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.

Recent titles by the same author:

A RICH MAN’S WHIM (Bride for a Billionaire) A RING TO SECURE HIS HEIR UNLOCKING HER INNOCENCE THE SECRETS SHE CARRIED

Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

The Trophy
Husband
Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover Page

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

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

SARA paid off the taxi in a breathless rush and raced up the stairs to the flat she shared with Antonia. Had they been burgled? Had someone in the family had an accident? Worse still, had something happened to Brian? Her imagination had gone into overdrive since she had received Antonia’s message at work.

‘Miss Dalton said you had to come home immediately, that it was very urgent,’ the girl on the switchboard had stressed anxiously. ‘I hope it isn’t bad news, Miss Lacey. She wouldn’t even wait for me to put her call through.’

Crossing the landing at speed, Sara unlocked the door of the flat. It was a disorientating experience. Loud music assaulted her ears. Phil Collins’ latest album was playing full blast. A single electric-blue court shoe lay abandoned like a question mark on the hall carpet.

‘Antonia?’ Sara called, a quick frown of bewilderment drawing her fine brows together as she glanced into the empty lounge. The bedroom door was ajar. She pressed it back.

‘Antonia?’ she said again, and only then did she see the half-naked couple passionately entangled on the rumpled bed.

‘Sara?’ her cousin squealed as she reeled up, her honeyblonde hair wildly mussed up, her pink mouth swollen, pale blue eyes wide with horror.

In the very act of embarrassed retreat, Sara froze. Her attention had lodged on the tousled male head lifting off the white pillows. Recognition hit her like a punch in the stomach. Cruel fingers clutched at her heart and her lungs, tripping her heartbeat, depriving her of the air she needed to breathe.

‘Oh, my God…’ Brian groaned, grabbing up his shirt and rolling off the bed in one appalled movement.

Antonia was frantically struggling back into her blouse. ‘Why the hell aren’t you at work?’ she screamed.

‘You phoned…left a message that I was to come home,’ Sara framed unevenly, not even recognising the distant voice that emerged from her bloodless lips as her own.

‘I phoned? Are you crazy?’ Antonia shrieked furiously. ‘Whoever phoned, you can be sure it wasn’t me!’

‘You bitch, Toni!’ Brian bit out in stricken condemnation. ‘You deliberately set me up—’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ Antonia hissed, but then without warning defiance replaced her angry discomfiture. She rested malicious blue eyes on Sara, who was already backing away on legs that were threatening to fold beneath her. ‘But I did warn you that Brian was mine for the asking…didn’t I?’

‘No…’ Brian’s voice wavered weakly as his gaze collided with Sara’s shattered green eyes—pools of stark pain in the dead white stillness of her triangular face. He made a sudden move towards her, both hands raised and extended as if to draw her back to him. ‘This has never happened before, Sara…I swear it!’

Sara turned jerkily away and fled. She nearly fell down the last flight of stairs—Brian’s frantic calls from the landing above acted on her like a trip-wire. Blocking him out, she steadied herself with one shaking hand on the dingy wall and made herself breathe in slowly and deeply before she walked back out onto the street.

Antonia and Brian. Brian and Antonia. She stared down numbly at the ring on her engagement finger. Her stomach lurched in violent protest. Six weeks off the wedding day…her cousin and her fiancé. It was as if the world had stopped turning suddenly, flinging her off into frightening free fall. She was in shock—so deep in shock that she couldn’t even think. But her memory was relentlessly throwing up scraps of dialogue from the recent past.

‘Brian chose you like he chooses his shirts…you’ve got to look good at the company dinners and wear a long time!’ Antonia had sniped.

‘Three years ago I could have lifted one little finger and Brian would have come running…He really had it bad for me.’ Antonia had savoured the words.

Sara squared her narrow shoulders, caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window and stared. She saw a small woman with black hair worn in a tidy French plait, dressed in an unexciting navy business suit and white blouse. No competition for a five-foot-ten-inch blonde who had once made it between the covers of Vogue. She felt as if she was dying inside. She didn’t know what to do, where to go.

A bus was drawing up at the stop several yards away and she started to run. Her dazed eyes skimmed over the man standing in a nearby doorway. He turned his head abruptly, making her wonder if she looked as odd as she felt. She didn’t notice that the man swiftly fell into step behind her and climbed on the same bus.

‘Do we have to have Antonia as a bridesmaid? My mother can’t stand her,’ Brian had complained peevishly.

‘She’s a real tart,’ he had muttered with distaste. ‘No decent woman would take her clothes off for money…’

Still with the same man tracking patiently in her wake, but quite unaware of his presence, Sara wandered back into the hugely impressive London headquarters of Rossini Industries. When the receptionist on the penultimate floor addressed her, Sara didn’t hear her. Blind and deaf, she was moving on automatic pilot. She entered the spacious office which she shared with Pete Hunniford. It was empty. Pete’s wife had gone into labour mid-morning, she recalled then. It was like remembering something that had happened a lifetime ago.

Her phone was buzzing like an angry wasp. She sat down and answered it.

‘Tasmin Laslo here. I want to speak to Alex,’ a taut female voice demanded.

‘Mr Rossini is in conference. I am so sorry. Would you like me to—?’

The actress said a very rude word. ‘You’re lying, aren’t you?’

Sara had been lying to Alex Rossini’s women for the entire year that she had been employed as his social secretary. Alex Rossini was very rarely available to his lovers during office hours, and when a name was removed from a certain regularly updated list he was never available again. Lying went with the territory, no matter how much Sara despised the necessity.

‘He sent me a diamond bracelet while I was filming in Hungary and I knew it was over!’ Tasmin suddenly spat tempestuously. ‘He’s found someone else, hasn’t he?’

‘You’re better off without him, Miss Laslo,’ Sara heard herself saying. ‘You’re a wonderful actress. You’re wasted on a slick, womanising swine like Alex Rossini!’

Incredulous silence hummed on the line. ‘I beg your pardon?’ Tasmin finally gasped.

Sara looked down dazedly at the receiver and thrust it back on the cradle in shock. She was trembling all over. Dear heaven, had she really said that? She rose unsteadily upright again. Her stomach cramped with sudden, unbearable nausea. She lurched into the cloakroom across the corridor and was horribly sick.

Ten minutes later, still shaking like a leaf, she returned to her office. The phone was buzzing again. She ignored it, walked over to Pete’s desk and withdrew the bottle of brandy that he kept in the bottom drawer. She poured a liberal amount into a cup and slowly drank it down, grimacing at the unfamiliar taste of alcohol. Maybe it would settle her stomach. Brian and Antonia. Their names linked in a ceaseless refrain inside her pounding head, making her want to smash her head against the wall in protest.

She felt as if she was going mad. Sensible, steady Sara, who always kept her head in a crisis. But Sara had never before faced a crisis in which her whole world had fallen apart. Shivering, she helped herself to another nip of brandy, struggling to get a grip on herself. ‘No decent woman…’ A choked and humourless laugh escaped her. She tore the ring off her finger, dropped it in a drawer and rammed the drawer shut. She made herself pick up the phone again.

Unfortunately it was her aunt on the line. Something about the wedding rehearsal. Sara froze while Antonia’s mother talked. Then she sat down, and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Aunt Janice?’ She hesitated and then forced herself on. ‘I’m sorry but the wedding’s off. Brian and I have broken up.’ Even to her own ears she sounded unreal, like someone clumsily cracking a joke in the worst possible taste.

‘Don’t be silly, Sara,’ Janice Dalton murmured sharply. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Brian and I have broken up. I’m very sorry…but we’ve decided we can’t get married after all.’

‘If you’ve had some foolish argument with Brian, I suggest you sort it out quickly,’ her aunt told her with icy restraint. ‘Brian had lunch with us yesterday and there was nothing wrong then!’

The line went dead as her aunt cut the connection. Sara trembled. Antonia’s mother…how could she have told her the truth? Janice and Hugh Dalton had given her a home when her own mother had died. How could she possibly tell them the truth? Much better simply to pretend that she and Brian had had a change of heartmuch cleaner, much less embarrassing for all concerned. The two families were neighbours and friends. A giant lump thickened her throat. Did Brian love Antonia?

