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.

Mediterranean Millionaires

The Italian’s Inexperienced Mistress
The Greek Tycoon’s Convenient Mistress
The Spanish Groom
The Cozakis Bride
The Stephanides Pregnancy
A Mediterranean Marriage
Don Joaquin’s Pride
The Sicilian’s Mistress
Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

The Italian’s Inexperienced Mistress

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

The Greek Tycoon’s Convenient Mistress

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Spanish Groom

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Cozakis Bride

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

The Stephanides Pregnancy

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

A Mediterranean Marriage

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Don Joaquin’s Pride

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Sicilian’s Mistress

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Endpage

Copyright

The Italian’s Inexperienced Mistress

CHAPTER ONE

ANGELO RICCARDI climbed out of his limousine, a heavy-duty vehicle armoured with reinforced panels and bulletproof glass, built to withstand a rocket attack. The heat outside was relentless. His sunglasses screening his hard dark gaze from the bright Venezuelan sunlight, he ignored the uneasy chatter of the English intermediary sent to greet him at the airport. While he understood the man’s tension he was also irritated by it.

Angelo had not experienced fear since childhood and the shame of it had been beaten out of him. He had known loathing, rage and bitterness, but fear no longer had the power to touch him. His relentless rise to power and influence had featured in hundreds of magazines and newspaper features, but his birth and parentage had always been shrouded in a haze of uncertainty. When he was eighteen he had been told the truth about his ancestry. Any idealistic notions he’d had had died that same day when his chosen career had become a complete impossibility. With every successive year that had passed since then he had grown tougher, colder and more ruthless. He had used his brilliant intellect and razor-sharp instincts to build a huge business empire. That he had not had to break the law to become a billionaire was a harsh source of pride to him.

‘There’s a colossal security presence here,’ his companion, Harding, muttered uneasily.

It was true, Angelo acknowledged. Armed guards were everywhere: on the rooftops of the ranch buildings, in every manicured clump of trees or bushes, their state of alert palpable. ‘It should make you feel safe,’ Angelo quipped.

‘I won’t feel safe until I’m back home again,’ Harding confided, mopping his round, perspiring face.

‘Perhaps this was not the job for you.’

He dealt Angelo a look of dismay. ‘Believe me, I meant no offence. I’m delighted to be of service.’

Angelo said nothing. He was surprised that such a man had been chosen to act as middleman in a secret meeting. But then, how many outwardly respectable men accepted the kind of undercover favours that forced them into uncomfortable repayments? He strode into the cool air-conditioned interior of the opulent ranch house where a lantern-jawed older man awaited him. Harding was dismissed like a lackey of no consequence, while Angelo was looked over and greeted with a level of respectful curiosity that bordered on awe.

‘It is a very great pleasure to meet you, Mr Riccardi,’ the older man declared in Italian. ‘I’m Salvatore Lenzi. Don Carmelo is eager to see you.’

‘How is he?’

The other man grimaced. ‘His condition is stable at present but it’s unlikely that he has more than a couple of months left.’

Lean, handsome features taut, Angelo nodded. He had thought long and hard before he had agreed to visit and the old man’s declining health had provided the spur. The infamous Carmelo Zanetti, head of one of the most notorious crime families in the world, was a stranger to him. Yet Angelo had never been able to forget that the same blood that ran in Carmelo Zanetti’s veins ran in his own.

The elderly man lay propped up in a hospital-style bed surrounded by medical equipment. His face was lined with ill health. Breathing stentorously, he feasted his clouded dark gaze on Angelo and sighed. ‘I can’t tell you that you look like your mother because you don’t. Fiorella was tiny…‘

Almost imperceptibly the inflexible cast of Angelo’s features softened, for his mother had shown him the only tenderness he had ever known. ‘Sì…’

‘But you have the look of my father and your own. Your parents were the Romeo and Juliet of their generation,’ Don Carmelo recited with caustic humour. ‘A Sorello and a Zanetti, not a match made in heaven as far as either family was concerned and the bride and groom were at each other’s throats within weeks of the wedding.’

‘Is that why my mother ended up scrubbing floors for a living?’ Angelo enquired smooth as glass.

The old man was unmoved by the reminder. ‘She ended up doing that because she deserted her husband and disowned her family. Who would credit that she was my favourite? It was once my pleasure to spoil her and indulge her every wish.’

‘So, my mamma was a real Mafia princess?’ Angelo sliced in with sardonic bite, unimpressed by the misty fairy-tale aspect of that assurance.

‘Don’t mock what you don’t know about.’ Carmelo Zanetti sent him an impatient look. ‘Your mamma had the whole world at her feet. And what did she do? She turned her back on all that education and fine breeding and married your father. Compared to us, the Sorellos were cafoni…uncouth people. Gino Sorello was a handsome hothead always looking for a fight. She couldn’t handle him or his extra-marital activities.’

‘How did you deal with the situation?’ Angelo was impatient to have the facts that had so far evaded his every attempt to discover them.

‘In this family we don’t interfere between a man and his wife. When Gino was jailed for the second time, your mother walked out on her marriage. She ran away from her home and her responsibilities as though she was a little kid.’

‘Maybe she felt that she had good cause.’

Dark eyes crackling with grim amusement rested on Angelo. ‘And maybe you’re in for a surprise or two, because I think you put your precious mamma on a pedestal when she died.’

Anger at that insinuation made Angelo turn pale below his bronzed complexion. Only the awareness that Carmelo would revel in getting under his skin kept him silent.

The older man slumped heavily back against the pillows. ‘Fiorella was my daughter and dear to my heart, but she shamed and disappointed me when she walked out on her husband.’

‘She was twenty-two years old and Sorello was serving a life sentence. Why shouldn’t she have sought a fresh start for herself and her child?’

‘Loyalty is not negotiable in my world. When Fiorella vanished, people got nervous about how much she might know about certain activities. Her treachery was a stain on Gino’s honour as well and it made her many enemies.’ Carmelo Zanetti shook his head wearily. ‘But she was destroyed by her own ignorance and folly.’

Angelo’s attention was keenly focused on the older man. ‘Obviously you didn’t lose track of my mother and you know what happened to her after she arrived in England.’

‘You won’t like what I have to tell you.’

‘I’ll cope,’ Angelo said drily.

Carmelo pressed the bell by the bed. ‘You’ll take a seat and have a glass of wine while we talk. This one time you will behave like my grandson.’

Angelo wanted to deny the relationship but he knew he could not. A certain amount of civility was the price he had to pay for the information he had long sought to make sense of his background. Squaring his broad shoulders, he sat down in a lithe, controlled movement. A manservant brought in a silver tray bearing a single glass filled with ruby liquid and a plate of tiny almond pastries. With a glint of something hidden in his sharp old eyes, Carmelo Zanetti watched the younger man lift the glass and slowly sip.

The old man laughed. ‘Dio grazia…you’re no coward!’

‘Why should you want to harm me?’

‘How does it feel to have rejected your every living relative?’

A sardonic smile of acknowledgement curved Angelo’s handsome sculpted mouth. ‘It kept me out of prison…it may even have kept me alive. The family tree is distressingly full of early deaths and unlikely accidents.’

After having taken a moment to absorb that acid response, Don Carmelo succumbed to a choking bout of appreciative laughter. Alarmed by the aftermath in which the old man struggled for breath, Angelo got up to summon assistance only to be irritably waved back to his seat.

‘Please tell me about my mother,’ Angelo urged.

His companion gave him a mocking look. ‘I want you to know that when she left Sardinia, she had money. My late wife had left her amply provided for. Your mother’s misfortune was that she had very poor taste in men.’

Angelo tensed.

Carmelo Zanetti gave him a cynical glance. ‘I warned you that you wouldn’t like it. Of course there was a man involved. An Englishman she met on the beach soon after your father went to prison. Why do you think she headed to London when she spoke not a word of English? Her boyfriend promised to marry her when she was free. She changed her name as soon as she arrived and began to plan her divorce.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I have a couple of letters that the boyfriend wrote her. He had no idea who her connections were. Once she was settled he offered to take care of her money, but he took care of it so well that she never saw it again. He bled her dry and I understand he then told her he’d lost it all on the stock market.’

Angelo was very still but his brilliant gaze glittered like black diamonds on ice. ‘Is there more?’

‘He abandoned her when she was pregnant by him and that was when she discovered that he was already married.’

In shock at that further revelation, Angelo gritted his teeth and was betrayed into comment. ‘I had no idea.’

‘She lost the baby and never recovered her health.’

‘You knew all this…yet you chose not to help her?’ Angelo recognised the cold, critical detachment that had ultimately decided his frail mother’s fate.

‘She could have asked for assistance at any time but she didn’t. I will be frank. She had become an embarrassment to us and there were complications. Gino got out of prison on appeal. He wanted you, his son, back and he wanted revenge on his unfaithful wife. Your mother’s whereabouts had to remain a secret if you were not to end up in the hands of a violent drunk. Silence kept both of you safe.’

‘It didn’t stop us going hungry though,’ Angelo replied without any inflection.

‘You survived—’

‘But she didn’t,’ Angelo incised.

Don Carmelo revealed no regret. ‘I’m not a forgiving man. She let the family down and the final insult was her belief that she had to keep her son away from my influence. She got religion before she died and turned against us even more.’

‘If you never saw her again, how do you know that?’

The old man grimaced. ‘She phoned me when her health was failing. She was worried about what would happen to you. But she still begged me to respect her wishes and not to claim you when she was gone.’

Angelo could see that exhaustion was steadily claiming the older man and pushing their meeting to a close. ‘I appreciate your candour. I would like the name of the man who stole my mother’s money.’

‘His name was Donald Hamilton.’ Don Carmelo lifted a large envelope and extended it. ‘The letters. Take them.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’ Angelo queried. ‘My mother died when I was seven years old.’

‘And now here you are, proud not to be a Zanetti or a Sorello. If you are so unlike the stock from which you were bred, why do you want Hamilton’s name?’ the old man riposted. ‘What could you intend to do with it?’

Angelo surveyed him with dark expressionless eyes and shifted a shoulder in an almost infinitesimal shrug.

‘Don’t do anything foolish, Angelo.’

Angelo laughed out loud. ‘I can’t believe you’re saying that to me.’

‘Who better? I’ve spent the last decade in exile. I’ve been hunted across this planet by the forces of law and order and by my enemies. But my time is almost up,’ Carmelo Zanetti mused. ‘You are the closest relative I have left and I have watched over you all your life.’

‘Only not so that I noticed,’ Angelo countered, unimpressed by the claim.

‘Perhaps we are cleverer than you think. You may also find out that, under the skin, you have more in common with us than you want to admit.’

Angelo lifted his arrogant dark head high, strong denial of that suggestion in every inch of his proud bearing. ‘No. I really don’t think so.’

A basket of flowers on her arm, Gwenna hurried down the muddy lane in pursuit of the two little boys. Thrilled by the growling noises she was making in her role as a pursuing bear, Freddy and Jake were in fits of giggles. With her dog, Piglet, a tiny barrel-shaped mongrel, hard on their heels and barking like mad, they made a noisy trio. The insistent ring of a mobile phone sliced through the laughter. Gwenna fell still and with a guilty air of reluctance dug the item out of her pocket.

‘Bet it’s the Evil Witch again,’ Freddy forecast gloomily.

‘Shush…’ Gwenna urged in dismay, wishing the children’s mother were more careful about what she said in front of her sons because the little boys didn’t miss a trick.

‘I heard Mummy tell Daddy that you’ll never get a man with the Evil Witch around. Do you need one?’ Jake asked earnestly.

‘Course she does…to have babies and change the light bulbs,’ Freddy told his little brother with immense superiority.

‘Is that children I hear?’ Eva Hamilton demanded sharply. ‘Have you let Joyce Miller lumber you with those horrid brats again?’

Giving the twins a pleading glance, Gwenna put a finger to her lips in the universal signal for silence and sidestepped the question. ‘I’ll be with you in less than an hour—’

‘Have you any idea how much still has to be done here?’

‘I thought the caterers—’

‘I’m talking about the cleaning,’ her stepmother cut in acidly.

Gwenna almost flinched for it seemed to her that the past week had passed by in a relentless blur of labour. Even her back, well toned from regular physical activity at the plant nursery where she worked, had developed an ache. ‘Did I miss something out?’

‘The furniture is getting dusty again and the flowers in the drawing room are drooping,’ Eva Hamilton snapped out accusingly. ‘I want everything to be perfect tomorrow for your father, so you’ll have to see to it all this evening.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Gwenna reminded herself that the endless preparation required to stage Eva’s buffet lunch for a handful of select guests was in aid of a very good cause. First and foremost, tomorrow was her father’s big day. Donald Hamilton had worked tirelessly to raise the funds necessary to begin the restoration of the overgrown gardens of Massey Manor. Although the manor house was virtually derelict, the gardens had been designed by a leading nineteenth-century garden luminary and the village was badly in need of a tourist attraction to stimulate the local economy. A host of local VIPs and the press would be present to record the moment when Donald Hamilton symbolically opened the long padlocked gates of the old estate so that the first phase of the work on the grounds could begin.

‘The EvilWitch always steals your smile,’ Freddy lamented.

‘I’m a bear and bears don’t smile,’ Gwenna informed him with determined cheer, snapping back into play mode for the boys’ benefit. But the children had barely got to loose a delighted giggle at the fearful face she assumed when an outburst of frantic barking gave Gwenna something more pressing to think about.

‘Oh no!’ she groaned, racing for the village green where Piglet had clearly found a victim. She was furious with herself for letting her pet off the lead. Although the little animal was very loving and terrific with children he had one troublesome quirk. Having been dumped by the roadside by his first owners and injured as a result, Piglet had developed a pronounced antipathy towards cars and was prone to taking an aggressive stance with their male occupants. Fortunately for him, he was so tiny that his belligerence usually struck people as a joke rather than a source of complaint.

‘Piglet…no!’ Gwenna launched the instant she saw her pet dancing furiously round the very tall dark male standing by the church lychgate.

In spite of the sunshine and his undeniably picturesque and bucolic surroundings, Angelo was not in a good mood. The state-of-the-art satellite-navigation system in the limo, developed by one of his own companies, had proved to be as accurate as a tenth-century map when challenged to deliver the goods in this rural location. His chauffeur had tried to drive down a lane barely wide enough to take a bike and had scratched the limo’s paintwork before finally being forced to admit that he was hopelessly lost. While Angelo had climbed out to stretch his legs, his security team were endeavouring to locate another living being in a village so deserted that he would not have been surprised to find out that he had strayed onto the set of a disaster movie. An attempted assault by a freaky mini-dog with enormous rabbit ears and incongruous short legs was no more welcome. As the careless pet owner approached him at a run Angelo had an icy cutting reproof on his lips.

‘Piglet…stop that right now!’ Gwenna was aghast to see that Piglet had targeted a male dressed in an immaculate business suit, for in her experience such men were less tolerant of annoyances. There were two houses for sale on the other side of the green and she wondered if he was a city estate agent.

Angelo looked down into clear eyes the startling blue of Dutch Delft, set in a heart-shaped face of such rare beauty that for the first time in his life he forgot what he had intended to say. In a millisecond the opportunity to stare was lost. Fair head bowing, she bent down in an effort to catch the offending dog.

‘I’m so sorry…please don’t move in case you stand on him,’ Gwenna begged, frantically chasing her defiant pet round masculine feet shod in the very finest leather. By the time she got a firm hand curved round Piglet’s wriggly little body she felt hot and exceedingly foolish.

Out of the corner of his eye Angelo saw one of his security team hurrying towards him to provide the usual if belated barrier between his employer and the rest of the human race. Angelo shifted a staying hand to keep the man at a distance. The rays of the sun were picking out streaks of pure gold in her hair. Even though that blonde waving mass was confined in a band at the nape of her neck, it was still long enough to trail down her narrow spine. In his mind’s eye he was still picturing her face and already questioning why she had had such an impact on him. He was fiercely impatient for her to look up again.

‘Piglet, you little rascal…I’m so, so sorry,’ Gwenna declared feverishly, clipping Piglet’s lead to his collar and rising. ‘He didn’t nip you, did he?’

Even while Angelo marvelled at the impact of her beautiful eyes, wide cheekbones and generous mouth, he was also registering that the world of fashion and style was foreign territory to her. Her faded blue summer dress hinted at the lush curve of her breasts before billowing out in shapeless folds that revealed only her slender ankles. ‘Nip?’ he queried, his lean, powerful frame poised with natural elegance while he waited for her to respond to him as women always responded, with widened eyes and smiles and a host of flirtatious signals.

‘Bite? He didn’t, did he? He has teeth like needles.’ Intimidated by his sheer size, for he was well over six feet in height, Gwenna kept her distance. It was impossible though to avoid noticing how extremely handsome he was. That awareness, not to mention the weird compulsion she had to stare at him, was sufficiently unlike her to make her feel distinctly unsettled in his presence.

‘He didn’t bite…’ Angelo watched and waited in vain for the female sexual response that was so predictable, he expected it and took it for granted. Instead her long silky brown lashes screened her expressive gaze and she evaded his scrutiny. It annoyed him even while he was absorbing the fact that, in spite of the unforgiving brightness of the light, her skin retained the luminescent sheen of a pearl. He wondered if she was that same pale-as-milk shade all over and almost smiled.

‘Thank goodness…Jake…Freddy!’ Gwenna was anxiously looking back to see where the boys had got to and eager to focus her attention elsewhere.

Two ginger heads popped out from behind the hedge that bounded the grounds of the church.

Angelo froze. She had kids? He scanned her hand. Her wedding finger was bare.

‘Chase us, Gwenna!’ Freddy begged.

‘Are you their nanny?’ Angelo enquired.

Gwenna blinked in surprise at that unexpected question. ‘No, I’m not…I’m just looking after them for an hour. Excuse me,’ she added, glancing up without meaning to and discovering that his dark golden eyes held a light that made her tummy clench and her throat tighten. Hurriedly she screened him out again and grabbed up the basket of flowers that she had set down.

‘Perhaps you could tell me how far Peveril House is from here.’

Gwenna came to a halt again, for any appeal for assistance was a sure path to her full attention. She glanced across the green but there was no sign of the car he must have arrived in. ‘It’s a good five miles. If you go down the fork behind the church, you’ll see a sign for the hotel,’ she told him. ‘People don’t often come this way.’

‘I wonder why not,’ Angelo drawled softly. ‘The scenery is quite exquisite. Will you dine with me tonight?’

Taken aback by that smooth invitation, Gwenna flashed him a surprised glance and soft pink warmed her cheeks. ‘But I don’t know you…’

‘Seize the opportunity,’ Angelo advised silkily.

‘No…thank you, but I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

Other men invariably retreated at the first hint of refusal. That bold demand for an explanation startled her. ‘Well, er…’

‘Boyfriend?’

Tongue-tied by discomfiture, Gwenna shook her head and wished she found it easier to tell lies. ‘No, but…’ Her full, soft mouth folding, she dipped her head and fell silent.

She had turned down the only excuse that Angelo could have accepted. Even then he would only have sought another angle of approach, for he had yet to meet a woman capable of resisting what he offered. Fidelity, he had long since discovered, was usually negotiable. The silence lingered. He could not credit that, for the very first time in his life, he was meeting with a flat refusal.

‘Excuse me,’ she muttered again, her eagerness to be gone yet another rebuff to the male watching her. ‘I have to go.’

Angelo stood in mute disbelief as she walked away from him and through the church gate. His gaze tracked her every move as he had a perverse need to know if she would look back; she did not.

Breathless and taut, Gwenna secured the dog lead to the wooden bench that sat to one side of the arched wooden door and stepped gratefully into the cool dim interior of the old church. Freddy and Jake chattered while she set about her task of arranging the flowers for the christening that was to take place the following morning.

It was quite some time since anyone had asked her out; she met very few fresh faces. She could not understand why she was so flustered. Or why she had the most peculiar desire to creep back to the door to peer out and see if the handsome stranger was still there, which of course he wouldn’t be. He would now be well on the way to his incredibly posh hotel, which was probably hosting an international business conference or some such thing. There had been a slight inflection on certain words that had suggested that English might not be his first language. Certainly men with that kind of gloss and sophistication were scarcer than hen’s teeth, locally.

What was the matter with her? Why was she even curious? She dashed impatient fingers through the strands of fair hair clinging to her damp brow. She didn’t date. There was just no point when it couldn’t go anywhere. She had learned the hard way that even when men said friendship was fine, they always wanted more and more always involved sex. But she didn’t want physical intimacy without love, which would leave her feeling just as empty and alone when it was over. The taunts she had endured as she grew up had convinced her that old-fashioned values could provide a bulwark of protection from the worst mistakes. She was painfully aware that her own mother had paid a high price for flouting those same principles.

An image of the stranger’s lean bronzed face swam before Gwenna afresh, and the extraordinary impact of those dark deep set eyes against the fantastic symmetry of his hard bone structure. A soft gurgle of laughter was reluctantly dragged from her. So, she was female and human and she had noticed a breathtakingly gorgeous guy. Not her type though. He had been altogether too arrogant and slick to appeal to her. She liked open, friendly men with a creative bent. Add in tobacco brown hair and laughing green eyes, she reflected abstractedly, and she would be describing her likeness of the perfect man.

Fifty breathless minutes later, Gwenna returned Freddy and Jake to their mother, who had had a pre-natal appointment to attend at the hospital. She knew Joyce Miller well for the two women had worked together at the nursery for over a year.

‘Come in for a while,’ the heavily pregnant redhead urged. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

‘Sorry, I can’t.’

Joyce gave her a wry appraisal. ‘Is the Evil Witch jerking your chain again?’

Gwenna shrugged acceptance. ‘There’s still a few things needing done at my father’s house—’

‘But you don’t even live there. I can’t see what the state of the Old Rectory has got to do with you.’

It was quite a few years since Gwenna had moved into the small flat above the office at the nursery. Her accommodation was spartan but it had been a relief to embrace peace and independence. ‘I don’t mind if it keeps Eva happy. Tomorrow is a special day for Dad.’

‘And for you,’ Joyce chipped in. ‘Massey Manor was built by your ancestors. It was once your mother’s home—’

Gwenna laughed and shook her head. ‘More than a generation back and even then it was going to rack and ruin. My grandmother moved out because the roof was leaking so badly and by then she and my mother were only living in a couple of rooms. It’s a pity that none of my Massey ancestors had the magic knack of making money.’

‘Well, I think you’ve done incredibly well getting the locals together and coming up with so many good ideas to raise cash for the garden restoration.’

Gwenna grinned. ‘Thanks, but I’ve only ever been the backroom girl. It was my father’s persuasive tongue and his fantastic business connections which brought in the serious pledges of money. He’s done a marvellous job. Without his input we would never have made it this far.’

‘I’ve finally realised why you’re still single. You adore your father,’ the redhead said ruefully. ‘No man will ever match him in your eyes.’

Walking over to the Old Rectory where her father and stepmother lived, Gwenna thought about that conversation. She had not argued the point because the truth was too private. But, even so, Gwenna did believe that for any man to match Donald Hamilton would be a very tall order indeed. Her father was special. It had taken an exceptional man to acknowledge an illegitimate daughter, take her into his home and keep her there even when it had cost him his marriage. She accepted that her father had his flaws. As a younger man, he had had a pronounced weakness for women and more than one extra-marital affair. Her mother, Isabel Massey, had been one of those women.

The following morning, Gwenna watched while her father posed for the cameras at the neglected main entrance of the Massey estate. Although comfortably into his fifties, Donald Hamilton looked younger. With his silvering blond hair swept back from his tanned brow, he was a very presentable man. A lawyer, who had forged a successful career with a furniture company, he was accustomed to dealing with the media and his short witty speech added gloss to an already polished public performance. The gates were swept open and the local television news team recorded the moment and punctuated it with an interview. Gwenna’s stepmother and her stepsisters, Penelope and Wanda, were revelling in the limelight. Gwenna made no attempt to join the family gathering since she was well aware that she would be unwelcome and that the subsequent unpleasantness would discomfit her father.

‘I didn’t realise the police bigwigs were coming too,’ a member of the Massey Garden committee remarked at her elbow. ‘That’s Chief Superintendent Clarke.’

Gwenna glanced over her shoulder and saw two men in suits standing by a police car. Their faces were grave. Another man was in conversation with her father and whatever was being said was evidently not to Donald Hamilton’s liking, for he had turned a dull red and he was saying loudly that something was nonsense. The news crew were now paying attention to the tableau. With an exasperated smile on his lips, her father strode towards the men by the car, even making a laughing sally as he approached. But a curious little puddle of silence was steadily spreading through the crowd. It enabled Gwenna to hear the senior police officer refer to ‘very serious allegations’. She watched in frank disbelief as her father had his legal rights read to him. In full view of his family and the media, Donald Hamilton was being arrested.

In his opulent private suite at the Peveril House hotel later that afternoon, Angelo Riccardi flicked on the recording that had been made for his benefit. Having received an anonymous tip off, the television crew had lingered for the more exciting finale that had been promised: Hamilton, captured on film at the very height of his self-glorification as local worthy and philanthropist, brought crashing down from his little plastic pedestal of respectability.

Angelo had bought the furniture company that employed his quarry and had sent in his auditors to check the accounts. Catching Hamilton red-handed had not been the challenge he had expected. Indeed it had been almost too easy. Of course, public exposure was only the beginning, Angelo reflected. Hamilton had to be made to pay the proper price for his sins. Piece by piece he intended to strip the man who had abandoned his mother of everything he valued and his good name was only the first step in that process…

CHAPTER TWO

GWENNA looked round the noisy room in despair and blocked out the angry flood of accusations being hurled at the hunched and pathetic figure of her father, who had been shorn of all his natural buoyancy by the events of recent days.

The drawing room of the Old Rectory was large and elegant. But the flower arrangement on the table, which Gwenna had taken such special pains with, was now wilting and dropping petals. It was three days since the world in which she lived had shattered into broken shards and, along with it, some of her most heartfelt convictions.

Donald Hamilton had been charged with fraud, false accounting and forgery and informed that other offences might yet be added to that terrifying tally. At first, everybody had been up in arms in defence of the older man. Not just his family, but his friends and neighbours as well for he was a popular figure. The fact that his employer and work colleagues stayed silent and kept their distance had been loudly condemned. But then, possibly people were worried about the security of their jobs. After all it was barely a week since Furnridge Leather had been bought by Rialto, the vast corporate business empire run by Angelo Riccardi. Possibly because of that more cosmopolitan and powerful connection, the case had attracted a great deal of unpleasant publicity.

Perhaps the biggest shock of all had occurred when Donald Hamilton, confronted with overwhelming evidence of his crimes, had chosen to confess his guilt. Gwenna had been truly devastated. That the father she adored and admired should have stooped so low as to steal money had appalled her, but she had been proud that he had ultimately had the courage to admit what he had done and accept the blame. When he had finally been allowed home, he had taken Gwenna into his study for a private chat. There he had confided how the extravagant lifestyle he had been leading had led to steadily mounting debts that he could no longer handle.

‘I just borrowed a little one month from the Furnridge accounts to tide me over,’ her parent explained heavily. ‘Naturally I intended to pay it back. Unfortunately Penelope sprang her big fancy wedding on us without warning and that cost a fortune. Her mother spent another fortune comforting her when her marriage failed. Last year Wanda needed the capital to set up her riding school. As you know that was another disaster and I lost a lot on that venture. But I do realise that that’s no excuse for stealing. You mustn’t think I’m blaming anyone either—’

‘I don’t…I don’t.’ Gwenna’s throat was thick with tears as she gave the older man a comforting hug. She was well aware that nothing less than the very best was ever acceptable to her stepmother and her two stepsisters and that they expected her father to provide for their every need and want.

‘You see, I’ve never been very good at saying no to the people I love. I’m afraid that we’ve been living above our means for a long time in this house but I found it impossible to deny Eva anything. I love her so much, Gwenna. I don’t know what I’ll do if she decides to divorce me over this.’

After that illuminating conversation, Gwenna was now finding it very difficult indeed to stand by listening while the rest of her father’s family made him the target of their bitter recriminations. He was a solicitor, whose main source of income had been earned by his employment at Furnridge Leather. A few hours a week, he worked for a handful of private clients, most of whom were elderly and whom he had inherited from his late father’s now defunct legal practice.

‘They’ve frozen your bank accounts. My allowance hasn’t been paid. How am I supposed to pay my credit card bill?’ her elder stepsister, Penelope, was demanding, her pretty face contorted with fury.

Gwenna wondered what would happen if she dared to suggest that perhaps it was time that the brunette looked for a regular job. Both her stepmother’s daughters still lived at home. Penelope was twenty-seven, a part-time model who treated her career like a hobby and expected her stepfather to fund the luxuries she enjoyed. Her sibling, Wanda, was two years younger and had never held down a job for longer than six weeks.

‘What about the repayments on my sports car?’ Wanda was demanding. ‘Where am I going to get the money to keep them up?’

Eva Hamilton gave her silent husband a bitter look of tearful condemnation. ‘Until now, I never appreciated how lucky I was that my first husband was such an excellent provider.’

Gwenna winced at a reminder that she felt was unnecessarily cruel and wondered fearfully if her stepmother would stand by her disgraced husband, now that the gravy train had ground to a halt.

‘Yes, he was and I’m certainly not living up to that challenge.’ Slumped in his armchair in the corner, Donald Hamilton was sunk so deep in depression that he was a soft target for all such attacks.

‘If only you hadn’t admitted that you took the money! With a good lawyer, we could have fought the charges!’ Penelope told him furiously.

‘We might have had a chance if Furnridge had still been under John Ridge’s ownership. But not now…Rialto is huge and Angelo Riccardi is a hard-hitter. In an organisation of that size, the rules are rigid and the resources unlimited. They’d pursue you to the edge of the grave for a penny, never mind what I’ve creamed off the accounts over the years,’ the older man framed bleakly. ‘I’m ruined.’

‘What matters is that you owned up to what you had done. I’m sure that that was a relief to everyone concerned and that you feel a little better now,’ Gwenna commented hastily.

‘Honesty is the best policy? Did you get taught that in Sunday School?’ Her stepmother sobbed with scorn. ‘You definitely didn’t pick it up at your mother’s knee. After all, she was your father’s secret bit on the side for years!’

Gwenna reddened with the old sense of shame that she had never managed to shake off. It was true: her mother’s long-running affair with Donald Hamilton had been furtive and built on lies and pretences. Even so, while she had often been treated to such sneering reminders as a child, few had come her way since she had attained adult independence. ‘Look, I came over to—’

‘Stick your nose in where it’s not wanted?’ Wanda sniped.

‘So that we could all try to work out how best to deal with this situation,’ Gwenna countered doggedly. ‘If we can pay back the money that’s been taken, Dad might still be able to escape prosecution. Obviously the Massey gardens and the nursery could be sold. Then there’s the apartment in London—’

The very suggestion that the city apartment, much used by Eva and her daughters, should be put on the market roused Gwenna’s step relatives to a vitriolic counter attack. But Donald Hamilton studied his only child with the first glimmer of hope he had displayed since his arrest. ‘Do you think an offer like that could make a difference?’

Gwenna gave a vigorous nod.

‘But if Massey is sold you’ll lose your job, the business you’ve built up and the roof over your head. Would you really do that for me?’ he prompted wonderingly.

‘Of course.’ Gwenna cleared her throat awkwardly. ‘Then there’s this place…’

Eva emerged from her handkerchief like a ferret scenting a rabbit. ‘This house is in my name and I’m not selling it or raising a loan on it!’

Gwenna had not been aware of that reality and she flushed and muttered a hasty apology.

‘You’ve got some nerve!’ Penelope told Gwenna.

The phone rang. The police wanted her father to answer some further queries. Before Gwenna’s anxious gaze the older man turned a sickly grey shade. It hurt her to witness his obvious fear at the prospect of yet another visit to the police station.

With an air of resolution, Gwenna stood up. ‘I’m going to go to Furnridge Leather and ask to speak to whoever has the power to make a decision on your behalf.’

‘You’ll be wasting your time,’ Donald mumbled. ‘I’m dead in the water, dead no matter what you do.’

Angelo accepted a black coffee, but ignored the erotic invitation in the PA’s admiring gaze and the manner in which she contrived to bend low enough to show off her cleavage. Where was her respect? If she had been on his personal staff she would have been history. He didn’t like sex in the office. It was a distraction and he disliked distractions. Women were wonderful…outside working hours, at a convenient time of his choosing. He let nothing get in the way of business or profit.

He stood by the window that overlooked the ground-floor reception area of Furnridge Leather’s premises and listened to his executives uneasily discussing ideas to regenerate the company with the former owner, John Ridge. Occasionally Angelo spoke up to rubbish the more unrealistic suggestions. This was the smallest company he had taken over in a decade. It was a challenge for his staff to think small enough to suit the project, particularly when this latest acquisition had a big black hole in its accounts. Now there were two thousand employees with very good reason to hate Donald Hamilton because the future of the business was very much in the balance.

A young woman approached the reception desk. Her long blonde hair was caught back in a simple clasp. Angelo stiffened, keen dark eyes narrowing in immediate recognition of the graceful angle of her head and her perfect profile. Well, what do you know? he thought without great surprise. Gwenna from the deadest little village in Somerset had found him again. Had she seen his limousine as he’d departed and recognised his financial worth? Whatever, she had evidently now identified him and intended to save him the hassle of looking for her. He felt disappointed. He had thought that just for once he might actually have to make a concentrated effort to get a woman into bed. The phone buzzed. The call was for John Ridge.

The older man set down the handset and muttered uncomfortably, ‘Donald Hamilton’s daughter, Gwenna, is downstairs asking to see me or whoever is in charge. Is there anyone here willing to speak to her?’

Angelo had become as still as a granite statue. He was frowning because when he had glanced through the background information on Donald Hamilton there had been no reference to a daughter by that name. ‘Hamilton’s actual daughter?’

‘His only child and a lovely girl, but I would really prefer not to have to deal with her. There’s nothing to say, is there?’

‘Nothing,’ one of the executives agreed very drily.

‘I will see her in here in fifteen minutes,’ Angelo decreed, rigorously suppressing the angry sense of shock and recoil spreading through him. A lovely girl? Sì, he could vouch for that. He was a connoisseur and she had stopped even him in his tracks. Impervious to his companions’ surprise at his announcement, he immediately accessed the file on Hamilton on his laptop. And there he found the brief reference to her as Jennifer Gwendolen Massey Hamilton, aged twenty-six years. Donald Hamilton’s only child, who had to be precious even to a lying, cheating fraudster.

Gwenna sat in the waiting area feeling the hostile chill in the air around her and registered that she was reaping what her father had sown. The nerve-racking minutes ticked past. She was astonished to be told that Angelo Riccardi, the billionaire head of Rialto, was in the building and prepared to speak to her, for she had dimly assumed that someone so rich and powerful would have little personal involvement in the acquisition of a comparatively small rural business. By the time she was escorted past the door that had once led to her father’s office and shown into the boardroom, she was very pale, stiff with shamed discomfiture and exceedingly nervous.

‘Miss Hamilton…’ Angelo murmured without intonation, watching the shock of recognition stamp the pure lines of her face. She could not hide her dismay and embarrassment and he marvelled at a transparency that was a rare trait in the world in which he lived. ‘I’m Angelo Riccardi.’

Astonished to be greeted by the male she had met in the village, Gwenna exclaimed in confusion,’ You’re…but you can’t be!’

Angelo elevated an ebony brow.

A timeless moment stretched while she stared, absorbing all over again the stunning set of his tawny gaze above the smooth dark planes of his high cheekbones, the masculine jut of his nose, the sensual fullness of his hard, handsome mouth. A curious little pulse of uneasy heat flickered in the pit of her stomach. Snatching in a ragged breath she made a mighty effort to regain her scattered wits.

‘Well, obviously you are…er, who you say you are,’ Gwenna conceded in an awkward rush. ‘My goodness, a coincidence I could’ve done without today.’

‘I still don’t know why you wanted to see me.’ Angelo was enjoying her frank inability to conceal how flustered she was. It seemed—and he considered himself a very good judge of character—that his enemy’s daughter lacked her parent’s innate guile and cunning.

‘To talk about my father.’

‘I’m surprised you think that I would be interested.’

Gwenna stiffened. ‘My father worked here for a long time—’

‘While he systematically stripped this business of its capital.’

Her lashes dipped over her troubled eyes. ‘I have no intention of trying to deny anything that he has done.’

‘Why else are you requesting this interview? But then, perhaps you expect the same special treatment that your father enjoyed when he worked here.’

Her uneasiness escalated. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘John Ridge treated your father more as a friend than an employee and he could never understand why improved productivity consistently failed to deliver more profits. That’s why he finally sold up.’ Angelo watched her lose colour and duck her head at that news. He was grimly amused by a sensitivity that he knew he would use against her. It was second nature to him to pick up on other people’s weak points and utilise them for his own benefit. ‘He’s gutted now that he understands how his trust was betrayed.’

‘Dad is very ashamed. I know that doesn’t change anything—’

‘You’re living in your own little world, Miss Hamilton. Right now my staff are trying to find a way for this business to survive without massive redundancies.’

Her tummy executed a sick flip of alarm. Already cringing at the reminder of how John Ridge had been deceived, she was even more dismayed to learn what a precarious position the company had been left in. Angelo Riccardi’s rebuke struck her as horribly well deserved; she had failed to consider the wider repercussions that might arise from her father’s embezzlement. In fact she had naively assumed that the future of Furnridge Leather would be more secure as a part of a much larger organisation like Rialto. The risk of redundancies appalled her since the furniture company was the main local employer.

‘I didn’t know…I genuinely had no idea matters were so serious.’

‘How could you not know? A large amount of money has been misappropriated.’ Angelo was discovering that the anger roused by the disclosure of her identity had gone to be replaced by a growing buzz of satisfaction. Why not? She was Hamilton’s daughter. He now had two people to play with, instead of only one, and as he was already discovering she was a very beautiful plaything with an entire repertoire of responses that he had not seen in a long time. ‘No business of this size could weather such a financial loss without shedding staff.’

A gleam of optimism lightened her anxious gaze and she lifted her head. ‘But that’s why I’m here…to talk about how that money could be repaid.’

‘Repaid?’ Angelo queried, his narrowed gaze skimming over her with renewed intensity. The upward tilt of her eyes and the sprinkling of freckles across her nose had an appeal he could not define. The trouser suit might be drab and un-flattering to her frame, but it was outshone by a radiant beauty that continually drew his attention back to her.

‘My father has property interests that could be sold and the proceeds put towards repayment.’ Eager to put that point across, Gwenna partially evaded his gaze as she became aware of the force of his scrutiny. Not for the first time she wondered why he made her feel so uncomfortable. Her throat was tight, her muscles clenched taut. Was it fear?

‘If any of those property interests were purchased with stolen funds and your father is found guilty in court, those assets could be seized and sold to provide compensation.’

That smooth assurance sliced through Gwenna’s hopes like a blade and she felt the full force of her own ignorance. ‘I wasn’t aware of that.’

His agile intellect was already engaged in wondering what favour she had intended to ask in return for the repayment of the stolen funds. In spite of what he had said to her, he was aware that the courts were often reluctant to seize and sell private assets, particularly where there was a wife involved. It would not be the first time that a con man had served his sentence only to emerge from prison and enjoy the ill-gotten gains of his crime. That was a galling prospect to Angelo, who was determined to see Donald Hamilton punished on every possible level. Stripping the offender of his worldly goods would add savour to that process.

‘However, bringing a case such as this takes time, and this business is almost out of time.’ Angelo offered up that piece of encouragement to draw her out again.

‘Dad has already admitted his guilt,’ Gwenna reminded him readily. ‘He would be happy to agree to the properties being put up for sale and to the proceeds being used to repay his debt—’

‘He’s a thief, not a debtor,’ Angelo cut in drily. ‘What is more, although I hate to rain on your parade, property can take a very long time to sell.’

Her teeth worried anxiously at her full lower lip. Although she too had thought of that angle there was no getting round that potential hiccup that she could see. ‘Yes, I appreciate that…’

Ebony eyes of extraordinary power sought and held hers in a grip as strong as forged steel. ‘Of course, if I was prepared to consider such an arrangement, a valuation could be done and the properties concerned could simply be signed over. That could be achieved very quickly.’

Ready to grasp at any prospect of agreement, Gwenna nodded eagerly at that suggestion. She snatched in a ragged breath, wildly aware of his gaze and the insidious unsettling pulse of awareness at the secret heart of her body. Her lovely face suddenly flaming at that acknowledgement, she tore her attention from him and walked over to the window. She could not credit that he could have such an effect on her. He was a stranger and alien in every way to her. How could he rouse the physical consciousness that she had suppressed and buried? She refused to believe that he could. It was a long time since she had decided that she would never give her body without her heart.

‘It would also lessen the risk of anyone suffering last-minute regrets,’ Angelo pointed out, gaze glinting with triumph at his success in finally raising a reaction from her. He had seen the flare of surprise in her eyes. Not quite the ice maiden after all, it seemed. ‘Obviously your objective is to free your father from the threat of prosecution.’

Not knowing whether to be relieved or threatened by the ease with which he had deduced that fact, Gwenna spun back to face him. She lifted her chin and knotted her hands together tightly as if she was bracing herself. ‘Yes.’

‘No can do, cara. It is my personal conviction that all wrongdoers should be punished by the full weight of the law.’

‘But if that money was replaced it would benefit this business and all the people who work here!’ Gwenna protested feverishly. ‘Don’t you care about that?’

‘My heart rarely bleeds, Miss Hamilton.’

Angelo watched her brush a fine strand of honey-blonde hair back from the peach soft curve of her cheek. She was exquisite, delectable, he acknowledged, his usually disciplined body reacting with painful immediacy to the sexual charge of her presence. She was trembling almost infinitesimally. He liked the idea that he might be responsible for that potent effect. He had an almost overpowering desire to see her long hair falling loose round her shoulders in a tumbling mass of waves. She made him think of a Victorian painting he had once seen of a naked woman on horseback—Lady Godiva. That whimsical reflection surprised him but that image gave him a distinctly erotic kick.

‘But in this particular case…’ she dared to prompt.

‘Business is all about the art of profit and the bottom line here is that there’s not enough in your offer to tempt me.’

Disappointment at his refusal flooded Gwenna. She had never felt so nervous or out of her depth. At her most happy when she was working outdoors, she had acquired a host of horticultural qualifications while still regarding herself as only a keen gardener. Now, for the first time, she was uneasily conscious of her lack of sophistication. She genuinely did not know how to appeal to such a man. He had the cold, hard glitter of a very expensive and elegant diamond and he showed no emotion. It was a combination that she found utterly intimidating.

‘What would it take to…er, tempt you?’

Angelo studied her with unnerving calm. ‘You.’

Gwenna blinked. ‘I’m sorry…I don’t follow.’

‘I want you.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Her Delft-blue eyes widened and she dragged in a ragged breath. She felt incredibly stupid because of course he could not mean what she had thought he might mean. True, he had asked her out, but it had been very casual, hadn’t it?

‘Are you always this slow on the uptake?’

‘Are you talking about…sex?’ Gwenna was furious that embarrassment made her mangle that last word into an almost incomprehensible mumble.

