he has himself under control again.’

‘No problem,’ she said stiffly.

‘He still has a lot to handle, Jess. He’s lost his job and his self-respect.’

As soon as the older man had gone, Jessica dialled the Deangate Hotel with clumsy fingers. She asked for Carlo’s suite. He answered the call with a growl of impatience in his voice.

‘It’s me...‘ she said tightly. ’I’ve changed my mind:

Silence buzzed on the line for long seconds. It went on and on and on while she trembled at her end of the phone with a heady mix of fear and despair. Maybe Carlo had never expected her to accept... maybe Carlo had been playing some sort of game with her.

‘I’ll send a car over to collect you.’ There was no emotion whatsoever in his response. She couldn’t believe her ears.

‘When?’

‘Now.’

‘Now?’ she echoed incredulously.

‘Now,’ he repeated, his accent more pronounced than she had ever heard it. ‘I waited six years. I won’t wait one hour or one day longer.’

‘I can’t come over to your hotel at this time of night,’ Jessica gasped.

‘Why not?’ His deep, dark voice thickened audibly. ‘You won’t be going home again...’

Jessica was shattered. Now...tonight?

‘And if you don’t come tonight, the deal’s off.’

‘That’s totally unreasonable!’

‘But what I want,’ Carlo asserted.

‘You can’t always have what you want—’

‘Can’t I?’ He laughed softly and the phone went dead.

CHAPTER THREE

JESSICA kept the car waiting an hour. She packed as though she was going away for the weekend. In the back of her mind, a voice kept on saying, You can’t be doing this... you can’t have agreed. The unknown beckoned with all the welcome of a black, endless tunnel. She lifted a photo of Simon off the night stand and stared at it tautly. It had been taken the day he opened the photographic studio. Unusually, he was wearing a suit. A slim, fair man of medium height with gentle brown eyes.

‘It doesn’t matter to me... that sort of thing is really not important,’ Simon had soothed when she sobbed out her shame and despair after that dreadful afternoon when she had almost ended up sharing Carlo Saracini’s bed. ‘Of course I forgive you:

Simon and his family had moved next door when she was ten and he was fourteen. He had been the odd one out in his large, extrovert family. Quiet and unambitious, his greatest interest wildlife photography. Simon had been an oddity to his rugby-mad father and brothers. And Jessica had been a lonely child, painfully conscious from an early age that her mother had no time for her or her father.

Simon had heard Jessica sobbing her heart out in the summer house the day she came home early from school and saw Carole half-undressed with a strange man. Simon had climbed over the wall and she had been so shocked by what she had seen that she had told him. He had been very kind and comforting. He had put his arm round her and listened, showing her the easy affection she craved.

The adult world had come to her door that day. Simon had explained that she mustn’t tell her father or anyone else about that accidental glimpse. He had been naive too in his assumption that her mother didn’t make a habit of that sort of thing. Jessica hadn’t been very much older before she had learnt that there was always another man in Carole’s life and that her father simply tried to pretend not to know about those men.

Indeed she had soon realised that her mother’s frequent affairs were food for the juiciest gossip in town. That knowledge had been an agonising humiliation to live with during the sensitive teen years.

And throughout it all, Simon had been there for her. Her best friend, her adolescent hero. By the time she had reached seventeen, both their families had begun to view them as inseparable. But, looking back, she now recalled that Simon had never talked of love or marriage or children with her, not until his family and other people began teasing them repeatedly about when they planned to tie the knot.

He had actually gone down to work in London for over a year, coming back on only odd weekends, and she had thought she was losing him, had actually wondered if Simon had ever been hers to lose, if indeed he was striving to break away from the popular belief that they were childhood sweethearts destined to marry.

Then out of the blue, the Christmas she was eighteen, Simon had asked her to get engaged. Even when he’d carefully stressed his wish for a long engagement, Jessica had been ecstatic, convinced that together they were a match made in heaven. There was nothing she could not tell Simon, nothing, it seemed, that they could not discuss. In every way they had seemed to complement each other, unlike her parents who didn’t have a single thought in common.

Dear God, but she had been so innocent, she reflected now, tucking the photo into her overnight bag. Blind right to the bitter end. When had it finally occurred to her that the average male would have lifted the roof when his bride-to-be very nearly fell into another man’s bed a week before the wedding? Her betrayal should have mattered to Simon. It should have been important to him. And forgiveness should not have come so quickly and easily to his lips. Ironically, Jessica had been far more upset than Simon had been. She had wanted to cancel the wedding but Simon had pleaded with her, telling her how much he needed her, and in the end, she had allowed herself to be persuaded...