‘No decent woman…’ Antonia had shed her clothes with alacrity when she had been offered the chance to feature in the famous Rossini calendar. Marco, Alex Rossini’s kid brother, had smoothly offered Sara the same opportunity, unperturbed by her incredulous embarrassment. ‘You’ve got something your long, tall cousin hasn’t got…You’re really sexy…and you have a lot of class.’

Marco had made the invitation in front of a highly amused audience at the staff party and it had become a tormenting, running joke in the months which had followed. The instant that Marco had seen Sara redden he had realised that he had found a real live target. Every time he saw Sara, he offered her an increasingly fantastic sum to bare all. No doubt he saw in her what everyone wanted to see, Sara reflected bitterly: a woman the exact, boring opposite of her exciting, beautiful cousin. Prim, quiet, predictable, ludicrously unlikely ever to set the world…or indeed any man…on fire.

Antonia had had Sara christened Prissy Prude at school, and, having created that image for her, had then delighted in shattering it by sharing the news that Sara was illegitimate, the inconvenient result of her youthful mother’s holiday fling with a Greek waiter. Some of the girls hadn’t laughed at first but they had soon fallen into line and obediently giggled and sneered. After all, Antonia had been the undeniable leader of the pack and peer pressure had been relentless. Sara had duly been persecuted, no other girl daring to stand her ground against Antonia lest she find herself enduring the same ordeal. To escape, Sara had left school at sixteen and taken a secretarial course. And that had not been her dream.

But Brian had been her dream…

Suddenly, with a violence that shook her, Sara hated everything about herself—her body, her personality, her inhibitions, her clothing. She was boring, laughably out of step with other women in her age group. Old-fashioned, sexually ignorant, eager to give up her job and become a housewife and mother at twenty-three. She should have been born a century ago, not in the nineties.

Out of the corner of her eye, she finally noticed that the door was open. Slowly she lifted her head and panic filled her, her cat-green eyes flying wide to accentuate the exotic slant of her cheekbones. Alex Rossini was standing there as silent as a sleek predator on the prowl…and both phones were ringing off the hook, unanswered. He should have been in Rome this afternoon, not here in London, she thought stupidly.

‘Coffee-break?’ Alex murmured in a curiously quiet voice instead of letting fly at her as she had expected. The phones stopped abruptly as if the switchboard had cut them off, plunging them into a sudden, thunderous silence.

In a daze, she looked back at him. Six feet three inches of lithe, rawly virile masculinity. Black hair, hard bronze profile with the deep, dark, flashing eyes of his Italian ancestry. A sexually devastating male with an overwhelmingly physical presence that few men could equal. And Sara hated being near him. She hated the way he looked at her. She hated the way he spoke to her.

If the cost of setting up the first marital home hadn’t been so extortionate, Sara would have sacrificed her excellent salary and taken a lesser position elsewhere within a week of being exposed to Alex Rossini’s sardonic asides and contemptuously amused appraisals. He made her feel so murderously uncomfortable…so self-conscious, so ridiculous. He made her feel like a curious specimen trapped behind museum glass.

‘Finish your coffee.’ A lean, long-fingered brown hand casually closed round the half-full cup of brandy sitting on the edge of her desk and extended it to her.

Didn’t he smell the alcohol, realise that it wasn’t black coffee? Evidently, obviously not. Jerkily, she reached out and accepted the cup and focused on his beautifully polished shoes, every muscle whip-taut. She tossed back the rest of the brandy in a burning surge. It brought tears to her eyes, which she blinked back furiously.

‘Where’s Pete?’

‘Still at the hospital with his wife.’ Sara struggled for some desperate semblance of normality, astonished that he wasn’t cutting her to ribbons with the satirical edge of his tongue. She forced herself upright, bracing both hands on the desk. Involuntarily her gaze collided with shimmering dark golden eyes and it was like falling on an electric fence, shock waves making every raw nerve-ending scream. Deliberately she turned her head away, closing him out again. No, she was not susceptible. She had proved that to her satisfaction over and over again.

‘Then I’m afraid you’ll have to take his place.’

‘His place?’ Nobody could possibly take Pete Hunniford’s place. Pete was Alex’s most devoted gofer. Nothing came between Pete and ambition. He had freely admitted to Sara that his first marriage had fallen apart because he was never at home. And right at this minute, if Alex employed his mobile phone, Pete would be out of the labour ward like a rocket.

‘Nothing too onerous…Relax,’ Alex breathed in that distinctively rich dark voice which rolled down her spine like golden honey, burning wherever it touched. ‘I only want you to take down a couple of letters.’

Her brow furrowed as she automatically lifted a pad and pencils. He was talking very slowly, not with his usual quick impatience. He hadn’t even asked her why she hadn’t answered the phones. He stood back for her to precede him from the room, and in her need to keep as much physical space between them as possible she jerked sideways and skidded off balance.

Strong hands whipped out and closed round her upper arms to steady her. Her head swam, her heartbeat kicking wildly against her breastbone. She quivered, fighting off sudden dizziness, and he drew her back. ‘OK?’ he murmured, still holding her on the threshold.

‘F-fine…Sorry.’ Her nostrils flared in dismay as the warm, definably male scent of him washed over her. Aromatic, intrinsically familiar…intimate. Intimate? What was the matter with her? What the heck was the matter with her? As she stiffened he released her and she walked down the corridor with careful small steps, noticing that the double doors of his office at the end looked peculiarly out of focus. Now near, now far, now skewed. All that brandy. Drunk in charge of a phone. But it felt shamelessly, unbelievably good: a short-term anaesthetic against the enormous pain waiting to jump on her—the pain she could not yet face head-on. As long as she didn’t think, she could protect herself.

‘Sit down, Sara.’ She plotted a course across the thick carpet with immense care and sank down on the nearest seat, suddenly terrified that he would notice the state she was in. Being intoxicated suddenly didn’t feel good any more. In Alex Rossini’s presence, it felt like sheer insanity. Discovery would be unbelievably demeaning.

Disorientatedly, she glanced up and found him standing over her. She flinched. Her hands trembled and she anchored them tightly round the pad. He didn’t sit down. He strolled with silent grace across to the floorlength windows. A stunningly handsome man, he had an innate elegance of movement, his superbly cut mohair and silk-blend charcoal-grey suit the perfect complementary frame to wide shoulders, lean hips and long, powerful thighs.

From beneath luxuriant black lashes he surveyed her. ‘Shall I begin?’

He didn’t normally request permission. Uncertainly she nodded. He dictated with incredibly long pauses that enabled her more or less to keep up but she still missed bits because her mind wouldn’t stay in one place. Shock was giving way to reality, denial giving way to bursts of agonised pain. For how long had Brian been deceiving her with Antonia? Her memory threw up the image of the open bottle of wine in the lounge, the half-filled wineglasses by the bed. No sudden passion there. They had carried the glasses with them into the bedroom. A carefully staged lunchtime encounter when Sara should have been at work.

‘Did you get all that?’

The page currently beneath her fingers was blank. Briefly she simply closed her eyes, willing herself to find calm and control.

‘It’s all right, Sara…the letter isn’t important.’

The softness of the assurance astonished her. Dazedly she glanced up, encountered Alex Rossini’s brilliant dark eyes and was mesmerised by the sincerity she read there. He was resting against the edge of his polished desk, far too close for comfort. He reached down and removed the pad from her nerveless fingers, setting it carelessly aside.

‘Something has upset you…’ he drawled.

Her creamy, perfect skin tightened over her fine facial bones as she focused on his silk tie. ‘No…’

‘You’re not wearing your ring.’

Sara went white. The pencil she was fiddling with snapped in two.

‘You are clearly distressed,’ Alex murmured in the same quiet, disturbingly gentle tone which she had never heard him employ before. ‘I believe you were called home unexpectedly this morning. What happened there?’

She was appalled to discover that she wanted to tell him, spill out the poison building up inside her, but instead she bit down hard on her tongue.

‘Perhaps you would prefer to go home for the rest of the day?’ Alex suggested lethally.

‘No…’ Sara muttered, horror bringing her back to life. Antonia would be waiting for her and she could not yet face that confrontation.