Dense black lashes lifted over his brilliant dark tawny eyes and he managed to look very bored. ‘What else?’

Gwenna surveyed him with as much unrestrained amazement as she would have shown a zebra that suddenly appeared out of nowhere to walk across the office. She had always had a problem seeing herself as a sexual being. The passes that came her way were usually pretty half-hearted because she was much better at being sympathetic and sensible than sexy. That a guy of such immense wealth and supposed sophistication should target her as if she were a provocative siren struck her as unbelievable.

‘Is this some kind of a wind-up?’ she asked tautly.

‘I don’t do wind-ups.’

Gwenna studied him, poised there so straight and tall in his sharply tailored black designer business suit. He was devastatingly handsome but she crushed that thought as soon as it entered her mind. ‘But are you really suggesting that if I sleep with you you might reconsider prosecuting my father?’

‘Yes.’ Angelo made that confirmation.

Gwenna was stunned by that unhesitating agreement. ‘But that’s morally wrong.’

‘We’re consenting adults and you have a choice.’

Gwenna flung her head high, furious that she was dying of embarrassment like a schoolgirl, while he was behaving as though nothing untoward was happening. ‘Do you get a thrill out of insulting me like this?’

‘One woman’s insult is another woman’s compliment.’ Angelo sent her a dark smile of challenge. ‘It’s not my ego talking, but fact, when I tell you that a score of women would kill to have the same opportunity.’

Gwenna, who rarely lost her temper, learned now that she could want to kill another human being. His insouciance, his sheer arrogance, his silken insolence, indeed the whole glossy patina of his rich and rarefied existence, which he wore like armour, made her teeth grit. Absolute hatred hurtled through her in an acrid flow. ‘Well, I’m not one of them! I have higher self-esteem.’

‘Which makes you infinitely more desirable.’

‘So, you’re one of those men who always wants most what he can’t have?’

Angelo held her outraged blue gaze, more intrigued than ever by her resistance and the anger that had unexpectedly cut through her tranquil surface. ‘I have never met with a “can’t have”,’ he told her truthfully.

‘You just have,’ Gwenna told him grittily and turned on her heel. ‘My body isn’t something I’m prepared to barter, Mr Riccardi.’

‘Then your father will have to pay the piper and go to prison,’ Angelo murmured and she stopped halfway to the door and turned back, her raw pain at that likelihood etched in her candid gaze.

Torn between stalking out in angry mortification and the sinking conviction that she could not afford such a demonstration of disdain, Gwenna hovered. The very idea of her father going to prison appalled her. He had already lost so much: his job, his reputation, his friends, his financial security. His marriage might well soon slip into that same category of loss. She knew and she accepted that he had done wrong. But what dominated her thoughts was the debt she had owed to her father since the day that he had opened the doors of his home to her after her mother’s sudden death.

When her mother, Isabel, had fallen pregnant during her long-term affair with Donald Hamilton, she’d expected her lover to leave his childless wife, Marisa. Instead Isabel had learnt that she had not been his only extra-marital interest. Heartbroken and bitter, Gwenna’s mother had become a less than enthusiastic single parent.

When Gwenna was eight years old, Isabel had died in a car crash. Donald, still married to his first wife, had come to his illegitimate daughter’s rescue at a time when Gwenna had had nobody else whom she could call her own. Even though he had been almost a stranger, her father had made her feel as if she truly mattered to him. Even when his long-suffering wife, Marisa, forced him to choose between his daughter and his marriage, he had refused to put Gwenna up for adoption. Not long afterwards, Marisa had demanded a divorce. The older man had never reminded Gwenna of the price he had had to pay for choosing to raise his daughter. But in spite of her father’s subsequent remarriage to Eva, Gwenna had always felt very guilty. And the passage of time and the arrival of maturity had not altered her belief that she would always be in her father’s debt for the loving sacrifice he had made on her behalf.

‘Before you leave, hear me out,’ Angelo drawled softly, playing on Gwenna’s hesitation with skill and cool.

Blinking, Gwenna focused on him again.

‘If sufficient assets are signed over to set against the empty coffers here at Furnridge Leather and you agree to be my mistress, I will withdraw the current charges against your father,’ Angelo spelt out.

A long shiver ran through her taut, slender body. He wanted a lot, he wanted everything. Mistress? What was that fancy term for? A one-night stand? Was conquest that important to him? Could he really want to have sex with her that much? The extent of her own sexual ignorance annoyed her.

‘What does being a mistress encompass?’ she pressed without looking at him.

‘Pleasing me…’ Angelo trailed out the word with exquisite enjoyment.

She gritted her teeth. ‘I don’t think I’d be very good at that.’

‘I’m willing to give lessons at no extra cost.’

Furious resentment burned like lava inside her. ‘I think you just can’t stand being turned down…’

‘I don’t think you’re going to turn me down twice.’

Gwenna sucked in a jerky breath. Unable even to imagine taking her clothes off in front of a man without cringing, she blanked out all thought of the nitty-gritty details of actual intimacy. She was aware that lots of people had sex without making a big issue of it. It would be physical, not emotional. There was no need for her to make a major fuss about something that really wasn’t that important, she told herself urgently. She was a pragmatist. She might not be into sex but presumably she could put up with it. ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned it’s senseless and crazy, but if my sleeping with you one night will help my family—’

‘One night won’t suffice.’

Gwenna was as flattened by that unexpected comeback as if a giant rock had been dropped on her. He wanted more than one night? The silence pulsed. Newly discovered defiance made her tilt her chin. She collided with brilliant dark eyes enhanced by spiky black lashes. If eyes were truly the windows of the soul, she thought helplessly, he lacked one. ‘Only hell has no time limit,’ she told him prosaically.

Disconcerted by that comment, Angelo studied her and then flung back his dark head and laughed with grim appreciation. ‘I like your sense of humour, cara.’

‘But I wasn’t trying to be funny. I need to know how long you envisage me filling such a strange role in your life.’

Angelo lifted a broad shoulder in a fluid shrug. But in a lightning-fast change of mood unfamiliar to him he was discovering that he had gone from amusement to an emotion very much akin to anger. He was a proud man and her parade of reluctance, which he refused to believe in, was fast becoming more insulting than intriguing. Long before they parted, she would sing a different tune, he swore inwardly. She would love him as his mother had once fruitlessly loved her con artist of a father.

‘I’ll want you for as long as you provide me with entertainment.’

‘You find it entertaining when a woman hates you?’ Gwenna asked fiercely.

Liquid gold flared in Angelo’s intense gaze and it was as if all the oxygen burned up in the atmosphere between them. ‘I promise you that hatred won’t be what you feel.’

Gwenna compressed her generous mouth and recalled that she was supposed to feel honoured by his interest, like some maidservant of old catching the eye of the lord of the manor. Loathing roared through her to such an extent that she felt dizzy. But then reality penetrated and she thought of her father and of how much she loved him. Angelo Riccardi was giving her the chance and the power to protect her father from prosecution and gaol. How could she say no? How many years of freedom would her father lose if she said no? How would he endure years of being shut away from the world? He would not be the same man when he emerged from such an ordeal, whereas if she kept him out of prison he would find it much easier to embark on a fresh start. What right did she have to deny him that chance of redemption?

‘I want your answer now,’ Angelo told her flatly.

‘Yes…you’ve made me an offer I can’t refuse,’ Gwenna breathed shakily.

Angelo extended his hand.

‘But let’s not pretend that it’s a civilised offer,’ Gwenna heard herself add as she took a step back from him.

Angelo took a step forward and before she had the slightest idea of his intention he framed her cheek with long brown fingers and brought his beautiful insolent mouth down in a mocking taunt on hers. Shock held her paralysed for the first ten seconds and then a wild surge of heat flamed up between her thighs, stretching every feminine muscle wickedly taut. It was like flame in freezing temperatures, shocking and sudden and shatteringly sweet. He lifted his arrogant dark head again, his scorching dark golden gaze raking in an assessing arc over her dazed expression.

‘Being civilised can be overrated, cara. My lawyers will be in touch. If everything is in order, I’ll contact you next week.’

CHAPTER THREE

DONALD HAMILTON slowly shook his distinguished head. ‘I’ll have nothing left, not even my independence.’

‘The valuations aren’t what you hoped? Even for the city apartment?’ Gwenna questioned anxiously.

‘I would say that the figures are anything but generous.’

Gwenna frowned. ‘Of course property prices have fallen in some areas. How did the Massey garden and nursery fare in the valuation stakes?’

‘The estate is listed and protected by law,’ Donald reminded her. ‘That keeps its value low because there are too many rules preventing more profitable types of development. The nursery is a small enterprise. You’ve worked wonders there but…’

‘It’s hardly big business,’ Gwenna filled in heavily.

‘Even so, if selling up protects me from having to make a court appearance, how can I possibly complain?’ her father asked her in a more upbeat tone. ‘As for what you told me about you and the owner of Rialto, that’s made all this even more amazing.’

Amazing? It seemed an odd choice of word. Gwenna coloured, her lashes concealing her bemused eyes. She was still wondering if the older man had quite grasped what she had delicately endeavoured to tell him with regard to her future association with Angelo Riccardi. In an effort to conceal her confusion, she bent down to pet Piglet, who was slumped at her feet.

‘You’re a beautiful woman and all grown up now.’ Donald Hamilton treated his daughter to a distinctly misty-eyed appraisal. ‘I mustn’t forget that. I’m not at all surprised that a man of Angelo Riccardi’s calibre should notice you and go for you in a big way.’

‘Well…he did notice me,’ his daughter muttered half under her breath, reckoning that her father could not possibly have registered the sort of liaison that she was being offered. No doubt that was a mercy, for she had worried about him kicking up a fuss even though she had packaged the unlovely truth with the pretence that she had been similarly impressed by Angelo Riccardi.

‘Perhaps you could have a little word with him about the valuations,’ the older man murmured casually. ‘Not right now, necessarily, but possibly in a week or two.’

Having tensed, Gwenna slowly lifted her head. ‘Have a word with him?’

‘You can’t be that naïve,’ Donald Hamilton said with a chuckle. ‘Obviously you’ve got influence with the man in the seat of power.’

‘I don’t think you can say that—’

‘This is not the time for false modesty,’ her father told her a touch irritably. ‘Choose your moment to speak to him about how unhappy you are over the treatment of your family. My word, do I have to paint pictures for you? Have you any idea what my life is going to be like when I don’t have a penny to call my own? When I’m forced to live off your stepmother like some ghastly ageing gigolo?’ But Gwenna was both taken aback and dismayed by his assumption that she would be able to persuade Angelo Riccardi to offer the older man a better price for his properties. She was very pale. ‘Look, I’m sorry…I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. All I’ve been thinking about is keeping you out of prison.’

Donald Hamilton winced as though she had been guilty of a gross lack of tact. ‘I think that risk has been safely laid to rest now and life does go on,’ he declared. ‘It is going to be very difficult for me to find another job.’

‘Yes, I suppose it will be. But how are you expecting me to help out by speaking to Angelo Riccardi?’ Gwenna asked apprehensively.

Her father grimaced. ‘You can be very naïve, Gwenna. For as long as you have Riccardi’s interest the world will be your oyster. Ideally I would like my job back at Furnridge Leather.’

Gwenna was staggered by that announcement. ‘Your old job?’

‘Yes.’ Impervious to her incredulity, Donald Hamilton added, ‘That would silence the scandalmongers. And help me get back on my feet again.’

Gwenna swallowed hard. ‘I honestly don’t think that I could do anything to help you to get your old job back.’

‘Well, if not it, something of equivalent status elsewhere. Why so shocked?’ he queried with dissatisfaction. ‘It would be no big deal to Riccardi to do one little favour for you.’

For once, Gwenna found it a relief to be joined by Eva and her stepsisters. She did not know how to tell her father that she did not have the influence he imagined, but she did feel that his expectations were unrealistic. At the same time, she strove to make allowances for his state of mind. He was under enormous pressure and the troubled state of his relationship with his wife was not helping.

‘Nice to see that you’re still running round in your dreary old Barbour and jeans like Little Miss Ordinary.’ Penelope treated Gwenna to a sour appraisal. ‘When does Angelo Riccardi wave his magic wand and turn you into a sex kitten? Or does mud turn him on?’

Gwenna had no wish to consider what might turn Angelo Riccardi on. Ever since that startling kiss, she had blanked him out of her mind. The discovery that he could dredge such a physical response from her had been deeply unwelcome. Indeed she was mortified to her core to appreciate that she was not impervious to his sexual charge. But, equally, forewarned was forearmed, and she had no plans to gratify his ego in that manner again.

‘You lucky, lucky cow,’ Wanda groaned with unhidden envy. ‘When I think of the effort I make to look beautiful, it’s depressing that you can go out looking like a dog’s dinner and still pull a billionaire.’

‘It won’t last five minutes,’ her stepmother, Eva, forecast with a dismissive but speaking distaste that raised goose bumps of chagrin below Gwenna’s skin. ‘These things never do.’

‘I’d better go. I’ve got orders to take to the post office,’ Gwenna muttered, keen to make her escape from the trio of cold, critical gazes fixed to her. Her stepmother’s contempt bit deepest of all.

‘Don’t forget what I’m going through here,’ her father urged, having taken the unusual step of accompanying his daughter to the door.

‘Of course, I won’t.’ Gwenna was touched by the affectionate hug he gave her.

‘See if you can work out something on my behalf with Riccardi.’

Gwenna drove slowly back to the nursery in the van. There was nothing more that she could do for her father at present, she thought unhappily. He was going to have to deal with the fact that his life was never going to be the same again, but that would take time. Her brow was pounding out her tension. Reasoning was a challenge when she felt as though the shock of recent events had set up a barrier between her and her wits. She was still struggling to accept that, in the space of ten days, her whole life had fallen down round her like a house of cards and with it the future that she had taken for granted. The village where she had lived from birth would no longer be her home. She would be barred from the gardens where she had grown up and happily worked whenever she had a moment free. The business she had laboured so hard to build would pass on to a stranger and might not even survive. After all, the profit margins at the nursery were low and, with Joyce on maternity leave, she was working alone.

Her mobile phone rang just as she finished packing the orders from the mail-order catalogue in the rear storeroom. It was Toby. Smiling with pleasure, she relaxed and went into the shop to chat and savour every piece of his news. He told her that he was in Germany. A landscape architect, Toby James had already made his name in design and he often accepted commissions abroad. Gwenna had first met him at college and saw a lot less of him than she would have liked.

‘A mate of a mate saw the story about your father in the paper and passed it on,’ Toby volunteered. ‘You must be really torn up about this. Why didn’t you tell me about it yourself?’

Piglet had started barking in the storeroom and she called out to him to hush. ‘There was no point spreading the bad news.’

‘How often have I cried on your shoulder?’ he censured.

‘Only once,’ she sighed, recalling that night with pained regret. ‘The nursery and the gardens are being sold.’

‘That is a total disaster…I can’t believe it!’

Gwenna pictured Toby raking an impatient hand through his brown hair, his green eyes glinting with concern and disappointment on her behalf. He was very attractive and tremendous fun. They had so much in common and she even got on like a house on fire with his family. It had taken a long time for her to register that their close friendship was destined to go no further because, although few people appreciated the fact, Toby was gay. By the time she’d found out she had been head over heels in love with him and had yet to meet the man who could compete with Toby’s hold on her affections, although goodness knew she had tried.

While Gwenna was enjoying her conversation with Toby, Angelo was descending from his limo that had purred to a halt outside. He surveyed his surroundings with huge disdain. The nursery as such was composed of ramshackle sheds and an ancient greenhouse. He strolled towards the open door of the shop and just as he began to frown at the strong perfume in the air he saw Gwenna. Endless long slim legs clad in slim-fit jeans, blonde hair in a pony-tail, she was leaning back against the counter, a glorious smile lighting up her lovely face. She was chattering, unaware of his presence. Instantly he knew that he would not be satisfied until she smiled at him like that.

‘It feels like a hundred years ago since I saw you…I miss you.’

Stilling in the doorway, Angelo began to listen. He was fifteen feet from her and she still hadn’t noticed him. That had never happened to him before. The average woman went on hyper-alert when he entered the building, never mind the same room. She was locked onto that phone as if it were her lover. Or, as if she were talking to her lover, eyes shining, voice husky, giggly, her entire manner in feminine flirt mode. His eyes turned to chips of black ice.

‘Things are kind of up in the air right now,’ Gwenna confided, having told Toby only what she deemed necessary for him to know, which was not a lot. ‘We’ll catch up when you get back.’

Gwenna did not know what it was that made her look up and when she did she jerked and almost dropped the phone. Shock gripped her vocal cords and her lungs. Angelo Riccardi was standing in the doorway, a long black cashmere overcoat hanging loose over his dark pinstripe suit, strikingly elegant, even more strikingly handsome.

‘Toby…I have to go…someone’s come into the shop,’ Gwenna announced in a clumsy staccato rush of unease, eyes wide and defensive. Her smile had fallen off her lips as if she had been slapped.

Angelo strolled in. ‘Who’s Toby?’ he enquired lazily.

‘A friend.’ Gwenna crammed the phone back in her pocket. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Are you going to ask me that in bed?’ Angelo murmured. ‘I’m not a customer.’

Hot pink washed her cheeks and only slowly receded. Her bright blue eyes touched on his and fled again, her hands clenching because he’d had the cruelty to mention what she had steadfastly refused to think about. She applied her tried-and-tested least-said-soonest-mended formula to her thoughts. As a young child she had learned the futility of excessive anticipation and worry when she was powerless to alter things. Now a tiny pulse beat out her extreme tension in the blue-veined hollow beneath her collar-bone. Even without looking at him, she felt the high-octane hum of energy that laced the atmosphere around him. It put her entire body into a crazy state of anticipation: her muscles were rigid, her breathing audible and her breasts felt heavy, her nipples tingling.

‘I’d like you to show me around the estate,’ Angelo imparted.

‘There’s not much of an estate left.’

‘Whatever. I need fresh air. I can hardly breathe for the perfume in here.’ Before he stepped outside, Angelo directed a cutting glance in the direction of the headily scented bowls of rosebuds and other mixtures set out by the counter.

‘I make pot-pourri. It’s a big seller. My customers come from miles away to buy from me,’ Gwenna told him.

Angelo said nothing. With difficulty she silenced the self-protective words on her tongue. His uninterest was blatant but she reminded herself that she owed it to the Massey Garden committee to check out his intentions in advance of the takeover. She let Piglet out of the storeroom. The little dog headed for Angelo, hovered in unsuccessful hope of an acknowledgement, and then raced out in a delighted fury of barking to investigate the strangers outside. The parking area out front was, at first glance, packed with cars and men.

‘Who are all these people?’ Gwenna frowned.

‘Security.’

Gwenna was tempted to make a tart comment, relating to his undoubted need to take such precautions. His brilliant tawny scrutiny met hers. ‘Much better not,’he said softly. ‘It’s never a good idea to put me in a bad mood.’

Momentarily she shut her eyes, disconcerted by the speed with which he had read her and almost equally shaken by her ongoing need to fight with him. On the other hand the idea of giving way to the chill of fear that he evoked scared her even more. ‘Only a tiny part of the gardens has been restored. I use part of the old kitchen garden to display the plants I grow in their natural habitat—’

‘I wouldn’t have said that this was your natural habitat.’

‘Well, then, you’d be wrong—’

‘I’m very rarely wrong about anything.’

Gwenna hung onto her temper with difficulty. He had come to a halt and he cast a long dark shadow.

In silence, Angelo reached for her hand and she had to combat a strong urge to whip it out of reach. Long brown fingers encircled her wrist with complete cool and exposed the roughened skin on her palms and the ragged state of her nails. ‘When I realised that you ran the nursery, I didn’t appreciate that that entailed working the ground like a navvy.’

Off-balanced by that physical contact, Gwenna breathed unevenly. ‘That’s what I enjoy the most.’

‘You’ve led a restricted life.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You’re very stubborn.’ Stunning dark eyes linked with hers and her chest went tight round the quickened pound of her heartbeat, until she was aware of nothing but him. He carried her fingers to his handsome mouth and pressed his lips softly to them in an elegant gesture that had immense style and assurance. ‘I like it. In a world of yes-women, you shine like a star, gioia.’

Shivering, she jerked her hand back but she could still feel the touch of his lips on her skin like a fiery brand of intent. A hard, tight knot of heat sat low in her tummy. Nothing fazed him. His ruthlessness was like a steel wall of chain-mail. That she knew it and was still capable of responding to him with excitement shamed her to the core. Excitement? He’d kissed her hand and the sizzle in the air blew her mind. What did that say about her? That she had spent too long dreaming about a man she could never have? She forced a breath into her straining lungs and started talking fast about the garden and the restoration plans and funds that were already in place.

Angelo listened without interest or comment. He had no intention of agreeing commitment to a project that on the face of it offered no useful advantage or prospect of profit. He wasn’t into green spaces. He had never had the time or patience to stand still and smell the roses or admire a view. Her love and enthusiasm for the hilly overgrown acres surrounding them were patent. But his mind was occupied with less innocent pleasures. He was wondering how she could look so marvellous when she was dressed like a tramp. He was keen to see her all packaged and groomed to her feminine best for his benefit. He was recalling the faint evocative perfume he had smelled on her skin, suspecting that it might possibly be the unspoilt aroma of simple soap. He was constantly noticing and being irritated by the skittish way she backed off on her long coltish legs every time he got within two feet of her.

‘Stop that.’

‘Stop what?’ she exclaimed.

Angelo closed a restraining hand over hers and anchored her to his side.

‘Mr Riccardi…’

And that formal mode of address filled him with such ferocious dissatisfaction that he hauled her to him and kissed her luscious pink lips with all the fierce desire that he usually kept in iron-clad restraint.

A muffled gasp of fright escaped her before the descent of his hard, hungry mouth silenced her. He stole her words, her breath, her ability to think and her legs threatened to buckle under her with the shock of it. The shattering swell of excitement snatched her up into a maelstrom. The sensual thrust of his tongue into the damp interior of her mouth set her body alight with reckless response. He backed her up against the old stone wall behind her. Firm hands cupped her denim-clad buttocks, lifting her off her feet into stirring contact with his erection. Seductive sensation made her tingle all over. His passion was raw and thrilling and terrifyingly new to her.

Suddenly, Angelo lifted his dark head and vented what sounded like an Italian expletive. ‘Your dog’s bitten me…’

Momentarily speechless, Gwenna blinked and focused with difficulty on the sight of Piglet growling like mad and hauling frantically at the hem of Angelo’s immaculate trousers. ‘Oh, my word, he really doesn’t like you…’ Crouching down, trembling all over like a wobbly jelly inside and out, she was grateful for the excuse to lift the little dog up in her arms.

‘Inferno! Is that it? No, “Are you hurt? Bleeding? In need of a tetanus shot?”’ Angelo Riccardi drawled with icy sarcasm.

‘I’m really sorry…are you okay?’

‘I don’t think I’ll bleed to death. And the shots are up to date,’ Angelo said very drily, unable to avoid noticing how the dog was being gently petted and soothed. He could have sworn there was a triumphant smirk in those little round doggy eyes. The fever in his blood had made him act without thinking and that awareness angered him. What was it about her? He looked forward to the aftermath of total conquest when he would no longer want her.

Legs feeling shaky, Gwenna thanked heaven for her pet’s opportune intervention and moved away. Putting Piglet back onto his four stubby legs, Gwenna straightened with reluctance. She was seriously ashamed of her own behaviour and not enough of a hypocrite to tell off her pet. Not when she was convinced that Piglet had saved her from losing her virginity. She did not believe that Angelo Riccardi would have called a decent halt. He did what he liked when he liked. He had hauled her into his arms like a Viking on the rampage. He was violently oversexed. Those daunting truths had sunk in on her. Her mouth felt hot and swollen and she was afraid to look at him. ‘The gardens are a wasteland beyond the wall. There’s really not anything more to show you.’

‘The ancestral mansion?’

A few minutes later she came to a halt a hundred yards from the large shell of the Regency house where her mother had been born. Its ruinous state had embittered Isabel Massey, who had never got over the conviction that fate had dealt her a very poor hand. In comparison, Gwenna regarded that part of her family’s history with rueful acceptance, for the truth was that her Massey ancestors had been hopeless social climbers who had never been able to afford to maintain the white elephant they had built.

‘What’s the inside like?’

‘A wreck. It had to be boarded up years ago for safety.’

‘This is only a flying visit,’ Angelo murmured on the walk back to the nursery. ‘I should mention that your father has been called to a meeting this afternoon.’

Gwenna tensed. ‘Am I allowed to ask what the meeting is about?’

‘The fact that he hasn’t given a truthful account of his property holdings.’

Her cheeks flamed, surprise and anger assailing her. ‘That’s an out-and-out lie!’

Angelo regarded her with impassive cool. ‘I don’t like people who waste my time.’

‘But Dad hasn’t been wasting your time and he hasn’t lied to you either!’ Her china-blue eyes sparking, Gwenna curled her hands into protective fists by her side. ‘You can’t assume he’s deceived you just because he made the mistake of helping himself to cash at Furnridge Leather.’

‘I’m not. Your father was told that he had to make a full disclosure of his assets.’

‘And he has done so.’

‘While carefully omitting details of the other London apartment he owns.’

‘He only has one, for goodness’ sake!’

‘He’s fortunate to own a second, as there is still a shortfall in the amount he has to repay.’

Gwenna sucked in a steadying breath. ‘You’ve got it wrong.’

‘I’m afraid not. My information about the second town property is from an impeccable source.’ Angelo watched the fraught look of sudden uncertainty and dismay tauten her fine bone structure. She could not hide her sorrow. He could have told her that her loyalty and affection were wasted on so undeserving a cause. Donald Hamilton had an unbroken record of lying, cheating and robbing those foolish enough to place their trust in him.

Worrying at her lower lip, Gwenna turned her head away because her eyes were stinging with tears. Like it or not, there was something horribly convincing about Angelo’s supreme confidence. ‘If you’re right, I really don’t know what to say.’

‘Our deal will still stand. Your father will sign over the agreed assets and we will draw a line below this matter.’

Gwenna swallowed convulsively. ‘In the circumstances that’s very generous of you.’

Angelo smiled. His smile would have chilled an iceberg. Events were moving exactly to plan. He was well aware that Donald Hamilton had committed at least one other offence, which would eventually surface. When it did, a court case and a custodial sentence would be a virtual certainty. By the time Angelo had finished, his quarry would have lost everything he valued.

‘My father is not a bad man, just a foolish one. I don’t know what’s got into him…maybe it’s some kind of mid-life crisis,’ Gwenna reasoned in desperation. ‘I honestly can’t explain why he’s done what he’s done, or why he seems to be acting like his own worst enemy right now. But I can tell you that he’s been an absolutely marvellous father to me. He’s done so much work in the community as well.’

Angelo found himself focusing on the sincere glow of conviction in her damp eyes. She was like a distress beacon radiating emotion. She was not putting on a show for his benefit. He was fascinated by the feelings she could not hide. His bed partners always had a hard glossy shell that matched his renowned self-containment. Full of ideals and optimism as she was, she was ridiculously vulnerable. In a few months’ time, possibly even sooner, she would be sadder and wiser. A faint stab of regret assailed him that that should be the case. Perturbed by that unwelcome jab of seeming sensitivity, he crushed it dead.

‘I’ve organised accommodation for you.’ Angelo turned to a subject of greater interest to him.

Gwenna froze, silky brown lashes screening her gaze to conceal her reaction to the sudden impact of that announcement. ‘What sort of accommodation and where?’

‘A penthouse in London…I like lofty spaces.’

‘I don’t…is there a garden? Piglet will need a garden,’ Gwenna told him tightly.

‘Piglet?’ Angelo queried.

‘My dog.’

‘I’ll pick up the bill for his stay in a pet hotel,’ Angelo imparted in a dry tone of dismissal.

‘No. He has to stay with me. He pines and refuses to eat when I’m not around,’ Gwenna responded with unhidden anxiety. ‘I know it might sound silly to someone who’s not sentimental about pets…but he’s a very emotional dog.’

Angelo settled his black gaze on the ugly little dog messily digging up the border behind her back. The dog with a foolish owner twisted round its short but crooked tail. No way was he prepared to share house-room even briefly with her pet. ‘He goes to the hotel. My staff will choose the very best available.’

‘But if I’m not there he won’t eat—’

‘Nonsense.’

‘It’s not nonsense—’

‘I’m not into animals indoors,’ Angelo pronounced with finality.

Gwenna breathed in very deep and reminded herself that it was two years since Piglet had starved himself to skin and bone while she was on holiday. The following year, Toby had helped her to get the little dog a pet passport so that he could travel with his mistress. But now it was very much to be hoped that he had got over such excessive reliance on her for his sense of security. She could feel her eyes prickling at the prospect of life without Piglet and would have died sooner than betray her weakness. Angelo Riccardi would be fed up with her within the space of a week, she told herself comfortingly. She would bore him to death.

‘Do I have any say about anything?’ she enquired flatly.

Angelo thought hard about that. If he had had a chain attached to her ankle, he would have been set on removing links to restrict her freedom even more. It was an unfamiliar attitude to a male accustomed to easy conquest and it annoyed him. ‘Your accommodation?’

Gwenna went for that assurance at speed because she saw no reason why she should be anything other than difficult. After all, she was in no hurry to fulfil the agreement he had enforced. ‘I want to live somewhere with a garden,’ she told him with complete truth. ‘I’ll go mad if I’m in the city and shut in between four walls.’

‘There’s a pool with a roof that rolls back.’

‘I want a garden…even a condemned man gets one last request.’

‘You’re not facing a firing squad.’ Angelo treated her to a fulminating appraisal. A garden? What the hell did she want with a garden? That was not a reasonable request. That would take more time to organise and waiting for her was killing him by inches. Ever since he had first seen her, a parade of disturbingly erotic images had kept up a constant assault on his concentration. He was tired of that mental invasion and unlikely ever to be a convert to the art of patience.

‘How soon will you come to me?’ Angelo prompted levelly.

Unnerved by that bold question, Gwenna made the mistake of looking directly at him. She clashed with stunning tawny eyes hot with hunger and her face flamed at what he let her see there. Her entire skin surface prickled and tightened over her bones.

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.’ A rougher edge had entered his dark-timbred drawl.

‘When I have to…when I have no choice.’

‘The answer of a pure and virtuous virgin facing ravishment about a century ago.’ His cynical smile of insolent amusement made the blood burn hotter than ever in her cheeks. ‘Take a reality check. You’re not in that category.’

‘You think you know everything, don’t you?’ Furious resentment raced through Gwenna. ‘But you don’t. For what it’s worth, I am in that category!’

His hard gaze narrowed, black spiky lashes lowering to intensify the black glitter of his potent scrutiny. He studied her in the charged silence and she dragged her attention from him, ferocious embarrassment and anger engulfing her.

‘Don’t you dare make any snide comments,’ she warned him fiercely.

Angelo was travelling from stunned surprise over her claim to a powerful surge of satisfaction. Was this the source of her unusually strong attraction for him? Had he somehow sensed the subtle distinction between her and the other women he had known? She was different, the exact opposite of his usual sexually adept partners. A virgin. Asking her to go back to London with him for a couple of hours to fill in the time before his flight to New York now struck him as very inappropriate, even tacky. For a split second the entire scenario felt tacky, but when he looked at her he blocked out that thought before it could get a toehold. He had never felt such an urgent desire for a woman and now that he understood that the source of her reluctance was inexperience the need to possess her had an even sharper edge. She was not indifferent or impervious to him. She was just shy, and he was willing to admit that he wasn’t used to shy women.

The silence had settled like a blanket. His lack of comment suddenly infuriated her and made her feel foolish. She so wished that she had not blurted out one of her biggest secrets. ‘Look, I have loads of work to do,’ she muttered curtly. ‘When do you expect me to come to London?’

‘Next week. You’ll be informed of the arrangements.’ Angelo withdrew a card from his pocket. ‘Should you wish to talk to me…here’s my private number. You’ll be able to reach me no matter where I am.’

Gwenna accepted the card, unable to imagine why she would ever wish to voluntarily seek contact with him. Her troubled thoughts were fixed to a much more important issue and, finally, she took her courage into both hands and just asked outright, ‘What are you planning to do with this place?’

Angelo shrugged, his expression noncommittal.

His indifference to the future of the historic gardens pierced Gwenna to the heart and sank even her lowliest expectations to rock-bottom. His lack of interest was monumental and unapologetic. He didn’t do polite pretences. She reckoned that he was probably the last man alive likely to shell out cash on a venture that would struggle to survive outside the main tourist season.

Before he climbed into the limo, Angelo glanced back in her direction. She didn’t return the compliment. Scooping up the muddy little dog, which was belligerently intent on barking at the nearest car, she vanished back into the shop at speed. His aggressive jaw line clenched.

CHAPTER FOUR

FOUR days later, Gwenna was in London. The morning after her arrival, she was met at her hotel by an elegant brunette in her thirties. A senior coordinator in Angelo Riccardi’s employ, it had been Delphine Harper who liaised with Gwenna on the phone and orchestrated all the arrangements to be made on her behalf.

‘It’s my job to ensure that you enjoy a smooth transition to city life. You have a full programme of appointments today,’ Delphine trilled with a polished smile that displayed her perfect white teeth to advantage. ‘First on the agenda, I’ve organised a viewing of the property Mr Riccardi has selected for you.’

A smooth transition? Gwenna could have wept at that useful little cover-all phrase that took no account of the drastic upheaval in her once tranquil daily existence. Only now that her contentment had been wrenched from her did she appreciate just how happy she had been pottering about with plants. The same day that Angelo had visited, her father had signed over all the property he owned. Within twenty-four hours a Rialto employee had arrived to take charge of the plant nursery. The speed of that takeover had stunned Gwenna and she’d found it very hard to hand over control of the business and the gardens she loved. She’d also had to vacate her flat above the shop in a hurry; the new manager needed the accommodation and nobody had appreciated until it was too late that she actually lived there. That had forced her to move temporarily to the Old Rectory, where everyone but her father made her feel like an unwelcome interloper.

Pressed by his daughter’s reference to his owning a second apartment in London, Donald Hamilton had released a heavy sigh. ‘I had very good reasons for keeping that a secret. Eva would have wanted me to sell it to buy a larger family place and I wanted to keep it for our retirement. My motives weren’t entirely selfish either. The current tenant is an elderly lady with a lease due for renewal. I was worried that the change of ownership would force her out.’

‘But you stayed silent about it when you had promised to disclose your assets. That must’ve made a poor impression on the Rialto legal team,’ Gwenna pointed out uncomfortably.

‘If I don’t look to my own interests, who else will?’ her father countered without remorse. ‘Of course, I’m hoping that when you get the chance, you’ll do the best you can to ease our problems here.’

Recalling that conversation, Gwenna felt her stress level merely increase. Her father’s airy lack of concern about his dishonesty had unnerved her. When he’d stolen from Furnridge, it had not just been a case of a man with financial worries succumbing to a moment’s temptation. His problems went deeper than that. There was a weakness in her father’s character, she acknowledged unhappily. That could explain the womanising streak that had caused such havoc when he was a younger man and perhaps she had been too quick to forgive and forget his history.

‘We’ve arrived.’ Delphine’s bright tones cut through Gwenna’s anxious reflections and shot her back to the present.

Emerging from the car, Gwenna stared in astonishment at the substantial property in front of her.

Delphine shook out keys with a pronounced air of importance and unlocked the imposing front door. ‘This has to be one of the best addresses in London.’

Gwenna froze in the marble hall, gazing round in wonderment at the pillars and the elaborate staircase. Fifty questions were on the tip of her tongue. But she was too embarrassed to direct them at her companion, lest she confirm whatever mortifying suspicions the brunette already had about Gwenna’s precise relationship with her fabulously wealthy employer.

‘It is a very large property, and don’t be misled by its age. The house enjoys air-conditioning, touch-pad electronic controls, an integrated sound system and amazing security features,’ Delphine declared.

The official tour began and stretched from a basement swimming pool, gym and wine cellar right up through the floors above and a bewildering parade of vast empty rooms and high-tech bathrooms.

Delphine started to look a shade anxious at Gwenna’s continuing silence. ‘The mews house at the rear has staff accommodation and garaging. Now let me show you the garden, which I believe is of special interest to you. It’s large and sheltered and south-facing.’

‘Please excuse me for a few minutes…er, I need to call your boss.’ Gwenna squeezed the words from her dry mouth and retreated into one of the lower rooms to fumble through her bag until she located the card Angelo had given her. As she punched out the number on her mobile she blinked and shook her head several times.

The minute she heard his voice she burst into speech. ‘It’s Gwenna. I’m sorry to disturb you.’

Angelo almost smiled and gave his PA a wave of dismissal. ‘Not at all, gioia mia.’

‘It’s just you said you’d sort out accommodation, and I’m being shown this house and I don’t understand. It’s a stonking great enormous mansion with eight bedrooms!’

Angelo spun round in his office chair to enjoy a view of the Manhattan skyline. ‘All the properties that I use must enjoy three essentials—the maximum space, privacy and security available.’

‘Yes, but a house that must be worth millions is utterly insane in these circumstances unless…er…You’re not planning on moving in with me, are you?’ Gwenna gasped in an appalled tone. That was the sole explanation for such extravagant expenditure that made sense to her.

Silence hummed at the other end of the line. Angelo was gritting his even white teeth. She might have the grace of a gazelle but she also had the diplomacy of a rampaging elephant. Didn’t she know anything about him at all? Had not even the mildest curiosity stirred her into surfing the internet or checking out the gossip pages? He didn’t do commitment or live-in arrangements.

‘Naturally, I’m not planning to move in,’ he murmured with deflating cool. ‘I’m sorry if that’s a disappointment.’

‘Oh, my goodness, no!’ Gwenna asserted at a much more cheerful pitch, quite impervious to the presence of the snub she was delivering. ‘We wouldn’t suit each other at all. But that doesn’t explain the house when we won’t last five minutes together. All this trouble and expense is so unnecessary.’

Angelo’s eyes flashed tawny-gold. ‘Perhaps you would like me to take you to some cheap hotel that hires out rooms by the hour!’

Gwenna bit down on her ready tongue. She was shocked to realise that she was trembling. Honesty obviously didn’t pay with him, she reflected uneasily. She had made him angry and she knew that wasn’t a good idea. She dared not say what she had almost said for fear of provoking him even more. But, in her opinion, the fancy trappings of a house in Chelsea would not alter the nature of the sexual transaction he had offered her and if a cheap hotel got the wretched business over with quickly she would have been the last to complain. False pride was not one of her problems.

‘If it is my wish, you will live in a stonking great mansion even if it is only for five minutes. Is that understood?’ Angelo enquired in a chilling tone of finality.

‘Yes,’ she conceded in a voice wiped clean of any expression or life.

‘I have work to do. I’ll see you when I get back to London.’ Angelo set down the phone. He was furious with her. He had expected her to be overjoyed with the house. It had an award-winning garden. He had personally selected it from his property holdings. When had he ever made that much effort for a woman?

Gwenna rejoined her guide and walked out into the beautiful garden, an oasis of peace and sunlight right in the centre of a huge city. Her eyes were stinging. She was all shaken up by that conversation with Angelo. She knew that she would not make the mistake of phoning him again. As far as he was concerned she had no rights and no opinions worth hearing that did not match his own. She would not make the mistake of forgetting that in the future.

Her next port of call with Delphine was the luxury pet hotel where a booking had already been made for Piglet’s benefit. The underfloor heating, miniature bed, webcam and the promise of a daily photo and bulletin about her pet made little impression on Gwenna. She explained that she would only be making occasional use of the facilities. Piglet would be exiled only when Angelo was around and, going by Delphine’s encouraging comments on her employer’s schedule, Angelo was much too busy to be around that often.

One week later, her eyes bright with extreme tension, Gwenna contemplated her imminent engagement at three with Angelo and its probable conclusion. A late lunch and then? Blocking out that intimidating thought-train, she studied her reflection in the vast hall mirror.

Her shift dress was white piped with black, tailored to a perfect fit and strikingly elegant. It had a famous designer label, just like all the other garments picked by the fashion consultant who had had the task of kitting Gwenna out with a fabulous new wardrobe. In truth, Gwenna barely recognised herself after her dutiful morning visit to a beauty salon. Her honey-blonde mane of waves had been straightened into a sleek glossy fall, her face expertly made up and her eyebrows ruthlessly waxed into perfect curves. She thought she bore a striking resemblance to a doll with big blue eyes and an artificially full mouth.

She had always happily gone for the natural look, choosing comfort and practicality over style. Her use of cosmetics had encompassed a touch of mascara and lipstick on special occasions. But Angelo had plunged her into the world of fashion and beauty in which her looks were all that mattered—and she was discovering that that was her equivalent of hell. She found it very hard to walk in flimsy high heels. She absolutely loathed the fake fingernails and felt hugely uncomfortable wearing white because she was convinced that she would brush against something and soil it. Even so, not a word of complaint had passed her raspberry-tinted lips; she had learned her lesson during that single voluntary phone call to Angelo Riccardi. He wasn’t interested in her personal preferences or her physical comfort. All the effort and expense that was being expended on her immaculate grooming was essentially for his benefit.

‘The car’s here.’ The housekeeper opened the front door and ushered Gwenna out. It was only forty-eight hours since she had moved into the house and she still felt very much like a guest staying in a top-flight hotel. Her new home had been furnished, fully equipped and staffed without any input from her.

Gwenna slid into the waiting limo. The parlous state of her nerves offended her pride. But how did Angelo Riccardi expect her to eat when she was presumably destined to provide the evening entertainment without so much as a dress rehearsal? When her phone rang she very nearly leapt a foot in the air.

It was Angelo. ‘It looks as though I’m not going to make it back in time,’ he informed her grimly. ‘The air traffic controllers here are calling a one-day strike.’

Gwenna blinked. ‘Oh, dear…’

‘Dannazione. I’m sorry, I was very much looking forward to seeing you,’ Angelo grated, striving not to yield to the suspicion that her mild response lacked any note of dissatisfaction at his news. ‘I’ll call when I have more information.’

Gwenna told the chauffeur to take her to Piglet’s pet hotel. As they sat in the heavy lunchtime traffic she couldn’t help picturing Angelo’s lean, darkly handsome face, hard with impatience. His compelling image was stuck in her mind like a fixture and she couldn’t push it out again. She realised that she was being torn in two by very different reactions: a sharp and shocking sense of unexpected disappointment, accompanied by a helpless sense of relief. She was startled by that stab of regret. For goodness’ sake, what was the matter with her? Okay, he was incredibly gorgeous and insanely fascinating in the same dangerous way that a sleek man-eating tiger would be. But in terms of compassion and decency Angelo Riccardi was an absolute bastard. Knowing that, how could she possibly respond to him on any level?

Her phone rang again and she tensed—but it wasn’t Angelo; this time it was Toby. ‘I tried to catch you at home and got your stepmother instead. Digging info out of her was not easy. Since when did you move to London and get into a relationship with some guy I’ve never even heard of?’

Gwenna winced. ‘I only moved this week…and, er, the relationship is very new.’