The limousine ate up the miles back to the hotel and with every mile her tension mounted another unbearable notch. Not only was she being forced to face a savage humiliation, but also to accept the necessity of bargaining with Carlo for her father’s sake. She did not yet know if Carlo would even agree to what she had already promised in his name.

Jessica didn’t approach the night receptionist. With the chauffeur bringing up the rear with her bag and waving away the proffered attentions of the porter, she was terrified of being asked where she was going and why she wasn’t signing the hotel register. The man flicked her a glance, said nothing, and then her pale cheeks fired on a worse thought. Did he think she was a call-girl? Didn’t hotels discreetly ignore those sort of comings and goings?

A waiter opened the door of Carlo’s suite.

Carlo was standing by the fireplace, talking on the phone in rapid Italian. He looked past Jessica and made a signal to his chauffeur, briefly connected with Jessica’s taut stance several steps inside the room and said carelessly in an aside, ‘I was about to dine without you, cara:

Her gaze fell on the table exquisitely set for two. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast but she did not feel hungry. The waiter lit the candelabra, dimmed the lights and then uncorked the wine and hovered.

Carlo cast the phone aside and crossed the room in a couple of long strides. Confident hands undid the sash at her waist, parted her coat and slid it off her tense shoulders as if she were a doll to be undressed.

‘Pour the wine and leave us,’ he murmured to the waiter, a hand touching her narrow back as he walked her to the table, tugged out a chair and sat her down.

With a not quite steady hand she reached for her glass as soon as it was filled.

‘One glass only,’ Carlo decreed with dark satire. ‘I would hate to be accused of getting you drunk a second time.’

Heat crawled up her slender throat. She couldn’t meet his eyes. She couldn’t think of anything beyond the fact that she was here in Carlo’s suite and expected to share his bed tonight. ‘I think the receptionist thought I was a call-girl.’

‘Surely not?’ Carlo parried silkily. ‘A high-class hooker would never be so badly dressed.’

Her teeth clenched. ‘I didn’t come here to be insulted.’

‘I think you came here to take whatever I choose to hand out,’ Carlo flicked back, skimming her taupe skirt and blouse with a curled lip. ‘When you kept me waiting, I mistakenly assumed you were dressing up for the occasion—’

A choked laugh that was no laugh at all escaped her. ‘What occasion?’

‘I ordered all your favourite foods.’

So he had. She hadn’t noticed. He had to have a phenomenal memory.

‘I remember everything about you:

He sounded as if he expected a round of applause.

‘We have to talk about my father,’ she opened in a rush.

‘You haven’t met my eyes once since you entered this room.’

Involuntarily, she clashed with glittering gold alive with impatience above a set jawline. Evidently she was not delivering the required responses.

‘This won’t work if you can’t do better than this,’ he said drily, unfeelingly.

‘Don’t threaten me...’ she warned tautly, great violet eyes nailed to his hard dark features. ‘I function even less efficiently under threat. Now ... can we talk about my father?’

‘I prefer to eat to the accompaniment of light conversation.’

Her gaze damned him to hell and back. She dug into the pâté with sudden appetite. She worked through the next two courses without speaking unless forced. If anyone lost their appetite it was Carlo, finally thrusting his plate away with an imprecation and tossing aside his napkin as he rose from the table.

‘You sulk like a little girl.’

‘I am not sulking. Carlo.’ Jessica embarked slowly on her dessert, it having long since occurred to her that the longer she spent eating, the longer she stayed out of the bedroom. ‘You wanted me here. I came. You wanted me to eat. I am eating.’

‘I won’t prosecute your father.’ The statement was coolly unemotional.

‘He can’t pay back the money—’

‘He must,’ Carlo’s tough jawline set hard. ‘The money must be returned:

‘How?‘ she demanded bitterly. ’He has no job and he’s not likely to get another one. And even if he sells everything he has, he will still owe you money.’

‘I will give him another position, then.’

Startled by that most unexpectedly generous offer, she stared at him. ‘Where?’

‘Not here. He needs a fresh start for this second chance. Leave it with me,’ he drawled. ‘I will find him something.’

‘And the money?’ she prompted.

‘He repays,’ Carlo repeated grimly. ‘If he is as sorry and as ashamed as you protest, he will want to repay it. He will not wish to be further in my debt.’

‘But—?’

‘In addition,’ Carlo cut across her interruption drily, ‘the offer of continuing employment will be conditional on his agreement to seek help for his addiction—’

‘He’s not addicted!’ Jessica jumped to her father’s defence.

‘Any man capable of gambling so far above his own income is an addict. He requires therapy to ensure he can withstand future temptation. Now, are you satisfied?’ he demanded shortly, dismissively, making her suspect that he had conceded more than he had planned to concede.