‘Why not?’ he prompted her.

‘I found my fiancé in bed with my cousin.’ As soon as she had said it she could not believe that she had said that out loud and to him of all people. A tide of chagrined colour crawled up her slender throat.

But Alex Rossini didn’t bat a magnificent eyelash and his response was instantaneous. ‘A merciful escape.’

‘Escape?’ Sara queried blankly.

Alex spread beautifully shaped brown hands expressively. ‘Think how much more disturbing it would have been had you discovered such a sordid liaison after the wedding.’

‘There isn’t going to be a wedding now,’ Sara said shakily, and whereas telling that same fact to her aunt had seemed like part of a living nightmare it now felt like hard, agonising reality.

‘Of course not. No woman would forgive such a betrayal, would she?’ Alex drawled softly.

The silence hummed. The tip of her tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lower lip. Forgiveness…understanding. Brian had been asking for both within seconds. He had not stood shoulder to shoulder with Antonia…

‘After all,’ Alex continued with honeyed persistence. ‘How could you ever trust him again? Or her?’

The darkness sank back down over Sara where for an instant she had seen a wild, hopeful chink of light.

‘Were you thinking of giving him another chance?’ Alex enquired in a tone of polite astonishment.

Sara flinched. ‘No,’ she muttered sickly, duly forced to see the impossibility of ever trusting again.

Yet she could not believe that she was actually having such a conversation with Alex Rossini, who was not known for his concerned and benevolent interest in his employees’ personal problems. Indeed, the Rossini credo was that the best employees left their private life outside the door of Rossini Industries and never, ever allowed that private life to interfere with their work.

‘Why are you talking to me like this?’ she whispered helplessly.

‘Do you have anyone else to confide in?’

Sara tried and failed to swallow. It was almost as if he knew, but how could he possibly know how frighteningly isolated she now was? She could not turn to Antonia’s parents and she had no other relatives, no close friends who were not also Brian’s friends or colleagues. ‘No, but—’

‘Nothing you have told me will go any further,’ Alex asserted, his night-dark eyes, sharp and shrewd as knives, trained on her, but those eyes were no longer cutting, no longer cold, no longer grimly amused.

‘You’re being so…so kind,’ Sara said in a wobbly tone as she fought to conceal her disbelief, for this was a side of his character that she had never thought to see, indeed never dreamt existed.

‘You have had a traumatic experience and, naturally, I am concerned.’

‘Thank you, but I don’t need your pity,’ Sara bit out painfully.

‘The very last thing you inspire is pity,’ Alex assured her, unleashing a wry smile of reproof on her. ‘You should be celebrating your freedom. Life is far too short for regrets. You’ve already wasted two years of it on that little salesman. The future has to offer far more entertaining possibilities—’

‘How did you know Brian was a salesman?’ Sara breathed, the words slurring slightly.

‘Isn’t he? He looks like one,’ Alex informed her smoothly.

Something not quite right tugged at her instincts and then drifted away again, for nothing in her entire world was right any more.

‘You live with your cousin, don’t you?’ Alex probed.

Again she was disconcerted by his knowledge and perhaps it showed, because he added, ‘Marco mentioned it to me.’

‘Yes.’ Sara flushed, reluctantly recalling all the unwanted, gory details which had been forced on her during Antonia’s short-lived affair with Alex’s brother. That connection had embarrassed Sara.

‘Naturally you do not want to return to your home at this moment,’ Alex murmured, and casually tossed a set of keys onto her lap. ‘You can use the company apartment until you have made other arrangements.’

Even in the state she was in Sara was staggered by such a proposition. The apartment was a penthouse on the floor above, used only by the Rossini family and, very occasionally, their personal friends. ‘I couldn’t possibly—’

‘Where else have you got to go?’

She clutched the keys, meaning to return them but thinking helplessly of the humiliation of dealing with Antonia as she felt now. Her strained eyes unguarded and vulnerable, Sara stared back at him. ‘I’m very grateful.’

‘A fresh start,’ Alex murmured intently. ‘I’m having a dinner party tonight. Why don’t you come? You shouldn’t be on your own.’

A nervous laugh lodged in her aching throat. A party? He thought that she was in the mood for a party? Was he insane or just downright incapable of comprehending the immensity of what had happened to her today?

‘I’ll be fine,’ she returned tremulously, wondering if he needed someone to supervise the caterers. Pete usually attended Alex’s dinner parties, checked the seating arrangements, oiled the conversation and ensured that everything went smoothly. Alex Rossini paid for that kind of service. Alex Rossini was so rich that he could afford to burn money for amusement.

‘I’ll call you later. I’ll send a car to pick you up at seven,’ Alex told her as if she hadn’t spoken.

Dully she fumbled for an excuse. ‘I have nothing—’

‘I’ll buy you a dress to wear. No problem, cara. Don’t even think about something so trivial.’

‘But I—’

Strong brown hands reached down and closed over hers, tugging her gently upright. He angled her towards the door as if she were a walking doll. ‘Go up to the apartment and lie down for a while; practise thinking optimistic, happy thoughts. Smile…’ he urged softly, and a blunt fingertip skimmed below the trembling curve of her full lower lip and withdrew again, the contact feather-light and strangely soothing.

Unwarily, like someone in a dream, Sara looked up at him, connected with shimmering, mesmeric gold eyes and staggered slightly. He balanced her again with ease. An ache unlike anything she had ever experienced made her shiver. ‘Mr Rossini—’

‘Alex…Cristo!’ he exploded, abruptly freeing her.

Sara almost fell over. Numbly she watched him stride over to sweep up the phone that she hadn’t even heard ringing. He swung smoothly back to her. ‘Go up to the apartment and lie down,’ he instructed her again.

Sara backed out slowly and walked back down to her office to collect her bag. Her head was aching. She put a hand up to her hair and undid the tight plait, running her fingers through the loosened tresses. The phone on her desk was ringing. For an instant she hesitated, and then she lifted it.

‘Sara?’ Pete demanded impatiently. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I was—’

‘Look, I need a favour,’ he broke in. ‘Alex told me to get Marco’s signature on some papers yesterday but I forgot. They’re in the top right-hand drawer in my desk. Take a cab over to the studio and get it seen to before Alex asks for them…OK?’

Sara took a deep breath, grimaced and then wearily sighed. ‘OK.’

‘You’re an angel. I bet your replacement won’t be half so helpful.’

The reminder that she was actually working out her notice hit Sara hard as she climbed into a taxi. She would be in the dole queue soon, she realised dully. Her successor was already picked, due to take her place in a fortnight’s time. Brian hadn’t wanted a working wife. And she had no savings. She had poured every penny of her salary into renovating and furnishing the Victorian terrace house that Brian had bought. Weekends and evenings, she had scraped walls, plastered, decorated, cut out and sewn and hung curtains. She had put her heart into transforming that house. The knowledge that now she would never live there sank in on her slowly and then blistered her soul like an acid burn.

Real anger began to rise inside her. Three years ago Sara had stood by, watching Brian pursue Antonia without success. But her cousin would take just for the sake of taking, and throughout the years that Sara had lived in the Dalton home she had been taught that lesson over and over again. Anything she had been foolish enough to value had inevitably been taken from her by her cousin…only this time it had not been a toy or a sentimental keepsake, it had been the man she loved. She clambered dizzily out of the cab with a white, frozen face.

She had never been in Marco Rossini’s high-tech photographic studio before. The reception area was incredibly busy. It made her feel claustrophobic. She forced her passage through the throng and trekked down the corridor indicated by the laconic redhead on the desk.

Marco was lying back in a chair inside the perimeter of a blinding circle of lights in an empty studio. He looked half-asleep but his mobile dark brows hit his hairline at speed when he saw Sara hovering, and he sprang upright with a mocking smile. ‘To what do I owe the honour? Don’t tell me you’ve finally decided to take me up on my offer? Miss December in red boots and a tasteful sprinkling of holly berries…what do you think?’

Sara gritted her teeth as she felt her cheeks burn. She was in no mood to take one of Marco’s baiting sessions. Evading his malicious gaze, she murmured flatly as she extended the file, ‘These documents require your signature.’