‘Not to mention sudden and impulsive and that is most unlike you. It can only be a wild passion—and about time too!’ Toby told her cheerfully. ‘Look, I’m flying in tomorrow for a meeting with a new client and I’d love to see you in the evening. We could go to a club. I could do with a chill-out session.’

Gwenna beamed. ‘I’d love that too. Will you be staying long?’

‘No. I have to go back to Germany to tie up loose ends on the park project.’

Comforted by the prospect of seeing Toby again, Gwenna went into the pet hotel with a spring in her step. Even though they had only been parted the night before, Piglet was as ecstatic to see his mistress as she was to see him. Having persuaded him into eating, she played with him and took him out for a walk. She was grateful to have a task to devote her energies to, for her recent period of idleness had made time hang heavy on her hands. Her plan to take the little dog home with her again was disrupted when the chauffeur came inside to pass on a message he had received on the car phone: Angelo would meet her at the same exclusive restaurant for an early dinner instead. Quite unprepared for the news that Angelo had successfully evaded being delayed abroad for the rest of the day, Gwenna was cast into renewed panic…

Having moved metaphoric mountains to overcome a major hitch in his travel schedule, Angelo was still in aggressive single-minded mode, energy pumping through him in an adrenalin-charged flow. Events had conspired to keep him out of the country longer than he had hoped and his impatience to see Gwenna had a raw edge that was unfamiliar to him.

‘Miss Hamilton has arrived, boss,’ Franco, his chief of security, approached Angelo’s table to murmur.

Angelo picked up on the note of admiration and soft ripple of comment and lifted heads that accompanied Gwenna’s passage through the restaurant. At first glance, her stunning beauty held his appreciative gaze. Yet, equally quickly, he regretted the changes he saw: he had liked the luxuriant waves in her hair and the unadorned glow of her skin. The artificial polish of perfection, however, had already taken a beating. Her shiny blonde mane of hair was wind-tossed and she had a set of clearly defined muddy little dog paw-prints stamped on the front of her dress. He rose to greet her with a smile that bore little of his usual sardonic reserve.

Mesmerised by the potent dark allure of his lean bronzed face, Gwenna could not drag her attention from him. When that smile slashed his wide sensual mouth he was staggeringly handsome, indeed nothing short of breathtaking. Ten out of ten women would appreciate him at such a moment, she assured herself hurriedly. That she should notice him too was par for the course. Had Toby been in the vicinity she was convinced she would not have registered that Angelo even existed. Her face pink with self-consciousness, she dropped down into the chair pulled out for her occupancy.

‘I didn’t think you’d make it back today at all,’ she confided, noticing that the table was set well back from the other diners to create an exclusion zone of greater privacy for their benefit.

Scorching golden eyes locked to hers and stole the very air from her lungs. ‘I wanted to be with you and when I want something I stop at nothing to get it.’

Detaching her gaze from his, Gwenna lowered her head. Now she felt hot all over and there was a tightness low in her tummy at the unmistakable awareness of his meaning and the high voltage sexual charge that he made no attempt to hide. ‘Is that your recipe for success?’

‘That would be too predictable for me. I choose my battles, gioia mia.’

As champagne was poured she grasped her glass, sipped steadily through the effervescent bubbles tickling her nose and studied the menu with fevered determination. He began to talk to her about Paris and she was intrigued by the discovery that he was an unexpectedly brilliant storyteller, capable of drawing an amusing picture with a handful of words. Enthralled, she listened and drank more than she ate; before dinner, she had shared a bar of chocolate with Piglet. As the champagne stole away her remaining discomfiture she was happy to let herself be entertained.

‘Are you not eating?’ Angelo enquired.

‘I’m not hungry.’ Except for you, a little voice whispered inside her head, shocking her with that instinctive message that rebelled against everything she had believed about her nature. But it was true: fascination had taken a powerful hold of her and she had shut out the voice of common sense that usually kept her feet on the ground. Even though she had suppressed that initial reckless thought she still found it almost impossible to break the potent hold of his dark golden eyes. Soon she was lost in her admiration of the ebony luxuriance of his lashes, the smooth olive planes of his hard cheekbones above the blue-black roughened skin of his jaw line and the pure masculine beauty of his wide sculpted mouth. In the same way she could not resist the exhilarating zing of awareness in the atmosphere.

Every fibre of his lean, powerful body on sexual alert, Angelo thrust his plate away. Finally he had her full attention and his predatory reaction was instinctive: to take immediate advantage. He reached for her hand. ‘Let’s go…’ he urged huskily.

‘But we haven’t finished,’ she framed shakily.

Angelo used his strength to inexorably tug her upright. His smouldering gaze gripped hers with a sensual force that made her knees tremble. ‘We haven’t even begun, bellezza mia.’

The buzz of conversation around them died. Gwenna was conscious of the stares as Angelo escorted her out, an arm possessively closed to her slim back. Her colour was high, her legs as weak as twigs. Without warning she found herself wondering if he had been with any other woman while he’d been away and a hollow sensation filled her tummy. He tucked her into the limo, got in beside her and pulled her to him. A heartbeat later the hungry driving heat of his mouth was on hers and a blaze as hot as an indoor sun was coursing through her tremulous length. It hurt not to breathe, but it would have hurt more to do without the gloriously erotic plunge of his tongue and the sweet flood of sensation he unleashed. A vital force was energising her body to a pitch of response so intense it almost hurt.

He released her lips, leaving her gasping for air and yet stricken at that loss of contact. Her bemused blue eyes focused on him again.

‘You’re amazing,’ Angelo purred. ‘I knew you would be.’

Her lashes dropped to shadow her shaken gaze. In a matter of moments he had rewritten her knowledge of herself. Her body was crying out for him and she was shocked. Chafed by the lace cups of her bra, her tender nipples were tingling. The prickling throb between her slender thighs painted her face pink. She wanted him. He had made her want him. Of course, a few glasses of champagne had loosened her inhibitions, she told herself defensively. But wasn’t that a good thing? Angelo Riccardi had offered her the devil’s bargain, and she had surrendered choice when she agreed to share his bed in return for the charges against her father being dropped. Wasn’t it wiser to make the best of a bad situation rather than try to resist the inevitable? And wouldn’t asking if she was currently the only woman in his life demean her? Give him the impression that she cared?

Angelo could feel her trembling and his very sensitivity to that fact annoyed him in the same way that so many things had in recent weeks. Disturbed nights when he had tossed and turned and burned for her had presumably affected his mood. The concept of deferred satisfaction was not for him. He wasn’t used to waiting for a woman. But he wasn’t an animal either, was he? She was a virgin and as highly strung as one of his pedigree racehorses. Gone, he could not help noticing, was the happy aura of serenity she had exuded at their first meeting. The brutal pressure he had utilised had left its mark. But why should that bother him? As Donald Hamilton’s daughter, she had been raised in the cosy comfort of middle-class respectability, he reminded himself grimly. The discovery that the world could be a much more challenging place would be a character-building exercise for her.

In the hall of the Chelsea house she gave him a swift uncertain glance from eyes as blue as the china his mother had once collected. He closed a hand to hers in an imprisoning gesture. ‘You haunt my dreams,’ he ground out with a harsh laugh. ‘You could be seriously bad for my health.’

Gwenna was feeling slightly dizzy from the champagne. Her mind was full of muzzy, disjointed thoughts, but the bitter light in his brooding dark eyes twisted something painfully inside her. Without understanding or conscious decision she lifted a hand to trace his aggressive jaw line in a soothing motion. Then startled by that extraordinary prompting, belatedly aware that he was equally surprised as questioning gold drenched the darkness of his gaze and his ebony brows pleated, she froze in confusion.

‘Per amor di Dio,’ Angelo breathed roughly, cupping her soft cheeks between long brown fingers. ‘Right now I think I could die from wanting you, mia bella.’

He tasted her lips with a searing sweetness that sent her every barrier crashing down. She didn’t want to think, she refused to think when he bent down and scooped her up into his arms as though she weighed nothing to carry her up the handsome staircase. But fear of being seen prompted her to mutter uneasily, ‘The housekeeper—?’

‘Off duty until we call.’ Angelo claimed a passionate kiss that silenced her.

CHAPTER FIVE

MERE minutes later, Gwenna caught an accidental glimpse of herself in the cheval mirror in her bedroom. Dismayed, rudely recalled to reality, she stared at her hectically flushed cheeks and swollen mouth. She looked like a shameless hussy. Air cooled her spine as Angelo ran down the zip on her dress and inched it off her shoulders.

‘I feel like a slut…’ she gasped strickenly.

Angelo spun her round, simmering dark eyes pinned to her unhappy face. ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard, bellezza mia,’ he censured. ‘I want you and you want me. What could be more natural than the desire to make love?’

A half-dozen tart retorts hovered on the edge of Gwenna’s mind but she kept them there, consciously protecting herself from a pointless outburst that would only upset her more. She was having an affair, nothing more or less, she told herself squarely. Hadn’t she always been a very practical person? Flights of fancy and histrionics were not for her. She would live only in the present, taking each day as it came.

Angelo smoothed her honey-blonde hair back from her troubled brow in a motion so gentle she blinked in surprise. ‘I saw you and I wanted you before you even spoke. One look and that was that.’

‘But that’s crazy.’

‘Dio mio, I would have moved heaven and earth to bring us to this moment,’ he drawled in a driven undertone. ‘Being desired to that degree should be a source of pride to you.’

Disconcerted by that statement, she blinked. ‘We…we don’t think the same…’

Angelo drew her to him with strong hands, a blaze of heat in his hungry gaze. ‘I wouldn’t want you if you were like me.’

He claimed her luscious mouth and she trembled again, made weak by the hunger he could awaken so easily. While she struggled to catch her breath he stripped off the dress and lifted her onto the bed, peeling off her shoes and, more slowly and provocatively, then her lace-topped stockings. He punctuated each and every action with the drugging demand of his lips on hers. So roused was she by this treatment that when he attempted to step back she automatically put her arms out to prevent him and stretched up to find that taunting, teasing mouth of his for herself. An earthy laugh rasped low in his throat as he toyed with her full lower lip and let his tongue plunge deep in an erotically sweet invasion that left her gasping.

Gwenna lay on the bed where he had put her, her senses singing and quivering. Clad only in a flimsy white bra and panties, however, she soon began feeling horribly exposed and shy and all too shamefully aware that she had pulled him back to her, desperate for another kiss. She watched as he cast aside his jacket and his tie in a series of easy fluid movements. Impatient tanned fingers moved to release the buttons on his shirt. The fabric edges parted to display the sleek bronzed expanse of his muscular chest and taut flat abdomen. Her tension went up another notch.

‘Relax.’ Registering her apprehension in the evasive flicker of her eyes, Angelo endeavoured to employ a soothing tone for the first time in his life. ‘You look incredibly lovely.’

Gwenna shot him a reluctant glance. He was down to black silk boxers that revealed more than they concealed of his bold state of arousal. It was a view that shocked her and she hastily looked away, her heart racing like an express train. Her tension acquired an edge of panic, for suddenly it seemed unbelievable to her that she was actually about to get into a bed with a man she barely knew. ‘I could really do with another drink.’

‘On the cabinet, beside you.’

Gwenna, who had hoped he would have to go off and get her a drink from somewhere, looked in dismay at the bottle of champagne and the glasses sitting in readiness. Angelo strolled round the bed and uncorked the bottle. Golden liquid foamed down into a delicate flute. He extended it with reluctance. ‘You really don’t need liquid anaesthesia.’

Refusing to look at him and edging away, Gwenna hugged her knees with one arm while taking a very hearty gulp of champagne.

‘I understand that you’re nervous—’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Gwenna gritted over the edge of the flute.

‘I’ll make it good, bellezza mia,’ Angelo swore softly. ‘In fact I’ll make the experience addictive.’

‘You couldn’t possibly.’

Angelo sank down on the bed with all the panache of a tiger stretching out in the sunshine. ‘I think that someone’s been telling you old wives’ tales. It won’t hurt.’

Gwenna flushed to the roots of her hair. ‘What would you know about it?’

‘You may be my first virgin but I have intelligence, common sense and exceptional proficiency in certain fields.’ Angelo loosened her hold on the champagne flute and eased her firmly back into his arms. ‘Don’t let alcohol take the edge off what promises to be a very pleasurable event.’

At the instant of contact with the muscular warmth of his lean, powerful body, she shivered violently. ‘You’re all ego—’

‘No, all confidence.’ Gazing down at her with glittering dark eyes of purpose, Angelo skimmed a casually possessive hand over the pale, slim expanse of her thigh. ‘Trust me. I’m not a clumsy or selfish lover.’

Little tremors rocking her from the intimate feel of his lean fingers on the taut smoothness of her thigh, Gwenna looked up at him with bemused blue eyes. Trust me. It should have been a laughable request. But she was making the extraordinary discovery that she was ready and willing to be convinced even if she could not understand why that should be.

Angelo kissed her and she stopped wondering and trying to think her way round unfamiliar and complicated corners. Wanton craving took over. He unclipped her bra and the cups fell away revealing smooth white delicate curves crowned by pouting pink buds. ‘You’re ravishing,’he groaned appreciatively.

Lowering her down onto the pillows, he rubbed the luscious crests to even greater prominence with skilful thumbs and finally laved the straining peaks with the tantalising warmth of his mouth.

Gwenna was catapulted from a moment of extreme shyness over her nakedness into an infinitely more shocking surge of pleasure. She shut her eyes tight at the height of it. Her tender nipples throbbed beneath his administrations while a feverish damp heat stirred between her thighs.

‘You can equal my passion at every step.’ As she tried to catch her breath and emerge from the sexual spell he had cast she looked up to find Angelo surveying her with unashamed satisfaction.

‘It means nothing,’ she protested, fighting to detach herself from the urgent messages of her awakened body.

He turned his attention back to the inviting fullness of her small breasts, coaxing the rosy points to a peak of throbbing sensitivity that made her hips writhe against the mattress. ‘It means we’re wonderfully compatible, bellezza mia.’

It scared Gwenna that what she was feeling could overwhelm all control. But she still could not resist the pleasure. At some stage in the breathless fervent heat he evoked her last garment was removed. Expert fingers feathered through the silky blonde down covering her mound to explore the coral-pink lushness beneath. He toyed with the delicate pearl at the apex and she whimpered helplessly, her back arching in sensual shock from the instant onslaught of her own intense response.

‘Tell me that you want me,’ Angelo commanded thickly, ceasing his tantalising caresses when she was utterly enslaved by her craving for that sweet, drowning pleasure.

Her dazed blue eyes struggled to focus on him.

‘I have to hear you say it, bellezza mia,’ Angelo admitted in a fierce undertone, his hot tawny-golden gaze welded expectantly to her lovely face.

There was an unbearably tight feeling of yearning low in her pelvis. She shifted up skittishly against a hair-roughened masculine thigh, absolutely desperate for his touch, controlled by instincts far stronger than she had ever imagined. ‘I can’t…’

Angelo studied her with sizzling determination. ‘Stop acting the victim. Tell me the truth.’

There was not an atom of softness in that lean, darkly handsome visage and the flaming high of anticipation he had induced came as close to physical pain as any she had ever encountered. Tears of fierce shame and angry frustration washed the backs of her eyes. ‘All right!’ she cried, despising herself for yielding. ‘I want you!’

Just as quickly that frightening instant of forced self-discovery was forgotten again beneath his expert touch. The dark, exquisite pleasure of his seduction made her jerk and moan and cling. And she didn’t care, she really didn’t care about anything but that he should continue holding her and teasing her with an erotic skill that made her feel as if she could fly as high and bright as the sun.

At the exact instant when the excitement threatened to become an indescribable torment, Angelo shifted over her and slid between her thighs. She felt the iron-hard length of his sex push against her tender entrance and, although she was frantic, all keyed up with eagerness for the ultimate act, she froze with nerves and the conviction that he was much too well endowed for her.

‘Don’t tense,’ Angelo urged grittily.

Gwenna lay as still as a sacrifice, eyes firmly closed. He stole a sexy, savage kiss that lifted her lashes and he gave her a slashing smile of challenge in reward. Coming up on his knees, he dragged a pillow across the bed and eased it below her hips. ‘It’ll be sublime,’he swore in a roughened undertone.

The slick, hot heat of him forged a passage into the tender depths of her damp, resisting flesh. He felt massive. A startled moan of discomfort was wrenched from her. Immediately he stopped, apologised, swearing in ferocious Italian below his breath.

Gwenna looked up at him with accusing eyes. Fierce strain was etched in his lean, strong face along with an astonishing hunger that made her feel oddly empowered. She was at a screaming pitch of nervous anticipation, both wanting and not wanting, burning quivers of need still shimmying through her slender frame because he had roused her to a point beyond bearing.

Scorching dark eyes met hers with frowning force. ‘You’re very tight. We could try this in another position—’

‘No…just do it!’ she gasped in wild embarrassment.

He was skilful and smooth, but that slow, deep plunge into her silken softness and the final piercing of the barrier of her virginity caused fleeting tears to well into her eyes. He stayed very still then, allowing her to adjust to the invasion. ‘I’m sorry…I hated hurting you.’

Ripples of heat and stimulation pulsed from the hot, secret heart of her again. Newly sensitised, she quivered, her body angling up to his in an invitation that spoke louder than any words. With a ragged laugh of gratification he moved again and a whimper of excitement escaped her because he felt amazing. Her heart began to hammer against her ribs. Exquisite sensation built and the knot of ravenous need in her was tightened and tightened as he set up a raw, sensual rhythm. Delirious with pleasure, she abandoned herself to his dark, driving passion. At the height of a shattering climax she screamed in ecstasy before she tumbled down and down and down in a release from her physical body that was so powerful that she was not quite sure she was conscious for several minutes afterwards.

Angelo kissed her and she stiffened, for once the fog of pleasure had seeped away she was gripped by a stark sense of shame and denial. She felt horribly emotional and tearful. How could she have let herself enjoy it? How could she have let herself down like that? Where was her pride? She was attempting to block out those disturbing thoughts when she registered that Angelo was removing her wrist-watch.

‘What are you doing?’ she mumbled unevenly, lying as still as a corpse under him as if to underline the fact that he was holding her entrapped.

Impervious to the hint intended, Angelo murmured lazily, ‘Giving you a present, passione mia.’

Her smooth brow indented. ‘A present?’

She lifted her hand to examine the new watch in shock and dismay. Gold, diamonds, a famous designer name. Painful early memories of similar expensive gifts surfaced. Revulsion ripped through her and she struggled with desperate fingers to take it off again but the intricate clasp defeated her. ‘No, thanks, I don’t want it. Look…how do you get this off?’

Angelo rested his stubborn jaw on the heel of his hand and surveyed her with deceptively sleepy tawny eyes. ‘I want you to wear it—’

‘What for?’ Her Delft-blue eyes flashed into direct contact with his narrowed gaze for the first time and the angry distaste etched there startled him. ‘So that you can kid yourself that you’re really a kind, generous guy? Or so that you can belittle me by paying me in jewellery for what I just did with you? Well, I may be stuck living in your stonking great status symbol of a mansion and forced to wear the fancy clothes that you paid for but—’ Gwenna had to pause just to draw breath.

‘But?’ Angelo encouraged, outraged that his generosity could be twisted into an insult and rejected.

‘I refuse to wear jewellery you give me.’

Angelo, confounded by her behaviour and furious with her, finally released her from his weight. ‘You will if it pleases me. Consider it part of the role you took on of your own accord.’

‘And do I have that role all to myself?’ The question flew off Gwenna’s tongue before she even realised that she intended to ask it. But just as quickly she accepted that she had to know, she simply had to know, whether or not she was one of a crowd.

His stunning dark gaze veiled; he was a veteran at facing down awkward questions from the women in his life. ‘No comment.’

Gwenna read only one meaning into that unrevealing response. And she felt as if he’d punched a hole right through her and sent the ground beneath her feet crashing away. He wasn’t even willing to be faithful to her? That new knowledge was like a jagged iceberg settling in her stomach and his unapologetic attitude was a humiliating slap in the face. How much lower could he make her sink? She was appalled by his attitude.

Distaste sliced through her. ‘Then, I suppose what we just did is the equivalent of a one-night stand.’

His lean bronzed face was grim as he pulled himself up against the pillows. ‘I don’t do those,’ Angelo growled with incredulous bite.

‘Perhaps I can only face thinking about this arrangement one day at a time.’ Gwenna had already been stripped of virtually everything she valued. Everything he said merely heightened the frightening sense that she was no longer in control of her own life.

Suddenly all the bewildered misery and anger and hurt she had been holding back just broke free of restraint and overflowed. ‘For goodness’ sake, I don’t even like you! You’ve taken my home, my garden, my very history from me and marooned me in a city where I don’t belong. You’ve even taken Piglet!’ she launched in a wild, almost incoherent surge of condemnation, scrambling out of bed to shoot into the bathroom at speed and noisily bolt the door behind her.

Angelo heard her sob and he sprang out of bed. Outrage powering him, he pulled on his boxers. So, let her cry, get it out of her system. She was overwrought. He always gave women in tears the widest possible berth. I don’t even like you!

‘Gwenna…’ Angelo reached the bathroom door without having taken a conscious decision to move in that direction and knocked once. ‘Open this door.’

Her eyes wet, Gwenna sucked in a ragged breath and turned on the bath taps to drown him out. Womanising louse, all sweet-talk one moment, ice-cold, heartless and utterly immoral the next. How could she have just sleepwalked into becoming the mistress of such a man?

Angelo rapped on the door again. ‘I want to know you’re okay. And I want to know right now.’

Blocking him out because she had absolutely nothing left to say to him, Gwenna slid into the warm bathwater. The hint of an intimate ache between her thighs made her pale and, reaching hurriedly for the soap, she washed with helpless urgency. Tears inched down her quivering cheeks and she dashed them away with a furious hand. Why was she crying? She never, ever cried!

Angelo tried the handle one more time and then pulled on his clothes in haste. He kicked the door at the weakest point beneath the lock and it burst open, slamming back against the wall. She was in the bath, drenched blue eyes enormous with fright, honey-blonde waves of hair cloaking her and trailing in the water.

‘I’m sorry if I scared you but you should have unlocked the door,’ Angelo murmured with measured quietness. ‘I was concerned.’

Trembling, Gwenna stared at him, absorbing the sight of his shirt hanging loose, disclosing a muscular wedge of bronzed hair-roughened chest. Shock was rippling through her. He had called her bluff. He had kicked in the door. She couldn’t believe he had done that. She tipped up her chin to snatch a glance at his lean strong face and then hurriedly jerked her head away, out of breath and more tense than ever.

Angelo crouched down by the side of the bath. ‘Look at me…’

‘Do you have to be so intimidating?’ she muttered tautly, sitting knees to chin in the water, naked and cornered.

‘I’m trying bloody hard not to be!’ Angelo flared back at her. ‘Stop cringing…you don’t have to be afraid of me.’

Gwenna dropped her head. How could she not be afraid?

‘I would never harm you.’

Gwenna thought about the kind of harm that had a more lasting effect than mere bruises.

Frustration was roaring through Angelo. She wasn’t listening to him. She often gave him the impression that she was only giving him part of her attention. Not in bed though, he reminded himself with grim satisfaction. But the rest of the time? Either he got the feeling she was holding back or she was lost in her own little world and he didn’t like either sensation. ‘I want to understand why you blew up over the watch.’

Gwenna studied the clear water lapping round her legs and compressed her full ripe mouth. ‘Dad was always giving stuff like that to my mother.’

His brows pleated. ‘So? He was her husband.’

Gwenna was surprised enough to look up again. She had forgotten that he had moved down to her level and she collided unwarily with lustrous dark eyes the colour of autumn. A very dangerous man with strikingly beautiful eyes that made her heartbeat race. She shut her eyes tight in self-reproach. What was the matter with her?

‘Gwenna,’ Angelo chided huskily. ‘I thought women loved to talk about themselves. What’s wrong with you?’

‘My father wasn’t married to my mother,’ she admitted flatly.

Angelo frowned. ‘I don’t follow.’

Gwenna reddened. ‘Mum had an on-off affair with Dad that dragged on for years and years. He was married to his first wife then.’

‘I wasn’t aware that your father had been married twice.’

‘Yeah, well, why would you be?’ Gwenna was mortified by the need to explain the unpalatable facts. ‘When Mum fell pregnant with me she thought he would leave his wife, who couldn’t have children. But he didn’t. Sometimes we didn’t see Dad for months on end and then he’d come visiting with extravagant pressies. My mother liked things like that…I don’t.’

‘But your father must’ve raised you…you have his name,’ Angelo pointed out flatly.

‘Mum died when I was eight and I went to live with Dad and he adopted me. His first wife wasn’t happy about that and they divorced.’

‘I had no idea.’ Angelo was furious that the confidential report he had had done on Hamilton had omitted such highly relevant details. He was astonished by the reality that her mother appeared to have been yet another one of the older man’s sadly deluded female victims. But no sooner had that angle occurred to Angelo than he reminded himself that she was still Donald Hamilton’s only child with the taint of his blood in her veins.

Gwenna watched him rise to his full imposing height, the sleek, hard planes of his darkly handsome features shuttered and cool. She assumed that the story she had just told him had made him think less of her. A lot of people had despised her mother for having an affair with another woman’s husband and giving birth to his child. Taunted and teased at primary school, Gwenna had had few friends. The locals had expressed their scorn and disapproval by excluding Donald Hamilton’s mistress and child from community activities.

In the uneasy silence, Angelo squashed the urge to ask further personal questions. He did not do personal in relationships. He kept it simple. He strolled out of the bathroom. I don’t even like you. That assertion rang clear as a bell in his head all over again, infuriating him. Since when had he cared whether he was liked or not? But then women made a real effort to please him. They were deferential, flattering…servile? The suspicion revolted him. Couldn’t he handle a challenge? Wasn’t he man enough to handle what could just be the very first honest woman he had met? At the last possible moment, Angelo paused in the doorway. Tugging a fleecy towel off the rail he shook it out and strode back to extend it to her. ‘Stop worrying about things.’

‘I’m not worried.’

‘You’re stressed out of your mind,’ Angelo corrected.

In an abrupt movement she scrambled up, water streaming off her slender curves in rivulets, and accepted the embrace of the towel. She felt manipulated, controlled, managed into doing what he wanted her to do. He lifted her out of the bath.

‘Don’t,’ she dared, drawing hurriedly back from him to firmly anchor the towel beneath her arms.

Gleaming eyes surveyed her from below a lush fringe of black lashes and she could feel her skin tightening and burning over her cheeks. Her lips felt full and moist and she imagined and immediately craved the scorching heat and pressure of his mouth on hers. She went rigid in rejection but still cruel sensation leapt and danced over her, wreaking havoc with her body. She was madly conscious and thoroughly ashamed of the straining prominence of her nipples and the wicked dampness of the tender place between her thighs.

‘You see, you may not like me, passione mia,’ Angelo murmured silkily, ‘but all I have to do is carry you back to that bed and you’re one hundred per cent mine.’

Gwenna was white with humiliation and self-loathing and she reacted with anger to that derisive gibe. ‘I’m not yours and I never will be because you can’t touch me where it matters,’ she launched back furiously. ‘I don’t care what you think of me, or what you say or do with anyone else either, because I gave my heart a long time ago to someone worth ten of you!’

As Gwenna spun away to the vanity basin Angelo closed a lean, strong hand to a slim white shoulder to turn her back. Incredulous dark eyes flashed down at her. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying? You’re telling me that you’re in love with another man?’ he pressed in a raw undertone.

Slowly she nodded, savouring the anger she had roused and yet disturbed by that ungenerous response. Being mean, argumentative or vengeful had not come naturally to her until she had met him. The reactions Angelo Riccardi incited were as foreign to her nature as the emotional highs and lows she was experiencing. ‘I don’t like the way you make me behave.’

‘You don’t like?’ Angelo framed in a dark, deep voice redolent of thunder in a confined space. ‘Dannazione! Who is this guy?’

Gwenna tilted her chin. ‘You don’t have the right to ask me that question.’

Angelo’s lean, shapely hands clenched into potent fists. He did not lose his temper. He never, ever lost it and prided himself on his rock-solid self-control. But a rage like a burning blinding surge of darkness was rising up inside him. Barely able to credit her answer, he strode into the bedroom and swung forcefully back to face her. ‘On the contrary, I have every right. I set no boundaries on our arrangement.’

‘You wanted my body and you’ve got it. You didn’t ask for and you’re certainly not getting anything else!’ Gwenna muttered bitterly.

‘His name,’ Angelo framed in a tone of ice.

‘None of your business.’

‘I expect compliance.’ Angelo fixed his tie and reached for his jacket. She was hyper-aware of his every move.

‘What I think and what I feel is my business,’ Gwenna told him shakily.

‘Your attitude offends me,’ Angelo delivered with lethal cool.

Her fingernails dug stinging crescents into her palms. The silence was awesome and terrifying in its totality. ‘Ditto.’

Angelo raised an ebony brow. ‘Non ci capisco niente? I don’t understand.’

‘Me too…your attitude offends me,’ she traded quietly, a tight, fearful feeling trapped somewhere inside her.

Angelo settled his chillingly intelligent gaze on her. ‘We have an agreement and you won’t walk away from it until I choose to set you free. You can’t insult me into dumping you.’

‘Is that what I’m doing?’

But Angelo didn’t answer her. He walked out without another word. Snatching in a sustaining breath, she studied the door with the busted lock. Her legs feeling wobbly, she sank down on the bed. He had gone and, instead of being over the moon, she felt annoyed and confused and…strangely abandoned. Had he left to take advantage of more entertaining and compliant female company? Her small white teeth gritted. She hated him with a passion. She had not thought it possible to hate anyone so much. Indeed she had not realised that she had it in her to loathe any living being with such venom. That he should refuse even to be faithful was the ultimate put-down. She was glad she had come clean and told him that she was in love with someone else. That had offended him. How dared he talk to her as if she belonged to him? How dared he? Yet when he came close or touched her she couldn’t say no to him and he knew it. Indeed he knew his own power so well he had thrown it in her face.

Hastily Gwenna stifled that disquieting train of thought. Her attraction to him was a crude, coarse, hormonal thing that had got the better of her self-discipline, she reasoned painfully. An irrational chemical reaction. Had she contrived to lie there like a stone statue he would’ve been a lot less keen. She glanced down and belatedly realised that she was still wearing the watch and that she had actually worn it in the bath. In guilty consternation, she examined it. The water had got in and fogged up the face. Had he noticed? She hoped he hadn’t assumed that she had deliberately set out to damage it…

The diamond watch that swam without a lifebelt. Maybe she would take a hammer to it next, Angelo mused, his handsome mouth set in a bloodless line as his limo ferried him across the city. She didn’t want anything he gave her. Nor did she appreciate anything. Not the house, the garden, the clothes, the fabulous lifestyle that he had created for her benefit. Yet when had he ever made so much effort? Where, one might have wondered, was the punishment factor in his acquisition of his enemy’s daughter?

Eyes hot as a bonfire, Angelo knocked back a brandy and savoured his misfortunes. Indifferent to the luxury that he offered, she preferred dressing like a tramp and grubbing through the soil in all weathers. He was the cruel bastard who had marooned her in a city mansion to be waited on hand and foot. That distance he had sensed within her? Oh, yes, there was very good reason for that distance. Although she was sleeping in his bed, it was in body rather than spirit because she loved another man. That struck Angelo as a deeply unnatural, distasteful and indeed outrageous state of affairs.

He was astonished at how bitter, affronted and cheated he felt. No woman had ever had that effect on him. But then no woman had ever regarded him as less than the main event. Revenge was threatening to take on a twist and rebound on him. He should ditch her, forget about her. What man would accept the role of second best in a woman’s bed? Angelo wanted very badly to smash something. Maybe a whole lot of somethings. In an implacable rage he told his chauffeur to head for a nightclub. There was a hell of a lot of other women available…

The following morning, Angelo attended a board meeting. He had had very little sleep. He had got drunk the night before, something he had not done since he was a teenager. Once he had learnt that his father had had a problem with alcohol, he had been ultra careful to monitor his consumption and he was annoyed and disturbed by his lack of discipline.

Gwenna was out in the garden when Angelo called her at noon.

The dark timbre of his deep voice vibrated down her spine and her tummy clenched. Sensual imagery threatened to engulf her and she tensed as though she had been slapped. No matter how hard she policed her mind he continually forged a bold passage into her thoughts. ‘Yes?’ she prompted tightly.

‘I’m planning to take you somewhere special tonight,’ Angelo told her smoothly.

Her bright blue eyes widened in dismay. ‘But I can’t see you tonight—’

‘Why not?’

Gwenna had no intention of cancelling her night out with Toby. ‘I’m already going out. I organised it yesterday.’

‘Un-organise it.’ With difficulty Angelo haltered his temper that was on a short fuse after the events of the past twenty-four hours. ‘I want to see you this evening.’

‘But I can’t alter the arrangement—this particular friend won’t be available another time.’

‘What gender is the friend?’

She stiffened. ‘I don’t have to answer that—’

‘You just did.’

‘He’s a friend…okay?’ Gwenna fired back, sudden guilt coming at her out of nowhere, which she fiercely fought off. How much honesty did she really owe Angelo Riccardi?

‘I’ll meet up with you, then. Give me a time, a place.’

She was aghast at that suggestion. ‘No way! I’m sorry, but I didn’t know you were planning to see me tonight. You can’t expect me to be available twenty-four hours a day!’

‘I do.’

‘I’ll start tomorrow…please be reasonable.’

Unhappily, Angelo was not in a reasonable mood. Refusal rarely came his way. Refusal in the face of his expressed displeasure had never come his way. He called Franco and instructed him to ensure that Gwenna was watched over from a discreet distance. He thought he should know where she was, what she was doing, who she was with. He did, however, have complete trust in her. After all, she had been a virgin, which suggested that the object of her affections was, for whatever reasons, unattainable. On that basis, Angelo decided that there was no reason why he should even think about the matter.

The bottom line for Angelo was that he still wanted Gwenna Hamilton. Even angry with her, he had fallen asleep aching for her and woken up in a worse state. He didn’t like that. But the more she held back and refused to play by his rules, the more determined he became to hold onto her. Was he suffering from some knee-jerk primal reaction to the challenge she set? Whatever, he was becoming increasingly eager for the moment when cool reason would be reinstated and he would find her more tiresome than desirable.

CHAPTER SIX

‘I’VE been doing some research on your boyfriend,’ Toby confided with a disapproving shake of his head over drinks in a fashionable bar. ‘You’re seriously out of your league.’

Gwenna wrinkled her nose in reproof. ‘What happened to tact?’

‘Your friends are supposed to be honest. From what I can understand, Angelo Riccardi makes it a mission to live up to his bad reputation.’ Toby pushed his tobacco-brown hair off his brow in a rueful gesture.

An unexpected current of irritation darting through her in response to that criticism of Angelo, Gwenna folded her lips. ‘In what way?’

‘In every way. He’s a shark in business and he runs through women like a knife through butter. I mean, what are you playing at? You’re a softy—’

‘Perhaps Angelo brings out the concrete in me. I don’t know why we’re talking about him—’

‘How about he’s a billionaire? You only met him a few weeks back? He’s an urban predator and you’re a country mouse? You have nothing in common with him. Of course I’m concerned about you.’

‘But when I spoke to you yesterday you talked like you approved,’ Gwenna reminded him in bewilderment. ‘You said I needed passion in my life.’

‘Where were you last night?’

‘Why?’

Toby grimaced. ‘I didn’t want to be the one to tell you but—according to the newspaper I read over my breakfast—Angelo Riccardi was partying very publicly with three fashion models last night.’

In shock, Gwenna went very still. So awful was the pain she couldn’t immediately speak or breathe. She wanted to argue that Angelo had been with her the previous evening but he had left early. In the mood he had been in, it was very possible that he had sought out the sort of women who would tell him how fantastic he was and swoon over a diamond watch. Whereas she had locked herself in the bathroom, wept, told a sad story and served him with a large bitter dollop of home truths. No comparison, was there?

‘Don’t you read the newspapers?’ Toby sighed.

It took effort but she made a stumbling recovery. ‘Not the sort that devote space to rumours like that.’

‘I don’t think it’s a rumour, Gwenna.’

Gwenna struggled hard to blank out what Toby had just told her. Why should she care? Why should the news hurt so much? And how could she be shocked when Angelo had slickly sidestepped an opportunity to promise fidelity? Nor could she understand her almost overwhelming urge to track Angelo down and confront him. Indeed the incomprehensible power of her reactions frankly appalled her.

‘You’re honest and loyal and you deserve better than him,’ Toby declared bracingly.

‘It’s not important. Do you think I don’t know that Angelo and I won’t last five minutes?’ Gwenna fixed a bright smile on her mouth, but her facial muscles felt as if they were set in solid cement. ‘But, hey, I’m twenty-six and I felt it was time to take a few risks.’

But the gloss went off her evening at that point and she couldn’t recapture it. She loved talking to Toby and she found she would get lost in an interesting dialogue about his work, only to have enjoyment vanish when a stab of memory pierced her afresh. She couldn’t really think of anything but Angelo for longer than five minutes. Her imagination kept on flashing up horribly creative pictures of Angelo playing around with a group of dazzling women. Time and time again she rearranged her thoughts.

‘I’ll always be here for you,’ Toby swore earnestly, holding her hand. ‘Even if I’m abroad, you can call me any time.’

Across London, Angelo was working late. He couldn’t settle, though. He paced round his office and finally phoned Franco to find out exactly where Gwenna was. After all, she had spent the whole evening with her friend. An hour later, he strolled into the chill-out room of the same club and saw Gwenna standing with a rangy guy with floppy brown hair. Honey-blonde waves rippling down her back, she was simply dressed in jeans and a blue vest top. He was torn between satisfaction and annoyance; satisfaction that she hadn’t bothered dressing up for her male companion’s benefit and annoyance that she had totally ignored her vast new collection of designer clothes.

An unwilling smile playing round the edges of his handsome mouth, Angelo headed towards Gwenna and her escort. Franco was organising a table and drinks and the club manager was hovering at a respectful distance. In his readiness to play host, Angelo felt that he was being very civilised, very liberal. The dark mood that had powered him throughout the day was lifting, lightening. But as his attention lingered on Gwenna he caught the expression on her face as she glanced up at her companion. To Angelo’s razor-sharp gaze the loving warmth of that look was indisputable. His lean powerful frame went rigid. It was as if something vital tore asunder inside him and savage anger flooded into the dangerous gap that opened up.

Gwenna only realised that Angelo had arrived when he closed an arm round her to say flatly, ‘Time for you to say goodnight.’

She twisted round and met scorching dark eyes and her heart jumped as if someone had pushed a panic button somewhere inside her. Resentment and excitement melded into an indistinguishable whole. ‘How the heck did you know where I was?’

Angelo shifted her to one side and nodded to the older man, who was awaiting instruction nearby. ‘Franco will see you out to the limo. I want a word with your…friend in private, bellezza mia.’

The deliberate hesitation in his reference to Toby made Gwenna stiffen. Mental alarm bells ringing, she picked up on the current of primitive masculine aggression Angelo exuded. Consternation gripped her but she could not quite credit her suspicions. ‘Angelo, for goodness’ sake—’

‘Go with Franco.’

‘Don’t you dare touch Toby!’ Gwenna gasped in a panic, hastily stepping in front of the younger man, for the dark menace in Angelo’s lean, strong features was unmistakable.

A savage wave of anger gripped Angelo. That she should oppose him and put herself at risk in a ridiculous effort to protect another man only heightened his antagonism. But a glimpse of the apprehension in her expressive eyes snapped him straight back into control.

‘Come home with me, then,’ he breathed tautly.

‘I’m not going any place with you.’ Yet, Gwenna still couldn’t take her eyes off Angelo. There was a light in his brilliant, brooding dark eyes that held her tighter than any chain. Slowly her attention stretched to encompass the impressive whole. In tailored black chinos worn with a striped designer shirt open at the neck, he looked absolutely gorgeous. As usual she was full of wildly conflicting responses. When she had believed he was about to thump Toby she had been terrified and then madly relieved by his withdrawal. Now her anger escalated in direct response to the fierce emotions she had been suppressing all evening.

‘I’m Toby James…just by the way, in case anyone’s interested in knowing that,’ Toby remarked wryly, hovering and much intrigued by the proceedings.

‘I’m not,’ Angelo imparted without looking in his direction.

‘You’re just so rude…you’ve got no manners!’ Gwenna simply exploded into speech, startling herself with that outburst as much as she startled Angelo.

‘One model is infidelity, two models is greed, three is hopelessly decadent,’ Toby extended in obliging explanation for Angelo’s benefit.

Pale as milk, Gwenna refused to even look in Angelo’s direction. ‘Let’s dance, Toby.’

‘I think you should have this out with Angelo…only not here because we’re attracting attention,’ Toby spelt out in a suggestive whisper.

Still ignoring him, Angelo strode forward and closed a hand like a cast-iron anchor to Gwenna’s narrow wrist. Long, lean fingers smoothed her delicate bones, but when she tried to pull free he retained his hold. ‘We’re going.’

Furious pink flushed her cheeks. Had Toby not reminded her that she was in a public place she would have screeched back at Angelo like a harpy. But she was keen to leave and say what she wanted to say with dignity. Chin at a pugnacious angle, she bade Toby goodbye and told him she’d phone him.

‘Not if I’ve got anything to do with it,’ Angelo contradicted in a raw undertone as he walked her away. ‘You told me you were out with a friend. I believed you—’

‘I was out with a friend.’

‘Where did you get the idea that you could fool me?’ Angelo shot her a chilling glance. ‘Now I know you can’t be trusted, you’ll have company everywhere you go.’

‘I can’t believe you have the nerve to talk like this to me. You just ignored what Toby said about the models you were with last night!’

‘I have nothing to say on that score,’ Angelo delivered with the lethal hard-nosed cool that always silenced female pretensions.

‘But I’ve got plenty to say,’ Gwenna hissed on the pavement outside. ‘No, I’m not getting into your limo. I have no need of a lift—’

Angelo shot her a warning glance from glittering dark eyes. ‘I won’t tolerate a scene.’

‘Well, I’ll keep it short and sweet.’ Gwenna squared her narrow shoulders and wondered why Franco was staring at her as if she had suddenly sprouted angel wings and a halo. ‘Just two little words…it’s over.’

Sizzling gold burnished the darkness of Angelo’s sceptical gaze. ‘What the hell are you talking about? What’s over?’

‘Angelo Riccardi…you are dumped!’ Gwenna launched back at him full volume. ‘Do you want it in writing?’

Angelo slung her an exasperated appraisal. Espying a man with a camera moving rapidly in their direction, he scooped her up and settled her bodily into the rear seat of the limo. He slid in beside her. ‘We’ll discuss this in private.’

‘I thought you had nothing more to say on that score!’ Gwenna reminded him irately as the car moved off.

Angelo reached for her, knotting a lean brown hand into the honey-blonde luxuriance of her hair to hold her fast. Breathing in short, shallow spurts, she focused on him in surprise and a second later he claimed her luscious pink lips with ravenous driving heat. Her head swam and her body clenched tight. She quivered violently in the circle of his arms.

‘I hate you,’ she whispered fiercely.