Yet Jessica had hoped for more. She had wanted the debt wiped out as she had promised Dr Guthrie. Whether it was unreasonable or not, she wanted every practical cause of stress removed from her father’s path. ‘You’re getting me pretty cheap, aren’t you?’ she said shakily and then, the instant she saw the dark fury leap into his set features, she wished she had bitten her tongue and stayed silent.

‘You want to go on the payroll for three months for sharing my bed?’ Carlo threw back at her with a flash of even white teeth. ‘A contract maybe, complete with severance pay and an assurance that you retain any jewellery or clothes that I buy you? OK, that is fine by me.’ He moved an expressive brown hand in a gesture that made it very clear that it was anything but fine with him. ‘I have heard of such contracts in America. But do tell me now up-front, what price do you put on that perfect body of yours?’

She wondered sickly whether, if someone handcuffed his talkative hands behind his back, he would still be able to articulate. ‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

‘Do I?’ Nostrils flaring, he surveyed her with derisive dark eyes.

She rested her brow down on the heel of one unsteady hand. It was almost one in the morning. That wouldn’t bother Carlo. He had reserves of energy unknown to less advantaged mortals. She wanted to go to bed but the prospect of bed was fraught with far more alarming possibilities than she could face. ‘At this moment,’ she whispered., ‘all I need to know is what you expect from me over the next three months.’

Silence fell. Since silence was rare from Carlo’s corner, she looked up.

Carlo cleared his throat, tension thrumming from his poised stance by the window. ‘I want you to pretend to be my fiancée—’

She couldn’t hide her astonishment. ‘Why?’

‘I have my reasons,’ he parried, the anger gone and replaced by a set gravity which disturbed her.

‘I don’t see why you can’t tell me—’

‘I will tell you only this,’ he breathed shortly, his golden eyes grim and distant as he studied her. ‘I have been estranged from my father for some years and now hie is dying. I wish to spend some time with him and, to facilitate this wish, I require a fiancee to accompany me to his home.’

Shaken by the unemotional explanation, Jessica studied him in turn, helplessly, maddeningly curious about why a pretend fiancee should be a necessary requirement of such a visit. She presumed he was intending a reconciliation with his father. Why muddy the water with the presence of a fake fiancee, for goodness’ sake? Especially when his father was dying ... a stranger would surely be even less welcome in those circumstances?

Her smooth brow furrowed. ‘Once you told me that you had no family.’

‘In the sense of the true meaning of the word “family”,’ he stressed, ‘that was the truth. My mother died when I was fourteen. I was sent off to school. My father remarried and after a while he chose to forget my existence. He had his life and I my own until, some years ago, we met again at his instigation...’ His strong features shadowed, his eyes night-dark and impassive. ‘And what happened between us then severed all familial ties,’ he completed harshly.

There were so many questions she wanted answered that she was on the edge of her seat. ‘What happened?’ she finally prompted in frustration when it was clear that he had no intention of continuing.

Carlo cast her a sardonic smile. ‘Like all women, you are incurably inquisitive. Knowledge is a weapon in a calculating woman’s hands. Do you think I don’t know that?’ he gibed, scanning her sudden pallor with derision. ‘I don’t spill my guts to anyone, cora... I never have and I never will.’

He made her feel like a peeping tom with a door slammed shut on her prying fingers. It hurt, humiliated.

‘I only require one thing from you. A good act. My father is not a stupid man. He will not be easily deceived.’

‘I don’t want to deceive anyone.’

‘That’s why we really will be lovers by the time we arrive. Intimacy, like sexual chemistry, is something that can be felt,’ Carlo asserted with husky conviction. ‘The sole deception will be the pretence of love and of course...my intention to marry you:

Lovers...She stiffened helplessly at the threat of what was yet to come. Arrive where? she might have asked, had not her nervous tension been too heightened for her to care at that moment. But still she longed to know why he was prepared to put on such an elaborate deception for his father’s benefit. And then cynicism suggested his motive. His father was dying, presumably a wealthy man. Was Saracini Senior attaching conditions to his heir’s inheritance? Was he demanding that Carlo settle down and marry? Could anyone be that old-fashioned these days? And was cold, hard cash at the foot of Carlo’s deception?

‘I think it’s time we went to bed.’

Jessica froze. Carlo reached down for her hands and drew her up slowly, almost tauntingly. ‘You’re trembling... why? You’ve been married for years; you are not without experience.’ Predictably, the reference to her marital status darkened his glittering eyes, hardened his mouth and roughened his syllables.

‘That doesn’t make any difference!’