Marco suddenly laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ Sara heard herself demand almost aggressively, the words slurring slightly.

‘Private joke.’

‘If it’s about me, it’s not private!’ Sara told him fiercely, standing her ground.

Marco surveyed her with intense amusement. ‘There’s a price.’

‘A price?’

Marco laughed again. ‘You tell me something first…haven’t you ever once got the hots in my brother’s radius?’

Sara looked back at him blankly. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Alex is a very good-looking guy, beats the women off with sticks. If he wasn’t family, I’d hate the smooth bastard! Come on, you can tell me…if it wasn’t for true love, you’d have given him a whirl, right? You know that movie where Robert Redford pays a million bucks for one night with Demi Moore—Indecent Proposal? You too could have made your fortune…’

‘I don’t understand.’ It was a lie. Sara just couldn’t believe what Marco was insinuating.

Marco dealt her an incredulous glance. ‘Are you saying you didn’t even notice? Or are you telling me that Alex didn’t once chance his arm?’

‘If you are trying to imply that your brother is attracted to me, you’re wrong—’

‘To the tune of a million bucks? He could drop a million without noticing. No, the sum I heard mentioned was two million,’ Marco imparted with undeniable relish. ‘I think Alex thought just one was bargain basement.’

Sara’s head was swimming again. It was so hot beneath the lights that she couldn’t concentrate. ‘This is a very distasteful conversation, Marco.’

‘So Alex wants to jump your bones…is that some sort of crime? Lust makes the world go round,’ he told her impatiently.

Alex Rossini wanted to go to bed with her? Her lashes fluttered in bemusement. She couldn’t believe it.

Marco shook his head slowly. ‘You really didn’t know, did you? Love is truly blind. But hey, don’t let your heart soften in his direction. Remind yourself that you don’t like him and steer clear. Marry your insurance salesman and live happily ever after,’ he advised very drily as he flipped through the file and began scrawling his signature.

Alex Rossini wanted her? Rubbish, nonsense, Marco’s deliberate mistake—doubtless another example of his nasty sense of humour. ‘You don’t like him’. Had her dislike of Alex Rossini been so obvious that even his brother was aware of it? She remembered Alex’s astonishing kindness and tolerance and a stark arrow of guilt abruptly pierced her.

No, she had never liked Alex Rossini—his arrogance, his impatience, his sardonic tongue, his rich man’s self-centred motivation which took no account of anything but his own wishes, his own needs. She had never liked the way he treated women either. As if they were things that he could buy and discard when he got bored…and he got bored so fast that your head would spin. Fast cars, fast women, fast-lane life. Nightclubs, movie premieres, gambling joints, summer in the South of France, winter in the Alps. When the beautiful face and body of his latest lover palled, she got twenty-four regulation red roses and a diamond bracelet. Imaginative in that line he wasn’t.

Why should he be? Women were easy around Alex Rossini. He didn’t need to lie and cheat and deceive. He had no need to make promises that he had no intention of keeping…

Oh, Brian, how could you do this to me?

For the first time Sara met her own anguish head-on, and she swayed slightly, her temples pounding. The heat was suffocating her. Her blouse was sticking to her skin. In a clumsy movement she tugged off her jacket and breathed in deeply. Two million pounds…She wanted to laugh like a hysteric. It was so ridiculous…

‘You know getting married costs a lot,’ Marco murmured reflectively, watching Sara with fascinated eyes as the jacket slid from her limp fingers to the floor. ‘Why don’t you reconsider my offer? Nobody need ever know. I wouldn’t be planning on publishing the shots. It could be your secret…and mine.’

As Sara attempted to focus on him, there was a sudden commotion out beyond the lights. A raw burst of Italian scorched her eardrums. A fist hit Marco on the shoulder, hard enough to knock him back, and suddenly Alex was there, ranting at his brother and with every blistering sentence punching him on the shoulder again, forcing him into retreat, like a boxer playing with a weak opponent.

White-faced, Marco leapt behind Sara. ‘Dio…switch him off before he kills somebody!’

CHAPTER TWO

SARA’S emerald-green eyes were wide with shock and incomprehension.

‘I’m ashamed of you!’ Alex roared at Marco, his strong features a mask of dark fury. ‘For a bet, for a lousy fifty K. She’s smashed out of her mind! She doesn’t even know what day it is!’

‘She’s still a hell of a lot safer with me than she is with you!’ Marco condemned furiously. ‘And why shouldn’t I have asked her?’

‘Get out of my sight, you little jerk! Think yourself lucky it didn’t go one step further—’

‘All I did was make her an offer!’ Marco shouted back.

‘Then why’s she got her jacket off?’ Alex demanded with clenched fists.

‘She took it off herself! Big deal! She wears more bloody clothes than Scott did in the Antarctic! Can nobody take a joke around here? I’m sorry, Sara,’ Marco breathed harshly, turning back to her. ‘I didn’t know about your engagement, but now the deck is clear I would go for that two million and not a penny less!’

Shoulders unbowed, Marco walked away out beyond the lights.

‘What the hell did you think you were doing coming over here in the state you’re in?’ Alex demanded with ferocious bite.

It was her turn, Sara registered numbly.

‘Didn’t I tell you to go and lie down? You could have fallen under a bus or something! When I realised you’d gone out again, I couldn’t believe it!’ Alex gritted, perfect white teeth flashing against sun-bronzed skin.

‘I n-needed his signature on some papers.’

‘So why did you take your jacket off?’ Alex persisted.

‘I was hot,’ she muttered heavily.

Alex swept down a lean, impatient hand and lifted the article. ‘Dio… I should’ve worked that out for myself. A woman who wears her skirts below the knee and covers up every inch even in the heat of midsummer is highly unlikely to strip off for the camera. You’re too much of a prude.’

Sara went suddenly rigid. Anger roared up through her without warning. ‘I am not a prude!’

Alex had fallen very still. ‘So you do have a temper,’ he murmured in a tone of discovery.

‘Just don’t put me down,’ she warned him unevenly, shaken now by the anger that had mushroomed up inside her and demanded an exit.

Alex drew fluidly back several paces and spread graceful brown hands. ‘I was worried about you. You see, my creepy little brother laid a bet with me six months ago—’

‘A bet?’ Sara echoed with a frown.

‘He bet me fifty thousand pounds that he could get you to pose in the nude.’

Sara shuddered, sick mortification flooding her.

‘It never occurred to me that there was the slightest possibility you would fulfil that bet. You’re not the type. It was a joke, Sara. Marco loves a good joke; sometimes, like today, he’s tempted to take it too far.’

Sara studied the floor with burning eyes. She could feel the tears but they were mercifully dammed up. ‘A good joke’. Her stomach twisted. A lousy male bet had lain behind Marco’s constant baiting. A choked laugh fell from her tremulous mouth. She couldn’t meet Alex’s gaze. Marco had never had the smallest hope of winning his puerile bet but Alex had still chased after her. Why? Alex was already painfully well aware that she had gone off the rails once today. All along, she registered in anguished embarrassment, he had known that she was drunk.

‘I’ve made an ass of myself,’ she whispered with stinging bitterness.

‘You haven’t made an ass of yourself,’ Alex breathed with raw emphasis. ‘You’ve had a rough day. That’s all.’

She quivered, a turmoil of emotion sweeping over her. She wanted Brian’s arms round her so badly that she thought she would break apart. But Brian would never put his arms round her again. That was finished, dead, destroyed. More pain than she would have believed possible was suddenly coming at her from all sides. Her hands knotted together.

‘You really love that bastard,’ Alex murmured flatly.

She covered her cold face with spread fingers, as if she could somehow hold in what she was feeling. She fought to get a grip on herself again.

A pair of determined hands drew her forward and balanced her. With enormous effort, she managed to slide her arms obediently into the jacket which Alex extended.

‘What was the crack about the two million?’

Sara’s slender length tensed as she shakily tugged her hair out from beneath the collar of her jacket and shook it back out of her way.

‘You have the most beautiful hair. I always wanted to see it loose.’ Alex’s dark eyes rested on the silky black torrent tumbling down to her waist. ‘Don’t ever get it cut.’