Smouldering dark eyes held hers. ‘So? It’s far from over.’

Gwenna raked trembling fingers through her wildly tumbled hair and twisted away from him into the far corner of the seat. Shame over her surrender threatened to choke her and she fought it by keeping her next move on track. ‘I haven’t got time for this and we’ve got nothing to discuss. I have to pack and pick up Piglet.’

Angelo wanted to drag her down horizontal and finish what he had started. He was painfully aroused and hugely angry and the last thing he wanted to do was talk. That word, ‘pack’. It was another challenge. He couldn’t believe she was still doggedly fighting him. Men feared his anger, his power, his opposition. Women, however, loved his power, his arrogance, his strength. Why didn’t she? He remembered her in the sunlight outside that church: serene and beautiful and gentle. He filed that soothing image away again. She had a core of steel, he acknowledged grimly.

Only when Gwenna stalked out of the car and into a porticoed entrance did she appreciate that she was not where she had expected to be. She rounded on Angelo. ‘Whose house is this? Where have you brought me?’

‘My place.’ Angelo dismissed the hovering staff with a practised inclination of his handsome dark head and ensured that the front door was locked behind him. ‘You’re honoured. My house is a very private space.’

Refusing to be impressed by that claim or intimidated by the soaring ceiling and marble pillars, Gwenna flung her head back. ‘You’re wasting your breath. You’re a total bastard and you have no standards. I refuse to have anything more to do with you!’

‘And where were your standards tonight?’ Angelo derided, strolling forward, which had the immediate effect of making her back away. ‘You set up a meeting with the guy you love behind my back!’

The colour drained from Gwenna’s face leaving her eyes looking a more vivid blue than ever against her pallor. How had he guessed? How on earth had he worked that out?

‘When you agreed to be with me you never mentioned him,’ Angelo continued in attack mode. ‘How truthful was that?’

‘I didn’t think you’d be interested—’

‘Che idea! No, that’s the sort of information every man wants up front and you know it.’ Glittering dark eyes slashed over her with punitive force and she quailed. ‘And when you went sneaking off to see him tonight—’

‘I did not sneak!’ Anger surged to Gwenna’s aid again.

‘Yes, you did. It was much more than an innocent night out with a friend. How fair and decent was your behaviour?’

‘According to some newspaper, you were out on the town with three other women last night, so what’s your problem? You can’t expect me to be truthful and decent when you’re out cavorting with a bunch of tarts!’ Gwenna shot back at him full volume.

‘You’re getting hysterical—’

‘No, I’m giving you the truth you said you wanted and I don’t think you like it much!’

‘Our agreement doesn’t give you the right to question my every move or make new rules,’ Angelo delivered with icy conviction.

‘That’s okay. I don’t care.’ Gwenna walked past him, a tight, hard knot in her tummy, her eyes hot and gritty with stinging tears. ‘I’m not staying here one minute longer, though. No agreement is capable of forcing me to share a bed with a guy who sleeps around—’

‘Dio mio…I don’t sleep around!’

‘There’s no point you arguing with me. My mother may have chosen to accept a relationship of that sort—’

‘Accidenti—do you dare to compare me to your father?’ Angelo thundered in raw disbelief.

‘All I’m saying is that I won’t let any man make a fool of me like that. It’s me and only me, or you can’t have me at all and not all the money in the world is going to change that,’ Gwenna swore shakily, her slender back ramrod-straight. But she was doubly mortified by his palpable distaste for her father. ‘So, open that door and let me out.’

Angelo swore in vicious frustrated Italian.

‘You virtually kidnapped me. I didn’t agree to come here,’ she reminded him steadfastly, only the nervous clenching and unclenching of her slim hands by her sides betraying the level of her agitation. ‘Keeping me here against my will is just not on, Angelo.’

Lean, powerful face rigid, Angelo studied her with seething intensity. The silence pounded and stretched. And then he dragged in a slow deep breath and said grittily, ‘Nothing happened last night.’

Gwenna studied him fixedly. A flood of relief washed over her and left her dizzy and more hopelessly confused than ever. It was not only her pride and sense of decency that had been offended by his apparent faithlessness, she registered in dismay. She had been downright tormented by the idea that he might have been with someone else. She had been jealous, hurt and furious.

Lean, angular features taut, Angelo set his perfect white teeth together. ‘I didn’t touch them…the models…they were company. That’s all.’

‘Did the company stay clothed?’

‘Sì,’ Angelo ground out as if he were being tortured, and that was very much how he felt. Why wasn’t he throwing her out of his house and his life? But the closer she got to the door, the more urgent became his desire to haul her back from it. It was lust, total overpowering lust, and one taste of her had set up one very powerful craving. He loathed the very suspicion that he was no longer one hundred per cent in control, but need was overriding principle.

Gwenna realised that her legs were quaking beneath her. Slowly she turned back to face him fully. ‘Okay…do you think you can do faithful now?’ she asked with sincerity. ‘There’s no point me hanging around if you can’t.’

Angelo dug potent fists of naked outrage and aggression into the pockets of his well-cut trousers. He could not believe what she was doing to him. What did it take to satisfy her? She was as persistent as water dripping on stone. Plain questions left no room for prevarication. He felt like a wild bear being chained up and forced to learn demeaning tricks. ‘Per meraviglia—’

‘Just yes or no will do,’ she whispered in helpful interruption.

Stubborn jaw line set at a most forbidding slant, Angelo was set on categorical resistance when he first rested his hard gaze on her. He did not respond to demands. He guarded his freedom. But with her honey-blonde curls tangled by his fingers and her pink pouting mouth slightly puffy from the imprint of his, she made a picture capable of enticing him over a cliff edge. She looked impossibly sexy. Later he did not recall the moment when he decided to surrender. ‘Sì…yes.’ He closed the distance between them in two graceful strides and closed his hands over hers. ‘You’ll stay?’

Unprepared for the immediacy of that demand, Gwenna blinked and mumbled, ‘But—’

‘But nothing, bellezza mia. I’ve agreed. I’ve given you what you want.’

With that resolute reminder, Angelo angled her head back and drew her close before she could think up any further refinements. He let his provocative mouth glide down the extended length of her neck. A sensation like hot wires tightening sent a frisson of delicious heat darting through her pelvis and she shivered and moaned. He pushed open a door into a dimly lit room and pressed her back against the wall. The heavy pressure of his lean, hard, muscular body against hers sparked a tantalising tingle of delicious warmth and awareness in her erogenous zones. In the midst of an exchange of hot, driving kisses, she found herself pushing back against him, maddeningly conscious of the engorged sensitivity of her breasts and the hollow ache stirring between her thighs. She squirmed against him, her fingers roving over his broad shoulders, delving into his black hair and finally forcing a path between their bodies to rip at the buttons of his shirt.

With a roughened laugh of satisfaction, Angelo lifted his head and let his hand close over the pouting curve of her breasts, teasing at the prominent peaks. The barrier set up by her clothes impelled a low moan of frustration from her. She wanted to touch him so badly she could hardly bear it and splayed her fingers across his hard, flat stomach, revelling in the feel of his warm bare skin.

‘Don’t do that,’ Angelo groaned, pushing away her hand and lifting her into abrasive connection with his fierce erection. He crushed her full, soft lips below his and plundered the damp interior of her mouth with an explicit sensual force that left her trembling.

‘Angelo—’

‘Later…all that you want but not now, cara,’ he growled, hauling her up into his arms and tipping her down onto the arm of a sofa to yank at the zip on her jeans and wrench them off with more impatience than cool.

She tumbled back into the cushions, passion-glazed china-blue eyes locked to him in surprise as he stripped her of her jeans and her panties just at the point when she had naively assumed he would take her upstairs. Her cheeks flamed red as fire but her entire body was hot and throbbing and desperately on edge and she made no complaint. Indeed she locked her arms round his neck for support while he discovered the moist, soft welcome between her thighs. With a guttural sound of uninhibited masculine pleasure, he buried himself to the hilt inside her.

Her back arching at the shockingly erotic impact of his entrance, Gwenna cried out. Smouldering tawny eyes welded to her, Angelo withdrew, slowly rotated his hips and then slammed back into her. Pleasure exploded along her nerve-endings in a blinding wave. She lost any sense of time, all ability to reason. Wicked excitement controlled her. He pushed her vest and her bra out of his path and stroked the painfully beaded tips of her breasts until she was whimpering she knew not what. From that point there wasn’t a moment where she regained control or even came close. She was squirming, writhing, begging him not to stop, possessed by a greedy blaze of elemental need. At an intoxicating high of delirious pleasure she was gripped by wild convulsions of ecstatic release. Shell-shocked by the jolting, all-encompassing power of that experience, she clung to him in the aftermath.

‘You’re amazing, gioia mia.’ Angelo surveyed her with rampant appreciation and dropped a teasing kiss on her brow. So what if he had never done fidelity before? He had never spared much thought for his sexual relationships, but he was becoming powerfully aware that she had an extra-special something that brought a whole new dimension to their every encounter. He should be congratulating himself on his amazing perception. Had he not recognised her extraordinary appeal the very first moment he met her? Hamilton’s daughter she might be, but she was also a triumph worth a harem of ten. Smiling, he vaulted lithely upright and rearranged his clothing.

Like a sleepwalker, Gwenna scrambled up on unsteady legs, wrenching at her vest with one hand and going for her discarded jeans with the other. They hadn’t even got undressed, never mind made it as far as a bedroom. She was embarrassed, hopelessly unsure of how to behave. Her mind was in total turmoil. Everything she had believed she knew about herself was being turned upside down. But she fought off her misgivings and reminded herself that Angelo seemed to be making a genuine effort.

After all, hadn’t he come looking for her this evening? He had been annoyed to find her with Toby. Had he been jealous? Perhaps Angelo was not quite as cold and unfeeling as his womanising reputation. Hadn’t he told her that she should be proud of the fact that he wanted her so much? Worrying at her full lower lip, she studied the sofa and reflected that he had not been exaggerating on that score. Maybe she was ridiculously old-fashioned. Maybe she needed to loosen up a little and stop fretting about the moralities. Although it was obvious that a promise of fidelity was a major undertaking for him, he had given it to her, she reminded herself bracingly. No longer was everything on his terms.

‘We need a shower.’ With that husky, mocking assurance, Angelo closed a lean hand over hers and walked her upstairs.

Gwenna was in a daze—a happy daze, and that acknowledgement stunned her. Her fingers trembled in his and his grip tightened. She had the feeling he didn’t want to let go of her and she liked that. He was making her feel things she didn’t understand, making her think things that struck her as unwise. It was just the impact of all the physical stuff that was confusing her, she reasoned, hurriedly squashing an almost overwhelming sense of vulnerability.

Her mobile phone rang two steps inside the door of a palatial bedroom. She dug it out to answer and walked away from Angelo the minute she recognised Toby’s familiar voice. ‘Yes, of course, I’m all right,’ she muttered in some embarrassment.

Angelo froze, dark eyes flaring angrily as he worked out who had called her. Here she was in his bedroom and she was just chatting to the guy as though that was all right, acceptable, even normal. His perfect white teeth gritted when she gave him an apologetic glance and finished the conversation with the gentle assurance that she would be in touch soon. She smothered a yawn with a polite hand.

‘I don’t think you should be accepting calls from him.’

Delft-blue eyes met his in honest surprise. ‘Why not? Toby’s my oldest friend.’

‘You’re in love with him,’ Angelo spelt out with stinging cool.

‘But nothing’s going to happen. Toby doesn’t think of me that way.’ Embarrassment and uncertainty, however, were claiming her. She always tried to be fair, always endeavoured to look at opposing points of view. It occurred to her that in the light of the fuss she had made about fidelity, Angelo probably thought he had every right to object to her friendship with Toby.

‘But I don’t like it,’ Angelo countered flatly.

Absorbing the smouldering aspect of Angelo’s intent gaze, Gwenna was surprised to feel an unexpected twinge of amusement. She dipped her head to hide it. He was so possessive, so incredibly passionate. He was not at all the cold, callous and insensitive guy she had once believed. ‘I can see your point,’ she answered with determined tact.

The savage tension in Angelo’s broad shoulders eased. He took her into a vast en suite bathroom and undressed her. Each garment was removed with subtle caresses and an exquisitely skilled sensuality that made her quiver and burn. The bright lights made her feel desperately shy but not even that could suppress the helpless tingle of arousal he roused. The lush, swollen heart of her ached but it didn’t stop her wanting him, didn’t stop the hunger rising to a torturous peak of need. He took her in the shower. She shut her eyes tight, surrendering to the melting ripples of slow burning erotic pleasure and the shivering, whimpering rapture of delirious relief. Afterwards, she just wanted to sleep and could hardly stand upright. He wrapped her in a fleecy towel.

‘I wish you would stay awake, passione mia, ‘Angelo complained.

‘Can’t…hardly slept last night,’ she mumbled, all the stresses of the past forty-eight hours finally taking their toll. Her eyelids felt as though weights were attached to them.

He eased her between cool sheets and she waited for him to join her. Instead she heard a door open and she peered sleepily across the room at him, noting that his sleek bronzed length was clad only in boxers. ‘Where are you going?’

‘My room is through here.’He was poised on the threshold of the room next door.

Her pale brow indented. ‘But—’

The smooth brown breadth of his muscular shoulders shifted in a casual shrug. ‘I always sleep alone. I’ll see you in the morning.’

The door closed. I always sleep alone. She had spent a lifetime sleeping alone too and could not comprehend why she should now feel rejected by his withdrawal. Exhaustion soon kicked in, however, to blur her troubled thoughts and sink her into a deep slumber.

She woke with a start, unsure of her surroundings and of what might have wakened her. In a rush she remembered that she was in Angelo’s house and she fumbled for the light switch by the bed. She was sitting up when she heard a disturbing sound from his room. A cry? Without further thought she slid out of bed and snatched up the shirt he had left in a careless heap. Hastily donning it, she opened the communicating door between their rooms.

In the dawn light filtering through the shutters she could see Angelo tossing and turning in the big bed. He was moaning something in his own language. The sheer terror in his voice grabbed her by the throat, shook her up and sent her flying straight to his side. She scrambled up on the mattress to get within reach of him and rested a soothing hand on his shoulder. His skin was as hot as fire.

‘Angelo…wake up!’ she whispered urgently, shaking him slightly.

Angelo wrenched himself up in a sudden movement that startled her. He was trembling, muttering in Italian. With a gruff exclamation, he raked rough fingers through his dishevelled black hair and he turned to study her with a frown that drew his sleek ebony brows together. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You were having a bad dream—’

‘I don’t get them—’

‘You cried out and woke me up!’

‘I couldn’t have,’ Angelo growled, dark eyes defensive, the fierce tension in his big powerful frame communicating itself to her.

Gwenna loosed a rueful sigh. Evidently, macho men didn’t have bad dreams. In the dim light he was a dazzling bronzed vision of raw masculine appeal. With his hair ruffled and blue-black stubble outlining the aggressive set of his jaw line he looked startlingly handsome, but it was the grim cast of his lustrous eyes that made Gwenna shimmy closer on her bottom and wrap her arms round him. ‘I get nightmares sometimes…’

‘Really?’ Angelo said very drily, but she noticed he didn’t push her away.

Gwenna rested her chin on his shoulder, absently drinking in the warm and already familiar scent of his skin. ‘I wasn’t there when it happened but I used to dream I saw my mother’s car crash. Then when I was at boarding-school—’

Angelo tensed. ‘When was that?’

‘I was ten when Dad first set up home with Eva and her daughters. Unfortunately, Penelope and Wanda didn’t take to me and, for the sake of peace, I was sent off to school. I hated it.’

‘Why…were you bullied?’

‘For waking the other girls up with my nightmares and being a terrible cry-baby.’ Gwenna winced in remembered shame over her past weakness. ‘I was horribly homesick—’

Angelo reached behind him with a long arm and tipped her round and deftly forward into his lap. ‘I was too, but I didn’t have a home to go to any more.’

‘You boarded too?’

‘My mother was dead and her generous employer paid for my education at an exclusive school. I didn’t fit in. Sardinian mothers spoil their sons. I spoke lousy English, and I was a science geek and very small—’

Gwenna squinted up at his shadowy profile. ‘Small?’ she interrupted in disbelief.

Angelo nodded. ‘Tiny…I didn’t shoot up until I was well into my teens.’

‘Were you bullied too?’

‘Of course not.’

But Gwenna caught a certain intonation in his dark-timbred drawl and sighed. ‘Yes, you were. I can tell.’

‘How? With your crystal ball, bella mia?’ Long, taunting fingers explored beneath the shirt she wore and she shivered, her breath catching in her throat. He cupped a pouting breast and in coaxing its tender pink nipple to straining prominence he provoked a gasp from between her lips.

‘Stop trying to distract me…’ she muttered breathlessly.

Angelo swung her down onto the bed beside him and shifted over her in one lithe motion, angling his hips into the soft cradle between her thighs to acquaint her with his thrusting hardness. Scorching eyes scorned her reproachful scrutiny. ‘Is that what I’m doing?’

‘But I want to know…I really want to know what happened to you to make you sound so scared!’ she protested.

His fabulous bone structure clenched hard and he was pale. ‘I was burned with cigarettes, kicked where it most hurts and beaten up.’

‘Oh my word…’ She was overcome by horror and consternation, and her eyes glistened, awash with moisture. ‘Angelo…that’s awful. And you still dream about it?’

‘Sì…’ Even as he wondered why the hell he had told her, Angelo was surveying her reaction in fascination.

Gwenna struggled to fight off the tears of sympathy without much success. She gulped, swallowed, sniffed and finally linked her arms tightly round him and hugged him hard. She was thinking of that bewildered and bright little boy, suddenly deprived of a loving mother and plunged into an alien environment.

‘It made me tough…I was too soft, bellezza mia. It was good for me—’

‘Don’t talk rubbish!’ Gwenna gasped, sucking in a steadying breath of oxygen. ‘I mean, I was just teased and scolded. But you were brutalized—’

‘Do you think I deserve a sympathy shag?’ Angelo enquired in silken interruption.

Her clogged lashes lifted on troubled blue eyes. ‘Sometimes you can be really offensive.’

Almost imperceptible colour scored his superb cheekbones.

‘And the answer is no…not because I’m annoyed with you but because—and I find this very embarrassing—I think I would find it rather uncomfortable right now.’ Grinding to a mortified halt as she referred to the fact that she was rather sore, she bit her lip and turned her face away.

Angelo hadn’t thought of that possibility and guilt came out of nowhere and attacked him full force. It was less then forty-eight hours since she had been a virgin and he had been pretty demanding as well as passionate. Either he had a cold shower or he introduced her to a more creative way of satisfying his high sex drive.

‘I can be a selfish bastard,’ he remarked and waited confidently for her to argue that description.

But it did not even occur to Gwenna to contradict him for a statement she considered accurate. ‘Maybe we could…later.’

‘Later I’ll be in New York, cara mia,’ Angelo groaned in frustration, releasing her reluctantly from his weight but tugging her into his arms, fully intent on attacking her learning curve.

Gwenna squinted at the face of the clock by the bed and gasped. ‘My goodness, is that the time?’

‘It’s only half past six,’ Angelo told her gently.

‘In less than an hour it’ll be feeding time at the pet hotel and I don’t want to be late,’ she lamented, pulling free and rolling over to vacate his bed at a frantic pace. ‘The staff don’t mind me going to give Piglet breakfast because he wouldn’t eat otherwise. But they do like me to fit in with their routine and they don’t like visitors between eight and nine in the morning.’

Barely able to credit that harried explanation, Angelo sat up. ‘Give me a moment,’ he urged tautly. ‘Are you telling me that you’re running over there every single morning to feed that animal?’

‘Evenings too…he has a very tiny tummy,’ Gwenna told him defensively. ‘You should see him on the webcam in his kennel…he’s so depressed, it would break your heart. He won’t even look at the TV or play ball any more.’

Her departure from his room was hasty. Angelo cursed vehemently while he took a cold shower and strode out of the wet room determined to get a look at Piglet malingering on the webcam. And there he was, the clever little tyke, curled up on his gilded four-poster bed with his head sunk between paws, little round eyes dull and his ridiculous bat ears drooping. In no need of canine acting lessons, he was the very picture of full-blown doggy misery.

But Gwenna was devoted to her pet. Totally devoted and obsessed, Angelo reflected dourly. And why not? How much love and attention had she got from her sleazy father and a mother who had probably only had her in an effort to destroy her lover’s marriage? He lifted the phone. When Gwenna got out of his bed at dawn to trek across the city simply to feed the dog, it was time to release Piglet from captivity.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANGELO surveyed the huge crowded room with concealed dissatisfaction. He wondered why it was that when fate gave him what he believed he had always wanted he should find it so irritating. Clingy women who remained welded to him like superglue in company had always exasperated him.

In the course of a month, he had learned that Gwenna did not cling, shadow him round the room or continually seek ways to attract his attention. In fact, he sometimes felt like handcuffing her to his wrist or tagging her with a satellite-navigation system he could use to locate her when he wanted her back by his side. When she got talking to his guests, she lost track of time. She was wildly popular with the garden enthusiasts and had to be regularly rescued from those who took advantage of her horticultural knowledge to request free advice and even personal visits.

‘Where is she?’ Angelo was finally forced to ask Franco.

A few minutes later, his chief of security at his heels, he strode out to the rear terrace of his impressive London abode and looked down into the garden below. Her iridescent blue evening gown trailing across the damp grass in her wake, Gwenna was showing off a flowering wall plant to a man and a woman. The man was a notoriously lecherous Swiss banker. That he should even be close to Gwenna set Angelo’s teeth on edge.

Franco cleared his throat. ‘You know, boss…Miss Hamilton doesn’t know she might be rattling your cage.’

‘Is that a fact?’ Angelo murmured without expression.

‘She’s a very friendly lady, who loves helping people,’ the older man remarked into the awkward silence.

So, that dangerous virus of niceness was subverting the loyalties of all the staff who came into regular contact with her, Angelo acknowledged sardonically. She took what Angelo considered to be an inordinate interest in other people and made no distinction between his employees and his acquaintances. Even Franco, a tough nut with a jaundiced view of the female sex, was eager to speak up on her behalf. His chauffeur, cured of a persistent cough with the gift of some magical mixture derived from honey, regarded her with positive reverence. His hard-hitting senior PA had mentioned how very pleasant and courteous Gwenna was. His chef conjured up special dishes adorned with horticultural motifs because she had planted herbs in containers for him.

Unfortunately, Angelo felt pretty much excluded from that general niceness and that awareness nagged at him like a fine stiletto knife in his side. She did not take an inordinate interest in him or question his absences. There was a barrier beyond which she did not go. But she did set him on fire in bed and wasn’t that what was most important? he asked himself impatiently. Sometimes he joined her at dawn after an all-night meeting. No woman had ever given him so much pleasure and he went to great lengths to make time to be with her. He also gave her a lot of attention. Naturally he wanted her to be content with her role in his life and he was a very generous lover. But she was not responding to his efforts to gratify her.

She wore the clothes and the jewellery he gave her with indifference, shedding them for jeans and T-shirts the first opportunity she got. Film premières and fashionable parties did not impress her. Celebrities, the very few that she actually recognised, roused an equal lack of enthusiasm. His houses were a roof over her head, but no more, and only the outside spaces were capable of engaging any real interest. Hadn’t he reunited her with her precious pet? Did he complain when that tiny psychologically disturbed mutt lay in wait to attack him? Piglet was the canine version of a piranha fish.

But what bothered Angelo most of all was the sneaking suspicion that Gwenna was not happy. She didn’t brandish that unhappiness, never mentioned it and didn’t droop in public. Yet he was continually conscious of it. Was she pining for Toby James? The very suspicion filled Angelo with a murderous tide of hostility. Infuriated by that lack of mental discipline, he used his fierce strength of will to thrust both the name and thought from his mind.

And if she was unhappy, Angelo was aware that he would soon be breaking news that would make her even unhappier. Three weeks ago, he had had a call from the lawyers he had instructed to check over every aspect of the properties that Donald Hamilton had signed over. Question marks had speedily been raised by certain anomalies in the paperwork and further extended investigation had revealed that Hamilton was guilty of yet another crime. Angelo now had the proof of an unscrupulous fraud that would destroy Gwenna’s faith in her father for ever.

Her face pink from the attention Johannes Saudan was paying her and the dagger looks of resentment emanating from his girlfriend, Gwenna answered the middle-aged banker’s query as briefly as she could. When she saw Angelo on the terrace above, it was a relief to be able to say, ‘I think Angelo wants me…’

‘What man would not? You are stunning.’ The older man’s appraisal made her feel horribly like a piece of meat on a slab.

‘Excuse me.’ Suppressing a shudder of revulsion, she headed back indoors.

Angelo strode in from the terrace to greet her. His brilliant gaze rested on hers and an erotic twist of instant heat shimmied through her pelvis. She stiffened, hating the weakness in her legs, the heavy feel of her breasts and the dulled hollow ache of response in a place she didn’t care to think about. He owned her body, she thought wretchedly. He looked at her, he touched her and she would be seduced by her own weakness and craving. Physically he reigned supreme over her for she had yet to find a way of resisting him.

‘I always have to look for you…even in my own house, bellezza mia,’ Angelo murmured silkily.

It was a reproof but she bent her head, lowered her long curling pale brown lashes and said nothing. After all, what could she have said? She operated a deliberate policy of being elusive and could hardly complain if it exasperated him. In the bedroom she was always where he expected to find her because to her mind that, according to their agreement, was where their relationship began and ended.

He had sex with her. He had sex an awful lot with her. She was honest enough to admit that she was equally keen to have sex with him. She supposed that, in the circumstances, this was fortunate, but her anguished pride and her shame at what he had made of her would not allow her to award him much notice outside the bedroom door. She had resolved not to make a fuss about the physical stuff and not to act like the virtuous virgin he had once called her. Regrettably that did not make it any easier to deal with an inner turmoil that was growing stronger by the day. In every way that mattered, that agreement offended her beliefs and destroyed her self-respect.

‘I would like to see a little more of you when we entertain,’ Angelo spelt out in the same even tone as he lifted her slender hand.

‘Okay.’ Gwenna reminded herself that he had said nothing when Piglet chewed up one of his shoes. Either time it had happened. For a man who didn’t like indoor animals he was being remarkably tolerant.

His thumb smoothed over the soft skin of her inner wrist and lingered. The faint aroma of her perfume flared his nostrils. Her pulse was going crazy. A slight tremor ran through her and the increased rapidity of her breathing stirred her breasts.

Madly conscious of the warmth of his skin against hers and of the electric sparks of awareness in the atmosphere, Gwenna glanced up at him. The dark pupils of her blue eyes were dilated. Sensual tension sizzled through her, holding her still. She was on a high and although she tried she could not pull back from that intoxicating sense of energy and power while his smouldering tawny eyes burned over her with masculine appreciation.

Angelo bent his arrogant dark head to murmur thickly, ‘How do you do this to me?’

Taunting heat pulsed at the heart of her. She felt so wicked she closed her eyes tight, fighting his electrifyingly sexual magnetism. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—’

‘Di niente. Let me show you.’ Snapping both hands over her wrists, Angelo backed into the room behind him and drew her with him.

The instant she registered his intention, Gwenna went rigid. She knew that hot, intent look on his lean, darkly handsome face. It filled her with an excitement she loathed. All too often Angelo had proved to her how weak she was by choosing unconventional times and places to slake his passion and always she surrendered, too caught up in excitement to resist. But, for a split second, she had an image of how she would look emerging from the room with tousled hair and smudged make-up and she recoiled in shame from that prospect.

‘No…not now. Your guests will notice we’re missing.’

‘So what?’ Angelo curved lean, determined hands to her hips to jerk her into more intimate contact with his hard thighs.

‘They’ll guess what we’ve been doing—’

Angelo vented a low-pitched laugh of amusement. ‘Why should they?’

But Gwenna had often seen herself in the mirror after their encounters, the feverish pink of her cheeks and the languorous daze in her eyes that told an all-too-intimate story. ‘They will.’

‘But why should we care about such things, bellezza mia?’ Undaunted, Angelo reached up to undo the halter ties at the nape of her slender neck.

‘No!’ Angry distress gripping her, Gwenna thrust his hands away from the ties. ‘You don’t care and why should you? All the men will think you’re a real ace, but I’ll just look like a slapper!’

Angelo dealt her an incredulous appraisal. ‘What has come over you? Where is all this nonsense coming from?’

‘It’s not nonsense. We really don’t need to advertise what this relationship is about,’ Gwenna slung back at him bitterly. ‘And I won’t be humiliated in front of smarmy creeps like Johannes Saudan!’

‘What did Saudan say to you?’ Angelo demanded angrily. ‘How have I humiliated you?’

‘Relax, Saudan didn’t say anything, but I could see what he was thinking and he’s not the only one—’

Angelo spread his hands in a slashing movement. ‘Will you calm down and talk sense?’

‘You put me on parade for them all like a prize poodle. The diamonds round my neck are the equivalent of a collar—’

‘Isn’t it amazing how many women look with envy on that collar?’

‘It’s like being branded by your ownership and I don’t care how much moneys it’s worth!’ Gwenna practically spat at him. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? You think that being your playmate is some kind of honour—’

‘Santo Cielo! Move away from that door,’ Angelo instructed with chilling ferocity. ‘I need to talk to Saudan about what he said to you.’

‘I told you that he didn’t say anything—he didn’t need to! He believes I can be bought and, when he looked at me, I could see that he was wondering how soon you’d put me back on the market again. Because to him I’m just a commodity and he was thinking that he could have me too—’

Angelo lifted her bodily out of his path. ‘I’ll bloody kill him!’

‘What for?’ she demanded wildly.

‘Dannazione! He upset you,’ Angelo grated.

Afraid of a scene, she stepped in front of the door to prevent his exit. ‘Why should you care about that?’ Without the slightest warning her voice had developed a wobble and tears were drenching her eyes.

Angelo loathed female tears like poison and never, ever let himself be swayed by tantrums. But when he saw those sparkling drops on Gwenna’s lashes he felt as hugely relieved, as if she had provided him with a list of instructions on how he should respond. She was upset, crying. He could not possibly take offence at anything she had said. The raging frustration inside him immediately subsided. Suddenly everything seemed simple and his own function wonderfully clear-cut. He rested his hands on her shoulders and in a clever series of stealthy moves slowly and gently eased her shivering slender length into his arms.

A sob convulsed Gwenna’s throat and she gulped it back hurriedly. ‘I don’t cry…I don’t—’

‘I don’t hear you crying,’ Angelo breathed, wondering if he was a pervert for just wanting to kick out all his guests and drag her up to bed and keep her there for at least twenty-four hours.

She rested her brow against a broad shoulder. She felt totally bewildered by her own behaviour. How had she ended up so close to him? The angry pain that had taken her over had gone and she recognised a disconcerting change in her attitude to him. Arguing with Angelo had once made her feel stronger and more in control but this time around it had made her feel as if she were being torn in two.

‘I’m all right,’ she muttered awkwardly just as her mobile phone rang. ‘Excuse me…’

It was her stepsister, Penelope.

‘We need to talk to you urgently,’ Penelope declared in a sharp voice that made Gwenna’s heart sink like a stone and her anxiety level rise even faster. ‘It’s a family matter and I can’t discuss it on the phone. How quickly can you get down here?’

‘I’ll get on the first available train tomorrow.’

‘I have to go home for a couple of days,’ Gwenna told Angelo, anxiously wondering if the problem that her stepsister had refused to discuss related to the total breakdown of their respective parents’ marriage. ‘It’s a family crisis.’

His lean, strong face austere, Angelo frowned. ‘I’ll come with you.’

Gwenna was painfully conscious of Angelo’s attitude to her father, and could only think that Angelo’s presence would increase the strain and embarrassment for all concerned. ‘Thanks, but I don’t think that’s a good idea. This is private family stuff.’

Angelo thought that was doubtful. Most probably Donald Hamilton was in serious trouble again. When Angelo had exposed the older man’s thefts from Furnridge Leather, he had known that it would only be a matter of time until further crimes were laid at Hamilton’s door. Other people’s suspicions and worries would almost inevitably lead to an investigation of Donald Hamilton’s other financial dealings. He studied Gwenna’s pale, troubled profile and marvelled that she could still be so vulnerable and naïve. He thought it was past time that she appreciated that her parent was a greedy, lying con man without a conscience.

‘Do you think you could look after Piglet?’ Gwenna asked uncomfortably. ‘It’s just my stepmother doesn’t like dogs and I think he would be traumatised if he was put back into the pet hotel.’

Angelo felt oddly humbled by her trust in him as regards her pet, for there was no doubt that Piglet was her most precious possession. ‘Non c’è problema…no problem.’

He closed a strong, tanned hand over hers. A wave of unidentifiable emotion was washing about inside Gwenna. She wanted to lean on him but she wouldn’t let herself and could not explain why such a strange prompting should assail her.

‘When I take you home later we’ll make it a night to remember, bellezza mia,’ Angelo husked, turning her insides to a delicious jelly of shameless anticipation.

Early the following morning, she wakened and listened to Angelo moving about in the room next door. He never spent the whole night with her. He always slept alone. Yet he gave her the most unimaginable pleasure…

Angelo strode in. Fully dressed in a very snazzy designer business suit and looking devastatingly handsome, he came to a halt at the foot of the bed. Her torrent of warm honey-coloured hair was an exotic tangle that framed her heart-shaped face and accentuated her glorious blue eyes and luscious pink mouth.

‘Dio mio…I’m not sure I can let you go, cara mia,’ Angelo breathed and he was only half joking. ‘You were amazing last night.’

Although she reddened, Gwenna shifted between the sheets like a sinuous cat being stroked by silk. His purring intonation and the hot glow of his hungry gaze made her feel empowered, but she was shocked when she heard herself say, ‘You should’ve stayed…’

‘I have a meeting in an hour,’he intoned huskily. ‘It’s very important.’

The sexual buzz in the air tingled through Gwenna like a shot of adrenalin. She studied his stunning dark features from below her lashes, crystalline blue eyes limpid.

It was the first time Gwenna had given him a come-on and Angelo felt dizzy with sheer lust and triumph. He called Franco and murmured in slightly ragged Italian, ‘Inform the office that I’ve been unavoidably detained.’

He loosened the knot of his tie with an air of purpose and shed it along with his jacket. Not once did he remove his striking gaze from her perplexed face. He released the buttons on his shirt with taunting slowness.

Gwenna was paralysed by surprise and the dulled heavy sensation of warmth low in her belly. ‘What are you doing? Your meeting…’

Angelo came down on the bed beside her and reached for her with confident hands. ‘Make missing it worth my while,’he invited in erotic challenge, letting his tongue delve deep between her parted lips and ravish the sweetness from her soft mouth.

Around noon, he shook her awake. She blinked up at him like a rabbit caught in headlights, still so exhausted that her body literally felt weighted to the mattress. Angelo on the other hand looked re-energised. His black hair was still wet and spiky from the shower, his beautiful eyes brilliant as diamonds above his superb bronzed cheekbones. ‘You’ve missed your train. A driver is standing by to take you to the heliport. You can fly down to see your family. Don’t stay away too long.’

Gwenna never woke up quickly and she was as flustered by the wild passion that had exploded between them as by the prospect of being flown by helicopter to Somerset. ‘Okay…’

Angelo carried her fingers to his handsome mouth and kissed them in a mocking gesture that made her tense up even more. Straightening, he surveyed her with wolfish satisfaction. ‘Congratulations, bellezza mia.’

Gwenna gave him a bemused look. ‘For what?’

‘You finally feel like you belong to me.’

Gwenna went white.

‘That’s how I wanted it and how it has to be. There was never any way that I was going to settle for less,’ Angelo imparted silkily. ‘What price true love now? You’re more mine than you could ever be his.’

Angelo strolled out the door whistling quietly. Gwenna stared into space, a sick sense of humiliation coruscating through her. In the grip of a frantic surge of tempestuous emotion, she leapt out of bed, snatched up her dressing gown and hurtled to the door to bawl. ‘Angelo?’

Angelo came to a lazily graceful halt on the landing and swung round to regard her from below dense black lashes in mocking enquiry. ‘Yes…?’

‘Who do you think I’m thinking about whenever I’m with you?’ she hurled and even as she said it she cringed for herself. Such spite and such lying were unfamiliar to her, but every time Angelo hurt her she found herself reacting in unpredictable ways.

Angelo stared steadily back at her, eyes black as pitch, lean, strong face expressionless. She saw his loss of colour and knew her nasty retaliation had hit home. Yet she was more ashamed and troubled than pleased by her success. She felt the sudden dangerous drop in temperature and she shivered, afraid and full of regret.

Reeling back into the bedroom, she leant back against the door to close it and covered her clammy face with trembling hands. What was happening to her? What had he done to her? Since when had she been a vindictive witch who told horrible lies?

When had thoughts of Toby even entered her head in Angelo’s presence? Not once, not once had she thought of Toby. That belated realisation shocked and frightened her…

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘YOU travel in luxury: a private helicopter for your sole use and a limo and driver to deliver you right to our door?’ Donald Hamilton awarded Gwenna an admiring smile across the depth of his spacious book-lined study. ‘I’m impressed. Obviously, Angelo Riccardi thinks very highly of you.’

‘I don’t know about that. I just missed my train.’ Gwenna was already wondering if Penelope had exaggerated the family crisis because her father did not seem unduly concerned. Indeed he seemed quite relaxed. ‘Penelope made the situation here sound grave and she was very mysterious. I’ve been really worried.’

‘Then you’ll be relieved to learn that my current problem is only what you might call a footnote to that other business at Furnridge.’ The older man grimaced. ‘There I was in a hell of a bind and I did what most people in a financial crisis do—I borrowed just a little from Peter to pay Paul.’

Gwenna tensed again. ‘Meaning…er, sorry, I don’t quite understand.’

‘I’m afraid that certain irregularities in the garden committee’s accounts have been uncovered. Of course, given time I could make all good.’ Donald shrugged. ‘Unfortunately the stuffy old worrywarts on the committee are demanding instant repayment.’

‘You took money from the Massey Garden Fund…as well?’ Gwenna was appalled when she finally grasped the gravity of what she was being told. ‘What on earth were you thinking of?’

‘I don’t care for your tone, Gwenna,’ her father censured with a lofty look of reproof.

‘I just can’t believe that after all that fund-raising and all those speeches you actually helped yourself to the donations of the people who trusted you,’ she whispered painfully, shame weighing her down like a giant piece of concrete. ‘Why didn’t you mention this last month?’

‘Obviously because I hoped to be in a position to replace the money. But that’s since proved impossible. I’m unemployed, and Eva and I can barely afford to live in this house. Two members of the garden committee called yesterday. They’re threatening to call in the police.’

Her brow felt as though a tension band was tightening round it. ‘How much money are we talking about?’

Donald winced and mentioned a sum that shook her rigid.

‘Oh, my word…what are we going to do?’ she exclaimed.

‘Well, possibly you could sell a diamond necklace or something to save our skins,’ a female voice interposed with very female venom.

Gwenna looked up in dismay to see her stepsisters and her stepmother coming into the room.

‘Or, you could simply ask your fabulously rich lover to bail your father out,’ Penelope continued in the same sarcastic tone.

‘I can’t do that,’ Gwenna whispered sickly, not knowing how to explain that she did not consider herself the owner of any of the diamond jewellery that Angelo had insisted she wear.

‘Sadly, you’re the only person who can help me now,’ her father told her heavily. ‘We have no money and no hope of getting a loan.’

And with that final comment, Donald Hamilton left the room.

‘I can’t do anything,’ Gwenna said again. ‘I don’t have any money either.’

Eva spoke up for the first time. ‘If you don’t find the means to sort this out discreetly, I assure you that I will divorce your father and then he won’t even have anywhere to live. I’ve had enough. I won’t tolerate any more.’

Gwenna sighed heavily. ‘I can understand how you feel—’

‘I don’t think you do. While our lives have been crashing and burning as we struggled to pay our bills, you’ve been swanning down red carpets to film premières!’ Penelope condemned furiously. ‘I see your picture in all the top magazines and your name in the gossip columns. You’re shacked up with a Category-A billionaire!’

‘It would have been crude to present Angelo with a shopping list of demands in your very first week,’ Wanda opined, ‘but it’s time you stopped being selfish and shared your amazing good fortune with your family.’

‘That’s enough, girls,’ their mother, Eva, murmured. ‘I’m quite sure that Gwenna has got the message.’

In shock from that combined verbal attack, Gwenna was hit even harder by the pure injustice of the allegations of selfishness.

‘I don’t believe that finding the money will be a problem for you,’ Penelope remarked sweetly. ‘After all, you’re wearing a fortune on your back. That handbag alone must be worth fifteen hundred pounds!’

Gwenna stared down at her bag in horror. Did bags come that expensive? She had not a clue what any of her clothing or accessories had cost, for the simple reason that she had not shopped for them personally and they had not been delivered with price tags attached. She now deeply regretted raiding her designer wardrobe in an effort to boost her confidence in advance of an encounter with her sharp-tongued stepsisters.

‘I don’t have any money of my own and I can’t ask Angelo for it,’ she argued tautly, her mind in turmoil.

‘How can you be such a mean, selfish cow?’ Wanda demanded shrilly.

Real bitterness flooded Gwenna at that denunciation. ‘I’m not a prostitute…I won’t ask him for money.’

Her stepmother wrinkled her nose with distaste. ‘Let’s not overdo the melodrama, Gwenna. From what I’ve seen, Angelo Riccardi needs very little encouragement to spoil you rotten.’

Angry, frustrated tears blinding her, Gwenna leapt to her feet. ‘Stop talking like I’m with Angelo out of choice! Or like it was some big treat for me! I was in love with someone else, for goodness’ sake. Angelo offered me a deal—if I slept with him, he would drop the charges against Dad!’

No sooner had the words left Gwenna’s lips than she regretted an admission that she would never have made had she not been so upset and desperate to defend herself. Silence had fallen. All three women were now viewing her with dropped jaws of disbelief and she was totally mortified.

‘I had no idea,’ Eva retorted frigidly. ‘It sounds absolutely immoral and I hope you’re not blaming us for your decision. Do we need the sordid details?’

‘Angelo Riccardi had to blackmail you into bed with him?’ Wanda gasped wide-eyed. ‘I’d have knocked him flat in the rush. What’s the matter with you?’

‘That is so, so sexy.’ Penelope could not conceal her envy. ‘You are really sad, Gwenna. No normal woman would be moaning about it!’

Dumbfounded by those reactions, Gwenna walked out of the room. She was taken aback to see Toby waiting in the hall. Just as quickly she appreciated that Toby, as a member of the garden committee, would already have been informed that her father had taken money from the restoration fund.

‘I only found out about this yesterday. I volunteered to break the news to you and I couldn’t do it on the phone. I meant to make it here before you but my flight was delayed,’ Toby confided apologetically.

‘Gwenna…’ Donald Hamilton spoke from the far end of the hall in an admonishing tone.

‘Get me out of here,’ Gwenna begged her oldest friend in a frantic whisper, before turning back to address her father. ‘I don’t know what to say to you right now. I need to think things over. Please don’t expect me to pull off a miracle. I’ll be in touch.’