‘Dio...’ he swore, running a familiar forefinger down the buttons lining her silk blouse and then pausing to flick up to the top one and slide it loose, allowing himself access to the shadowed valley between her breasts. ‘Of course it makes a difference. Were you a faithful wife?’

He towered over her. His broad shoulders blocked out the light. She felt trapped and cornered and told herself that that was why she could barely get air into her lungs. A blunt fingertip, very dark against her pale skin, hovered and she stopped breathing altogether. ‘Of c-course I was—’

‘Really? I find that hard to believe,’ Carlo murmured softly as his fingers hit on the next button.

‘Why?’ she gasped half an octave higher.

‘You weren’t faithful before the wedding ... why afterwards?’ he prompted. ‘If you had been my bride, I would have killed you. I certainly wouldn’t have gone ahead and still married you.’

I would have killed you. Said softly, conversationally but with incredible certainty. A buzzing sound filled her eardrums as a hand brushed across the swell of her breast. All of a sudden she felt light-headed and dizzy but her breasts felt full and heavy.

‘Did you tell him about what happened between us?’ Carlo asked.

‘Yes!’

‘So you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I bet you didn’t,’ Carlo guessed with cruel and merciless amusement. ‘I doubt if you gave him a blow-by-blow account... he’d never have recovered from it.’

‘I don’t want to talk about this!’ Jessica slung at him tremulously and then, belatedly registering that her blouse was now hanging open, she backed away from him so fast, the side table behind her dug painfully into her hipbone. ‘Carlo... I met you again less than five hours ago—’

‘Who’s counting? I’m not. I would have been at this stage four and a half hours ago if you hadn’t been so stubborn—’

‘That’s disgusting!’ she threw back in raw outrage.

‘But truthful...don’t you know yet how the male mind works?’

She was starting to find out. Carlo was surveying her with smouldering golden eyes, hot with unhidden desire. And the sexual charge her mother had once mentioned was like fireworks in the heavy atmosphere. She edged round the table beneath that tracking, utterly ruthless gaze. ‘Carlo...please...not tonight... I mean—’ the tip of her pink tongue snaked out to moisten her lower lip ‘—I mean, you can’t really want to do this—’

‘I do.’ He bent down and shattered what remained of her fast-fleeing composure by letting his own tongue follow the path her own had taken along the full curve of her sultry lower lip, and heat surged between her thighs in a sensation long buried but never forgotten. She leapt back as though he had struck her and sent a lamp flying, her heart thumping like a jack-hammer against her breastbone.

He ignored the crash and caught her arm before she could busy herself reaching down for the broken pieces.

‘I want a bath!’ she exclaimed in desperation.

‘And maybe you’d like me to go downstairs and smoke even though I don’t smoke while you prepare yourself for bed like some blushing bride!’ Carlo whipped back with lancing satire.

‘Yes...what a good idea,’ Jessica slung back at him bitterly. ‘And maybe if you’re very lucky you can find a whore in the bar, because clearly that’s the only kind of woman you’re accustomed to!’ she completed with the shrill edge of hysteria in her shaking voice.

An electrifying silence fell. Carlo dropped her arm as though she had burnt him. Beneath her distraught gaze, he had tautened. Dark colour had highlighted his blunt cheekbones. ‘Is that how you think I am treating you?’ he gritted back at her.

‘What do you think?’ After that one explosion, Jessica was drained.

‘That was not my intention.’ He released his breath in a hiss.

Dully, she looked back at him, her lack of conviction in that assurance clearly visible.

‘I’ll go downstairs,’ Carlo intoned flatly. ‘I suppose I may hope that when I return, you will not have broken out into a rash or got blind drunk in my absence.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Cary Grant and Doris Day... That Touch of Mink,’ Carlo supplied sardonically. ‘Haven’t you ever seen that movie?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ she admitted tightly.

‘I don’t think I’ll buy a video. You’re doing just great on your own.’

And he was gone. And she couldn’t quite work out how she had managed the feat. Smothering a yawn, she wandered into the bedroom, wondered if he realised that his biggest challenge would be keeping her awake. She rooted through her bag, dug out what she required and went into the bathroom without once looking at the bed. Maybe he would meet some loose woman down in the bar.

Carlo was very, very good-looking. Funny, how she had sort of blocked that out over the years. Along with so much else. The cliff edge excitement he generated. The swift, volatile changes of mood. She didn’t want to think about that afternoon six years ago. The turmoil, the passion, the sobbing utterly soul-shattering pleasure of his mouth and his hands on her body. Briefly she closed her eyes, her skin flaming. She really hadn’t realised that the episode could have been anything that special on Carlo’s scale of experience.

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