She slowly lifted her head, bewildered green eyes colliding with smouldering gold. It was electrifying. Stunned, she kept on looking at him. ‘Marco said…Marco said you’d pay two million pounds for one night with me…’

Alex tautened, dark colour accentuating his hard cheekbones. ‘You are even more drunk than I thought you were.’

Her glazed eyes fell from his. ‘I’ve put my foot in my mouth—’

‘I intend to put my fist in Marco’s.’

‘I was only joking.’

Alex pressed her towards the door. ‘He wasn’t…’

‘H-honestly?’ she stammered in disbelief.

‘You think I’d be here if it wasn’t true?’

He guided her out through the buzzing reception area. Her blitzed brain was endeavouring to absorb what he had confirmed. Alex Rossini wanted her. He found her desirable. What would have threatened and appalled her a mere twelve hours earlier now, for some reason, fascinated her. ‘You were so kind this afternoon—’

‘And I wouldn’t be kind without a hidden agenda?’

‘No,’ she said without even thinking about it.

A chauffeur was standing by the door of a silver limousine. Sara climbed in, slid along the richly upholstered leather seat. Her luxurious surroundings made no impression on her at all. Don’t think about Brian, don’t think about Brian, she urged herself feverishly. ‘Why didn’t you…? I mean, you never showed—’

‘Sara, I’m not a lovesick teenager. I find you physically very attractive. That is chemistry.’

‘Sex.’

‘Sex,’ Alex agreed drily.

Was that the way Brian wanted Antonia? Did it matter whether it was love or infatuation or simply lust which had motivated him? Would love hurt any more than the way she was already feeling? Had it only been guilt which had made him chase out of the flat in her wake? Stop it…stop it a little voice shrieked inside her. It’s over, Sara. Accept it. Alex was right. You could never trust Brian again.

‘You think I’m very naive,’ Sara muttered, closing out the seething turmoil threatening her again.

‘No. I don’t think this is the time for this conversation.’

‘I don’t believe in love any more.’ For hadn’t Brian done all the right things? Romantic cards, constant phone calls. Last night he had been with her, holding hands, smiling…the consummate actor, and she had been the blind fool, for she had noticed nothing different.

‘How would you like to sink into an alcoholic stupor and have a nice long sleep?’ Alex enquired with unconcealed hope.

‘Very, very much,’ she whispered painfully.

The silence pulsed with undertones that she didn’t understand.

‘I really didn’t know your feelings went this deep.’ A grim laugh splintered from him.

She didn’t show her feelings. She had learnt that young. But today she had been brutally wrenched out of her protective shell. ‘How could you know?’

‘I thought you were more in love with the bridal trappings…not to mention the wallpaper books, fabric swatches and paint-cards,’ Alex enumerated with sardonic bite.

‘I wanted a home that was really mine. Easy to mock what you’ve always had, Alex.’ Sara shot him a look of angry intensity that challenged him and then tore her gaze away again, but he stayed etched in her mind’s eye. The gleaming black hair, the slashing brows, the hard, arrogant slant of his mouth and nose. Hard—that was the definitive word. He might be possessed of a quite intoxicating masculine beauty but the raw stamp of power and fierce force of will overlaid those spectacular dark good looks like bonded steel.

Her head was pounding sickly. ‘I’m not even asking you where we’re going…’

‘You’re safe with me. Tonight you don’t have to think for yourself.’

She closed her aching eyes. The one male in the world whom she would never, ever have trusted and yet all of a sudden she instinctively did trust him. Alex Rossini, protector. She ought to have laughed at the idea but instead she fell asleep.

Sara surfaced from a nightmare, shivering and perspiring. She sat up with a dizzy start and found herself in a completely unfamiliar room. The bedside lamps were lit on either side of the wide divan bed. The sheet tangled round her was silk. She lifted an uncertain hand to the thin, strappy nightdress clinging to the damp thrust of her breasts and fell still only when she saw the tall, dark male rising from a chair in the shadows.

‘Alex…’ she whispered shakily as it all came back in jagged bits and pieces and she breathed in sharply in relief, helplessly reassured by his presence.

‘Feel like something to eat?’ He sounded so normal, so casual.

‘Where am I…? Oh, Lord, to have to ask that,’ she muttered between clenched teeth.

‘This is my house. I didn’t think leaving you alone in the company apartment would be very wise—’

‘Your dinner party.’

‘Cancelled. Not one of my better ideas.’

From below the screen of her lashes she surveyed him with inescapable fascination. Nothing seemed real—not the day’s events, certainly not the extraordinary alteration that had taken place in their relationship within the space of hours. She had not looked before she’d leapt today. He had looked for her, watched over her, kept her safe. Why? Did he want her so much that he was prepared to put up with her as she was now?

‘I’ll order some food.’

The door flipped quietly shut in his wake but still she looked to where he had been. She had got blindly, foolishly drunk and Alex Rossini had picked up the pieces. But he hadn’t expected her to react that way…What had he expected? Why should he have expected anything when he couldn’t have known what would happen to her today? The dinner party—’Not one of my better ideas’. He had talked almost as though the dinner party had been stage-managed in advance for her entertainment, which was crazy. She must have misunderstood him.

She slid out of bed. Her head was still swimming a little. She grimaced at the foul taste in her mouth and was exceedingly grateful to find a bathroom through the other door that she had espied. Her own tousled reflection in the mirror shook her. Peeling off the nightdress, she switched on the shower and stepped into the cubicle, grateful for the warm water and the rich lather of the soap that would wash her clean.

Who had undressed her and put her to bed? Alex? How strange that she shouldn’t be plunged into stricken mortification over the idea. Yesterday she would have died a thousand deaths. Today—tonight—she knew that she had already betrayed so much to Alex Rossini that the once slavishly cherished sanctity of her own body no longer seemed worthy of such earth-shattering importance.

And why didn’t she face it? She had very probably driven Brian into Antonia’s arms! She had refused to sleep with him before they got married. Deaf to his every protest, she had been determined to wait for their wedding night, had smugly believed that the sexual restraint would lend an extra-special meaning to the vows they would take. Only now there wasn’t going to be a wedding day…and it was cold comfort to acknowledge that she had saved her virginity but lost the man she loved. Maybe she had got exactly what she deserved. She had put her wretched principles first and where had it got her? She slid back into bed, forcing her cold face into the pillow, raw with the bitter pain of rejection and humiliation. Nothing was ever going to give her her pride back.

She didn’t hear the door open; she went rigid when she was gathered up into strong male arms, and then her nostrils flared on the scent of Alex and she trembled, her arms uncoiling and curving round him very, very slowly. No, I mustn’t do this…she thought. But it felt so good, so damned good to be held close. The breath shortened in her dry throat. Her fingers splayed centimetre by centimetre across one powerful shoulder and stayed there. She was almost paralysed by her own daring.

The silence thundered in her ears.

He released his breath in a faint hiss and she could feel the savage tension in his taut, muscular frame and the pounding of his accelerated heartbeat against hers. And Sara smiled for the first time in hours with a sense of gratified wonder and curved even closer, her other hand sliding against his silk shirt-front, feeling the heat of his flesh burning through the fine fabric. His response was intoxicating.

‘Is this a solo party…or a masquerade?’ Alex demanded softly. ‘I am not him. You will not close your eyes in my arms and pretend that I am.’

Shocked, she tipped her head back, eyes wide, and met a vibrant gold challenge. ‘I know who you are,’ she whispered dazedly, yet in his arms, even with her eyes open, she felt as if she was living some fantastic dream.

Lean hands closed gently round her wrists and pushed her back against the pillows. He curved one long-fingered hand to her cheekbone and held her still, raking her bewildered face with grim intensity. ‘You want me to want you now,’ he said tautly.

It was the truth, although she hadn’t seen it for herself. Hectic colour lashed her cheeks beneath that appraisal. ‘Yes…’

‘Not like this,’ Alex swore, his eloquent mouth hardening. ‘And not tonight.’

She had been stumbling round like a clown half the day under his gaze. No doubt whatever imagined attraction he had endowed her with had evaporated fast when he had been faced with such pathetic reality. Alex Rossini was accustomed to sophisticated women and none of those experienced ladies would ever have made such a fool of herself in his presence as she had. As he released her a semi-hysterical laugh was torn from her. It came out of nowhere and shook her.