Ignoring the older man’s protests, Toby ushered her quickly out to his car. ‘Look, I’m booked in at the Four Crowns inn for the night. Why don’t we go there to talk?’

Her mobile phone was buzzing. It was Angelo calling. He was still talking to her, then. But her surge of guilty relief was short-lived when she contemplated telling Angelo about her parent’s latest act of embezzlement. Mentally shrinking from that ghastly challenge, she switched off her phone. When they arrived at the Four Crowns, Toby confessed that he hadn’t eaten for hours and added that, as far as he knew, starving had never solved a crisis. Neither of them mentioned the theft over a late dinner. Afterwards they went up to his comfortable room with its ancient oak beams to talk over a bottle of wine.

‘I’ll be blunt. The committee is champing at the bit to call in the police but I persuaded them to hold off for another day or so. They don’t want the scandal of this going public in case it inhibits further donations to the fund,’ Toby explained. ‘Is Angelo likely to bail your dad out?’

Gwenna swallowed hard. ‘I doubt it—Angelo won’t be sympathetic.’

‘But Angelo struck me as keen on you.’

Gwenna reddened because she didn’t feel that she could point out that her sole value in Angelo’s terms was of a highly physical nature. And that after the lie she had flung at Angelo earlier, even that low measure of her worth had probably hit rock-bottom.

‘I won’t say what I’d like to say about your father.’

‘I appreciate that…’ Gwenna flinched nervously as a knock sounded on the door.

Toby opened the door. Gwenna saw Angelo and her heart reacted as if it were jumping right out of her chest. She jumped to her feet, Delft-blue eyes locking in sudden fear to the icy black outrage flaming in Angelo’s glittering gaze. As she moved forward Angelo hit Toby, who went flying backwards to fall against the side of the bed.

‘Are you insane?’ Gwenna shrieked.

‘You were lying on his bed!’ Angelo gritted. ‘Stay out of this. This is between me and him—’

‘I’m not a coward, but I’ve just never seen the point of all that macho shouting and thumping stuff,’ Toby groaned, hugging his ribs and struggling to catch his breath.

Angelo studied him in incredulous disgust. ‘He won’t even fight for you!’

‘Why would he fight for me? He’s gay,’ Gwenna said woodenly, crouching down beside Toby to ask him if he was all right.

‘Gay?’ Angelo thundered in disbelief.

‘Gay,’ Toby confirmed, squinting at Gwenna in surprise and then back at Angelo. ‘Didn’t she mention it?’

‘It was none of Angelo’s business,’ Gwenna declared, refusing to look at either man.

Angelo strode forward and immediately extended a hand down to Toby to help the younger man up. ‘I’m sorry. I owe you a sincere apology.’He sent Gwenna a shimmering glance of challenge. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? How wasn’t it my business?’

Her cheeks flushed a discomfited pink, Gwenna folded her lips on a stinging retort. A slanging match in front of Toby in which Angelo was certain to give as good as he got would only embarrass her more. She already felt foolish, angry and guilty that Toby had got hurt. She did not want to recall that, when she first realised that Angelo had followed her down to Somerset, she had been pleased.

‘Are you coming back to my hotel with me?’ Angelo drawled softly.

Gwenna jerked her chin in grudging affirmation. ‘How could you do that?’ she snapped the minute she was alone with Angelo.

‘You’re responsible for that stupid farce,’ Angelo drawled with cutting cool, thrusting open the inn door for her to precede him into the car park.

‘And how do you make that out?’ Gwenna demanded.

‘You didn’t answer your mobile phone. You walked out of your father’s house with the man you told me you loved. You then dined alone with him and went upstairs to his hotel room. What was I supposed to think?’

‘That not everyone is as oversexed as you are!’

Gay! The guy was gay! Why hadn’t she said? Angelo’s aggressive jaw line squared. She was all sweetness and light with everyone else, but she had gone out of her way to put him through the equivalent of a meat mincer. Subtle torture of the most female kind. Naturally he had found it offensive that her main source of interest should be another man, when it was his bed she was sharing! When she had thrown that fact in his teeth earlier that day, Angelo had been dismayed by the discovery that he was struggling to restrain his temper even with his staff.

‘I still don’t understand how you knew where I was today.’

Angelo dealt her a sardonic look. ‘I always know where you are. Whenever you go out, someone on Franco’s team watches over you. I’m in the public eye. I have enemies. Even if the only threat is from the paparazzi, you need protection.’

Gwenna could hardly contain her annoyance. ‘It’s like being under police surveillance…why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Your safety is my concern. So, tell me the tale of Toby,’ Angelo invited, determined to satisfy his curiosity. ‘How did you manage to fall for someone who’s gay?’

Gwenna worried at her lower lip with her teeth before she finally answered. ‘It was a secret and I wasn’t in on it when I first knew him. By the time I found out, it was too late.’

‘How too late? Finding out that should have been a wake-up call,’ Angelo said very drily.

‘It’s not that simple—’

‘In the same scenario I would find it very simple.’

Gwenna tilted her chin. ‘When did you last fall for anyone?’

Angelo felt as if he had been dumped in conversational quicksand. He didn’t do love, didn’t believe in it, didn’t go into the building, never mind the living room. Love was a four-letter word that had never crossed his lips since childhood and not something he was prepared to talk about. His icy reserve was well known. People didn’t ask him personal questions. They didn’t have the nerve. They didn’t want to irritate him.

‘How come you can ask me but I can’t ask you?’ she prompted in the simmering silence.

‘Dio mio…I don’t fall. Okay?’

Gwenna fixed stunned china-blue eyes on him. ‘You mean…ever?’

‘So what?’ Angelo was infuriated by her compassionate look that implied he must be some kind of emotional cripple.

Gwenna wished she hadn’t asked. She felt terribly sad for him and hastened to breach the awkward silence. ‘My grand-mother used to say that it takes all sorts to make a world,’ she continued brightly. ‘I suppose that if I’d ever met anyone else worth caring about, I would’ve got over Toby. There again, he would be a hard act to follow. He’s very creative—he designs parks and gardens. We have a lot in common—’

‘Soil…plants…’ Angelo slotted in with lethal derision. ‘The wow factor.’

Her heart-shaped face tightened. ‘Toby’s really special—kind and caring.’

Worth caring about. Although he wasn’t looking for love, Angelo felt affronted. Toby was kind, caring and creative. It was not a level playing field. Possibly Toby filled in for the saints in his spare time. Angelo decided that pursuing the topic was beneath his dignity.

It was almost midnight when they arrived at the Peveril House hotel. A private lift whisked them up to an opulent suite that comprised several rooms. Gwenna had taken one step through the door when Piglet hurled himself at her in rapturous welcome.

‘My word, you brought him with you!’ Gwenna pounced happily on her pet. ‘Thank you.’

Angelo wondered how he was supposed to have left behind a dog that went on hunger strike without her. Piglet had to be the most successful attention-seeker in canine history.

The next morning, Gwenna woke up at nine. In spite of everything she had slept like a log and Angelo had left her undisturbed. Totally undisturbed. Maybe he had realised how exhausted she had been. She was surprised that he hadn’t asked about the nature of her family crisis the night before. But then why should he be interested? But if he wasn’t interested, why had he followed her down to Somerset?

She could no longer avoid the disagreeable decision she had to make. Did she or did she not ask Angelo to help her father? Certainly, she didn’t want to make that approach. In fact she cringed at the very thought of it. But although Eva and her daughters had been unpleasant and her father had treated the matter far too lightly, Gwenna still felt that she should do what she could to try and help. The money had been taken from the garden fund around the same time as the money from Furnridge. In many ways it could be seen as another strand of the same offence, she told herself bracingly.

When she appeared for breakfast, Angelo acknowledged her with an inclination of his handsome dark head. He was poised by a desk across the room and talking in rapid Italian, and it was clear to her that he was fully engaged in business. She watched him covertly while she chased some cereal round a bowl, her appetite steadily dwindling at the prospect of the dialogue that lay ahead.

Angelo tossed the phone aside and strolled fluidly towards her. In a well-cut suit the colour of rich caramel, a silk shirt and a narrow trendy tie, he was drop-dead beautiful, she acknowledged helplessly.

‘Sleep well?’ he enquired casually.

‘Yes…thanks.’

‘I didn’t.’ Lean, powerful face intent, Angelo lounged back against the table edge. He watched her with a smouldering intensity that spoke louder than any words. Slow, painful colour inched up her pale, slender throat and into her cheeks and she didn’t ask him why he hadn’t slept well because she knew. ‘Come here,’ he breathed softly.

And she lifted out of her chair before she even appreciated that she was going to move. With a husky sound of amusement, Angelo curved an assured hand to her hip and looked her up and down with bold visual appreciation. ‘I picked out that dress for you in New York.’

Gwenna was surprised. ‘I didn’t know you picked anything.’

Angelo was wholly engaged in admiring the enchanting picture she made. The dress was a perfect fit for her luscious curves and the exact same shade of blue as the one she had worn the day they met. ‘Only a couple of items that caught my eye. I’ve decided that we need a break, bellezza mia,’ he imparted. ‘We’re flying to Sardinia at the end of the week.’

‘Are you serious?’ Gwenna exclaimed.

‘I have a house there…a huge garden,’ Angelo tossed in for good measure. ‘You’ll love it and so will I. Like your plants, I need copious amounts of sunlight and attention to thrive.’

Gwenna studied him uncertainly. ‘Don’t you want to know why I needed to see my family yesterday?’

Angelo released his breath in a slow, expressive hiss. ‘I have a fair idea.’

Her smooth brow furrowed. ‘How? I mean…you didn’t say anything,’ she faltered.

‘How? I have senior staff at Furnridge and the rumours about the depredations on the local garden fund hit the grapevine there a few days ago,’ Angelo confided with precision. ‘I then made further enquiries, which is why I’m here.’

‘It’s not just a rumour.’

Level dark eyes gazed steadily down at her. ‘I didn’t think it would be.’

Gwenna moistened her dry lips. ‘My father took the money and used it to try and conceal the sums he had taken from Furnridge.’

Angelo lifted his hand to skate a warning forefinger gently across her full lower lip. ‘Let’s rewind and not have this conversation. I don’t like the direction I suspect it might be taking.’

Her lashes fluttered up on her bemused gaze. ‘How am I supposed to answer that?’

‘Hopefully with a change of subject. Your life has moved on.’

‘You don’t just move on from family.’

His lean face was sombre. ‘You could be surprised.’

‘You knew about this and you didn’t even mention it last night?’ Gwenna shook her head in genuine confusion. ‘No wonder you didn’t ask me what was wrong! How do you keep things in separate compartments like that?’

‘I’m a practical guy,’ Angelo quipped.

‘But just to ignore the whole issue like that…’

Angelo lifted and dropped a broad shoulder in silence.

Gwenna could feel the chill in the air. She also noticed that he was no longer touching her. ‘Angelo…’

‘Don’t go there, bellezza mia,’ Angelo cautioned.

Gwenna spun away from him and turned round again in a troubled half-circle. ‘You can’t know what I’m about to say before I’ve even said it!’

‘Can’t I?’ Angelo countered bleakly.

‘You’re making this very hard for me. Do you think I find it easy to ask you for money?’ she prompted unevenly and then groaned out loud. ‘And now I’m making a mess of it.’

‘Not at all. You’ve packaged yourself very prettily for the challenge. No jeans and T-shirt in sight,’ Angelo derided softly.

Gwenna scrutinised him in sincere shock. ‘You really think that that’s why I’m dressed like this? I’m packaging myself? I’m not like that—’

‘I thought you weren’t like that too. Sadly, you seem set on course to prove me wrong.’

Pale and taut, Gwenna stilled, her eyes full of strain. ‘Stop being clever and trying to scare me into silence. Don’t you understand that I can’t not ask?’

‘No, I don’t. Do you honestly believe that your father is a deserving cause? A truly penitent sinner worthy of a helping hand?’

His cold contempt lashed stinging colour into her cheeks. ‘He’s my father and I love him. Just at present, I’m ashamed of him too,’ she confided with a catch in her low-pitched voice. ‘He’s weak and he’s broken the law and he’s betrayed the trust of others, but he’s still my closest living relative—and I can’t forget how he stood by me when I was a child.’

Angelo vented a harsh laugh. ‘And what if he didn’t stand by you in quite the way you imagine?’

Gwenna gazed back at him in bewilderment. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Forget it. I was thinking of something else.’

Angelo veiled his granite hard gaze. She would have to deal with the truth some time. But now when she was already upset would be very poor timing. He would tell her in Sardinia and that would cut her loose. Like most con men, Hamilton was a seasoned liar and his life had more sordid secrets than a soap opera. Once she had been made to face the reality, she would soon rethink her sentimental take on family ties. And although he thought it regrettable that she would lose that trusting naivety in the process, he was determined to do it.

Gwenna laced her fingers through each other and threw back her slight shoulders as she steeled herself. ‘I desperately want my father to have the chance to turn his life around—’

Angelo threw up his hands in a gesture of total derision and walked over to the window to turn his back on her. ‘Oh…please,’ he said acidly.

‘He’ll never do it if nobody believes in him. He’ll go to prison if the garden committee has to press charges and what choice do they have? Some very influential people donated money to the fund. Please consider replacing the money,’ she whispered shakily. ‘Even as a loan.’

‘Dio mio…A loan with what security?’ Angelo swung back and rested sardonic dark-as-night eyes on her. ‘You almost had me convinced that you were different and I liked that idea. A lady with principles. Until now you had the unique distinction of being the only woman who has never asked me for money…Or jewels to the value of.’

The blood drained from below her fine creamy skin. She wanted to sink through the floor in shame and could not sustain his challenging gaze. The line that divided right from wrong was no longer as well defined as she had once believed it to be. Even while she felt bound in duty to try and protect her father, she was appalled by what she was doing.

‘You also told me that you couldn’t be bought,’ Angelo reminded her darkly. ‘But you just named your price.’

Hot, prickly tears hit the backs of her eyes. ‘Angelo…I really didn’t want to do this—’

‘Yet you did. If I wanted to play games, I could ask you what’s in it for me. But it would be cruel to put you on the spot when I have no intention of giving you a positive response. Do I care what happens to your father? No. Do I wish to please you to that extent? I’m afraid not,’ Angelo completed with chilling cool.

That final assertion hurt as much as an unexpected slap in the face. It was one thing to tell herself that her sole value to Angelo Riccardi was sexual, quite another to be confronted with his unapologetic confirmation of the fact. Indeed he was so cold, so unemotionally distant, that he frightened her. It was as though the last month hadn’t happened and he had reassumed the guise of a callous stranger.

Gwenna straightened her taut shoulders. ‘I’m sorry I made the mistake of believing that you might have some compassion.’

‘I reserve compassion for worthy causes and your father will never feature in that category.’

‘Yet you can squander a fortune on stupid clothes for me! Hang diamonds worth…whatever round my neck!’ she protested in a feverish rush of incomprehension. ‘Even the way you sneer at me for caring about what happens to my father—’

‘I don’t sneer—’

‘Your voice does it for you!’

‘Your father is trying to use you again. Where’s your common sense? Can’t you tell? Does a decent man let his daughter pay for his freedom with her body?’ Angelo raked at her with derision.

Gwenna gulped. ‘That’s not fair. Dad thinks we’re really involved—’

‘We are really involved—’

‘You know what I mean. He thinks we care about each other,’ she shot back wretchedly. ‘And since you said it first—does a decent man ask a woman to pay for her father’s freedom with her body?’

Outrage flashed in Angelo’s punitive appraisal. ‘Per meraviglia. Don’t pair me with your father in the same sentence. If people could still be bought and sold like goods, he’d be the first to sell you to me at a profit!’

‘That’s a filthy lie! My father loves me—’

‘He’s a con man and a swindler,’ Angelo sliced in with cutting hauteur. ‘I’ve an even better question for you to ask yourself. What sort of man steals his eight-year-old daughter’s inheritance from her?’

Her feathery brows lifting in a frown of incomprehension, Gwenna stared back steadily at him. ‘What are you saying? I’m sorry…what’s that supposed to mean? What inheritance?’

Lean, darkly handsome features taut, Angelo swore under his breath for he had not intended to reveal that information. ‘Donald Hamilton forged his own version of your mother’s will.’

It took so much effort to concentrate that Gwenna felt dizzy. ‘Forged? I beg your pardon?’

‘There’s a lot of solid evidence. Handwriting experts have been consulted. The will is not even a clever fake. One witness and the solicitor involved have since died,’ Angelo explained. ‘The second witness, however, has been tracked down abroad and he’s prepared to swear that the will is not the document he originally signed in your mother’s presence. Your father forged another will and named himself as the main beneficiary. He wanted the Massey Manor estate and he took advantage of your mother’s death to steal it from you.’

Gwenna was shaking her head back and forth like a metronome. ‘This is nonsense, totally ridiculous nonsense—’

‘And when your father rushed to offer you a home and adopt you, everybody was surprised but impressed. Nor did anyone ask why a woman who had been known to have hated him would have left him everything she possessed.’

‘Angelo…this is wicked, what you’re trying to insinuate, what you’re saying,’ Gwenna told him jerkily, words and phrases getting jumbled as she attempted unsuccessfully to master her shock.

‘I’m sorry. It’s the truth.’

‘No…no, it can’t be.’ Gwenna grabbed up her bag from the seat where she had left it the night before and hauled out her phone.

‘Who are you calling?’

‘Toby.’

Angelo snatched the phone off her. ‘What do you need with him?’

‘Give me my phone!’ Gwenna screeched at him.

‘Think before you spill the beans…can you trust Toby James with such highly sensitive information?’ Angelo set her phone down on the table between them as though it were a very dangerous weapon. ‘He’s on that garden committee, isn’t he?’

Gwenna snatched up her phone but she did not make the call. She wanted to hit Angelo for making her think twice about contacting her best friend for support. Her throat was thick with emotion. ‘Dad did not forge my mother’s will and this entire issue is nothing to do with you.’

‘He signed over the property against his debt to Furnridge. If he didn’t legally own the estate, he committed another act of fraud. Perhaps you would prefer the police to investigate the matter.’

A chill settled over Gwenna then. She felt as if she were trapped in a nightmare from which there was no escape. Angelo settled a hand to her spine. She pulled away in a violent movement of rejection.

‘You had to be told some time, bellezza mia.’

Gwenna shot him a defiant glance. ‘I intend to discuss your insane allegations with my father.’

‘You should see the evidence first.’ Angelo removed a file from the drawer of the desk and walked back to hand it to her.

‘Go away,’ she urged unevenly.

Angelo went out to the hall where Piglet had been corralled in disgrace. The little dog’s morning walk had concluded with the noisy harassment of a driver climbing out of his car. Angelo had been quite heartened when he’d heard about that unprovoked attack. It was good to know that he wasn’t the only man that Piglet hated. Purposefully leaving the door back into the drawing room ajar, Angelo watched Piglet take the bait and pelt past him to join Gwenna with a triumphant burst of barking.

Clutching her pet below one arm, Gwenna sat down at the desk and opened the file. There were legal letters, samples of her mother’s signature, expert opinions. But when she came on the deposition from the man who had witnessed her mother’s will, her tummy turned queasy. The witness was prepared to swear in court that Isabel Massey had left her estate to her child.

When Angelo reappeared half an hour later, Gwenna was proud that she had hung onto her composure. She stood up. ‘I want to see my father.’

‘He’ll give you a pack of excuses. My staff tell me that that’s how he operates,’ Angelo advanced.

‘I can handle it.’ Her blue eyes were bright as stars with defiance as she looked steadily back at him.

‘I’m sorry but I can’t agree.’

‘What the hell has it got to do with you? How would you know?’ she practically screamed at him, the sudden uncontrollable flare of her temper taking her by storm and shocking her.

Angelo remained tactfully silent.

‘You think I’m going to lose it. Well, I’m not going to. I only lose it with you!’ she muttered defensively.

Gwenna sat in the limo like a stone statue, but below the surface she was seething with a mess of disturbed emotions. The vehicle pulled up outside her father’s home.

‘You don’t have to confront him. Why don’t you let me deal with this?’ Angelo asked levelly.

‘He’s my father.’ Clutching the file, Gwenna climbed out. ‘And don’t you dare come in!’

CHAPTER NINE

DONALD HAMILTON leafed frantically through the file Gwenna had presented him with. Finally he thrust it down on the table. His complexion had taken on an unhealthy grey hue, his shock palpable. ‘Did Angelo Riccardi put all that stuff together for you?’

‘Yes,’ Gwenna breathed. ‘Please don’t tell me any lies. I need to hear the truth.’

‘It looks a lot worse than it is,’ Donald declared defensively. ‘Let me explain how it happened—’

‘It wasn’t something that just happened. Don’t talk as though it was something that you had no control over,’ Gwenna broke in tautly. ‘You forged my mother’s will so that I was left penniless. That’s what it comes down to!’

‘You’re making too much of this,’ the older man argued vehemently. ‘It all started out quite innocently. When you were a baby, I tried to persuade your mother, Isabel, into a business partnership. I hoped that together we could build houses on the Massey estate.’

‘Build?’ Gwenna parroted. ‘But it’s against the law to develop a site that’s been listed as being of historical significance.’

‘It was over twenty years ago and the estate wasn’t listed then,’ he reminded her doggedly. ‘I wanted to make some money for us all. Isabel was as poor as a church mouse, but she went crazy when I suggested the property deal. Playing lady of the manor, even if the big house was in ruins, was very important to your mother.’

‘I know,’ Gwenna acknowledged reluctantly.

‘By the time you were born, my relationship with Isabel was only a friendship,’ Donald Hamilton contended.

That was not how Gwenna remembered it. The affair had waxed and waned according to her father’s mood. Her mother’s bitterness had escalated when she had finally begun to appreciate that the man she had loved for so long had never cared for her the way she cared for him.

‘My first marriage was a disaster and I wanted a divorce. Developing the Massey estate seemed like my only escape route,’ the older man continued with determination. ‘I needed to make a lot of money. I had a wife to keep, I had you and your mother to support and, by then, I’d also met another woman.’

Gwenna could not say that she was surprised by that admission. ‘Didn’t that happen to you rather too often? Off with the old, on with the new?’

Her father grimaced. ‘I don’t expect you to understand but Fiorella was different. She was an Italian, very glamorous. I hoped to marry her but that affair blew up in my face—’

Gwenna frowned. ‘I don’t see what all this has got to do with my mother’s will.’

‘I’m trying to explain why I did what I did.’

Unimpressed by what struck her as a clumsy attempt to somehow excuse the inexcusable, Gwenna stared at the damning file, which lay on the coffee table. Beneath the table, Piglet sighed in his sleep. She was beginning to wonder why she had even bothered coming to see her father. She felt empty. Nothing he could say was going to make her feel better about the fact that he had stolen her birthright and held onto it for so many years at her expense. She had felt so guilty about his first marriage breaking up. He had allowed her to believe that her adoption had led to his divorce. Yet he had just admitted that he had wanted out of that marriage.

Things she had closed her eyes to, comparisons that it hurt to make, were now crowding in on her. Her stepsisters had grown up in a lovely big house with their mother and her father, while Gwenna had been exiled to a down-market boarding-school that she’d hated. During the holidays, her presence in her father’s marital home had been barely tolerated by her stepfamily. Gwenna had scrimped and saved and worked part-time through all her college courses. From the age of eighteen, she had lived in a cramped and shabby little flat that was basically just the roof space above a glorified shed of a shop and she had run the nursery for a meagre wage. Yet a mere word of approbation from her father had been sufficient to keep her walking on air for days afterwards.

‘Gwenna…’ Donald Hamilton spoke with unusual urgency. ‘You have to listen to me.’

‘If you want me to listen, tell me something relevant. The story of your romance with some glamorous Italian woman isn’t,’ she muttered with distaste.

‘In this case, it is,’he insisted. ‘One day three men walked into my office in broad daylight and told me I’d been messing around with a very important man’s daughter, who already had a husband. I was warned that if I wanted to stay alive and prosper I had to get out of Fiorella’s life.’

‘Really?’ Gwenna only registered that her father had been indulging in an affair with a married woman and she thought it served him right if he had for once been called to account for his behaviour. ‘Maybe my mum would have had a happier life if she’d had a father capable of pulling the same stunt.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Gwenna. They put a gun to my head— I thought I was going to die!’ Donald Hamilton protested furiously. ‘They were violent criminals.’

‘I’m sure,’ Gwenna sighed, wondering where the tall tale would go next.

‘I was managing Fiorella’s money and she was a wealthy woman. Her father’s thugs demanded that I hand over all of that money. They escorted me to the bank and waited while I made arrangements to withdraw her cash. But she’d already spent a good deal of it and the men threatened to come back and visit me a third time if I didn’t cover the amount that had been spent. I had to pay up. They bled me dry. Needless to say I cut loose fast from Fiorella, but I was financially ruined.’

‘I’m sorry…I don’t believe any of this and I don’t know how you can expect me to.’

‘Your mother’s solicitor worked in the same practice as I did. He was elderly, overdue for retirement. It was easy to remove papers from his safe,’ the older man admitted. ‘I approached a loan company in London and pretended I owned the Massey estate. Using it as security, I borrowed a large sum of money. I had to have some way of meeting my obligations at home. Remember you and your mother were my dependants then.’

Gwenna frowned, finally grasping the connection, even if she didn’t credit the preceding story. ‘How could you do that to my mother? Was she just one more person to be used and fleeced? Is there anyone you won’t use?’

‘When your mother died, there was still an outstanding loan against the estate and I had to cover up the evidence of that. What choice did I have? I may have forged that will but I did it with the best of intentions. I had such wonderful plans.’

A ragged laugh fell from her lips. ‘Mum wanted me to have the estate, not you.’

‘I gave you a home. I adopted you,’ her father reminded her without hesitation. ‘I hoped to develop the estate and you would have benefited from that too, if it had come off.’

‘I don’t think so. I was just a means to an end and a cheap way to keep the nursery going.’ Gwenna lifted the file and got up on stiff legs. ‘I’m taking the Jeep. It’s mine.’

‘You can’t leave like this. What’s going to happen now?’ Vaulting to his feet, the older man skimmed an apprehensive glance out the window.

She followed his gaze. Angelo was leaning up against the long gleaming bonnet of his ridiculously sumptuous car. She realised that she didn’t care what action Angelo took over her parent’s most recent act of fraud. Presumably Angelo would relish the opportunity to prosecute him. That was fine by her but it also meant that her private agreement with Angelo would be null and void. Her father would be arrested and charged and he would go to court. And if she could not or would not intervene that meant that she was free again, as free as a bird, she registered numbly.

‘That’s Angelo Riccardi?’ her father queried, his frown deepening. ‘He looks younger than he does in newsprint. He reminds me of someone. Why don’t you invite him in?’

‘I don’t want to,’ she admitted without apology.

She walked out to the kitchen, grabbed the keys to the old four-wheel drive and went straight out to the yard at the back. She drove round the house, braking to a halt beside the limo before she could lose her nerve. With clumsy fingers, she frantically lowered the creaking window.

The epitome of cool, Angelo elevated an enquiring brow. ‘Is that a roadworthy vehicle?’

‘Don’t be a snob,’ Gwenna breathed tightly. ‘Well, I suppose this is it. Our arrangement is over.’

Disturbed by the hollow, unfocused look in her eyes, Angelo cut in. ‘Over?’

‘You can press charges against my father. I don’t care any more.’

His dark, lustrous eyes glittered. ‘You don’t mean that—’

‘Yes, I do. He’s a horrible man,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m certainly not going to sacrifice my life to keep him out of prison, so go ahead and prosecute him.’

‘I wasn’t referring to your father. It’s the, “over” angle that I was questioning,’ Angelo countered with pronounced care. ‘You and me…’

Gwenna stared out the windscreen, her classic profile pale and tight. ‘There is no you and me,’ she whispered.’ There was an arrangement and now it’s finished. If the will was forged, the Massey estate is mine and just as soon as the legal work’s done and your staff move on, I’ll be taking over there again.’

‘This is not the place to stage this discussion—’

‘I don’t have to discuss it. You can keep the clothes and forward the rest of my stuff to the nursery.’ With that final assurance, Gwenna angled her vehicle round the nose of the limo and sped off down the drive.

Angelo was thunderstruck by the turn of events. She had taken him by surprise. How had that happened? He was always ahead of the game. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that she might walk away once she stopped caring about what happened to her father? When had he lost his grip to that extent?

Piglet appeared round the corner of the house and ran past him in frenzied pursuit of Gwenna’s old banger of a car. Left behind, the little dog had had a hair-raising encounter with the white Persian who ruled the Hamilton kitchen and he had fled through the cat flap.

For about ten seconds, Angelo stared after the dog in frowning surprise, and then, seeing the distraught little animal charging right out into the road, he unfroze and sprinted down the drive. Shouting at his team, Franco took off after him. The older man reached the roadside just in time to see his employer make a dive for Piglet, who was running frantically through the traffic. Scooping the little animal up, Angelo tossed him onto the grass verge and almost lost his balance in the process. As he rocked back on his heels, he was clipped by the wing of a car. Flung up over the bonnet, he came crashing down again to the accompaniment of squealing brakes and strident shouts. He lay still on the road, blood seeping from the side of his head. Shaking and whining with fright, Piglet sought security from the only familiar face and darted nervously into the shelter of Angelo’s body to lick at his hand.

Gwenna had almost driven right through the village before she realised that she had not a clue where to go. At first she did not want to think about anything that had happened that morning. Every thought seemed laden with the threat of hurt and she felt curiously unable to cope even with the comparatively minor decision of where to go next.

The familiar sight of the Massey Manor gates took care of that concern for her. That part of the estate was closed to vehicular traffic and she parked outside, scrambling out to walk up the rough lane that had once been the entrance drive to the house. For the first time she wondered if her inability to think and react normally related to shock. Shock at her father’s treachery and greed?

Shock at the revelation that she was, after all, the rightful owner of the estate that had been in her family for generations? Of course that fact would have to be ratified by a court of law before it was officially hers but, even so, it was good news, wasn’t it? Nobody would ever be able to take the estate away from her again and in her hands it would be safe. The plant nursery would belong to her once more. It had made a reasonable income. When she was no longer required to pass over all the profits to her father, she would be able to build up the business and look forward to more comfortable takings in the future.

Yet even those rousing prospects failed to comfort her. What she had learned about her only surviving parent had devastated her. Worse still she was looking back and seeing that, although she had chosen to avoid acknowledging it, she had always been a rank outsider in her father’s family circle. She had hovered on the sidelines, eager to please, desperate to make a place for herself at the Old Rectory and most often ignored, dismissed or scorned.

She wandered round the overgrown grounds of the estate for quite a while and the familiarity of her surroundings helped her to calm down somewhat. Perhaps, she finally conceded, she was also a little bit in shock at the concept of a life that no longer contained Angelo. How had he managed to become so entwined with her every thought and expectation? Why could she not imagine a future without him? Her mind served up a compelling image of Angelo. Aggressive and dynamic, he lived and moved at a fast pace. His electric energy, high expectations and impatience were symptomatic of his genius. He was only still and silent when he was asleep. At last she let herself contemplate the prospect of never seeing Angelo again and she realised with greater shock than ever that it hurt much more than anything else had that day. She pressed clammy hands to her tear-wet cheeks and sank down shakily on the worn sun-warmed steps of the old house.

When had she stopped hating Angelo? And why hadn’t she realised that she had long since stopped hating him? At what point had Toby begun to feel like a much loved friend rather than the source of her unfulfilled dreams? How could she have fallen in love with Angelo? She fought all the time with him! He always knew best about everything! What interests did they share? But she got quite a buzz out of fighting with him, didn’t she? He was incredibly attractive and sexy and he made everything seem wildly exciting. Was it an infatuation? Well, she was soon going to have the chance to find out, wasn’t she? She had just dumped him.

Could she change her mind about that? Would that be foolish? Pathetic? Or was it her duty to go cold turkey and get over him? Why, oh, why had she left her phone in the car? Suppose Angelo had called her?

It was at that point that Gwenna finally registered Piglet’s absence and realised that she had left her pet behind at the Old Rectory. What a state she must have been in to walk out of there and just forget about poor Piglet! Rising upright and dusting down her dress, she went back down the lane and found Toby walking round her car and peering in.

‘Looking for me?’ she asked, unlocking the driver’s door and immediately reaching for her phone.

‘I was surprised to see your car parked here…’

There were a number of missed calls on her phone and she was about to access them to check out the caller when she noticed the odd note in Toby’s voice. ‘What’s up?’

‘I assumed you’d be at the hospital.’ Toby was watching her closely for signs of reaction. ‘You don’t know, do you? Angelo’s been involved in an accident.’

Her tummy flipped and her head swam. Angelo…accident. She stared at Toby in horror. ‘An accident? Where? When?’

‘Your stepmother saw it happen. She was coming home with her shopping—’

‘Never mind where she was coming from—just tell me about Angelo! Is he all right?’

‘Look, I’ll take you to the hospital now.’ Toby tucked her into the passenger seat of his low-slung sports car.

‘Toby!’ she prompted sickly. ‘Just tell me!’

Toby drove out onto the road and cleared his throat. ‘Eva said he was unconscious. He was hit by a car—’

‘You mean his car was hit—’

‘Angelo wasn’t in his car. It’s possibly not the moment to mention it, but Piglet’s all in one piece.’

‘What’s Piglet got to do with it?’

So Toby told her that Angelo had saved her dog’s life. Angelo, who had once referred to her pet as a piranha fish on four legs. She felt sick with fear and horribly guilty.

‘It was an item on the lunchtime news. I didn’t quite appreciate how important the guy was—’

‘Where is he?’ Gwenna interrupted.

‘I’m taking you straight there.’

Her mobile rang and she snatched it up. It was Franco. She was grateful for his calm but disturbed to hear that Angelo had still not regained consciousness. Having warned her that the press were gathering at the front of the hospital, Franco arranged to meet her in a less public location.

‘I’ve told everyone that you’re Mr Riccardi’s partner,’ Franco confessed, within a minute of their harried meeting.

Considering the connotations of that label and deeming them an outright lie in her case, Gwenna bit her lip. ‘I don’t think that…I mean—’

‘That’s the only way you’ll be allowed to see him, Miss Hamilton. Lawyers are already on their way here to take charge.’

Gwenna stepped into the lift. The only way you’ll be allowed to see him. The risk of being barred from seeing Angelo was quite enough to silence her qualms. ‘Lawyers?’

‘Decisions have to be made quickly about Mr Riccardi’s treatment. You care about him. I trust you to make the right choices.’ Franco looked grave. ‘If you don’t accept the responsibility, other interests could step in and take over here very quickly.’

Gwenna was startled by that warning, but she respected a candour that cut right through to what was really important. In the absence of family, Angelo’s lawyers would hold sway and evidently Franco distrusted them. Angelo was hugely wealthy. Might that influence the quality of the choices made on his behalf? Angelo reposed great trust in his chief of security. Gwenna didn’t understand why Franco was so worried but she recognised his sincere concern for Angelo and hastily nodded agreement.

Franco guided her through a throng of people and into the presence of a harassed doctor, who was eager to issue a report on Angelo’s condition. He thought Angelo’s head injury should be scanned, which meant taking him to another hospital. But the lawyers were fighting over whether or not Angelo should be moved. Time was passing and the doctor was worried about the delay.

‘Go ahead and make the arrangements for the scan,’ Gwenna instructed.

‘You’ll take responsibility?’

‘Yes, may I see him now?’ Gwenna was struggling to contain her fierce impatience.

Angelo was pale, the side of his face cut and badly bruised and he was very, very still. She closed her hand over his limp brown fingers curled on top of the sheet. Swallowing convulsively, she sat down by the bed. Angelo just about tolerated Piglet, yet he had put himself in jeopardy to save the little dog from being run over. Angelo had done a crazy but wonderful thing. And he could only have done it for her benefit. Wiping her eyes, she mustered a steadying breath and began to pray. Very few minutes passed before the nursing staff came in to prepare Angelo to be airlifted to a city hospital.

Angelo surfaced from what felt like the worst hangover of all time with a splitting headache. He was in the act of mastering a surge of nausea when he registered that a man was speaking in a sharp hectoring tone and that a hand was tightening on one of his as if he were a lifeline.

‘I’m afraid you’re going to hear my opinion whether you want it or not, Miss Hamilton,’ the suave lawyer intoned with contempt. ‘The scan was a waste of time. You let a junior doctor dictate a decision that may have seriously damaged Mr Riccardi’s prospects of recovery.’

‘That hospital didn’t have the facilities to carry out a proper investigation. At that point, I felt that there was no time to waste.’ Gwenna was wondering how many hours it was since she had last slept, for her head felt too heavy to be supported by her neck. Dawn light was filtering through the curtains.

‘You acted without authority and with my express disagreement. Who are you? His partner?’ the lawyer derided. ‘Don’t make me laugh! You’re the daughter of a criminal, and only one more in a long line of little—’

The thick black fringe of Angelo’s lashes lifted to reveal the blazing impact of his gaze. ‘Dio mio! Stop right there if you want to stay employed,’he growled hoarsely. ‘Treat Miss Hamilton with respect. You do not abuse or bully her. Is that understood?’

Gwenna was only dimly aware of the other man’s shaken apologies and immediate retreat. She was so overjoyed that Angelo had recovered consciousness that she was incapable of appreciating anything else. Her eyes filled with tears of relief. ‘I was scared you were never going to wake up. I’ll ring the bell for the nurse.’

‘Not yet.’ Angelo surveyed her, taking in the tousled honey tumble of her hair, her mascara-smudged-and-shadowed eyes and her unflattering pallor. He had never seen her look less beautiful and could not comprehend why, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, she should look so wonderful to him. ‘How long have I been out of it for?’

‘Almost eighteen hours.’

She was still wearing the same clothes. Most probably, he reflected, she had not even looked in a mirror, for she was not vain. ‘Have you been with me all that time?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She had not left his side. She had sat up all night. He could not imagine a single woman of his acquaintance caring so little for her appearance or comfort and he was touched. ‘You fought with my lawyers for my benefit. That was very brave,’ he pronounced, retaining a firm grip on her hand. ‘Did you shout at them?’

‘No.’

‘So, it’s only me you shout at.’

Tears ready to overflow, she shook her head in wordless defeat at the over-emotional state she was in.

‘It’s a distinction that makes me feel special, bellezza mia,’ Angelo declared, wondering why he liked the fact that she was crying over him.

Gwenna darted an uncomfortable glance at him and then lowered her lashes. ‘After what I said, you must be wondering what I’m doing here.’

‘You’re here now,’ Angelo cut in with the faintest suggestion of haste. ‘Planning to go anywhere?’

And it was as if a door swept open in front of her without warning and he was already walking through it and away from her. The future had been static and unthreatening while Angelo was out for the count. Now life was beckoning again and the decision was hers. Yes to Angelo’s question would mean turning her back on her misgivings and letting her heart guide her. If she listened to common sense, she would tell him no. She did not know if she could ever forgive him for the way things had started out. But the alternative was to leave him and she could not face that. Love, she was discovering, was much more complex than she had once fondly believed and it had stolen her freedom of choice.

‘I still want you to come to Sardinia with me,’ Angelo imparted huskily. ‘I’m not putting any pressure on you. You owe me nothing.’

But she only had to look at that lean, dark, devastating face to feel the magnetic pull of the pressure he exerted without even trying. When he said that she owed him nothing he was coming as close as he was prepared to come to the fact that he had plunged her into a highly immoral arrangement. But he wasn’t saying sorry and he probably never would. Yet she still needed him, still wanted him, she acknowledged guiltily. At that moment nothing else mattered. With a preliminary knock the consultant and his staff strode in. She had to give up her seat to let them carry out their checks on Angelo but his brilliant dark gaze did not stray from her.

‘I’m waiting for an answer,’ he told her as if they were still alone.

And she gave the only answer she could give.

But it was eight full days before they managed to get together again in Sardinia. A strike by an airline that Angelo owned resulted in chaos for thousands of travellers and Angelo left hospital and flew straight to Paris to take part in talks to end the crisis. As a result, Gwenna did not see him again until she landed at Olbia on the Costa Smeralda coast. Piglet, equipped with his official pet passport, travelled out in the cargo hold of the same plane. A slender but shapely figure clad in white linen cropped trousers and a white lace top, Gwenna attracted a good deal of male attention at the airport. Eyes starry, she jumped into the passenger seat of Angelo’s Range Rover.

‘You look fantastic,’ he ground out sexily before he took her strawberry-tinted mouth in a devastatingly sensual kiss that set every nerve-ending she possessed alight and left her quivering.

His villa rejoiced in a stunning site on the limestone cliffs of the Golfo di Orosei. The property was surrounded by vibrantly colourful tropical gardens. A twisting secret path hedged in by vegetation led down through a grove of ancient cork oaks to a private beach of white sand. The magnificent house was staggeringly opulent. The overhanging roof, natural stone walls and wood floors kept the interior cool while huge comfortable sofas heaped with cushions made it inviting.

‘And this…’ Angelo trailed out the word with purring satisfaction at the conclusion of the grand tour ‘…is the master bedroom.’

At the press of a button, the wall of glass that overlooked the sunlit stone veranda split into two sections that slid back into recesses at either side. A hint of a breeze sent the diaphanous drapes fluttering. Gwenna strolled out to enjoy the dazzling view of the Mediterranean. In the sunlight, the sea had a sparkling turquoise brilliance.

‘I’m in paradise,’ Gwenna sighed, revelling in the warmth of the sun on her skin. ‘I love the sound of the waves. It’s so soothing. Mum used to have a friend with a house at the beach and when we went to visit we stayed over. I used to fall asleep listening to the surf.’

‘How well do you swim?’

‘Like a mermaid…why do you never mention your family?’ Gwenna asked abruptly.

His lean body tensed as he closed his arms round her. ‘What is there to say? After my mother died, I stayed in foster homes between school terms. I never knew my father.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘Think of the grief your father has caused you, cara mia.’

‘That’s true.’

Angelo turned her slowly round. Dark eyes smouldering beneath his black lashes, he dropped a kiss on top of her head. ‘Chill,’ he urged huskily.

He tugged loose the ties on her lace top. The heady strength of anticipation made her breath catch in her throat. Heat was slowly uncoiling in her pelvis, sending out wicked little tendrils of sensual awareness to every part of her. The swollen peaks of her breasts pushed against the lining on her top.

‘No bra…’ Angelo registered with appreciation, sliding the edges of the lace apart as if she were his one and only gift and he was in no hurry to unwrap her. As the full perfection of the pouting swells was revealed, he expelled his breath on an admiring hiss. But the sensual appeal of the protruding velvety pink peaks wrested a hungry groan from him. He unzipped her cropped trousers, pushed them off her hips.

The burn of his gaze on her nakedness made her tingle. A clenching sensation pulsed between her thighs and she reacted to the surge of moist response there with heightened colour and an almost soundless gasp.

‘You like being stripped.’ Angelo pulled her to him and toyed with her achingly tender nipples. Exquisite sensation flooded her trembling body.

‘Yes.’ She was both shamed and excited by that new knowledge about herself. Supporting her, he let his sensual mouth engulf an engorged rose crest while he scored a forefinger back and forth across the damp band of silk stretched tight over her secret place. Involuntary whimpers of sound were forced from her. Her legs went weak and he lifted her to carry her over to the bed.