‘Don’t…’ Alex reproved her thickly. ‘I want to make love to you very badly. I’ve wanted you for a long time but I won’t take advantage of you when you don’t know what you’re doing.’

But she did know, for she knew herself far better than he did and she wasn’t the type to have an affair with her boss, or the sort of woman who longed to see herself made notorious in newsprint as Alex Rossini’s latest bedpartner for a few adventurous weeks. There would be no tomorrow for them; there was only tonight. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, she registered in fascination.

‘Sara…?’ he prompted rawly, his blunt cheekbones overlaid with dark colour and prominent with ferocious tension.

Green eyes gazed back at him in defiant challenge. ‘One night…and it won’t cost you two million. It won’t cost you anything. I don’t put a price on myself,’ she told him with a bitter edge to her voice because she knew now that once she had put a price on her body and that price had been a wedding ring.

‘Cristo…’ Alex seethed down at her in sudden incredulous frustration. ‘What’s come over you that you’re talking like this?’

Her jewel-like eyes were relentlessly nailed to his as an unfamiliar feeling of power took her over. ‘I want…I want to be wanted tonight…’

‘OK…’ Alex sprang upright in one driven motion and stared fulminatingly down at her. ‘But you remember that this is not how I wanted it to be between us.’

And how had he imagined it would be? The two million for one wild night? Had that been his sexual fantasy? Or a few candlelit dinners, a lot of Italian charm and compliments and so to bed? Alex usually conducted his affairs with style. With flowers, gifts, country weekends, cruises on his fabulous yacht, Sea Spring. This was more honest—much more honest—than either proposition and she did know exactly what she was doing, didn’t she…? Didn’t she? For an instant Sara had a frightening glimpse of her own emotional turmoil and knew that she was actually on the brink of an abyss, knew that she simply couldn’t bear the thought of the long, lonely hours of the night which stretched ahead, knew that Alex’s desire was balm to her savaged ego.

But had any woman but her ever wanted Alex Rossini for company rather than physical gratification? She wasn’t expecting the latter, wasn’t expecting any rolling waves to hit any metaphoric seashores, could be honest enough now to admit to herself that she had never been particularly interested in that aspect of human relations, even with Brian. It had been no sacrifice for her to practise celibacy. All that clumsy, awkward, heavybreathing stuff had, frankly, left her cold, but she was intelligent enough to accept that other women didn’t feel that way. She had often heard her own sex talk unashamedly about their sexual urges and once she had worried that there was something lacking in her because she did not feel the same needs as they apparently did. Then she had come to terms with her own essential coolness in that field.

She heard the shower switch off, the door open again, the sound of his footfalls on the thick carpet and thought, Dear heaven, what am I doing? Am I crazy, am I on the edge of a breakdown to be inviting an intimacy that I don’t even want? And then Alex reached for her, pulling her up against him with a long, powerful arm. A stifled gasp of shock escaped her as he drew her into remorseless contact with every lean, hard line of his masculine physique. He rolled lithely over on the bed, taking her with him, and gazed down at her with burning golden eyes.

‘You can change your mind,’ he told her not quite evenly.

Eyes to drown in, eyes to tempt a saint, so wickedly beautiful in that hard male face that they took her breath away. Sara looked up at him, bereft of words, suddenly hopelessly entrapped by that all-enveloping gaze. She wondered, in a state of complete abstraction, what it would be like to be kissed by him, which was about as far as her craven imagination was inclined to take her.

‘I want the lights on…I don’t want you to forget…bella mia,’ he murmured with a sudden fractured roughness that tingled down her spinal cord and made her shiver. Forget what? she almost asked, but she couldn’t make her voice work and it didn’t seem important.

He wound his forefinger into a silky strand of her hair and slowly lowered his dark head, almost as if he expected her to shout, No! at the last possible moment, but Sara was wholly entranced. Bella… beautiful, she was savouring dreamily.

And then she found out what his mouth felt like on hers and she froze when his tongue probed between her parted lips. She had never liked that… but his sensual mouth became more insistent, more demanding and she trembled, pulses suddenly racing, heart accelerating madly, and she discovered that she had no resistance, no urge to pull back from that intoxicating pleasure.

Her head swam, a kind of stunned disbelief threatening to demand utterance, but he kissed her breathless and it would have taken restraint to initiate dialogue and she had none at all. She was carried blindly from one seductive kiss to the next, as badly hooked as an addict on heady delight.

Sure fingers moved against the full thrust of her breasts and a surge of such tormenting excitement took her in its grasp that her mind was a complete blank. She couldn’t think, indeed she could barely breathe as she felt her own flesh swell, her nipples pinching into tight, prominent buds. He ran his mouth down the extended line of her throat, strung a line of inflaming kisses along her collar-bone, dallied on pulse-points and places she didn’t know she had until that moment, and left her weak but with every skin cell alive with quivering, devastating anticipation.

‘Look at me…’ Alex demanded.

Her lashes flew up on command. She looked, lingered, drowned in smouldering gold. ‘Alex,’ she mumbled shakily, the fingers of one seeking hand pushing through his thick dark hair, shaping his head in an involuntary caress that also held him fast.

A brilliant smile flashed across his sensual mouth. He ran the tip of his tongue teasingly down the valley between her breasts and she shivered violently. ‘Alex,’ she said again without the smallest shade of doubt.

He peeled the nightdress out of his determined path, slowly shaped the quivering thrust of her achingly sensitive flesh with expert hands and then imprisoned a throbbing pink nipple in his mouth, suckling hungrily at the tender bud. Her whole body jerked in the surge of scorching heat that he evoked, the sudden, shattering, first-time pull of nerve-endings awakening to sexual passion taking her over. What remained of her control vanished simultaneously.

She heard a voice moaning, didn’t recognise it as her own, her fingers tightly gripping the hot, sleek smoothness of his shoulders as her back arched. Pleasure she had never dreamt of was shooting through her in agonising waves and there was hardly a pause between one peak and the next. She twisted beneath him, couldn’t stay still, wanting, needing, her thighs trembling, tightening on the ache building inside her.

He said something caressing in Italian, and the last thought that she would afterwards recall was that Italian was definitely the language of love in that incredibly rich, deep voice of his, and then he skimmed a hand through the damp curls at the base of her taut stomach and the world became a delirious, multicoloured shower of lights behind her lowered eyelids as he discovered the moist heat at the very heart of her. She cried out, gasped, shuddered. The hungry ache fired higher and higher, the strength of her own need biting so deep that it hurt, driving her to the edge of torment and making her plant desperate little kisses over any part of him that she could reach, her tongue tasting him, her teeth grazing him as her slender hips rose pleadingly against his most intimate caresses.

‘Wait…’ Alex groaned raggedly.

A split second after he drew back from her Sara tugged him back again with insistent hands and covered his mouth wildly, feverishly with her own, automatically utilising everything that he had taught her to keep him in the circle of her arms. He stiffened and then with an earthy groan surrendered with raw enthusiasm, his long, muscular length shuddering as his hands settled on her thighs and he moved against her, freeing her swollen lips, gazing down at her with ferocious hunger. ‘If this is a dream, I don’t ever want to wake up,’ he confessed with passionate conviction.

‘Alex…’ she gasped tautly, her entire quivering body reaching up to his in helpless need, reacting with liquidhoney-enticement to the tantalising, hot, hard probe of his flesh against hers.

The surge of pain caught her on the crest of tortured anticipation. She gasped in shock, eyes flying wide to meet similar shock in his startled gaze. ‘Cristo cara…’ he said in hoarse disbelief, but the momentary frown etched between his ebony brows was swiftly wiped away and the dark eyes glittered more golden than ever.

And then he moved again lithely, powerfully deepening his penetration, and a truly stunning wave of breathtaking sensation swept her back into that wild oblivion where only the demands of her own hungry body held sway. With every driving thrust he took her with him, made the fire burning inside her flame ever higher, ever more unbearably, until her teeth clenched and her heartbeat thundered and her nails raked fiercely down his damp back because the wild, hot pleasure that went on and on only made her more desperate. The explosive burst of her own climax was electrifying. It blew her apart, left her trembling in devastated aftershock from a sheer overload of pleasure.