‘You’re so ready for me,’ Angelo stood over her, wrenching off his clothes.

He too was fiercely aroused and she began to conduct her own exploration. Bending her head, she pleasured him with the sensuality that he had taught her.

‘I want more…I want to be inside you,’ Angelo growled, breaking free to tumble her back against the pillows.

As he spread her slender thighs every individual fibre in her body was leaping with eager excitement. She angled her hips up in helpless supplication for his possession. He came into her hard and fast and hungry. Sweet pleasure engulfed her in a haze of passion. Tormenting sensation piled on sensation. She was frantic, her responses getting stronger and wilder. It was as if her system were on fast-forward and she was wildly out of control by the time that he sent her hurtling into an explosive climax. Hearing him cry out her name as he shuddered over her, she felt intensely happy.

‘I apologise…that was a little rough and ready, bellezza mia,’ Angelo groaned, studying her with melting tawny eyes that were slightly dazed.

Gwenna gave a delighted little shimmy beneath him and hugged him tight. If that was rough and ready, she could only look forward to refined.

Angelo tipped up her face. ‘I mean it. That was more of a quick snack than the banquet I planned.’

Noting that the bruises were fading fast from his temples and cheekbone and feeling incredibly tender towards him, Gwenna grinned up at him. ‘You are always so ambitious—’

‘I wanted you to know how much I—’

‘Missed me?’ she slotted in buoyantly.

‘How much I appreciate you,’ Angelo contradicted a shade stiffly, beautiful eyes guarded, for it felt like a major statement to him.

Smothering a yawn, Gwenna let her eyelids drift down. ‘I’m so sleepy.’

Angelo stared down at her in frustration. ‘I really appreciate you…’

‘Whatever,’ she mumbled, drowsily unimpressed.

CHAPTER TEN

GWENNA threw a stick for Piglet to fetch as she walked along the beach. Four weeks of perfect relaxation and contentment in Sardinia had put a healthy glow in her cheeks and a spring into her step. She had got her peace of mind back and the silliest things made her smile, she reflected cheerfully.

Angelo had shamelessly bribed his way into Piglet’s affections with chocolate treats. It had amused her that Angelo, so hopelessly competitive in every way, would not settle for mere tolerance from her pet. Piglet now adored Angelo and one of his favourite spots to sleep was below Angelo’s desk. Unfortunately Angelo did not appreciate Piglet’s amazingly loud snores.

Gwenna thought about the fact that she adored Angelo just as much as her pet. She was very happy, but occasionally a cold chill would run over her when she considered the inevitable end of the affair. Nothing lasted for ever and she knew it. He was sure to get bored with her. She couldn’t believe that she had what it took to hold his attention much longer. But she was determined to live for the moment…

And the moments that every fresh day brought were wonderful. Sometimes they were very active and she had been sailing, windsurfing and scuba-diving, not to mention dancing all night at a couple of exclusive clubs and at a much less exclusive street carnival. She had cheered at a horse race and had got embarrassingly tipsy at a peach festival, an instant of mistaken judgement that Angelo was prone to mentioning more than she liked. They had eaten out in tiny restaurants in inland villages where tourists were still rare and she had fallen madly in love with cheese and honey pastries. Occasionally, however, they had gone no further than their bedroom or the beach, and she had fallen asleep in his arms and wakened still in them for Angelo no longer left her to sleep in a bed of his own.

Slowly but surely she had come to recognise that he was truly making an effort to please and entertain her. He seemed gloriously unaware of the reality that she found just being with him a joy. He gave her flowers. He bestowed a jewelled collar and toys on Piglet. He ordered the food she liked best when they stayed in. He had said, rather touchingly, that he hoped it would be all right to buy her diamonds for her birthday. As that was still two months away she had been secretly overjoyed by that evidence of forward planning and stability…

The newspapers had been delivered at nine and, from the instant that Angelo saw the first headline, he was flooded by negative uneasy feelings. Blanking them out, he finally threw the papers aside and went outside to take some much-needed fresh air. He used binoculars to locate Gwenna, checking the shrubberies first and smiling at the reflection that his gardeners had been very more active since her arrival.

On this occasion, however, she was on the beach larking about with Piglet like a kid. Dressed in blue polka-dot shorts and a lemon sun top, she looked delectable. His shapely mouth compressed. She was solid gold. Unspoilt, honest and kind, as well as being the first woman to value him more than his wealth. Of course there was that guy, Toby, but Angelo had noticed that references to him had become a rarity. In any case he resolutely avoided recalling that awkward angle because, in every way that mattered, Gwenna Massey Hamilton was his. Possession was nine-tenths of the law, he reminded himself staunchly.

But sometimes as now, when disquiet put him into a more contemplative mood, Angelo was seriously spooked by what he had done to Gwenna. Once or twice he had endeavoured to get himself to the point of discussing his attitude to her when they had first met, but he had not known what he could possibly say. He knew that what he had done was unpardonable and he was just as aware that she had a lot of heart and not a spiteful bone in her beautiful body. Unfortunately, he was equally conscious of her principles, her outlook on the world, her essential trusting innocence. How could she forgive betrayal? Or cruelty? How could she ever understand a desire for revenge that had got out of hand?

He couldn’t possibly tell her the truth. It wasn’t his fault that his family tree was full of gangsters. But it was his fault that he had acted like one. He did not feel it would be wise to admit that he was haunted by the fear that there was such a thing as bad blood and that he had inherited it in his genes. After all, he had treated her badly and, put in possession of those facts, might she not understandably decide that he was a total bastard? And even if he was a total bastard, he reasoned fiercely, there was no reason why she should ever have to know. A leopard could change his spots—at least into the stripes of a tiger.

Gwenna noticed that Angelo was unusually quiet over dinner. There was a distant aspect to his lustrous dark eyes. Although he rarely touched alcohol, he took a brandy out onto the veranda without inviting her to join him. So, he was having an off-day, acting human, maybe even keen to escape the incessant chatter she occasionally directed at him, she reasoned ruefully. She was annoyed that she was being so over-sensitive and when he went down to the beach she resisted the urge to follow him. To occupy herself she lifted the newspaper he had been studying. It was a lengthy article about the life of a Mafia don who had died in South America. She took it to bed with her and ended up reading every word of the ghastly riveting stuff.

‘What are you reading?’

Startled, Gwenna looked up and focused on the tall dark male poised beyond the circle of the lamplight. ‘Angelo…where have you been?’

‘You sound like a wife.’ His dark voice was slightly slurred.

‘If I was your wife, I’d have phoned you and asked you where you were and exactly when you would be back,’ Gwenna admitted without hesitation.

Angelo flung back his cropped dark head and laughed with raw amusement. ‘I like your candour, cara mia.’

In a black designer shirt and jeans, with his masculine beauty enhanced by stubble, Angelo looked mean, moody and magnificent. Her heartbeat speeded up. He threw himself down on the bed beside her and tapped the paper she had cast down. ‘So, you’re reading about Carmelo Zanetti…’

‘He was so wicked and yet he never went to prison for his crimes—’

‘But he died in exile, alone and sick and despised.’

Gwenna blinked because she wasn’t accustomed to Angelo showing a more sensitive side unless he could make a joke of it. ‘There is that…’ Glancing back at the article, she pulled a face. ‘He was very good-looking when he was young, which is deeply creepy. Did you know he was originally from Sardinia?’

Angelo scrunched up the newspaper and thrust it clumsily off the bed.

‘What on earth—?’ Gwenna began.

He reached up and hauled her down to him, kissing her breathless with a hunger that could have burned out a bonfire. ‘I need you,’he confided hoarsely. ‘I really need you with me tonight, bellezza mia.’

Although he was far from sober, there was something in that appeal and the almost clumsy way he was holding her prisoner that melted Gwenna down deep inside. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she whispered, tracing one bronzed cheekbone with tender fingers.

He made love to her first with blazing power and potency, and then with a piercing sweetness that brought tears of gladness to her eyes in the aftermath.

‘Even when you’re drunk, you’re amazing,’ she muttered gently, wishing she knew what was wrong with him—because there was very definitely something wrong.

‘I’m not drunk,’ Angelo groaned, and even though it was a very warm night he kept hold of her until he slid into a restless sleep.

Before dawn, she wakened to see him emerging from the bathroom towelling dry his hair and she switched on the lights to study him with troubled blue eyes. ‘Can’t you sleep?’

His lean, darkly handsome face tightened. ‘I have something to tell you,’ he breathed abruptly. ‘I’ve done some stuff you know nothing about…’

Gwenna went rigid and suddenly she didn’t want to know what was wrong; she was afraid that any confession he made would haunt her for ever. She wanted to shove a brick in his mouth. Had he been with another woman? But, in the space of a month he had left her side for a total of just three nights and he had spent a lot of time on the phone to her those evenings.

Angelo had slammed the door shut on the secret room of sins concerning her inside his head. He was convinced there would be no profit and only loss if he risked walking the true confessions route. Instead he presented her with what he saw as good news, designed to alleviate her worries, protect her reputation and make her happy.

‘I’ve paid off your father’s debt to the garden restoration fund.’

Astounded by that announcement, Gwenna gazed at him with wide blue eyes. ‘That’s not possible. I thought he was being prosecuted—’

‘Prosecuting him wouldn’t be a good idea. Your father has made a full statement confessing to the forgery of your mother’s will. That’s to protect you and I from any future claim he might try to bring. I’ve also signed over ownership of the Massey estate to you. This way the dirty linen stays hidden and nobody need ever know. The garden committee is delighted—’

‘Obviously, but—’

Angelo sank down on the bed beside her. ‘If your father goes to prison now that you own the estate, some people will suspect that you were involved in his thefts. Mud sticks, cara.’

Gwenna winced. ‘I didn’t think of that…but I did think that he should be punished this time.’

‘Don’t worry. He’s an incorrigible thief. He’ll be caught stealing again and I won’t intervene,’ Angelo asserted with a confidence on that score that she found ever so slightly chilling. ‘This time around, however, I was thinking of you, and you don’t deserve to suffer any more for his crimes.’

‘Okay,’ she muttered uncertainly, wishing he had waited until she woke up properly before tackling such a serious subject. ‘But it means that you’ve lost thousands and thousands of pounds.’

Angelo shifted a smooth brown shoulder in remarkably casual dismissal. ‘My choice.’

‘And what about Furnridge?’ she pressed.

‘The company won’t suffer.’

‘But it’s just not right that you should make a loss because you want to protect me.’ Gwenna raked anxious fingers through her sleep-tangled honey-blonde tresses.

‘It feels right, bellezza mia.’ Angelo curved her back firmly into his arms and she rested her drowsy head back against his shoulder. ‘Go back to sleep.’

‘Got a hangover?’ she quipped.

‘I wasn’t drunk so I couldn’t have one,’ Angelo asserted with level cool.

Gwenna turned her head round so that her cheek rested against him. He smelt of soap and the indefinable scent that was just him. With a drowsy smile she drifted back to sleep.

She wakened to the noise of a helicopter coming in to land and a phone ringing somewhere. It was almost lunchtime. She had slept in and was surprised that Angelo hadn’t roused her. From the veranda she could hear voices speaking in Italian on the level below. It sounded as though Angelo had flown in staff to work. After a shower she put on a light skirt and top and wandered downstairs in search of Angelo. The ground floor office suite was jumping with activity. People rushed past her, hurrying between one room and the next, while phones seemed to be ringing incessantly.

‘We need a massive piece of damage limitation,’ someone was saying urgently in English. ‘But it won’t do the boss any harm in the market-place.’

Angelo was in his study and he was doing something she had never seen him do in their entire acquaintance; he was doing nothing. In spite of the obvious crisis he was staring into space, pale as death beneath his olive skin, his striking bone structure clenched into hard, forbidding lines.

Gwenna closed the door behind her. ‘Please tell me what’s wrong,’ she pressed worriedly. ‘It was wrong last night as well, but you were determined to act like everything was okay. Where were you? Did something happen?’

Angelo rose lithely upright. ‘I had a couple of drinks and then went to the church and lit a candle for my mother. I got talking to the priest. That’s why I was out so late.’

Surprise and relief assailed her. ‘I could’ve come with you…’

‘I needed some time to think. But events have caught up with me. I have to tell you what happened because that information is now in the public domain. It’s in the papers, on the TV news, all over the internet.’

‘It sounds important, but I’m sure that whatever it is can’t be as bad as you seem to think. You seem…a little shocked,’ she said gently, striving to be tactful after his rejection of the suggestion that he might have imbibed too much alcohol the night before.

Grim dark eyes rested on her. ‘I’m angry and I’m bitter, but I am not shocked.’

Gwenna went the diplomatic route and nodded in agreement.

‘And to explain, I have to go back a few years. When I was eighteen I was called to a lawyer’s office and told who my parents really were. My mother had left instructions to that effect in her will,’ Angelo volunteered flatly. ‘Before she died she had already warned me that she came from a bad family, that my father was a dangerous man and that if they found out where we lived, they would try to take me away from her.’

Gwenna thought that such knowledge must have been a very frightening burden for a little boy to carry around with him. Introduced to that culture of secrecy and fear at a very young age, it was hardly surprising that he had matured into so reserved a character.

‘Riccardi is not the name I was born with,’ Angelo continued. ‘In fact my mother changed our surname a couple of times after she came to England because she was afraid of being traced. She was running away from her heritage and I’ve spent my life denying it,’ Angelo admitted harshly.

‘What heritage?’

‘My mother was Carmelo Zanetti’s daughter and my father was the son of another crime family.’

It took Gwenna thirty seconds to work out what he was telling her and if she was aghast, it was not for the reasons he had expected. ‘My word, that old man who died this week was your grandfather and yet you didn’t trust me enough to tell me that. No wonder you were upset last night!’

‘Per amor di Dio! I wasn’t upset!’ Angelo launched at her in an immediate denial. ‘He was an evil man and I didn’t know him—we met only once when he was already dying.’

Gwenna saw that being upset fell into the same category as being drunk and in shock in Angelo’s uncompromisingly tough expectations of himself. If he said it wasn’t happening, he could avoid having to acknowledge that he had emotions. She could only imagine how disturbing he must have found that meeting with his grandfather. She would have put her arms round him if she hadn’t known that such obvious sympathy would infuriate him.

‘You may have despised the person Carmelo Zanetti was, but he was still a close relative and you’ve been on your own virtually since your mother died,’ she reminded him gently. ‘Who your parents were doesn’t matter, though. What you are inside is more important.’

‘And where did you pick up that piece of worldly wisdom? Out of a Christmas cracker?’ Angelo derided.

Gwenna stood her ground. ‘What you do with your life matters more than your ancestry.’

Angelo vented a humourless laugh. ‘Believe it or not, I wanted to be a barrister when I was eighteen. Once I found out that my entire family on both sides of the tree were involved in organised crime, I knew there was no way I could pursue such a profession.’

Drawn by his bitterness, Gwenna moved closer to him. ‘That must have hurt.’

‘It’s immaterial. I had to know who I was to protect myself. I had to be careful who I trusted, who I did business with. I swore that everything I did would be legal and above board,’ he breathed in a savage undertone.

‘Of course you did,’ she murmured softly.

‘The same year the Zanetti family approached me through an intermediary with a job offer and a Ferrari car.’

Gwenna was appalled. ‘So your mother’s family knew who you were and where to find you in spite of the change of names?’

‘I rejected the offer and ensured that I kept my distance. I should never have agreed to that meeting with Carmelo. It was the worst mistake I ever made,’ he breathed grittily.

‘Naturally you were curious.’ Gwenna closed her hand over his in a helpless gesture of supportiveness. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. Obviously your mother tried to make a new life for both of you. But having to keep such a huge secret all these years must’ve put you under a lot of strain as well.’

Closing his arms round her, Angelo stared down at her with frank fascination. ‘Have you put all this together in your head yet? Or are you still too busy trying to make me feel better?’

‘Too busy trying to make you feel better. But I don’t quite understand yet. You’re annoyed because somehow your connection to Carmelo Zanetti has become public knowledge? How did that happen?’

‘Carmelo decided to have the last laugh and he’s blown my reputation sky-high,’ Angelo volunteered heavily. ‘The contents of his will have been leaked and I’ve been informed that he’s left me all his worldly goods. In death he has made our relationship impossible to deny.’

‘He must’ve had a soft spot for you…I mean, you’re very successful and you didn’t have to become a thug to achieve that. Making you his heir was probably his equivalent of boasting about you,’ Gwenna contended in a positive tone, leaning into the hard shelter of his big tense frame and wishing he would relax a little.

‘I also learned that it wasn’t my mother’s elderly former employer who financed my boarding-school education,’ Angelo said bitterly. ‘It was Carmelo. That makes me feel like an idiot!’

‘I don’t see why. You were only a child and people lied to you,’ Gwenna said sensibly. ‘Did Franco already know that you have dodgy relations?’

‘Not the details, but the reality that I had to take certain precautions about how I operate and who I employ close to me…yes.’

Gwenna recalled the older man’s concern that what he had called ‘other interests’ might try to take control when Angelo was unconscious and unable to make decisions for himself. It dawned on her that Carmelo Zanetti, as a blood relative, might have demanded a say in the proceedings and she suppressed a shiver.

‘Did your grandfather leave you much?’ she asked as an afterthought.

‘Millions…all clean and legitimate, according to his lawyer. I was the only close relative he had left. But I don’t want his filthy money,’ Angelo ground out with ferocious bite.

‘Then you make sure that all that cash gets spent on really deserving causes. Cancer research, famine relief, Third World projects,’ Gwenna suggested. ‘Good can be made to come out of bad and nobody can fault you for that.’

Gazing wonderingly down at her serene face, Angelo was more than ever determined to take the story of his own involvement in her father’s downfall to the grave with him. Not for one moment had she considered holding his ancestry against him. In addition, her inspired suggestion was the simple solution and the most appropriate to his predicament. His very highly paid PR consultants would not have dreamt of proposing that he give away that much money. But he didn’t want it and putting that massive legacy to humanitarian use was the only way of acknowledging his unfortunate connections, while at the same time detaching himself from that taint.

Long brown fingers framed her cheekbone and his glinting golden gaze was openly approving. ‘You’re a very special woman, bellezza mia.’

‘Sometimes you take stuff too seriously. Rise above it all,’ she urged. ‘Remember that your mother rejected her family so that she could bring you up to lead a law-abiding life. Be proud that you’ve honoured that.’

His lean, powerful face shadowed. ‘Law-abiding, sì,’ he conceded sombrely. ‘But I’ve still done things I’m not proud of.’

Someone knocked on the door and Angelo answered it. ‘There’s a phone call for you,’he interpreted as the maid spoke.

Less than pleased by the interruption at a point when Angelo seemed to be dropping the steel barrier of his reserve, Gwenna hurried past him. ‘I’ll be back in two minutes…don’t go away anywhere.’

Angelo smiled and then looked very surprised that he was smiling. Knowing that she had lifted his mood delighted her. It was a challenge for her to follow the maid into the next room when all she could think about was how much she loved him. Although she would never have dreamt of telling him the fact, she loved him all the more for betraying his vulnerability.

The sound of her father’s voice on the phone made her tense in dismay. She supposed it would be too much to hope that he had not seen or heard some report of Angelo’s origins. ‘What is it?’

‘Angelo Riccardi is Fiorella’s son,’ Donald Hamilton announced.

Gwenna was perplexed by that statement, for it came at her from an unexpected angle. ‘Sorry, what are you saying?’

‘Haven’t you seen today’s big story? Listened to the news? Don’t you realise that your boyfriend is Don Carmelo Zanetti’s grandson?’

‘Yes, but…this Fiorella lady you mentioned—’

‘She was Zanetti’s daughter, but she wasn’t calling herself Riccardi when I knew her. I only saw Angelo a couple of times when he was a toddler. Fiorella always left him with a babysitter,’ her father informed her. ‘Remember me saying thatAngelo put me in mind of someone that day he got hit by the car?’

‘Yes.’ Gwenna was finding it hard to catch her breath and her legs were feeling all wonky. She backed down into the nearest chair. A past connection that close between her family and Angelo’s? How could that be possible?

‘He’s got his mother’s eyes. Don’t you see what this means?’

Her brain felt as if it were drowning in sludge. ‘What a very small world we live in?’

‘You can’t be that naïve. Obviously we have both been set up to take a fall. I ditched Angelo’s mother and ran, and maybe life wasn’t too good for her after that without her money or me. But it wasn’t my fault!’

‘What are you talking about?’ she exclaimed. ‘Why on earth would I have been set up?’

‘You’re my daughter and that must have been the ultimate power-play for Riccardi. He’s been toying with us like a cat with mice before it goes in for the kill!’ Donald Hamilton condemned bitterly. ‘My recent bad luck is no coincidence. Riccardi buys Furnridge and suddenly I’m being accused of theft—’

‘You were guilty of theft—’

‘Use your brain. The minute I realised who he was I knew I had to warn you. He’s out to settle scores. What is he planning to do to you? I let his mother down badly…All right, I admit it. But I had no choice,’ he argued fervidly. ‘At least I now know that the reason I’m living a nightmare is that Angelo Riccardi came into my life!’

‘I think the people you’ve stolen from might have a different opinion on that. I’m sorry, I don’t want to continue this conversation.’ Gwenna replaced the phone handset on its base with a shaking hand.

She could not bear to think about what she had just been told. She was afraid that if she did she might lose control. But could Angelo have been using her, intending to hurt her all along? Before she could lose her nerve, she went back into his study.

‘Was your mother called Fiorella?’ she asked straight out.

Angelo froze as if she had drawn a gun on him. ‘Sì…’

Her tummy performed a nasty little somersault, because she had been so eager for him to tell her otherwise. Yet, somewhere in her heart of hearts, she already knew that, for once, her father had been telling the truth. ‘Did you know that she had an affair with my father?’

‘Santo Cielo—that was him on the phone, wasn’t it?’ Angelo could actually see the change in her. Her face had a tight, pained aspect and her normally clear eyes were dulled and wary. He had a horrible sick sense of inevitability and it paralysed him. He could not think of a single line of defence. He could still hear Carmelo’s voice saying, ‘Don’t do anything foolish.’ He knew that what he had done was much worse than foolish. He had hurt her, and he couldn’t take that hurt back.

Gwenna moistened her full lower lip with a nervous flicker of her tongue. ‘A month ago, Dad told me about Fiorella for the first time. I thought it was such a silly melodramatic story and I didn’t believe a word of it. I mean—gangsters threatening to kill him, taking your mother’s money and his—’

‘What story?’ Angelo broke in to demand.

She repeated it as well as she could remember. Angelo lost colour and stared at her with incredulous dark eyes. He swung away then and turned back just as quickly. ‘If they stripped her of her money, it would’ve been a deliberate ploy to force her home to her husband. If that is the real truth—’

‘Dad didn’t know who you were when he told me. He didn’t realise you were her son until the newspapers identified you. I think that for once he wasn’t lying but, hey…you go question him yourself!’ Gwenna slung in a low, shaking voice, the pain and the anger coming out of nowhere at her. ‘You were so careful never to go near him until things started getting too complicated—’

Angelo flung up his hands and brought them down again in a slow, holding movement. ‘Just calm down…’

‘Did you set out to destroy my father?’

‘That’s a hard question to answer.’

Her nails dug into her palms and the sting of discomfort spurred her on. ‘I deserve an honest answer.’

His eyes were very dark and stormy, and he threw up his hands and strode out onto the veranda.

Gwenna followed him. ‘Angelo…please don’t lie.’

‘Don’t do this…it’ll rip us apart,’ he breathed very low.

‘You’re ripping me apart right now!’ she fired back at him chokily.

Releasing his breath on a hiss, he swung back to her. ‘It was my belief that your father stole my mother’s money and left her destitute—’

‘No…that’s not what’s at issue here. You don’t try and muddy the water with excuses. Did you deliberately target him?’

‘Yes. I had him investigated and it was obvious that he was spending much more than he was earning. I took over Furnridge and sent in the auditors. That’s all it took to uncover his embezzlement.’

She swallowed thickly. ‘What about me?’

‘You…’ Angelo echoed hoarsely. ‘I can’t explain you. I saw you and it was like being hit with a sledgehammer. I would have done anything to make you mine. I swear that I didn’t know you were his daughter until you came to the office to plead for him—’

‘It gave you a kick, didn’t it?’ she condemned in disgust. ‘When did you realise that it wasn’t him you were hurting, it was me?’

‘Do you think I’m proud of it? Do you think I’m so stupid I didn’t realise that I was damaging you?’ Angelo shot at her fiercely. ‘But I was in too deep before I understood that and then I thought I could make it all right. I just didn’t want to let you go—’

‘I was your mistress,’ Gwenna flung back between gritted teeth of self-loathing. ‘That’s all I’ve ever been.’

‘No, we passed that point long ago. You put me through hell. You kept on trying to dump me—you came to Sardinia of your own free will.’

‘Blame that on your fatal charm. Or maybe you brainwashed me. I obviously wasn’t clever enough to see that I was just part of your revenge,’ she muttered shakily. ‘You weren’t going to confess either, were you?’

‘I didn’t want to lose you,’ he bit out thickly.

‘You never had me to lose,’ Gwenna lied, determined not to show her distress. ‘But I can see now that you set out to own me. Replacing the garden fund money, giving me back the estate. What else was that about?’

Angelo was studying her with raw intensity. ‘Not about owning you. You’ve had so little in your life…what it was about was putting you first, taking your worries away, making you happy, bellezza mia.’

Gwenna shook her head in vehement disagreement. She had booted all her soft, squishy feelings and optimistic hopes behind a mental locked door. She didn’t want to fool herself. She didn’t want be taken in by anything he might say. She knew that she loved him so much she had to be very strong to break free of his hold on her.

So, all of a sudden, she was making herself look at their relationship as it really was. Why had she refused to see that she was still his mistress? He had even contrived to ensure that she cheerfully accepted that demeaning role. The only commitment she had asked for was fidelity and in return she had a guy who really appreciated her. That was how much in love she was. Like her misguided mother before her, she had settled for less because she was willing to take him on virtually any terms. Flailing herself with that humiliating belief, Gwenna stalked forward and crouched down to haul Piglet out from beneath Angelo’s desk.

‘As soon as it can be arranged, I want to leave and go home.’

‘The press will eat you alive if you’re linked with me now,’ Angelo warned her tautly.

Gwenna hugged Piglet tight. ‘If I can survive you, I can survive anything.’

Angelo watched her walk away and he did not know what to do. He felt like a man in a strait-jacket being tortured. The right words wouldn’t come, yet he was a master of manipulation! He didn’t know what was the matter with him. He knew he could handle anything but, for some reason, he could not handle what was happening with her.

Gwenna beat to death a weed, hammering it into the ground until it was obliterated. Straightening, she sucked in a quivering breath and pushed her hair off her damp brow. Piglet was seated on the path looking anxious a good twenty feet away. Shocked by the turbulent emotions that kept on overwhelming her, she blinked back tears and took in another steadying breath.

It was only a week since she had seen Angelo, seven days of unadulterated hell and misery. Over and over again she kept on reviewing everything that had happened and everything that Angelo had said. He had not said much. He had not denied his guilt, which was in his favour, and he was hopeless at talking about feelings. But he hadn’t fought to keep her either, had he?

Every time she thought about texting him like a lovesick teenager she made herself recall that Angelo, who thrived on aggressive challenge and argument and scorching passion, had done nothing to stop her leaving him. Yet he was absolutely ruthless when he wanted to be. But he still hadn’t tried to drag her off to bed to change her mind, or at least give her a proper chance to think over what she was doing. He hadn’t threatened to hold her hostage or claim custody of Piglet. She could think of a dozen things he could have done to hang onto her—none of which he had done.

Twenty-four hours and the space to think over what had happened would have made a difference to her attitude, she reflected unhappily. For once she had begun looking back she had seen how much their relationship had changed and strengthened. Most importantly she had appreciated that Angelo had abandoned all thought of revenge when he chose to repay her father’s depredations on the garden fund and sustained the loss of the value of the Massey estate without complaint. He hadn’t cared that the downside of his generosity was that, once more, Donald Hamilton had escaped retribution. No, Angelo had indeed put her first. He had showed that he cared more about her peace of mind and happiness. That had been a big step for him. Only what did that matter now, and why did she keep on rerunning it all in her mind? In refusing to accept that Angelo had decided to let her go, she was driving herself crazy!

Piglet’s tail began to wag and he charged off down the walled garden. When she called him, he ignored her. He had got very wilful since he had been spoilt rotten in Sardinia, she ruminated ruefully. He had also been very restless and excitable. The suspicion that he missed Angelo set her teeth on edge. She attacked another clump of weeds with her hoe.

Piglet’s wild barking finally made her look up. Her dog was leaping and dancing in frantic welcome round the feet of the very tall, dark male striding across the grass towards her. Angelo, all potent masculinity and sophistication in a designer raincoat and a sleek business suit. As always, he was the living, breathing definition of drop-dead gorgeous. Her heart started thumping. She let go of her hoe and stepped off the soil onto the gravel path.

Angelo came to a halt ten feet away. His brilliant dark eyes roved over her in a hungry, all-encompassing appraisal, but there was a combative edge to his stance. ‘I’m not leaving without you,’he intoned with cool resolve, ‘but first you have to listen to what I need to say.’

Her mood had taken wings at that first declaration; however, she had too much pride to show the fact. ‘You didn’t have much to say when I left Sardinia last week.’

‘I thought I deserved it. I was ashamed. I didn’t know what to say to you.’

Her worried eyes brightened.

Angelo looked unusually pensive. ‘Carmelo made a fool of me and who likes to admit that? I knew next to nothing about my mother. I only had a few memories. My enquiries met a brick wall and then I was invited to meet Carmelo and fill in the blanks.’

‘So, of course, you went.’

‘I took the bait. I was so arrogant, so sure I was incorruptible, but I was wrong,’ Angelo admitted stonily and quietly. ‘The old man reeled me in like a fish. He wound me up with the tale of how Donald Hamilton had seduced, robbed and dumped my mother when she was pregnant—’

‘Oh…was she? Pregnant, I mean?’ Gwenna questioned in consternation.

‘Your father says no, but I’m not sure he could be trusted to give an honest answer on that score.’

Her eyes widened. ‘You’ve been to see him…actually talked to him?’

‘This morning. It was the sane thing to do. It’s what I should’ve done when I first found out about him. Instead I tried to play God and I got burned.’

Gwenna was really impressed that he had been prepared to talk to her father but sort of cringing at the same time. ‘What did you think of him?’

‘He’s very slippery with the truth, but he does tell a rollicking good story.’ Angelo shrugged. ‘I can’t blame him for running like hell when he realised my mother was Carmelo’s daughter and the wife of a Sorello. He’s not hero material—’

‘No, he’s not.’

‘He also swears that my mother knew he was already married, and how are we ever going to know otherwise? The truth is, it doesn’t matter to me as much as it did. It’s over and done with. Neither of them were saints.’

Gwenna had not appreciated just how badly his mother had been betrayed, or how deeply attached Angelo must have been to the image of the mother he had lost when he was still very young. ‘But why did your grandfather wind you up about what my father had done?’

Angelo loosed a rueful laugh. ‘Because he could; because it amused him. He saw that I believed I was different. I thought I was better than the tainted stock I came from—’

‘Don’t talk like that…you are better!’

‘Carmelo still taught me a valuable lesson. Power and wealth corrupt.’ Lean, powerful face taut with discomfiture, Angelo murmured curtly, ‘I thought I was above the rules. I thought it was all right to use that power to expose your father—’

‘And then you thought it was all right to use your power over him to have me,’ she completed tightly.

‘Will you ever forgive me for that?’ Angelo asked gruffly.

‘I don’t know.’

Angelo paled and shifted from one foot onto the other. ‘I never wanted anything as much as I wanted you…no woman, no deal, no prize ever exerted that much of a hold on me. You’re in a class of your own, bellezza mia.’

‘I’m not denying that, for some weird reason, I found you very attractive too,’ Gwenna allowed, softening a little because he really did look miserable.

‘But I didn’t treat you properly. I was very stubborn. I couldn’t understand why you couldn’t be happy with what other women had accepted. But I didn’t want you to be like them—in fact I wanted you because you were different.’

Gwenna finally grasped why he had sought her out again and her heart sank like a stone. ‘You’re here to tell me that you’re sorry.’

Shimmering dark golden eyes collided with hers. ‘But not sorry to have met you or known you. I can never regret that. I’m sorry I screwed up. I’m sorry I kept the truth from you. I’m sorry I hurt you,’he told her urgently. ‘But right from the start I wanted you to love me and want me the way I believed you wanted Toby.’

Tears burned the backs of her eyes and she blinked fiercely. ‘I was lying when I said I thought about him when I was with you.’

Angelo loosed an uncertain laugh. ‘Now she tells me. You put me through hell.’

‘I couldn’t help it.’

‘You kept on dumping me, but if you give me the chance I’ll spend the rest of my life making you happy.’

Gwenna studied him fixedly. ‘Seriously?’ she enquired a tad shrilly, for she was very much afraid of misinterpreting what he was saying.

Without batting an eyelash, Angelo got down gracefully on one knee. ‘Will you marry me?’

Gwenna was so astonished that she couldn’t find her voice at first. He was asking her to marry him. He was asking her to marry him! Her Delft-blue eyes shone. She struggled to think of all the questions she should ask before coming to a decision and then decided not to bother, because there was absolutely no doubt in her mind about what her answer had to be. ‘Yes…’

Angelo sprang upright, surprised at the speed of her response but content not to question it. ‘Does that mean you forgive me?’

‘Not necessarily…but I will marry you.’ Gwenna discovered that her teeth were chattering with shock.

‘Okay,’ Angelo pronounced, wondering if that dazed look was positive or negative, and then remembering what he had not yet said. ‘I love you…I love you a lot, amata mia.’

Dazzled by the enormous sapphire and diamond ring he’d placed on her finger as he confessed his love, Gwenna lifted startled eyes to his lean, darkly handsome face. ‘You don’t have to say that if you don’t mean it.’

Angelo strode forward and caught both her hands in his. Intense tawny eyes claimed hers in a look as possessive and urgent as his hold. ‘I can’t sleep at night without you. When you left Sardinia I thought my life was over. I’ve been in love with you for weeks and weeks without realising it…I really need you to be with me…for ever. ‘

Overwhelmed, Gwenna nodded several times and squeezed his fingers and whispered fervently, ‘I love you too…’

‘What about Toby?’ Angelo enquired with forced lightness of tone.

‘I think I was just really scared of falling in love,’ she confessed with an embarrassed grimace. ‘It wrecked my mother’s life, and Dad has a dreadful track record. Perhaps believing that I still loved Toby when I couldn’t have him made me feel safe—’

‘So, you’re over him?’ Angelo checked, not quite sure what he was being told, but hauling her up against his hard, muscular length just the same. ‘Like, totally over him?’

‘I love him as a friend…You know, I never did fancy him the way I fancied you.’ Gwenna dropped that news in a self-conscious whisper. ‘There’s times when I can’t wait to rip your clothes off.’

‘I know the feeling, amata mia,’ Angelo agreed raggedly, long, tanned fingers skimming through the layers of her jacket and her T-shirt to find the smooth skin of her slender waist.

Gloriously happy and quivering with the hot pulse of excitement that he always aroused, Gwenna wrapped her arms round him. ‘I’m all muddy,’ she muttered apologetically.

‘I’m not fussy,’ Angelo confessed, covering her luscious pink mouth with his, and groaning with sensual satisfaction when she responded with the abandoned enthusiasm that had made him her biggest fan.

From the gallery above the classic Regency hall of the Massey Manor, Angelo watched with amusement as the assembled members of the press tried without success to catch a photo of Gwenna either standing still or even looking in their direction. Having posed earlier that day to mark the official opening of the gardens, she had had quite enough of the cameras.

A glittering charity benefit in aid of a children’s hospice was being staged in their exquisitely restored English country home. In fact, a whole busy calendar of such events had been organised by the Rialto Foundation, the charitable trust established with Carmelo Zanetti’s legacy. Angelo and Gwenna were giving as much time as possible to the foundation and it had been well supported by the media, who had been well impressed by Angelo’s surrender of that amount of money.

Angelo thought that Gwenna was looking ravishingly beautiful in her pale blue evening dress, with sapphires and diamonds flashing at her throat and ears. He was very proud of his wife. In two years of marriage she had overseen the restoration of both house and gardens, travelled all over the world with him and acquired the name of being a wonderfully laid-back hostess. She also wrote a regular gardening column in a Sunday newspaper. He was the envy of many men.

But the greatest gift that Gwenna had given him apart from herself and her love was the lively little bundle Angelo was cradling against his shoulder. She had been christened Alice Fiorella Massey Riccardi, a giant moniker for a tiny baby. Six months on, they called her Ella. Angelo had been totally unprepared for the instantaneous attachment he had experienced the first time his daughter was placed in his arms. Piglet trotting at his heels—for Piglet did not like large crowds—Angelo took Ella back to her nanny in the nursery and laid her down in her cot. It was time to go downstairs and escort Gwenna onto the floor in the ballroom for the first dance.

‘It’s been a long day. I can’t wait to have you all to myself, amata mia,’ Angelo confided as he closed his arms round her.

A delightful quiver of anticipation rippled through Gwenna’s slight frame. He was so demanding, she thought blissfully. She knew she was a very lucky woman. Whirled round the floor below the magnificent Venetian glass chandeliers, she nestled closer to her husband’s lean, powerful body. It was a wonderful evening.

After she had said goodbye to the last of their guests she shooed Piglet out of the dining room. ‘You’re getting fat,’ she scolded, lifting him away from the plate of cake he had discovered lying beneath a chair. The little animal was assuming an even more barrel-like shape.

She went upstairs and checked on Ella, beaming down at her darling rosy-cheeked daughter with her riot of black curls. She had to admit that her pregnancy had come as a surprise. In fact Angelo had been teasing her about her weight gain long before it had dawned on either of them that an impromptu bout of outdoor lovemaking during the previous summer had borne fruit. But they had found Ella so much fun that they were planning to have another baby quite soon so that their daughter would have a playmate.

Gwenna felt that life had been exceedingly kind to her. She was busy and fulfilled and not even her problem father had managed to put a check on the great joy of her marriage. Admittedly, Donald Hamilton had proved to be an ongoing source of concern. His second marriage had broken up in a welter of acrimony. Forced to live in reduced circumstances and shunned by former friends, the older man had drowned his sorrows in alcohol. Gwenna had tried her best to help but to no avail. She had been very pleasantly surprised when Angelo had taken the trouble to intervene and succeeded where she had failed. Within weeks, Donald Hamilton had been attending regular AA meetings in clean, smart clothes, and last month he had started his new job: advising on how to detect fraud within Rialto.

‘He’ll have no access to money and he’ll be watched like a fox in a hen coop. His boss is an ex-policeman,’ Angelo had assured her when she’d voiced the fear that the temptation might prove too much for her parent. ‘I believe your father has already come up with some useful ideas.’

Angelo strolled up behind her as she removed her last earring. He scanned her dreamy blue eyes in the bedroom mirror. ‘What are you thinking about?’

She went pink, for she had been thinking how touched she had been that he had sorted out her father’s problems purely for her sake. That, in her opinion, was the definition of real lasting love.

‘You were chatting to Toby for ages this evening. Any old vibes for me to worry about?’ Angelo enquired, utterly despising himself for voicing that question but unable to silence it. He got on great with Toby James, but he could never quite forget that Toby had once been a threat to his peace of mind.

‘Angelo…we were talking about the drainage problem in the kitchen garden,’ she proffered gently.

She spun round and he linked his arms round her.

‘I’m much more exciting, bellezza mia,’ Angelo murmured silkily.

‘I know…’ Her breath tripped in her throat as he cupped her hips and lifted her against him in a shamelessly erotic move that literally melted her from outside in.

‘Drainage,’ Angelo repeated in a genuinely pained tone of disbelief.

His kiss was sweet, honeyed intoxication and wonderfully sensual.

‘I may not be creative in the garden—’

‘You’re awfully creative in other ways,’ Gwenna pointed out breathlessly.

His slashing smile was her reward. ‘Because I love you…in bed, out of bed, any place, any time—’

Gwenna let her fingers delve adoringly into his luxuriant black hair. She was filled with a glorious swell of happiness and contentment. ‘I love you too.’

The Greek Tycoon’s Convenient Mistress

PROLOGUE

ANDREAS NICOLAIDIS kept a powerful grip on the steering wheel as his Ferrari Maranello threatened to skid on the icy, slippery surface of the country lane.

The rural landscape of fields and trees was swathed in a heavy mantle of unblemished white snow. There was no other traffic. On a day when the police were advising people to stay at home and avoid the hazardous conditions, Andreas was relishing the challenge to his driving skills. Although he owned a legendary collection of luxury cars he rarely got the chance to drive himself anywhere. In addition, he might have no idea where he was but he was wholly unconcerned by that reality. He remained confident that he would at any moment strike a route that would intersect with the motorway, which would enable his swift return to London and what he saw as civilisation.

But then, Andreas had always cherished exceptionally high expectations of life. He led an exceedingly smooth and well-organised existence. To date every annoyance and discomfort that had afflicted him had been easily dispelled by a large injection of cash. And money was anything but a problem.

It was true that the Nicolaidis family fortunes, originally founded in shipping, had been suffering from falling profits by the time Andreas had become a teenager. Even so, his conservative relatives had been aghast when he’d refused to follow in his father’s and his grandfather’s footsteps and had chosen instead to become a financier. In the years that had followed, however, their murmurs of disquiet had swelled to an awed chorus of appreciation as Andreas had soared to meteoric heights of success. Now often asked to advise governments on investment, Andreas was, at the age of thirty-four, not only worshipped like a golden idol by his family, but also staggeringly wealthy and a committed workaholic.

On a more personal front, no woman had held his interest longer than three months and many struggled to reach even that milestone. His powerful libido and emotions were safely in the control of his lethally cold and clever intellect. His father, however, had been on the brink of marrying his fourth wife. His parent’s unhappy habit of falling in love with ever more unsuitable women had exasperated Andreas. He did not suffer from the same propensity. Indeed the media had on more than one occasion called Andreas heartless for his brutally cool dealings with the opposite sex. Proud of his rational and self-disciplined mind, Andreas had once made a shortlist of the ten essential qualifications that would have to be met before he would even consider a woman as a potential life partner. No woman had ever met his criteria…no woman had even come close.

Hope curled her frozen hands into the sleeves of her grey raincoat and stamped feet that were already numb.

She was hopelessly lost and there was nobody to ask for the directions that she needed to find the nearest main road. Pessimism was, however, foreign to Hope’s nature. Long years of leading a very restricted life had taught her that a negative outlook lowered her spirits and brought no benefits. She was a great believer in looking on the bright side. So, although she was lost, Hope was convinced that a car containing a charitable driver would soon appear and help her to rediscover her bearings. It didn’t matter that the day she had already endured would have reduced a less tolerant personality to screaming frustration and despondency. She knew that nothing could be gained from tearing herself up over things that she could not change. Yet it was hard even for her to forget the high hopes with which she had left home earlier that morning to travel to the interview she had been asked to attend.

Now, she felt very naive for having pinned so much importance to that one interview. Hadn’t she been looking for a job for months? Wasn’t she well aware of just how difficult it was to find employment of any duration or stability? Unfortunately she scored low when it came to the primary attributes demanded by employers. She had no qualifications in a world that seemed obsessed with the importance of exam results. Furthermore, hampered as she was by her lack of working experience, it was a challenge for her to provide even basic references.

Hope was twenty-eight years old and for more than a decade she had been a full-time carer. As far back as she could remember, her mother Susan had been a sick woman. Eventually her parents’ marriage had broken down beneath the strain and her father had moved out. After a year or so, all contact had ceased. Her brother, Jonathan, who was ten years older, was an engineer. Having pursued his career abroad, he had only ever managed to make occasional visits home.

Now married and settled in New Zealand, the Jonathan who had flown in to sort out their late mother’s estate a few months earlier had seemed almost like a stranger to his younger sister. But when her brother had learned that he was the sole beneficiary in the will, he had been so pleased that he had spoken frankly about his financial problems. In fact he had told Hope that the proceeds from the sale of his mother’s small bungalow would be the equivalent of a lifebelt thrown to a drowning man. Conscious that her sibling had three young children to provide for, she had been relieved that their late mother’s legacy would be put to such good use. Back then, she had been too ignorant of her own employment prospects to appreciate that it might be very hard for her to find either a job or alternative accommodation without a decent amount of cash in hand.

The silence of a landscape enclosed in snow was infiltrated by the distant throb of a car engine. Fearful that the vehicle might be travelling on some other road, Hope tensed and then brightened as the sound grew into a reassuring throaty roar and the car got audibly closer. Her generous pink mouth curved into a smile. Eyes blue as winter pansies sparkling, she moved away from the sparse shelter of the hedge to attract the driver’s attention.

Andreas did not see the woman in the road until he rounded the corner and then there was no time to do anything but take instant avoiding action. The powerful sports model slewed across the road in a wild skid, spun round and ploughed back across the snowy verge to crash with a thunderous jolt into a tree. Ears reverberating from the horrible crunching complaint of ripping metal, Hope remained frozen to the same spot several feet away. Pale with disbelief and open-mouthed, she watched as the driver’s door fell open and a tall black-haired male lurched out at speed. He moved as fast as his car, was her first embryonic thought.

‘Move!’ He launched at her, for the pungent smell of leaking fuel had alerted him to the danger. ‘Get out of the way!’

As his fierce warning sliced through the layers of shock cocooning Hope, the car burst into flames and she began to stir, but not speedily enough to satisfy him. He grabbed her arm and dragged her down the road with him. Behind them the petrol tank ignited in a deafening explosion and the force of the blast flung her off her feet. A strong arm banded round her in an attempt to break her fall and as she went down he pinned her beneath him.

Winded, she just lay there, lungs squashed flat by his weight and struggling to breathe again while she reflected on the impressive fact that he had in all probability saved her life. She looked up into bronzed features and clashed with eyes the exotic flecked golden brown of polished tortoiseshell.

At some level she was conscious that her clothes had got very wet when she’d fallen, but the damage was done and it seemed much more important to recognise why those stunning eyes of his struck such a chord of familiarity with her. As a child she had visited a zoo where a splendid lion had been penned up behind bars, which he had fiercely hated and resented. Tawny eyes ablaze, defying all those who had dared to stare, he had prowled the limits of his humiliating cage with a heartbreaking dignity that had made her tender heart bleed.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked in a dark, deep accented drawl that would have made her toes curl had she been able to feel them.

Slowly, carefully, she shook her head to express her continuing health. The fact that he was flattening her into a wet ditch was meaningless when she met those gorgeous eyes. She spread her visual net to appreciate the lush spiky black lashes that provided a fitting exotic frame for his deep-set gaze. He had a lean, hard-boned face that was angular and uncompromisingly male, yet possessed of such breathtaking intrinsic beauty that she could do nothing but stare.

Andreas looked down into the bluest eyes he had ever met. He was convinced they could not be naturally that bright turquoise colour and was equally suspicious of the spill of shiny pale blonde hair tumbling round her heart-shaped face like tangled silk. ‘What the hell were you doing in the middle of the road?’

‘Would you mind letting me up?’ Hope mumbled apologetically.

With a stifled curse as he registered in rare embarrassment that he was still lying on top of the woman responsible for the death of his car, Andreas wrenched himself back from her. A faint tinge of colour demarcating his superb cheekbones as he questioned his own uncharacteristic loss of concentration, he sprang upright and reached down a lean, long-fingered hand to assist her. An unsought thought emerged out of nowhere: she had skin as smooth, soft and tempting as whipped cream.

‘I wasn’t in the middle of the road…I was scared you would drive on without seeing me,’ Hope explained, wincing at the freezing chill of her clothing as she let him pull her upright. He was impossibly tall, so tall, she had to throw her head back on her shoulders to look up at him.

‘You were standing in the centre of a very narrow road,’ Andreas contradicted without hesitation. ‘I had to swerve to avoid hitting you.’

Hope looked back down the road to where his car still smouldered. It was obvious even to her that when the last of the little flames died down, it would be a charred wreck fit only for the scrapyard. She could see that it had been a sports model of some kind and probably very expensive. That he appeared to be blaming her for the accident sent a current of guilty anxiety travelling through her.

‘I’m really sorry about your car,’ she said tautly, striving to sidestep the possibility of conflict. Having grown up in a family dominated by strong personalities, who had often been at loggerheads, she was accustomed to assuming the soothing role of a peacemaker.

Andreas surveyed the pathetic remains of his customised Ferrari, which he had only driven for the second time that day. He turned his arrogant dark head back to his companion and flicked his keen gaze over her at supersonic speed. He committed her every attribute to memory and dismissed her with every cold succeeding thought. Her clothes were drab and shabby. Of medium height, she was what his father would have called a healthy size and what any of his many female acquaintances who rejoiced in jutting bones would have called overweight. But no sooner had he reached that conclusion than he recalled how soft and feminine and sexy her full, ripe curves had felt under him and a startling spasm of pure, unvarnished lust arrowed through him at shattering speed.

‘It’s such a shame that you weren’t able to avoid the tree,’ Hope added, intending that as a sympathetic expression of regret.

‘Avoiding you was my priority. Never mind the fact that, in the attempt, I could easily have killed myself,’ Andreas countered with icy bite at what he interpreted as a veiled attack on his skill as a driver. Having dragged his attention from her, he had felt the heat of that startlingly inappropriate hunger subside as swiftly as it had arisen. He decided that the crash had temporarily deprived him of his wits and caused his libido to play a trick on his imagination: she had to be the least attractive woman he had ever met.

‘But mercifully,’ Hope bravely persisted in her efforts to offer comfort, ‘we both have a lot to be grateful for—’

‘Educate me on that score,’ Andreas sliced back in an invitation that cracked like a whiplash.

‘Sorry?’ Hope prompted uncertainly, turquoise eyes locking to him in dismay.

‘Theos mou! Explain exactly what you believe that I have to be grateful for at this moment in time,’ Andreas demanded with derision, snowflakes beginning to encrust his cropped black hair as the fall grew heavier. ‘I’m standing in a blizzard and I’m cold. It’s getting dark. My favourite car has been obliterated from the face of the earth along with my mobile phone and I am stuck with a stranger.’

‘But we’re alive. Neither of us has been hurt,’ Hope pointed out through chattering teeth, still keen as mustard to cheer him up.

He was stranded with Little Miss Sunshine, Andreas registered in disgust. ‘May I make use of your mobile phone?’

‘I’m sorry…I don’t have one—’

‘Then you must live nearby…how far is it to your home?’ Andreas cut in, taking an impatient step forward.

‘But I don’t live round here,’ she answered ruefully. ‘I don’t even know where I am.’

Ebony brows drawing together, Andreas frowned down at her as though she had confessed to something unbelievably stupid. ‘How can that be?’

‘I’m not a local,’ Hope explained, trying to still a shiver and failing. ‘I’m only in the area because I was attending an interview and I got a lift there. Then I started walking…I followed this signpost and I thought I couldn’t be that far from the main road but I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere—’

‘How long were you walking for?’

‘A couple of hours and I haven’t seen any houses for absolutely ages. That’s why I didn’t want you to drive past. I was getting a little concerned—’

Watching her shiver violently, Andreas noticed that her coat was dripping. ‘When did you get wet?’

‘There’s a stream in that ditch,’ she told him jerkily.

‘How wet are you?’

Having established that she was soaked through to the skin, Andreas studied her with fulminating intensity, brilliant eyes flashing tawny. ‘You should have said,’ he censured. ‘In sub-zero temperatures, you’re liable to end up with hypothermia and I don’t need the hassle.’

‘I’m not going to be any hassle,’ Hope swore hurriedly.

‘I saw a barn a couple of fields back. You need shelter—’

‘Really, I’ll be fine. As soon as I start walking again, I’ll warm up in no time,’ Hope mumbled through fast-numbing lips, for of all things she hated to make the smallest nuisance of herself.

‘You won’t warm up until you get those clothes off,’ Andreas asserted, planting a managing arm to her spine to urge her along at a pace faster than was comfortable for her much shorter legs.

Her lips were too numb for her to laugh at the very idea of getting her clothes off in the presence of a strange man. But she was tickled pink by his instant response to what he saw as an emergency. In a flash, he had abandoned all lament about his wrecked car and his own lack of comfort to put her needs first. At a similar speed he had found a solution to the problem and he was taking charge.

Wasn’t that supposed to be a typically male response? Only it was not a response that was as common as popular report liked to suggest, Hope reflected thoughtfully. Neither her father nor her brother had been the least bit tempted to help her out by solving problems. In fact both the men in her life had beat a very fast retreat from the demands placed on them by her mother’s long illness. She had been forced to accept that neither man was strong enough to cope with that challenge and that, as she was capable, there was no point blaming them for their weakness.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked him. ‘I’m Hope… Hope Evans.’

‘Andreas,’ Andreas delivered grimly, watching her attempt to climb a farm gate with incredulous eyes. With purposeful hands he lifted her down from her wobbly perch on the second bar so that he could unlatch the gate for their entry.

‘Oh, thanks…’ Wretched with cold as she was, Hope was breathless at having received that amount of attention and shaken that he had managed to lift her without apparent effort. But then she could not recall anyone trying to lift her after the age of ten. She would never forget, however, the cruel taunts she had earned at school for the generous bodily proportions that had been the exact opposite of the fashionable slenderness possessed by the most popular girls in her form.

As she lurched into a ditch by the hedge where the snow was lying in a dangerously deceptive drift Andreas hauled her back to his side. ‘Watch where you walk…’

The numbness of her feet was making it well nigh impossible for her to judge where her steps fell. The natural stone building ahead seemed reassuringly close, however, and she tried to push herself on but stumbled again. Expelling his breath in an impatient hiss, Andreas bent down and lifted her up into his arms to trudge the last few yards.

Instantly, Hope exploded into embarrassed speech. ‘Put me down, for goodness’ sake…you’ll strain yourself! I’m far too heavy—’

‘You’re not and if you fall, you could easily break a limb,’ Andreas pointed out.

‘And you don’t want the hassle,’ Hope completed in a small voice as he lowered her to the beaten earth floor towards the back of the dim barn, which was open to the elements on the side closest to the road.

Before she could even guess what he was doing, Andreas tugged off her coat. Her suit jacket peeled off with it. ‘My goodness!’ she gasped, lurching back a step from him in consternation.

‘When you get the rest off, you can use my coat for cover,’ Andreas declared, shrugging broad shoulders free of the heavy wool overcoat and extending it with decisive hands.

Hot pink embarrassment washed colour to the roots of Hope’s hair. Grasping the coat with reluctance, she hovered. She was too practical to continue questioning his assertion that she had to take off her sodden clothing.

‘I’ll get on with lighting a fire so that you can warm up,’ Andreas pronounced, planning that he would then leave her ensconced while he sought out a house and a phone. He would get there a hell of a lot faster on his own.

There was a massive woodpile stacked against the wall. She stepped to the far side of it, rested his coat over the protruding logs and began with chilled hands to clumsily undress. Removing her trousers was a dreadful struggle because her fingers were numb and the fabric clung to her wet skin. She pulled off her heavy sweater with equal difficulty and then, shivering violently and clad only in a damp bra, panties and ankle boots, she dug her arms into his overcoat. The coat drowned her, reaching down to her ankles, hanging off her shoulders and masking her hands as though she were a child dressing up in adult clothes. The silk lining made her shiver but the very weight of the wool garment bore the promise of greater warmth. Wrapped in the capacious depths of his carefully buttoned coat, she crept back into view.

Andreas was industriously engaged in piling up small pieces of kindling wood with some larger chunks of fuel already stacked in readiness. Again she was impressed by the quiet speed and efficiency with which he got things done. He was resourceful. He didn’t make a fuss. He didn’t agonise over decisions and he didn’t moan and whinge about the necessity either: he just did the job. She had definitely picked a winner to get stranded with in the snow.

She studied him, admiring the trendy cut of his luxuriant black hair, the sleek, smooth and undoubtedly very expensive tailoring of the charcoal-grey suit he wore teamed with a dark shirt and a silk tie. He looked like a high-flying business executive, a real urban sophisticate, the sort of guy she would have been too afraid even to speak to in normal circumstances.

‘One small problem…I don’t smoke,’ he murmured.

‘Oh…I can help there,’ Hope recalled, hurriedly digging into her handbag and producing a cheap plastic lighter. ‘I don’t smoke either but I thought my future employer might and I didn’t want to seem disapproving.’

As he waited for her to complete that rather intriguing explanation Andreas glanced up and registered in surprise that she was very far from being the least attractive woman he had ever met. In the dim interior, her pale blonde hair, now loose and falling almost to her shoulders, glowed like silver against the black upraised collar of his coat. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright. She was smiling at him and when she smiled, her whole face lit up. Lost in the depths of his coat, she looked startlingly appealing.

‘Here…’ Hope extended the lighter.

‘Efharisto…’ Andreas thanked her gravely, mentally querying her unexpected pull for him. She was blonde and rather short and he went for tall, leggy brunettes.

‘Parakalo…you’re welcome,’ Hope responded with a weak grin, striving to move her feet to instil a little feeling back into her toes. ‘So, you’re Greek?’

‘Yes.’ Protecting the minuscule blaze of wood shavings from the wind whistling through the cracks in the wall, Andreas fed the fire. She was virtually naked below his coat. It was that knowledge that was making her appear appealing to him, he told himself in exasperation. He resisted a foolish urge to look at her again. Why would he even want to look at her again?

‘I love Greece…well, I’ve only been there once but it was really beautiful.’ When her companion failed to grab that conversational opener, Hope added, ‘You’re used to lighting fires, aren’t you?’

‘No, as it happens,’ Andreas remarked, dry as dust. ‘But I don’t need to be the equivalent of a rocket scientist to create a blaze.’

Hope reddened. ‘I’m talking too much.’

Andreas told himself that he was glad that she had taken the hint. Yet when he looked up and saw the stoic look of accepting hurt in her face, he felt as though someone had kicked him hard in the stomach. When had he become so rude and insensitive?

‘No. I’m a man of few words and you’re good company,’ he assured her.

She gave him a huge surprised smile and, blushing like a schoolgirl, she threaded her hands inside the sleeves of his over-large coat and shuffled her feet. ‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly,’ Andreas murmured, taken aback by her response to the mildest of compliments and involuntarily touched.

He coaxed the fire into slow life. She was so cold she was shivering without even being aware of it. As the fire crackled he sprang up to his full height of six feet four and approached her. ‘There’s a hip flask in the left pocket of my coat.’

Hope reached in and lifted it out.

‘Take a drink before you freeze.’

‘I’m not used to it…I couldn’t—’

Andreas groaned out loud. Taking the flask from her, he opened it. ‘Be sensible.’

Hope sipped and then grew bolder. When the alcohol raced like a leaping flame down her throat she choked, coughing and spluttering.

Closing the flask for her, Andreas surveyed her and rueful amusement tilted his wide, sensual mouth. ‘You weren’t joking when you said you weren’t used to it.’

Hope sucked in a jerky breath and wrapped her arms round herself. ‘I didn’t know I could feel this cold,’ she confided in a rush.

Andreas uncrossed her arms, closed lean, strong hands over hers and slowly drew her close. ‘Think of me as a hot blanket,’ he urged.

Her lashes fluttered in confusion. ‘I don’t think I could…’

‘Try. It will be a while before the fire puts out enough heat to defrost you.’

Hope lifted wide eyes as turquoise as the Aegean Sea on a summer day. ‘I suppose…’ she mumbled.

‘Do you wear coloured contact lenses?’ Andreas enquired, black brows pleating because even as he spoke he questioned the inanity of his enquiry.

‘You must be joking… I can’t even afford makeup!’ Hope’s state of nerves was betrayed by the tiny jerk she gave as he eased her into physical connection with his tall, well-built body. All of a sudden her heart felt as if it were jumping inside her chest and she could hardly catch her breath.

‘You have perfect skin…you don’t need it,’ Andreas said thickly, his big, powerful body growing rigid. Even the separation of their clothing could not dull his high-voltage awareness of the tantalising softness of her lush, feminine curves. In spite of his every effort to freeze his own all-too-male reactions, his libido was rocketing into overdrive.

That close he turned her bones to jelly and Hope couldn’t think straight. She looked up and connected with his mesmerising dark golden eyes. A dulled heaviness gripped her lower limbs while a tight, hard knot of agonising tension formed in her pelvis. He lowered his handsome dark head and she guessed what was going to happen before it happened but still couldn’t believe that he would actually do it.

But Andreas confounded her expectations and captured her mouth with hungry urgency. That single kiss devastated her and as it began, it continued, his tongue delving between her readily parted lips to demand greater intimacy. She was defenceless against that wild, sweet tide of sensation, for her body flared into sudden desperate life. The tense knot low in her stomach spiralled into a drugging flare of heat that suffused her entire body with explosive effect. Only the need to breathe conquered that wicked heat and she had to pull her swollen lips free to drag in a great gulp of oxygen.

Andreas gazed down at her with heavily lidded dark eyes and then, abruptly, he yanked his head up and colour delineated his hard cheekbones. ‘Theos mou…I had no intention of…’ His handsome mouth clenched. ‘I should never have touched you. I’m sorry.’

‘Are you married?’ Hope demanded, voicing her worst fear instantaneously and only contriving to drag her hands from him as she finished speaking.

‘No.’

‘Engaged?’ Hope was no longer cold. Her entire body felt as though it were hot as a furnace with embarrassment.

His ebony brows pleated. ‘No.’

‘Then there’s no need to apologise,’ Hope declared half under her breath, scrupulously avoiding his scrutiny while she struggled to get a grip on herself. The way he had made her feel had been a revelation to her and she felt incredibly vulnerable and confused. Her fingers clenched into the cuffs of the coat sleeves to prevent her hands from reaching back to him. She turned away in an awkward semi-circle, so many thoughts and emotions and physical feelings bombarding her that she felt momentarily overwhelmed.

Her first real kiss and he had apologised. It would be terribly uncool to confess that he had thrilled the socks off her and that if he wanted to do it again he was more than welcome. Her face flamed with guilt and bewilderment. For goodness’ sake, where had that shameless thought come from? With hands that trembled she made herself concentrate long enough to pick up and drape her wet clothing over the pile of logs.

‘I’ve upset you,’ Andreas breathed.

Hope whirled round, turquoise eyes bright as precious stones in her flushed heart-shaped face. ‘No… I’m not upset.’

She felt a hundred things but not upset: shocked, bemused and exhilarated by the sheer strength of her response to him. For too many years she had lived in a world empty of any form of excitement. Andreas was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her and so great was her fascination that it hurt to deny herself the pleasure of looking at him.

‘I planned to leave you here alone,’ Andreas drawled flatly, still struggling to get a handle on his own inexplicable behaviour and somewhat stunned by his loss of control.

Startled, Hope whirled round. ‘Why? Where were you planning to go?’

‘I intended to try and find a house but it’s too dark now.’

‘And I have your coat. Much better to wait until daylight.’ Hope snatched in a stark breath of the icy air while she gazed out at the fast-swirling snow being blown about by the wind. It was no longer possible to see even the hedges bounding the road.

She drew nearer to the fire and then knelt down beside it to take advantage of the heat the flames were beginning to generate.

‘Tell me about your interview,’ Andreas invited, having noted that she would no longer meet his gaze and determined to eradicate her unease. ‘What was the job?’

‘The position of live-in companion to an elderly woman but the interview never happened,’ Hope confided ruefully. ‘When I got to the house I found out that a relative had moved in with the lady instead and there was no longer a job available.’

‘So these people didn’t bother to cancel your interview and left you stranded?’ Andreas queried with disapproval.

‘I asked why I hadn’t been contacted but the woman who spoke to me said it was nothing to do with her because she hadn’t placed the ad in the first place.’ Hope just shrugged and smiled wryly. ‘That’s life.’

‘You are far too forgiving,’ Andreas told her. ‘Why did you want work of that nature?’

‘I’m not qualified for anything else…at least, not at present.’ Hope wanted a stable roof over her head and a period of steady employment before she checked out what she considered to be the much more remote and ambitious possibility of winning a place on a design course. ‘I also need somewhere to live and it would’ve suited me very well. Where were you travelling?’

‘I was heading back to London.’

‘Why did you kiss me?’

It was hard to know which of them was most surprised by that very abrupt question: Hope, who had not known that she was about to embarrass herself by asking for clarification on that score, or Andreas, who had never been faced with such a bald demand to know his motivation before.

Dark golden eyes surveyed her steadily. ‘Why do you think?’

Face hot again, Hope studied her tightly linked hands. ‘I haven’t a clue…I was just curious.’

‘You’re very sexy.’

Her lashes swept up on her astonished gaze. ‘Are you serious?’

‘I should know…I’m a connoisseur,’ Andreas asserted without hesitation.

Her lush, full mouth curved into a grin, for she liked his frankness. So, he liked women and no doubt in large numbers. And why should he not? He was gorgeous and women had to fall for him in droves. Naturally he took advantage and who could blame him? If deep down a little twinge of pain stabbed at her that that should be so, she ignored it.

After all, she was much more interested in what Andreas had said prior to that final statement. It seemed like a miracle to her but he had called her sexy. Hope was used to thinking of herself as plain, overweight and ordinary. She had spent years hating her own body and longing to be thinner. To that end she had dieted and exercised and her weight had fluctuated up and down while the slender figure she craved continued to elude her. Even the mother she loved had sighed over her daughter’s lack of looks and lamented her keen appetite.

Yet Andreas, who was heartbreakingly handsome, considered her attractive. And not only that…he thought she was sexy. Even better he had proven his own conviction by succumbing to charms she had not known she had. She reckoned that she was probably going to love him until the day she died for allowing her to feel just once like a young and pretty woman. She had waited what felt like half a lifetime to hear such words and had truly believed that she would die without ever hearing them. He was the fulfilment of a dream and she studied him with massive and grateful concentration.

‘So what do you do for a living?’ Hope asked chattily.

‘I deal with investments.’

‘I suppose you’re stuck at a desk all the time studying figures and it’s a bit boring. Still, somebody has to do it.’ Her turquoise eyes were warm with sympathy.

Andreas got a high out of his immensely successful career but he had met far too many women who faked an interest in finance in an effort to impress him. Hope, he recognised, was not tempted in that direction. His rare smile illuminated his lean bronzed features, which in repose could seem grave and cold.

‘Would you like some chocolate?’ she asked, rooting round in her capacious bag and emerging with a giant bar and only then seeing that smile and riveted by it. He had buckets of charisma and she was entrapped.

‘Yes…before you melt it,’ Andreas laughed, hunkering down to reach for the bar, which she was holding perilously close to the fire. He broke off a piece and let his brilliant gaze sweep from her clear bright eyes and the fascination she couldn’t hide to the ripe curve of her lips. He remembered the intoxicating taste of her and the laughter left him to be replaced by a disturbingly strong desire to haul her back into his arms. He put the square of chocolate he had intended for himself into her mouth instead.

‘Oh…’ Hope gasped in surprise and closed her eyes in slow, blissful appreciation as the cold chocolate began melting against her tongue.

Andreas was transfixed by the expression she wore. He could not take his attention from her. He wondered if she would react like that to him in bed. He tried to kill the thought. He tried to suppress the powerful tide of hunger she ignited in him, but his usually disciplined libido was behaving like a runaway train.

Her lashes lifted. ‘I would do just about anything for chocolate…’

Her voice faded away and her mouth ran dry on the glittering blaze she met in his intent golden eyes. On a level of understanding she had not even known she possessed she recognised his hunger and she leant forward without even thinking about what she was doing and sought his hard, sensual mouth again for herself. With a hungry growl, Andreas came down on his knees and kissed her until the blood drummed at an insane rate through her veins and her head swam.

‘I’ll buy you chocolate every day,’ Andreas promised huskily.

‘You know…I wasn’t meaning anything provocative,’ Hope warned him anxiously.

‘I know.’ Long fingers framed her cheekbones while his eyes devoured her. ‘I find that straightforward streak of yours very refreshing.’

‘Other people call me blunt—’

‘Whatever, I don’t meet with much of it,’ Andreas admitted thickly, his hands not quite steady on her. ‘I also want you so much it hurts to deny myself. That’s a first for me.’

Hope felt utterly unlike herself. It was as though at that first kiss she had become an alien inside her own once familiar skin. She felt wild and greedy and joyous and as tempting as Cleopatra. All the years of stoically repressed regret at the manner in which life was passing her by, all the wistful longings and fanciful dreams that crowded out the fertile imagination she hid behind a front of no-nonsense practicality finally got to break free. Andreas was the embodiment of her every fantasy.

‘A first for me too,’ she confided breathlessly.

He unbuttoned the coat and then froze, a rare glint of confusion in the wondering appraisal he gave her. He had no grasp of quite how the situation had developed but he couldn’t make himself let go of her. ‘We have to be out of our minds—’

Hope closed her fingers into the lapels of his suit jacket. ‘Shush…don’t spoil it,’ she whispered pleadingly.

Andreas spread her back against his coat and let his mouth glide down the length of her throat. ‘Tell me when to stop…’

With no intention of calling a halt at any point, Hope shivered with delicious tension and lay there. She booted the misgivings struggling to be heard out of her mind and slammed shut the door on them for good measure. For twenty-eight years she had been good and just once, and for the space of one stolen, secret night, she was going to be bad and what was more she was going to enjoy it.

He unsnapped the lace bra and groaned out loud at the creamy swell of her pouting breasts in the firelight. ‘You have a body to die for.’

Hot with a mix of self-consciousness and helpless longing, she opened her eyes to see if he was teasing: his appreciation spoke for him. With reverent hands he toyed with the tender pink peaks already straining into thrusting points. Deep down inside she felt as if she were burning and her hips shifted in a pointless effort to contain the feeling. Within very little time the whole world centred on him and what he was doing to her.

He employed his knowing mouth on the stiff crests that crowned her breasts and the inner thrum of her body’s response became so powerful she could not stay still. Her entire skin surface felt unbearably sensitive but more than anything she was aware of the damp ache at the swollen heart of her.

‘Andreas…’ She sounded his name in a throaty, pleading purr and at last he touched her where she most needed to be touched.

Sensation electrified her and took her to a place she had never been before, where all that mattered was the sensual glory of his touch and the wildness that was being born within her. She writhed, wrapped herself round him, lost in the hot, male scent of his skin and hair and the enervating roughness of his hard, muscular body against her.

‘I can’t wait…’ Andreas confessed rawly, passion breaking through his formidable control at a level of excitement he had never known before.

The sheer overload of physical pleasure had driven her to a tortured peak and she was helpless in the hold of the powerful craving that controlled her. He pulled her under him and she was with him every step of the way. With an earthy groan he sank into the slick, hot heat of her and met with unexpected resistance.

‘You’re a virgin?’ he breathed in stark shock.

‘Don’t stop…’ she gasped, reaching up to lock imprisoning arms round him.

He yielded and swept her through the sharp little pain into a fast, frantic rhythm as primal as the overpowering sensations that had taken her over. Intolerable excitement pushed her into ecstasy and a cocoon of pleasure. In the aftermath, she felt amazingly silly and happy and buoyant.

Andreas gazed at Hope with wondering golden eyes and then he gathered her very carefully back into the warmth of his coat and tugged her into his arms. He kissed her brow. ‘You’re very sweet…but you should have told me I’d be the first.’

‘It was my business,’ Hope muttered, burying her face into his shoulder, fighting off the shock of what she had just done.

‘But now’s it mine,’ Andreas asserted, determined fingers tipping her chin up so that he could look at her again in the flickering light cast by the burning logs. ‘I think that in the very near future you will decide to move to London and I will be your lover.’

‘Why would I do that?’ Hope dared to ask although sparkles of joy were running through her like precious gold dust.

His hard, sensual mouth slashed into a sudden smile of breathtaking assurance. ‘Because I will ask you to and you won’t be able to resist.’

Her heart was bouncing like a rubber ball inside her chest and she smiled up at him with all the natural warmth that was the very core of her character.

CHAPTER ONE

ALMOST two years later, Hope sat in a fashionable London café waiting for her friend Vanessa’s arrival.

Her thoughts were miles away and centred entirely on Andreas. She was dreamily wondering how she could best celebrate the second anniversary of that first eventful meeting. By seeking out a snow-bound barn? That would not be a good idea, she conceded with a grin. Andreas disliked inconvenience, cold and, indeed, had a very low tolerance threshold for any form of discomfort.

‘Sorry I’m late.’ A slim redhead with sharp but attractive features and bright brown eyes sank down into the seat opposite and settled a heavy camera case down. ‘If that hair of yours grows any longer,’ she remarked, surveying the pale blonde hair Hope wore secured at her nape but which reached halfway to her waist, ‘people are going to start wondering if you’ve got Rapunzel fantasies.’

Hope blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You know…the lady in the fairy tale who got locked up in the tower and let her long hair down to be used as a ladder to rescue her,’ Vanessa clarified. ‘Only unfortunately for her, it wasn’t the handsome prince who climbed up, it was the witch. Be warned.’

Hope laughed and they ordered coffee. She was accustomed to her more sophisticated friend’s cynical outlook on life. The daughter of a famous artist, Vanessa had survived a Bohemian and unstable childhood to become a gifted photographer. But the redhead still bore the scars inflicted by parents who had enjoyed tempestuous love lives.

‘So, how is your handsome prince?’ Vanessa enquired a tinge dryly.

Hope was impervious to that tone and her eyes sparkled. ‘Andreas is great. Very busy, of course, but he phones me a lot when he’s out of the country—’

‘A mobile phone being Andreas’s equivalent of a ball and chain,’ her friend mocked. ‘I seem to recall that if you switch it off he wants an explanation in triplicate.’

‘He just likes to know where I am. He worries about me,’ Hope countered equably. ‘Do you realise that in ten days’ time, Andreas and I will have been together for two whole years?’

‘Wow. The guy who doesn’t commit is going for gold. You could be making gossip column headlines. Of course,’ Vanessa murmured wryly, ‘the world would first have to know you existed and you remain a very well-kept secret.’

‘Andreas hates media attention and he knows I wouldn’t like it either. I’m a very contented secret,’ Hope admitted, telling herself with the ease of long habit that what little time she had with Andreas would be very much diluted if she had to share him with a social whirl and lots of people as well. ‘Right now, I’m trying to think of some special way to celebrate our anniversary.’

‘Andreas didn’t make the effort to mark the occasion last year, did he?’

‘I doubt if it even occurred to him that we had been together an entire year. I shouldn’t have sat around waiting for him to say or do something, I should just have reminded him,’ Hope said ruefully

‘Did he ever mention it afterwards?’

Hope shook her head.

‘Then, let me offer you a piece of advice,’ the younger woman remarked. ‘If you want to hang onto Andreas Nicolaidis, resist the urge to celebrate your second anniversary in his presence.’

‘But why?’

‘The reminder that you’ve been around for two years might set the cold wind of change blowing.’

‘What are you trying to say to me?’ Hope prompted anxiously.

Vanessa compressed her lips and sighed. ‘I just feel you’re wasting your time with Andreas. He didn’t even bother to show up the night you collected the top award for your design course.’

‘His flight was delayed.’

‘Was it?’ The younger woman looked unimpressed. ‘He has no interest in anything in your life unless it directly affects him.’

‘Andreas isn’t artistic…or into fashion. I don’t expect him to take an interest in the handbags I design—’

‘He hasn’t introduced you to a single member of his family or to any of his friends. If he takes you out it’s to some place where he won’t be bothered by the paparazzi and where he won’t be seen with you. He’s kept his life separate from yours and he keeps you in a little restricted box. Why don’t you face facts? You’re his mistress in everything but name—’

‘That’s not true! Andreas doesn’t keep me. I take nothing from him…OK, I live in that flat, but I pay all my own expenses and I don’t accept expensive gifts or anything from him,’ Hope reasoned in a low-pitched tone of urgency.

‘But it’s not a question of what you think, it’s all about what Andreas thinks and how he treats you—’

‘He cares about me…he treats me really well,’ Hope argued tightly.

Vanessa gave her a concerned look but Hope felt far too raw to take comfort from a sympathy that could only further dent her pride. ‘Why shouldn’t he? You’re devoted to him and he knows it and he uses it. He set the boundaries of your relationship way back at the beginning—’

‘No…there were no rules set. I am not his mistress…I wouldn’t be his mistress!’ Hope stated in an almost fierce undertone.

‘So he was too smooth an operator to put a label on it. Has he ever mentioned a future with you? Love? Marriage? Children?’

Battered down by those bold words, Hope almost flinched.

‘You have a right to ask where things are going at any stage of a relationship,’ Vanessa informed her and then she changed the subject.

Afterwards, Hope had no real idea what she had discussed with Vanessa beyond that point. She remembered having smiled a lot. She had been keen to reassure her closest friend that she was not offended by that blunt appraisal of her relationship with Andreas. But, in truth, those same comments had blown her peace of mind sky-high and caused her considerable pain. Vanessa’s every word replayed again and again in Hope’s troubled thoughts. She was devastated when she was forced to acknowledge that most of what the other woman had said had been based on unarguable fact rather than personal opinion.

Only hours earlier, Hope had felt supremely happy and perfectly contented with her life and with Andreas’s central position within it. It had been Vanessa who had sowed discontent inside her. Yet she did not blame her friend. After all, Vanessa had only shown her a more disturbing interpretation of limitations that Hope had simply accepted. Slowly and painfully, Hope felt all the concerns that she had suppressed and all the questions she had never dared to ask Andreas rise like taunts to the surface of her mind.

Andreas had never taken her to Greece, although he knew that she longed to visit the country of his birth with him. Even though his one and only sibling, his younger sister, Elyssa, was married to an Englishman and lived in London, Andreas had not succumbed to Hope’s gentle hints that she would like to meet Elyssa. Hope had always avoided dwelling on that omission and had told herself that in time Andreas would make that suggestion on his own account. In the same way, she had also convinced herself that she was unconcerned by her lack of contact with Andreas’s family and friends. But he had never given her the option, had he?

It was equally true that Andreas had never been known to make a reference to the future as something they might share…at least not a future that extended further than a calendar month ahead in his highly organised schedule. Not once had he mentioned marriage or a desire for children. As for love, well, he was prone to making cutting comments on that topic and she had learned to avoid the subject.

Her eyes stung with a surge of rare tears as she entered the big penthouse apartment that had become her home. Andreas might be in no hurry to offer commitment, but that still did not mean that she was his mistress. Did it? By nature, Andreas was reserved and cautious. Another doubt crept in to make itself heard: how could she even tell herself that they lived together? In the strictest sense they did not because Andreas continued to own and make occasional use of another, even more substantial city property. He had pointed out that the apartment was a necessary convenience for him because it was a lot closer to his office than his town house. His relatives also stayed at the town house when they visited London, as did he when it suited him. Furthermore, Hope had never set foot inside the town house…

Suddenly, Hope was seeing the foundations of her happiness wash away like sand on a beach. She adored Andreas. She had truly believed that their relationship was wonderful and well worth cherishing. But Vanessa’s frankly offered opinion had lacerated Hope’s pride and destroyed her confidence. Was it possible that she had been wilfully blind rather than face the harsh, hurtful truth? Was it possible that, like the penthouse apartment, she was really just a convenience to Andreas too? A sexual rather than residential convenience?

The phone in the echoing reception hall was ringing. After a moment of hesitation, she picked up.

‘Why has your mobile been switched off for three hours?’ Andreas demanded. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I was meeting Vanessa and…er…shopping and I forgot to put it on again.’ Hope crossed two sets of fingers as she told that small lie and swallowed hard.

‘I’ll be with you by eight tomorrow night. So, talk to me,’ Andreas invited, because he had taken a break for coffee and he could always depend on her to fill the space with the minutiae of her daily existence. No matter where he was in the world, he could pick up the phone and within minutes her tide of chirpy chatter would filter away all stress and entertain him. Hope had been very well named. She never said anything bad about anyone. She went out of her way to do favours for total strangers. She put a positive spin on every experience.

Her mind was blank. ‘What about?’

‘Anything and everything…how clothes are shrinking in size to fuel the diet industry…the addictive quality of chocolate…what a lovely day it is…how even wet days can be fun…what wonderfully pleasant people you have met in the apartment foyer, on the street, in the stores,’ Andreas enumerated without hesitation. ‘I’m used to a deluge of irrepressibly cheerful chatter.’

Hope’s face flamed. Did he see her as a mindless babbler? What did he see in her? She had always wondered. It took huge effort but she managed to talk and it must have been mindless because, the whole time, one half of her was concentrated on the less-than-encouraging reflection she could see in the contemporary mirror on the wall opposite. How could any guy who looked like Andreas really care for a woman her shape and size? Stop it, stop it, stop it, the voice of common sense urged her. With resolute courage, she turned away from the mirror and assured herself that self-doubt was not about to make her bolt to the kitchen and use food as a source of comfort.

In Switzerland, Andreas set down his phone, a frown dividing his ebony brows as his analytical brain homed in on the question of what had upset Hope. She was not prone to moods. Indeed her temperament was remarkably even and upbeat. When something bothered her, she shared it with him. In fact, she told him immediately and appreciated his advice. What kind of problem would she choose not to share with him?

Although she remained blissfully unaware of the fact, Hope was currently enjoying very discreet twenty-four-hour protection. Andreas, in common with many wealthy individuals, had suffered threats. Concerned that Hope might also be targeted, Andreas had hired security professionals to watch over her. Initially he had planned to tell her. But he had feared that the safeguards he had put in place might frighten her. She was friendly and trusting and thought the very best of everyone she met. He did not want that to change and had decided that it was kinder to leave her in ignorance. Only for an instant did he consider contacting her security team to find out where she had been and whom she had been with. That would be taking advantage of the situation and he respected her privacy. Even so, a sense of annoyance that Hope should for once have given him cause for disquiet made Andreas icy cold and tough with the executives who at his signal returned to the conference table.

Hope always dressed up for Andreas. Staring into her wardrobe, she was mentally dividing it into three separate collections of clothes. Of the three, usually only one set fitted her at any one time. The first had enjoyed a brief but glittering life after a crash diet and the second was filled with all the replacement clothes in different sizes that she had had to buy while she’d steadily regained the weight she had lost. The third was full of stalwart outfits with forgivingly stretchy proportions. Almost everything was bright in colour. As she yanked out a dress her head spun a little and she felt momentarily dizzy enough to sink down on the edge of the bed. It had not been the first time that she had felt that way in recent weeks but she reckoned that the light-headed feeling was an irritating hangover from a virus she had found hard to shake off during the autumn. No doubt the bug was still working its slow way out of her system and she would be wasting her doctor’s time if she approached her with such a vague symptom.

In an hour, Andreas would be with her again and excitement was leaping through Hope in intoxicating waves. She refused to torment herself with Vanessa’s gloomy forecast of doom and disappointment. Her friend had only wanted to put her on her guard, had in short spoken up out of pure, disinterested kindness. But Hope was equally well aware that Vanessa, who had had several unfortunate experiences, cherished a pronounced distrust of men and their motives. Furthermore, Vanessa had never met Andreas, had not even had the opportunity to appreciate what a wonderful guy he was.

Andreas kept the media at arm’s length and suffered accordingly for his determination to protect his privacy. It took a great deal to anger Hope but she had been very much annoyed by several magazine articles and newspaper columns that had utilised old photos and old stories to enable their continued unjust depiction of Andreas as a ruthless, callous womaniser who was merciless in business. Had Vanessa read those items and been influenced by them?

As Hope brushed her hair she was thinking about the male she knew. Strong, generous, wildly passionate, literally everything she wanted in a man wrapped up in one fantastic package. Even though Andreas hated roughing it, he took her on picnics because he knew she loved them. Sightseeing bored him to death but he had flown her out to Paris, Rome and a host of other fabulous cities so that she could explore her passion for history in his company. Whenever she had been scared, discouraged or in need of support, he had been there for her. She loved him with her whole heart and soul for a host of very understandable reasons. On the debit side…? No, no, she wasn’t going there, she was determined not to allow foolish negativity to creep in and wreak havoc with her happiness.

Andreas called her from the airport.

‘I’m counting the minutes,’ she told him truthfully.

He called her from the limo when it got stuck in city traffic.

‘I can’t bear it…’ she gasped strickenly.

‘Have you any idea how much I’ve missed you?’ Andreas finally broke through his cool to demand in his final call made as he stepped into the lift to come up to the apartment.

By that stage, Hope was in a heady fever of anticipation. The front door opened: she saw him and all intelligent thought ceased. Her knees felt weak. She leant back against the wall to steady herself. Everything about Andreas thrilled her to death. From the stubborn angle of his proud dark head to the lithe, leashed power and grace of his hard, muscular frame, he was spectacularly male. Lamplight burnished his cropped black hair and cast his lean, bronzed features into tantalising angles of light and shade. He was breathtakingly handsome and he still only had to walk through the door to make her heart threaten cardiac arrest.

Andreas kicked the door shut behind him and powered on across the hall to haul her into his arms. For an endless moment of bliss she was lost in the glorious touch and feel of him. Her nostrils flared on the familiar male scent of his skin overlaid with a faint tang of designer lotion and her responses went into overdrive. ‘Andreas…’ she breathed unsteadily.

‘If you could travel with me, we would have more time together.’ Brilliant dark golden eyes entrapped her misty gaze, his accented drawl husky and reasonable in tone, for he chose his moments with care. ‘Think about that. You could let your artistic endeavours take a back seat for a while.’

And lose her independence, which was quite out of the question, Hope acknowledged while she agonised with guilty longing over the seductive idea of being able to see more of Andreas. ‘I couldn’t…’

His hands closing over her smaller ones, and content to have planted yet another seed, Andreas pinned her back against the wall with all the single-minded purpose of a male guided by lustful intent. She succumbed to the allure of his hard, sensual mouth with the same fervour she would have employed in a life-or-death situation. He tasted like heaven, like something addictive she could not do without, and she clung. The tight knot of excitement in her belly fired her every nerve ending into an eager blaze of expectation. He dropped her hands to curve possessive fingers to the full, feminine swell of her hips and lift her into stirring connection with his bold erection.