‘I feel better in my bed.’ Alex was sweeping her up, letting his mouth caress hers again tenderly, then there was movement. That was all her punch-drunk senses could recognise. She felt the faint chill of colder air and then a cool sheet against her back before the heat and muscularity of Alex connected with her again.

‘Don’t go to sleep,’ he instructed her, his dark drawl impossibly vibrant and wide awake as he wrapped his arms around her possessively and vented a deeply satisfied sigh of slumberous relaxation.

Not waves on shores so much as a golden sun of glory around which she had revolved, she conceded sleepily. So much effort to think…so much easier simply to feel, and she felt wonderfully at peace.

‘We spend the weekend on the yacht. I’m in Paris on Monday…you’ll love Paris, cara. What do you think?’ he probed.

What did she think? Sara struggled valiantly to think. She thought that he sounded as if he had closed a tremendously difficult and lucrative business deal which had lost some poor fool a fortune and made him another mountain of money that he didn’t need: immensely, shamelessly self-satisfied. At that point her brain switched off and she shifted with positive contentment into the warm, comforting solidarity of him.

Her nose twitched on the heady scent of flowers. She lifted heavy eyelids slowly, focused on a giant, beribboned basket of flowers and then another basket…and then another. Her mouth went dry. She woke up in a hurry, jerking upright in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar bedroom and gaped at all the flowers surrounding her. Her attention lodged on a man’s silk tie lying in a tiny splash of crimson on top of a dense, creamy carpet and her heart plunged as if she had gone down at supersonic speed in a lift.

She nearly fell out of the bed in her haste to vacate it. Memory took her back and then forward. She turned as white as a sheet and suddenly knew without any prompting what being sober really felt like. A case she recognised as her own was sitting by the window. With a pained groan of disbelief, she stared at it. He had somehow got her clothes out of the flat? Oh, dear Lord, what had she done? What had she done?

With frantic hands she tore into the case. Taped to the inner lid was a big piece of paper, slashed with Antonia’s untidy scrawl. ‘What the hell is going on?’ it said.

Sara grabbed up a handful of clothes and dived into the en suite bathroom. She studied herself in the mirror-red, swollen mouth, shadowed eyes, wildly tousled black hair. Trollop, tart, she castigated herself with tears of rage and shame burning her eyes. How could she have behaved like that with Alex Rossini? She wanted to sink into a great black hole—no, she wanted to put him into a great black hole and pour tons of concrete over him so that he could never escape and she would never have to meet his eyes again!

Thankfully he had already left for the office…Oh, dear heaven, the office! It was already after nine. She would say that she had missed the bus. Nobody would think anything of that; nobody need ever know…but if she had had any choice she wouldn’t have walked into Rossini Industries ever again. However, there would certainly be talk if she suddenly disappeared and failed to work out the last ten days of her notice—much better to grit her teeth and finish her time there. In any case, she conceded bitterly, she badly needed her month’s salary because her bank account was almost empty.

Fumbling, with little of her usual dexterity, she contrived to confine her hair into a murderously tight bun at the nape of her neck.

She crept out of the bedroom, her arm nearly falling off from the weight of the case she was hauling with her. Tight-mouthed, she dragged it along to the landing at the top of the stairs. With every movement, she was more and more aware of the complaint of newly discovered muscles in unmentionable places and the undeniable ache in the least mentionable place of all, and her rage thundered higher with very step.

‘Buon giorno, cara…’

Her throat thickened. Slowly she straightened, stricken eyes flying to the tall, devastatingly attractive male standing at the head of the staircase.

‘I was coming up to see if you wanted to join me for breakfast…but we can do without the luggage,’ Alex assured her very softly, measuring dark eyes speeding over her furiously flushed face and lingering with incipient shrewdness. ‘Don’t do it—don’t say what’s brimming on your lips…Don’t disappoint me, cara.’

She wanted to kick him down the stairs. A temper that she had never had any trouble controlling until now was suddenly threatening to explode. She sucked in air, freezing her facial muscles. ‘I happen to be late for work, Mr Rossini.’ Ice dripped from every syllable.

She hit her lowest ebb as she watched his sensual mouth twist and then compress. She didn’t need to be told how ridiculous she had sounded. Then his strong dark face tautened. Brilliant dark eyes rested on her. ‘Sara…I want you to count to ten and think about last night without prejudice. Is that possible for you?’

‘No,’ she said woodenly, honestly, dragging her mortified gaze from his—an act which took so much willpower that she felt drained.

‘We shared something very special which I don’t want… or intend…to lose. It doesn’t matter that you were on the rebound…the only thing that matters is how we both feel now,’ Alex drawled very quietly. ‘Clean page, open book.’

‘Close it,’ Sara said between gritted teeth.

‘I don’t mind you cutting off your nose to spite your face…per Dio, I mind very much if you attempt to make a similar sacrifice of me!’ Alex covered the space between them in one long, fluid stride.

‘I made a mistake, damn you!’ Sara spat, tears scorching her eyes.

‘No, cara. That’s where you’re wrong. What happened between us was no mistake—not for me and not for you either.’

‘Am I entitled to voice an opinion of my own?’

‘Not right now…no.’ Alex lifted the case from her, set it arrogantly aside. ‘The prudish streak is threatening to go on the rampage.’

Sara flinched as though he had struck her.

‘Bella mia…’ Alex sighed reprovingly, smoothing long brown fingers caressingly over one pale, taut cheekbone, his accented drawl low and very soft. Even though she didn’t want to stand there and allow him to touch her again, something frightening, something stronger than she was kept her still, unresisting, her slender length leaning involuntarily closer as if she wanted to curve into that hand and stretch like a sensual cat. ‘Don’t leave. I promise not to try and force anything more. You need time and space to think. I’ll give it to you. I’ll be patient…I’ll stay in the background.’

‘Alex…’ Her voice fractured as she fought to free herself from the spell he cast even while she mentally reeled at the impossible image of Alex Rossini endeavouring to sink into the woodwork.

‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to regret—’

‘But I don’t want this!’ Sara gasped, suddenly finding that freedom to speak her own thoughts. She jerked her head away from him. ‘I don’t want to have an affair with you. Last night was madness—’

‘Sweet insanity that worked like a dream…Don’t deny what you’re feeling right now.’

‘I feel nothing…nothing!’ she swore violently, and, snatching up her case again with an energy born of desperation, she started down the stairs.

‘Sara, you cannot possibly go back into the office after this.’

He caught up with her in the hall. A firm hand closed round hers and tugged her back and round to face him again.

‘You think I’m going to be your mistress, you think wrong!’ Sara threw at him rawly.

‘What did I tell you to be sure to remember today? That this was not how I wanted it to be between us,’ Alex reminded her with controlled anger. ‘But you wouldn’t settle for anything less and now you blame me for it. That’s very female but bloody unfair.’

Her shocked eyes fell from his. ‘I’m not blaming you. I just want to forget this happened, that’s all.’

‘But I will not play that game…and take your hair out of that excruciatingly ugly old-maid style!’ Alex suddenly gritted, and hauled her even closer, banding one strong arm round her narrow back as his free hand roved free to the thick coil of hair and released it from its confinement. ‘You’re a beautiful young woman; rejoice in that beauty…don’t stifle it!’

‘Let go of me!’ Sara told him shrilly.

‘All I want to do is take you back to bed,’ Alex confided in an undertone of angrily suppressed passion as he brought her up against him, a lean hand splaying to the feminine swell of her hips with a lover’s intimacy.

Appalled cat-green eyes collided with his gaze and the atmosphere sizzled. She blinked bemusedly, feeling the piercingly sweet heat reawaken low in the pit of her stomach, the sudden ache of her nipples as her breasts stirred beneath her bra. Her soft mouth trembled. Alex smiled lazily down at her, shifted with fluid emphasis against her and she felt the force of his arousal with shock. Her lower limbs turned to cotton wool. Her ability to breathe and think for herself diminished with terrifying rapidity. ‘Stop it…’ she whispered breathlessly.

‘One kiss, bella mia, and I’ll let you go into work,’ he bargained mockingly.

‘No!’ she spat as her heartbeat pounded like a trapped bird in a cage.

‘Stubborn…’ Alex breathed thickly, amused. ‘You want that kiss as much as I do.’

‘I’m sorry…I didn’t realise…I used the rear entrance,’ another voice intervened.

Alex’s hand dropped instantly. Sara sprang back from him, eyes wide with horror when she saw Pete Hunniford standing several feet away, his mobile features momentarily transfixed with incredulity and then swiftly rearranged into total impassivity.

CHAPTER THREE

SARA stood there like a graven image as Pete handed a file to Alex.

‘Sara needs a lift back to the office.’ Alex quirked a sardonic black brow as he glanced reflectively at her. ‘Unless you’ve changed your mind, cara?’

‘No.’ She wrenched open the heavy front door for herself, and frankly couldn’t get out of the huge house quickly enough.

Alex dropped an arm round her and walked her out onto the top step, seemingly indifferent to a degree of icy, repulsing rigidity which would have frozen off the continuing advances of any normal male. ‘Lunch at one…Sara?’

Sara was staring in consternation at the man who had darted out from his position by the railings and focused a camera on them both. Click! Grinning, he then ran across the street and jumped into a car. ‘How unfortunate,’ Alex said, and he didn’t even attempt to sound convincing.

The thick atmosphere between Sara and Pete on the drive back to the office would have defied the sharpest knife.

‘Right,’ Pete began grimly. ‘Now the first thing you do is lie like a trooper to dear Brian. You worked late, had to stay over…you say I was there too. You do not confess; do you understand that, Sara? Believe me, Brian does not want the whole truth and nothing but the truth in this instance. That story covers you on all fronts. The paparazzi are always watching Alex. So there’ll be a photo of you emerging from his house at ten in the morning in tomorrow’s papers…What does that prove? Nothing.’

Paper-pale, Sara parted her lips, unsurprised by his cynical advice but deeply embarrassed by his frankness. ‘Pete, I—’

‘I can’t believe it…You!’ he muttered, shaking his smoothly styled head. ‘I thought you were bombproof around Alex. I feel responsible. I only gave you the job because you were engaged. Only the day before yesterday you were handing Alex a cup of coffee as though he was the carrier of some dread social disease, and this morning…?’

‘Please, let’s not talk about it,’ Sara mumbled. She thought of yesterday’s sunny awakening, her blinkered innocence of what the day would bring. And then this morning’s devastating dawn.

‘Obviously Alex finally made a move on you. Well, heaven knows, I’ve been waiting for it to happen. I’ve worked around Alex a long time. Believe it or not, I like Alex…but if he looked at my sister the way he’s always looked at you I’d lock her up and throw away the key…because Alex is very bad news with women. He’s emotionally cold and detached. I’ve seen him in action too many times not to know that—’

‘Pete…’ Had everyone but her been aware of Alex’s interest in her?

‘Your two predecessors fell head over heels for him and made a blasted nuisance of themselves! I thought you had more sense.’

Sense? When and where had sense figured in yesterday’s turmoil? She felt cheap and stupid and desperately ashamed of herself. Was that prudish? But she couldn’t discard the values of a lifetime overnight. She had invited…no, far worse, virtually pleaded for Alex’s sexual attentions. She had thrown herself at his head. Her stomach cramped with nausea.

How could she have done that? Why had she done it? Had she sunk so low in self-esteem that she had been grateful to Alex Rossini for finding her desirable? Had she needed the proof that she could still attract a man after seeing Brian in Antonia’s arms? Or on some level had she sought revenge for that agonising betrayal? If that had been her motivation, she was now discovering that revenge was a two-edged sword that could turn back on you and inflict piercing pain and regret.

When she and Pete arrived at the office Gina, the svelte receptionist, gave her a curious, veiled look as she murmured a greeting. Two executive secretaries were out in the corridor having a close conversation, but fell silent as she walked past. Their greetings were very muted indeed. Sara didn’t have to wait long to find out why.

‘Miss Lacey?’ A uniformed waiter whipped the covers from a selection of food on a heated trolley. ‘Breakfast, compliments of Mr Rossini.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Pete said only half under his breath as he drew to a halt beside her. Clearing his throat, he said rather loudly, ‘I hope there’s enough for two. Working so late, I slept in—didn’t have time for much this morning.’

Sara was so taken aback that she couldn’t even throw Pete a look of gratitude for his efforts to cover up for her. In any case, who was likely to believe that Alex had demanded Pete to leave his wife’s side and work overtime last night?

She sank down behind her desk, watched numbly as the food was served. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast yesterday, but she might have eaten last night had she not been far more intent on seducing Alex Rossini into spending the night with her. Hectic colour fired her creamy skin. Alex hadn’t wanted her to return to the office. He would be well aware that such an extravagant gesture would create gossip—the kind of gossip that Sara shrank from. Could he be cruel enough to use that as a weapon against her?

‘What did Molly have…a boy or a girl?’ she asked, striving valiantly for normality.

‘Didn’t Alex tell you? He was on the phone a good ten minutes with me yesterday…’ Pete flushed. ‘Sorrylittle girl. We’re going to call her Flora.’

‘Congratulations.’ Sara lifted her knife and fork, her fingers all thumbs.

‘Sara…you look like death warmed over,’ Pete said, tight-mouthed.

‘I’m fine.’

She wondered if she would ever feel fine again. As she forced herself to eat, she drowned in a torrent of brutally unwelcome erotic images. She sat there growing ever more appalled, ever more bewildered by the wanton creature that she had become in Alex Rossini’s arms. If only it had been unpleasant, sordid, disappointing even…She hated him all the more for the fact that it hadn’t been! She did not think that she could ever forgive herself for finding Alex Rossini more physically exciting than the man she loved. What did that say about her?

Maybe her aunt had been right about her all along. Janice Dalton had regularly lectured Sara on the dangers of promiscuity. As a quiet, far from precocious teenager, Sara had found those sessions deeply humiliating and she had bitterly resented the knowledge that the older woman feared the hereditary factor. ‘I don’t want you turning out like your mother did,’ her aunt had told her. Had the mother she barely remembered slept around? The concept had been distastefully implied more than once. There had always been a grim irony in Janice Dalton’s blind refusal to see how her own daughter lived her life.

‘Sara?’ Pete was in the doorway.

Sara glanced up from the accounts that she was checking. Her job covered a lot of ground. She had overall responsibility for the day-to-day running of Alex’s various homes round the world. She dealt with minor household crises, changes of staff, repair and maintenance bills, indeed all the boring minutiae that Alex didn’t have time to deal with but which had to be dealt with if the smooth running of his domestic arrangements was to continue with the faultless efficiency that he took for granted.

‘I understand that Alex gave an order that you were to receive no personal calls yesterday afternoon.’

‘Did he?’

Pete grimaced. ‘Brian is on his way up in the lift.’

Every scrap of colour ebbed from her cheeks.

‘See him in here. I’ll take myself off.’

‘But Alex—’

‘So Alex doesn’t allow personal visitors…but then Alex isn’t in yet.’

Sara stood up slowly. Brian appeared on the threshold. He looked as if he’d been up all night—pasty pale, tense, his eyes bloodshot. Pete closed the door on his way out, giving her a ludicrous thumbs-up sign behind Brian’s back.

‘Sara…’ Brian swallowed. ‘What do I say to you?’

It was as if a glass wall stood between them, as though a thousand years had passed since yesterday. ‘There’s nothing to say.’ She felt nothing, absolutely nothing at all, only a terrible emptiness.

‘She’d been chasing after me for weeks,’ he muttered unevenly. ‘I’m not making excuses…but—’

‘It gave you a kick because she wasn’t interested three years ago.’

He flushed and then nodded with compressed lips.

‘And you just couldn’t help yourself.’

His strained brown eyes met hers. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. I don’t even like Toni. I know what she’s like. It was just…you know…a physical thing. Damn it, Sara, how do I say to you that I just wanted to go to bed with her and then forget she existed? But that’s how it was!’ he told her with sudden fierceness, and she could feel him willing her to believe him. ‘There was no emotion involved. I know you have to think that’s disgusting but it’s you

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