‘Oh…’ she moaned, melting like honey in sunlight while the wicked throb of helpless hunger shimmied down into her pelvis and made her ache.

Plastered to every line of his big, powerful frame, she dragged her mouth free to snatch in a necessary gulp of oxygen while dimly her mind prompted her to recall an important ritual that she could not afford to overlook. ‘Your mobile…’ she gasped.

Andreas tensed.

‘It’s me or the phone,’ Hope reminded him reluctantly.

One-handed, Andreas wrenched the phone from his jacket, switched it off and tossed it down on the hallstand. He returned to plundering her mouth with devouring hunger and then wrenched himself back from her, dark colour scoring his aristocratic cheekbones. ‘For once, we are going to be cool and make it out of the hall.’

Dazed by passion, Hope slowly nodded.

With determination Andreas angled her away from the wall and backed her towards the bedroom. ‘If I surrender my phone, you have to make it worth my while, pedhi mou.’

‘Oh…’ Hope gazed back at him, soft mouth pink and tingling from the heat of his, her legs unsteady supports. The blaze of sexual challenge in his eyes imprisoned her as surely as a chain. A blinding wave of excitement sizzled through her.

Andreas surveyed her with scorching satisfaction. He ran down the zip on her turquoise dress and shimmied it down over her hips to expose the pink lace bra and panties that moulded her ripe curves. He vented a husky masculine sound of appreciation. ‘You’re superb…’

Self-conscious colour flushed her cheeks and even burnished the slope of her full breasts. Scooping her up, he deposited her on the bed, his rare charismatic smile flashing across his lean dark features, and her heart leapt as though it had a life of its own.

‘Don’t move,’ he told her with urgency.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she whispered, her attention locked to him like a magnet as he peeled off the tailored jacket of his business suit.

He looked sensational. Lithe, dark and arrestingly handsome, he emanated the prowling, lethal sexiness of a predator. Butterflies were fluttering in her tummy and she was on a helpless high of anticipation. But on another level, she suddenly discovered that she was fighting off a sense of shame that she should be lying on a bed in her underwear for his benefit. She had not been raised in a liberal home and when Andreas had come into her life she had not just thrown away the rulebook, she had virtually burned it. Did she mean anything to him? Or was what they had just a casual thing on his terms?

‘Do you think about me when you’re away?’ Hope blurted out.

His shirt hanging loose on his bronzed muscular chest, Andreas came down on the bed and laughed out loud. ‘After two weeks without sex?’ he teased in his dark deep drawl. ‘By this week, I was thinking about you at least once a minute!’

Hope flushed to the roots of her pale hair, hurt and disappointment scything through her that he should be so literal. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

Andreas hauled her up against him with strong hands, and golden eyes ablaze with arrogant confidence assailed hers. ‘Don’t ask a Greek trick questions,’ he warned her. ‘You’re my lover. Of course I think about you.’

Without hesitation, he plundered her mouth and her uneasy thoughts blurred. Fire sparked low in her belly and a wave of tormenting hunger consumed her. Two weeks without Andreas felt like half a lifetime. Even as she doubted his commitment, she could not resist her need to take refuge in his passion. Her body was taut with sensitivity, begging for sensation. The expert caress of his hands on her breasts made her moan. The rosy buds crowning her tender flesh tingled and when he utilised his teeth and his tongue on those inflamed peaks, she writhed, control slipping from her as steadily as any form of rational awareness.

Her heart was racing, the breath catching in her dry throat. He was pure bronzed elemental male and he knew exactly what inflamed her. He found the hot, swollen secret at the heart of her and clever fingers drove her to ever more desperate heights of longing. The passion took over, roaring through her twisting, turning length like an explosive fireball.

‘This is how I like to picture you,’ Andreas rasped with raw satisfaction. ‘Out of your mind with the pleasure I give you.’

He sank into her with ravishing force and her body leapt and clenched. The frenzy of excitement mastered her with terrifying immediacy. Delirious with desire, she was way beyond any hope of mastering the tempestuous surge of her responses. Her need for Andreas was almost painfully intense. His passion pushed her to a wild peak of unbearable pleasure and then she fell down and down and down into a state of turbulence that bore no resemblance to her usual languorous sense of peace and happiness. Her body was satisfied but her emotions were raw. Tears lashed her eyes and overflowed before she even knew what was happening to her.

Andreas rolled over onto his back. In the act of rearranging her on top of him, he pushed her hair gently off her face and his fingers lingered on her damp cheekbone. ‘What’s wrong?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing’s wrong.’ Hope gulped. ‘I don’t know why I’m crying. It’s silly.’

Foreboding nudged at Andreas, who excelled at second-guessing those who surrounded him. She buried her head in his shoulder. He smoothed her hair. Handsome mouth taut, he closed his arms round her. If he were patient she would tell him what was wrong. She was quite incapable of keeping anything important from him. Her confiding habits were engrained, he reminded himself.

‘I’m sorry…I suppose I’ve just come over all emotional thinking about our anniversary,’ Hope mumbled in a muffled voice.

Lush black lashes lifted on guarded dark golden eyes. ‘Anniversary?’

‘Don’t you know that in another few days we’ll have been together for two whole years?’ Hope lifted her tousled head, a happy smile of achievement on lips still swollen from his kisses. ‘I want to celebrate it.’

Two years? His gaze narrowed, his lean, darkly handsome face impassive, concealing his stunned reaction to that news. Had she really been in his life that long? He was appalled that he had neglected to notice her staggering longevity. Two years? Marriages didn’t last that long. When had she become the equivalent of a fixture? She had inserted herself into his daily routine with astounding subtlety. She was just…there. She didn’t cling but the tendrils of her existence were as meshed with his as ivy round a tree. That was not an inspiring analogy. But when had he last slept with another woman? He squashed the instant sliver of guilt that even the thought ignited. He had been incredibly faithful to her. Acknowledging that reality set his even white teeth on edge. Inexplicable as it seemed to him, she had infiltrated his freedom like an invisible invading army and conditioned him in ways that were foreign to him. Angry surprise turned him to ice as though he were in the presence of the enemy.

‘I’m not into anniversaries with women,’ Andreas delivered, brilliant eyes dark as coals and diamond-bright. ‘I don’t do the sentimental stuff.’

Hope could hardly breathe. She wanted to put her hand over his beautiful mouth and prevent him from saying anything more. She could not bear that he should fulfil any part of Vanessa’s disparaging forecast, yet she was equally unable to let that laden silence lie. ‘But it’s special to me that you’ve been a part of my life for so long.’

Andreas shrugged a muscular bronzed shoulder and firmly lifted her off him. ‘We have a good time together. I value you. But it would be inappropriate to celebrate an anniversary. That’s not what we’re about.’

Hope felt like someone tied to the railway tracks in front of an express train and the roar of the metal monster was his words crushing the dreams she had cherished and ripping apart her illusions. In one lithe, powerful movement, he sprang off the bed and headed into the bathroom. She lay there cold and shocked and shattered. In her presence he had changed from the guy she loved into an intimidating stranger with cold eyes and a harsh, unfeeling voice and he had pushed her away. She got up to pull on the ice-blue wrap lying on a nearby chair. But she was forced to sink back down onto the bed because her head was swimming. It was that stupid dizziness again, she thought wearily. Perhaps it was an ear infection that was interfering with her sense of balance.

I value you. What sort of a declaration was that? That Andreas knew the exact extent of her worth? In terms of convenience? No, he didn’t do sentimental but, perhaps more tellingly, he had not cared whether or not he wounded her feelings. He had to be very sure of her to put a blanket ban on even a minor celebration. Biting her lip and with a knot of fear forming inside her, Hope tightened the sash on her wrap. But anger was also slowly stirring out of the ashes of the hurt caused by his humiliating response to her perfectly innocent remarks.

Taut with angry, frustrated tension, Andreas leant back against the limestone wall in the power shower and let the water stream down over his magnificent bronzed body. Usually he was still in bed with Hope at this stage of the evening. His chill-out time with her had been wrecked. Taken by surprise, he had been tactless. He wanted to punch something. Their relationship was as near perfect as he had ever hoped to achieve on a casual basis. Hope never made unreasonable demands and appeared to have no greater ambition in life than to make him happy. And she was bloody brilliant at making him happy, Andreas acknowledged grudgingly. He did not want to lose her. But what did he do with a mistress who did not know she was a mistress? A mistress who wanted to celebrate anniversaries as if she were a wife? Theos mou… He winced. What had come over her?

Most probably, Andreas reasoned with a surge of fierce resentment, Hope’s shrewish friend, Vanessa, was responsible. Was it she who had destroyed Hope’s sunny contentment? Who else could it have been? Once or twice Hope had repeated Vanessa’s revealingly acidic remarks about men. Andreas had gained the distinct impression that Hope’s best friend would fry him alive in hot oil if she ever got the chance.

That his association with Hope should be so misjudged and so undervalued outraged Andreas. He was proud of the way he treated Hope. He looked after her. She was a very happy woman. Why? He kept all the nasty realities of life at bay. He even made her dreams come true. Although she had no suspicion of the fact, eighteen months earlier it had been his influence that had won her a place on a design course at a leading art college. Thanks to him she had since graduated and begun fashioning handbags that he was secretly convinced no sane woman would ever wish to buy. He had a shuddering recollection of the one shaped like a ripe tomato. But the point was, Hope was cheerfully content…or, at least, she had been until the serpent had entered Eden.

Andreas was towelling himself dry when Hope entered the bathroom. She drew in a slow, deep breath to steady herself and fixed turquoise blue eyes bravely on him. ‘So if we can’t have anniversaries, what can we have?’

Six feet four inches tall, black hair still wet from the shower and crystalline drops of water still sparkling on the ebony curls defining his powerful pectoral muscles, Andreas froze. He had not expected a second assault in that line. The first had been startling enough. Winged ebony brows drew together. ‘I don’t believe I follow…’

Hope realised that there was a lump in her throat, a lump that was swelling with every second that passed with the threat of tears. ‘I…I suppose I’m asking is this it for you and me?’

‘Clarify that,’ Andreas instructed in the cool tone he used in the office to make underlings jump. But his dark golden eyes shimmered with intensity. He could not credit the idea but for a split second he wondered if she was threatening to dump him.

‘Once you told me that nothing stays the same and that everything must progress,’ Hope reminded him unsteadily. ‘You said that the things that remain static wither and die. Yet from what I can see, in the last two years we haven’t changed at all.’

Right there and then, Andreas decided that in the future it would be wiser to keep all words of wisdom on the score of goal-orientated achievement targets and healthy change to himself.

Every word Hope spoke came from her heart and nothing was pre-planned or judged for its effect. She was very upset. Horribly conscious of his cool distance, she was desperate to make sense of what was happening between them. She needed the reassurance of finding out exactly where she stood with the man she loved.

‘So what about us?’ Hope continued half under her breath, doggedly pushing the question out, refusing to surrender to her inner fears. ‘Are we going anywhere?’

Incredulous that Hope should be subjecting him to such an onslaught, Andreas snatched in a charged breath and reached for her with determined hands. Gathering her small, curvaceous body to him, he reclaimed her mouth in a fierce, sweet invasion that left her quivering with disconcertion. ‘Back to bed?’ he murmured with hungry intent as he finally lifted his arrogant dark head.

Her pale face flamed as though he had slapped her. Indeed she felt as though he might as well have done, for she was bitterly ashamed that he had found it so easy to distract her. ‘Is that my answer? I want to feel like I’m part of your life, not just someone you sleep with,’ she confided painfully.

Golden eyes ablaze with displeasure, Andreas spread lean brown hands wide in emphasis. ‘You are part of my life!’

‘If that’s true, why do I never get to meet your friends?’ Her voice was rising with stress in spite of her efforts to keep it level. ‘Are you ashamed of me?’ she gasped strickenly.

‘When we’re together, I prefer to keep you to myself, pedhi mou. I won’t apologise for that,’ Andreas fielded smoothly. ‘Calm yourself. You’re getting hysterical!’

‘I’m not…I’m just fighting with you!’

Andreas dealt her a stony appraisal. ‘I won’t fight with you.’

‘Is that something else you’re not into?’ Hope heard herself hurl in shock at her own daring. Backing away from him, she jarred her hip painfully on a corner of the vanity unit behind her.

‘Are you hurt?’ Lean, strong face taut, Andreas strode forward.

In the room next door the phone started ringing. The untimely interruption made Andreas swear in exasperated Greek, but Hope was grateful for the excuse to escape and answer the call.

‘Get me Andreas…’ Elyssa Southwick’s imperious voice demanded.

‘Hold on, please,’ Hope said gruffly.

If Elyssa couldn’t raise Andreas on his mobile phone when he was in London, she called the apartment instead. The Nicolaidis siblings were close, for their parents had died when Elyssa was barely a teenager. Still only in her mid twenties, Elyssa leant heavily on her big brother for support. The young Greek woman, however, seemed to have no inkling of Hope’s identity, for she always spoke to Hope as though she were a servant on telephone duty.

Andreas accepted the phone Hope extended. But his attention was on Hope, who looked like glass about to shatter, her warm blue eyes cast down and her generous mouth taut with strain. He was furious with her. Why was she doing this to them? The phone dialogue continued in Greek. Hope understood the gist of it for she had been learning the language at night class for many months and had planned to surprise Andreas with her proficiency. Elyssa was reminding her brother that she was throwing a housewarming party the next week. Hope left the room.

Of course, she would not be invited to the party. Andreas was in no hurry to take her out and show her off. Was that because he was only using her for sex? Easy, uncomplicated sex with a woman who had been weak and foolish enough to give herself freely on that basis from the very outset of their acquaintance? How could she complain on that score when Andreas had never promised anything else and she had never had the courage to ask for anything more?

Pure anguish threatened to take hold of Hope. She wanted to weep and wail like a soul in torment and the power of her own distraught emotions scared her. Her mouth wobbled and she pinned it flat. Terrified as she was of breaking down while Andreas was still in the apartment, she fought to keep a lid on all distressing thoughts.

But her mind marched on with relentless cruelty. Andreas thought nothing of making love over and over again. He was all Greek, an unashamedly passionate guy with an insatiably high libido. But he was more into work than leisure and a woman who required little in terms of romance or attention was a necessity. No doubt, she suited him on those scores. She had always tried to be independent. She didn’t create a fuss when he was late or business kept him from her. She had accepted her backstage role in his life.

Why? Andreas was so much what she was not and never could be. It was not that she suffered from low self-esteem; simply that she could not ignore or forget the reality that Andreas outranked her in so many ways. He was the gorgeous, sophisticated product of a world of immense privilege and even more immense wealth. If it rained on a summer day, he thought he was suffering and he had once flown her halfway across the world to spend three hours on a hot beach. He was highly educated and shockingly clever. Far too clever for his own good, she had often thought, she recalled ruefully, for he was a perfectionist, obsessively driven to achieve, but rarely satisfied even by superlative results.

What had she to offer in comparison? Basic schooling, an ordinary background and at best what she deemed to be only average looks and intelligence. How could she ever have dared to dream that some day he might fall in love with her? Or that he might eventually choose to offer her a more secure place in his life? But she had been guilty of harbouring exactly those dreams. She loved Andreas, she loved him a great deal, and right from the beginning that had been a handicap to any form of restraint or common sense.

Hope tilted up her chin as if she was bracing herself. Andreas might be satisfied with the current status quo, but she needed to have a good hard think about whether or not she could cope with a relationship that had no future. And presumably none of the commitment she had taken for granted that she already had. Her tummy flipped. She felt sick at the very idea that she might have to walk away from Andreas. But if she meant nothing more to him than a casual bed partner, wasn’t that her only option?

On the other hand, was it possible that she had chosen the worst possible moment to mention something that Andreas seemed to find so controversial? Maybe the very word ‘anniversary’ struck horror into his bones. Maybe she was overreacting to her own anxieties, concerns that she had contrived to ignore until a friend had voiced similar reservations.

Here she was fighting with Andreas for the very first time. Here she was putting their entire relationship in jeopardy. Her hands knotted into fists and her eyes swam with hot tears. She never cried. What was the matter with her? So much emotion was swilling about inside her, she felt frighteningly on edge. She had almost shouted at him. He had been astonished. She pressed trembling hands to her cool cheeks. She breathed in slow and deep in an effort to recapture the tranquillity that had until very recent times been so much a part of her nature.

‘Hope…’ His long, lean, muscular body garbed only in a pair of cotton boxers, Andreas found her by the window in the elegant sitting room. Looking incredibly male and sexy, he strolled across the handsome oak-planked floor and closed firm hands over her knotted fingers to pull her close. His brilliant golden eyes snared her deeply troubled gaze and held her entrapped. ‘How would you like to go to my sister’s party next week?’

Her surprise and pleasure linked and swelled into a sensation of overwhelming joy and relief. ‘Are you serious? My goodness, I’d love to go!’

Andreas watched the glow of happiness reanimate in the instant generous smile that lit up her face. Situation defused: it had been the right gesture to make. A weekend in Paris would have compromised his principles in regard to anniversaries. That Elyssa would barely notice Hope’s existence among so many other guests was irrelevant. There was no reason why Hope should not attend, but he had no intention of making a habit of such invitations.

Eventually, he would have to do his duty by the Nicolaidis name and marry to father an heir. In the light of that prospect, it was wise to make a distinction between his public and his private life and be discreet. Hope would be hurt but, the longer she had been part of his life, the harder she would find it to break away and the more easily she would adjust to the inevitable restrictions and accept them, Andreas reflected with hard determination.

Her heart beating very fast, Hope curved into the gloriously familiar heat of his big, powerful frame. She felt very guilty over her temporary loss of faith in him. Obviously, she should have spoken up sooner. Perhaps he had just needed a little nudge in the right direction.

‘Now…’ Long brown fingers curved to her cheekbones and her breath began coming in quick shallow bursts. His scorching golden eyes dazzled her. Excitement leapt even before he tasted her readily parted lips with devastating hunger and swept her up into his arms to carry her back to the bedroom.

CHAPTER TWO

ENTERING the imposing mansion that Elyssa and her wealthy husband, Finlay Southwick, had renovated at reputedly vast expense, Hope smoothed her V-necked black dress down over her hips with damp palms.

The party was already in full swing, for Andreas did not believe in early arrivals. She was very nervous and was resisting a powerful urge to stick to him like superglue. She had been so scared of wearing the wrong thing that she had opted to play it safe with black, but women all around her were wearing rainbow colours and she felt horribly drab and unadventurous. In addition, her plan to spend half the day grooming herself to her personal best in the presentation stakes had been interrupted, cast into confusion and pretty much destroyed by Andreas arriving three hours early.

Warm colour blossomed in Hope’s cheeks. A business meeting had been cancelled, leaving Andreas free to finish early. The intimate ache between her thighs testified to the enthusiasm with which Andreas had taken advantage of that rare gift of extra time with her.

A youthful blonde caught up in the crush stared at Hope in surprise and stopped dead. ‘It is you, isn’t it? You’re the handbag lady who does the stall in Camden market…aren’t you?’

‘I think you will find that you are mistaken,’ Andreas interposed in a cool, deflating tone that would have crushed granite.

Hope tensed. The teenager already reddening with embarrassment had vaguely familiar features. ‘Yes…that’s me,’ she confirmed with a warm smile to ease the girl’s discomfiture.

‘My mother adores the bag I gave her for her birthday and loads of her friends are desperate to find out where she got it from! I’ll be calling back soon,’ the blonde promised.

Before Hope could confide that she had given up on selling at the market, Andreas had curved a firm hand to her spine to urge her past. The foyer was big and crowded with noisy knots of chattering guests. He pressed her into a doorway to say in an icy undertone, ‘Is it true? Have you been flogging merchandise from a stall?’

Taken aback, Hope looked up at him in dismay. His gleaming dark eyes were hard and cold. ‘Yes. Initially, I was doing market research to find out what sells to which age groups. It helped me keep in touch with current trends—’

‘You’ve been keeping a market stall,’ Andreas sliced in, cold, incredulous disapproval etched into the hard angles of his lean, strong face. ‘Trading in the street as though you were penniless and without means of support! How dare you affront me in such a manner?’

Hope was paralysed to the spot. Astonishment had leached all the natural colour from below her skin. ‘It never occurred to me that you might be so snobbish about it,’ she muttered unevenly.

‘I am not a snob.’ Andreas rejected that accusation out of hand.

Anxious turquoise eyes clear as glass rested on him. ‘I’m afraid you are, but with your privileged background that’s perfectly normal and understandable—’

‘Theos…what has my background to do with this?’ Andreas grated, his annoyance fuelled to anger by the expression of gentle and compassionate forgiveness that she wore. ‘Why did you not tell me that you were working as a street trader?’

‘For goodness’ sake, it was only an occasional casual thing. I had no idea you would feel like this about it. I didn’t even think that you would be interested,’ Hope murmured unhappily. ‘As it happens, I’m not doing the market any more—’

‘You should never have stooped to such a level. From now on you will respect the standards required to conserve your dignity.’ Devastatingly handsome features set in grim lines of intimidating impassivity, Andreas reined back his temper with difficulty.

‘I don’t think I’ve got any to conserve,’ Hope confided apologetically, deciding that it might not be the best time to tell him that she had only given up the market in favour of craft fairs.

Sometimes, the cocoon of his own stratospheric wealth made Andreas hopelessly impractical, she thought ruefully. After all, she was virtually penniless. She had lived like a church mouse on her student loan and had since stretched her meagre earnings to paying for all her outgoings but it was a real uphill battle. Only the fact that she had no rent to pay for the roof over her head had enabled her to manage. Was he even aware of the contribution she made to the household bills? Or did one of his staff deal with all his domestic expenditure at the apartment?

‘But I have, so cultivate dignity for my benefit,’ Andreas delivered with cutting clarity, refusing to be softened by the playful light in her gaze.

His pride was outraged by the very idea of her rubbing shoulders with market traders and serving customers. Such a milieu was beneath her touch and she ought to know that without being told. She was too naive and she lacked discrimination. How much over-familiarity and coarseness had she endured without complaint? What other foolish things did she get up to that he didn’t know about? His unquestioning trust in her was shaken. For the first time he acknowledged the inherent flaw in his own all too regular absences abroad. If he had been around more, he would have found out about the market-trading project and he would have suppressed it. In the future he would need to take a much closer interest in her activities.

Hope knew Andreas too well not to recognise his distaste and it cut her to the quick at a moment when she was already feeling vulnerable. He was disappointed in her. It was plain that he believed she had embarrassed him and that really hurt. The cool distance stamped in his stunning dark golden eyes hit her hardest of all.

At that point she registered that the crush had magically cleared to allow them a clear passage. But she was discomfited by the discovery that they appeared to be the cynosure of all eyes. A perceptible ripple of excited awareness was travelling round the big reception room, turning every head in their direction. Eyes skimmed over her with curiosity but lingered with fascinated awe on the tall, authoritative male at her side. Andreas was the main attraction and the crowds parted before him as though he were royalty. Certainly, he was royally indifferent to the power of his own presence. He ignored all but a tiny number of the hopeful and gushing greetings angled at him.

A beautiful young woman with sultry dark eyes and long brown hair, her slender figure displayed to advantage in a strappy iridescent pink dress, was hurrying towards them. Hope, who had often seen photos of Elyssa in gossip magazines, recognised Andreas’s sister instantly and smiled. Her tummy felt tight with nerves. She so much wanted her meeting with the other woman to go well. Elyssa focused her attention on her brother and kissed him on both cheeks in ebullient welcome even as she uttered a spirited barrage of complaint about his late arrival.

Untouched by that censure, indeed laughing, Andreas flicked a glance at Hope as though he was about to introduce her to his sibling. However, a heavily built older man approached him just then and addressed him in a flood of Greek. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ Andreas said to both women, his mouth tightening with impatience as he stepped to one side.

‘I’m Hope,’ Hope confided as she extended a friendly hand to Elyssa. ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.’

A glittering smile pinned to her burgundy-tinted mouth, Elyssa fixed sullen dark eyes on her, ignored her hand and murmured with stinging scorn, ‘You’re my brother’s whore. Why would I want to meet you?’

As Elyssa walked away, her smile brighter than ever, Hope struggled to conceal her shock. Her face burning, she was gripped by a sick sense of humiliation. That Andreas’s sister and closest relative, a woman who did not even know her, should attack her with such venom appalled her. She told herself that she would not think about the offensive label the brunette had applied to her. She had been mad keen to come to Elyssa’s party, she reminded herself doggedly, and she had to make the best of the event for Andreas’s sake. Andreas was very fond of his kid sister. There was no way she could tell him what Elyssa had said to her. She would just have to take it on the chin.

Across the room, a man in his twenties with fair, angelic features at odds with his bloodshot eyes and tousled spiky blond hair raised his hand to her in nonchalant greeting. Grateful to see a face she knew in that sea of daunting strangers, Hope beamed at him.

‘Do you know who that guy is?’ Andreas enquired flatly.

‘Ben Campbell…he’s Vanessa’s cousin,’ Hope told him, her face shadowing as she once again fought off the recollection of the name Elyssa had applied to her. Whore…no, she refused to even think about that.

Andreas spared the younger man a chilling glance and made no effort to acknowledge him. Campbell had a sleazy reputation for wild parties and indiscriminate womanising. He was very much disconcerted by the evident fact that Hope should be on friendly terms with him.

‘I don’t want you associating with Campbell,’ Andreas imparted with succinct clarity.

Hope stiffened in surprise, chewed at her lower lip and then dropped her pale head. When had Andreas begun to talk as though his every word, unreasonable or otherwise, ought to be her command? She might only have met Ben a few times but she liked him.

‘Which means,’ Andreas extended very dryly, for he was less than impressed by her lack of response and the way she appeared to be avoiding his gaze, ‘as of now, you no longer know him.’

Hope said nothing. How could she cut Ben dead and offend her best friend? Apart from anything else, it would be ridiculous overkill for a casual acquaintance that only encompassed a handful of meetings at Vanessa’s apartment.

A woman glittering with diamonds swam up to speak to Andreas. She paid Hope the barest minimum of attention and was the forerunner in a long and constant procession of people frantic to get a chance to talk to him. In comparison, Hope felt as interesting as a wooden chair and would not have been surprised to find coats being draped over her.

Her confidence already smashed to bits by her hostess, Hope retreated into an alcove nearby. From that safe harbour, she watched the female contingent gush and flatter and hang on every word that fell from Andreas’s beautifully sculpted lips. The men were loud with nerves, unerringly deferential and eager to hear his opinion.

His whore. Without the slightest warning, that dreadful tag leapt back into her mind and had much the same effect on her as an axe wielded by a maniac. A whore was a promiscuous woman, she thought sickly. A woman who bartered sex for reward. A woman who made a special effort to please men sexually. Could she be described in those terms?

Andreas did not give her money, but she lived in an apartment worthy of a princess and it did rejoice in a designer décor, fancy furniture and fantastic art works. Even if she worked a thousand years she would never be able to afford such luxury on her own income. But she was not promiscuous. When she had met Andreas, she had been a virgin. She had only ever slept with Andreas. He had taught her everything she knew. But Andreas being Andreas and a demanding perfectionist in all fields had doubtless ensured that she had learnt exactly what pleased him in bed. Did that make her a whore?

Feeling claustrophobic in her dim corner and too tormented by her own fears to stay still, Hope wandered off into the next room. Only then did she appreciate that her eyes were awash with tears. Ashamed of her lack of self-control, she hurried on in her exploration of the big, crowded house, afraid that if she lingered anywhere someone would notice that her emotions had got on top of her. A sob was clogging up her throat. She wished she had never come to the party. She felt duly punished for daring to crave what she had naively believed would be an important stepping stone in her relationship with Andreas. Finding herself alone in a quiet branch corridor, she paused, listened outside a solid panelled door and, reassured by the silence within, pressed down the handle.

The door creaked wide on a low-lit room and a startling spectacle. Andreas’s sister, Elyssa, was passionately kissing a dark-haired man, who bore no resemblance whatsoever to her husband, Finlay Southwick.

Consternation momentarily froze Hope on the threshold. Shocked eyes veiling, she pulled the door closed again in a nerveless harried movement and sucked in air to steady herself. But before she could even breathe out again and move on, the door flew open again to reveal Elyssa.

‘Don’t you dare tell Andreas!’ the young Greek woman hissed in a tempestuous mix of revealing fear and fury. ‘If this gets back to my brother, I’ll know who to blame and I’ll destroy you!’

Barely able to credit the extent of the other woman’s aggression, Hope murmured tightly, ‘There’s no need to threaten me—’

‘There’s every need,’ Elyssa condemned furiously. ‘What were you doing snooping? Did you follow me in here?’

‘Of course I didn’t!’ Hope protested in disbelief. ‘I wasn’t snooping either. I was just looking for somewhere quiet where I could sit down. I thought the room was empty—’

‘Did you really?’ Elyssa sneered.

‘Yes, I did. Look, I have no intention of telling anybody anything. I always mind my own business—’

‘Just you see that you do, you fat cow!’ the enraged brunette spat at her spitefully.

Reeling from that second attack, Hope walked away with a rigid back. Tears were blinding her: it was a nightmare party with the hostess from hell. She cannoned into someone and looked up with a stifled apology to focus on Ben Campbell.

‘What’s up?’ Ben asked, his voice a trifle slurred.

‘Nothing!’ Brushing past him, Hope took refuge in the cloakroom. Secure then from prying ears and eyes, she punched out Vanessa’s number on her mobile phone and said wretchedly, ‘Everything’s going horribly wrong. Elyssa hated me on sight!’

‘Good. Andreas must be even keener than I suspected,’ her friend responded with disconcerting good cheer.

‘How do you make that out?’ Hope swallowed back another sob and decided that she did indeed look very large in the black dress. All that dark unbroken colour was less than flattering. In fact her reflection seemed to fill the whole dainty mirror above the vanity unit.

‘Elyssa’s a spoilt little brat of an heiress and she’s possessive of her big brother. She must have some idea how long you’ve been with him and I bet she’s worried that he’s serious. Did she say anything nasty? Anything you could make decent mileage out of?’

Hope frowned, for where Andreas’s sister was concerned she felt honour-bound to preserve a discreet silence. ‘Why?’

‘Because you could use it as ammunition and confide tearfully in Andreas. Only a week ago, I would have said that that was a major no-no, but with impressively little effort you miraculously persuaded Andreas to take you to the party of the year,’ the redhead mused thoughtfully. ‘I’m now convinced that you have more influence over Andreas Nicolaidis than either he or you appreciate.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Hope encouraged, desperate to have her spirits raised even with what she deemed to be a false hope. ‘But I wouldn’t dream of saying anything that would cause trouble between Andreas and his sister. That would be dreadfully mean of me and certain to fail—’

‘If Elyssa is planning to be your enemy, you may not have much choice,’ Vanessa warned.

‘Don’t be so pessimistic.’ Hope sighed. ‘She may well think that I’m not good enough for her brother—’

‘Oh, please, don’t start making excuses for her!’ Vanessa groaned in despair.

Finishing the call, Hope returned the phone to her bag. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell her best friend that she had been called a whore. She was too afraid that Vanessa might secretly think that Elyssa had had some justification for voicing that cruelly humiliating opinion. Emerging from the cloakroom, she saw that Ben was now lounging up against the wall a few feet away.

‘Let’s talk…’ he urged, holding out a languid and rather wavering hand, which made her suspect that he was drunk. ‘Who stole your big happy smile? I want you to tell me what’s wrong. Van would kill me for walking by on the other side.’

Cheeks hot with self-consciousness as envious female eyes locked to her, Hope hurried over. ‘Shush…there’s nothing wrong…please keep your voice down—’

Ben locked both arms round her as much to keep himself upright, she suspected, as to prevent her walking away. ‘Would you like me to take you home?’

‘Thank you but no—’

‘I got droves of women,’ Ben confided lazily, bloodshot green eyes mocking her as she blushed and attempted to tug free of his hold. ‘Do you think I could seduce you away from your Greek billionaire?’

‘No chance. Nothing and nobody could,’ Hope swore with fervour.

‘Never say never…it’s like challenging fate.’ Scanning her pale, troubled expression, Ben sighed and dropped an almost paternal kiss down on top of her head. ‘You’re way too sweet and straight for Nicolaidis.’

Andreas was the restive centre of a crowd. He was bored: even at a distance she could tell. His stunning dark golden eyes picked her out when she was still moving towards him. Lean, extravagantly handsome face intent, he abandoned his audience without hesitation and strode forward to intercept her. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded.

‘When the dialogue turns to gold prices and pork bellies, I feel a bit surplus to requirements.’

‘Let’s go, pedhi mou.’ Closing a determined hand over hers, Andreas trailed her in the direction of the hall and remained wonderfully impervious to every fawning attempt to slow down his progress. ‘We should never have got out of bed…’

As he hurried her down the steps into the cool night air the shameless sexual sizzle in his skimming appraisal made her tummy clench and her mouth run dry. Suddenly everything that had upset her seemed utterly unimportant. She loved him to death. What else mattered? In a spontaneous movement, she stretched up on her tiptoes to press a kiss to a bronzed cheekbone and she breathed in the heady male scent of his skin with the delight of an addict.

‘Andreas? Please wait,’ a soft voice interposed from behind them in Greek. ‘I need to speak to you.’

Andreas tensed, ebony brows drawing together. He tucked Hope into the waiting limousine with scrupulous care and an apologetic smile. ‘Give me five minutes…I’ll say your goodbyes for you.’

Elyssa’s approach had made Hope tense as well, but she was grateful to be released from the challenge of dealing with his volatile sister again. She had been surprised at how quiet and hesitant the brunette had sounded until it occurred to her that perhaps Elyssa intended to confide in her brother and admit that all was not well in her marriage. Hope liked that idea, for she felt bad about withholding what she had seen from Andreas. After all, he was very attached to his sister and her two young children. Cynical he might be, but Hope was convinced that he would make considerable effort to keep his sister’s family together.

Perhaps Elyssa, who had married when she was still very young, had allowed a flirtation to get out of hand. Whatever, Hope reminded herself that the situation was none of her business. But even so the whole wretched tangle was liable to put Andreas in a very bad mood. Andreas was not tolerant of female mistakes in the fidelity line, Hope reflected ruefully. More than once she had heard him pass distinctly judgemental comments on that score.

It was fifteen minutes before Andreas joined her. In the artificial light his vibrant olive skin tone had an unusually pale aspect. His brilliant eyes were dark and screened to a brooding glitter. Convinced that his sister had told him what had happened, Hope was unsurprised by his silence during the drive back through the city streets. He was fiercely loyal to his own flesh and blood and he had never discussed Elyssa with her.

When Hope recognised the tension in the atmosphere, she thought she had to be imagining it. Then doubt crept in. Had Elyssa accused her of snooping? Surely Andreas was too sensible to pay credence to that far-fetched idea? Her brow tightened even more with tension.

In the lift on the way up to the apartment, she met bold dark eyes cold as the Atlantic in winter. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked instantly.

‘Why are you asking?’ Andreas murmured sibilantly.

Hope had never heard that daunting inflection in his rich dark drawl before. Entering the hall, she kicked off her shoes as was her wont and hesitated.

‘Hope…?’

Slowly she turned round and stared back at him. Andreas was still lodged at the far side of the spacious hall. Lethally tall and exotically dark and sexy, he looked so drop-dead gorgeous he took her breath away. Yet her sense of being under threat at that moment was so intense that she felt slightly queasy.

Andreas strolled fluidly towards her. Brilliant dark eyes flashed shimmering gold. ‘Did anything happen tonight that you would like to tell me about?’

CHAPTER THREE

HOPE gulped. Why was Andreas acting as if she had done something wrong? She had no desire to whinge about Elyssa’s unkindness or indeed to tell tales about the younger woman. Yet if Andreas knew that she had seen his sister with another man, why was he making a mystery of that embarrassing event?

‘No, nothing comes to mind,’ Hope answered uneasily, wishing she did not feel quite so guilty about keeping quiet on Elyssa’s behalf.

‘You were seen with Ben Campbell,’ Andreas imparted icily, but there was a dauntingly rough and unfamiliar edge to his intonation.

Disconcerted by that reference to Ben, Hope turned pink and shifted uncomfortably, but she could see no reason to be the slightest bit apologetic on that score. ‘Yes, I did speak to Ben for a couple of minutes.’

‘Finlay, my brother-in-law, saw you with him. You were in Campbell’s arms.’

That particular choice of wording sent a stab of sincere annoyance travelling through Hope. Could something so minor and innocent in every way be responsible for causing so much bad feeling? She had not even met Elyssa’s husband. But she could not help thinking that there was surely something rather mean-spirited about a man capable of reading anything suspect into her brief chat with Ben. ‘It wasn’t quite as you make it sound—’

Andreas elevated a black brow. ‘Wasn’t it?’

Her usual calm chipping away at an ever-faster rate, Hope stared back at him in an effort to comprehend the mystery of his unusual behaviour. He had never shown signs of being unreasonably jealous or possessive. Now all of a sudden he was acting like a stranger. ‘Of course it wasn’t. For a start there were at least half a dozen other people nearby,’ she pointed out. ‘Ben wasn’t even flirting with me, he was just fooling around.’

His lean bronzed features remained maddeningly uninformative. ‘Was he?’

‘For goodness’ sake, Andreas,’ Hope continued with gathering force, for a cascade of little mental alarm bells was beginning to go off inside her head. ‘Ben probably put his arms round me because he had to hang onto me to stay upright. He was rather merry. There certainly wasn’t anything else to it. In fact, I’m finding it very hard to believe that we’re having this conversation.’

‘We’re having this conversation because five minutes after Finlay saw you getting cosy in public with Campbell, Elyssa surprised you getting cosier still in private,’ Andreas delivered with grim clarity.

Hope stilled, the animated pink draining slowly from her shaken face. ‘Say that again…’

‘Surely I don’t need to repeat it,’ Andreas said, his disgust unconcealed. ‘You went into a private room with Campbell.’

A tiny pulse had begun to go bang-bang-bang at Hope’s temple and she was so stiff she might have been fashioned out of stone. ‘I did not go into any room to be alone with Ben—’

Something flashed in his hard, dark gaze: a sizzle of golden fury. ‘This is grubby…this is beneath me!’ Andreas incised with a raw, slashing derision that cut her to the bone. ‘At least admit the truth. When such behaviour is witnessed, there is no scope to lie or make excuses.’

‘But I’m not lying or making excuses,’ Hope fielded breathlessly, for sheer shock was making her feel as if she had been punched squarely in the solar plexus. ‘What am I supposed to have been doing with Ben?’

‘You were kissing him—’

‘I wasn’t!’ Hope gasped. ‘Your sister is—’

Andreas spread his arms in a sudden violent movement that shook her into silence. ‘Don’t offend me even more by daring to question my sister’s integrity. She saw what she saw. You abused her hospitality and embarrassed her.’

‘I did not…I swear I did not,’ Hope muttered in bewilderment, her head swimming with too many thoughts at once. As she finally grasped how cruelly manipulative and unashamedly deceitful Elyssa Southwick had been, she felt sick to the stomach. For an instant she was simply shattered that someone she barely knew could be prepared to tell a lie of such appalling magnitude about her.

‘Elyssa was very upset and she didn’t know what to do. But after discussing the matter with her husband, she decided that I had a right to know that you were behaving like a slut behind my back!’ Andreas bit out rawly, his wintry cool and control starting to crack.

Hope trembled. ‘But it’s not true. Not a word of it is true—’

‘I want to hear you admit the truth before I leave. You owe me that at the very least,’ Andreas growled.

Even as she saw that her world was falling apart, Hope was sickly fascinated by the callous ruthlessness that Elyssa had employed to bring about the destruction she had threatened. ‘I’ve been a real fool,’ she mumbled in a daze. ‘I always try to overlook other people’s mistakes and not stand in judgement because I know I’m not perfect either. But I overlooked one very dangerous fact…your sister is as clever as you are and it seems she decided that I was a threat to her security.’

His handsome mouth curled. ‘That’s offensive nonsense. Have the decency to leave Elyssa out of this unpleasant business.’

‘I don’t think I can.’ Yet Hope was also asking herself how she could possibly stage a creditable counter-accusation. Having got her story in first, Elyssa had backed it up most impressively with her husband’s reference to having previously seen Hope in Ben Campbell’s arms. It didn’t matter that that latter incident had taken place in the most innocent of circumstances. The other man’s additional testimony had made the case against Hope look irrefutable. On the other hand, she reasoned, perhaps the story might have looked unarguable to a stranger, but should Andreas not know her better?

‘Don’t you know me better than this?’ she whispered out loud.

That question hit Andreas as hard as a blast of dynamite detonating inside a giant rock. Rage was like a clenched-tight fist inside him and it took all his concentration to keep it contained. He could not stand to look at her; yet somehow he could not make himself look away. He had trusted her. Until his sister had blown away his illusions he had had no idea just how deep his trust in Hope had run. The sleazy truth had come as a body blow. But then placing that amount of faith in a mistress was asking for trouble, he reflected bitterly. He had kept her around too long. He had let her rosy, cosy sentimentality infect him like a virus and blur the boundaries of what they shared: great sex, nothing more, and he could find equally great sex elsewhere.

‘Andreas?’ Hope breathed unevenly, a tumult of emotions thrust down as she fought a fierce battle not to lose control. ‘Do you really think that I would do something like that?’

Insolent golden eyes zeroed in on her. ‘Is it beyond impossible?’ Andreas drawled smooth as silk. ‘You did it with me in a barn the first night we met.’

All the natural colour bled from Hope’s complexion to leave her pale as parchment. Pain exploded inside her. But on some level, she welcomed the hurt inflicted by his cruel derision. Perhaps it was a long overdue punishment for her recklessness that night. Evidently that bad beginning had come back to haunt her. He didn’t respect her; he had obviously never respected her. Virgin or not, she had been too easy a conquest and he was now looking back at that as though it had been the first betraying symptom of her being a slut in the making. It was incredibly cruel of him to throw that first night back in her teeth. She had cherished the memory of the night she fell in love with him as the very essence of romance. But he had slung that same recollection back to her as a base and humiliating insult.

Her eyes felt horribly hot, dry and scratchy. Shock seemed to have driven all desire to cry out of her. ‘Yes I did, didn’t I?’ she managed gruffly. ‘But even if it wasn’t special for you, it was for me.’

Emanating pure indifference on that issue, Andreas shrugged a broad shoulder in a gesture that was as careless as it was wounding.

Hope tried again. ‘You have to listen to me—’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I didn’t do anything tonight and I’m not lying to you. I have never kissed Ben Campbell,’ Hope declared with vehemence.

‘I expect you to find alternative accommodation by the end of the month. It’s over,’ Andreas countered with supreme derision.

Hope realised he was about to leave and horror galvanised her out of her paralysis into sudden action. She placed herself between Andreas and the front door. ‘You can’t leave!’

‘Watch me—’

‘No, I won’t. I want you to stop and think about the person you know me to be. Ask yourself if I’d throw what we have away just for the chance to snog Ben Campbell!’

His strong jaw line clenched. ‘Other women have. He’s wrecked several marriages with his little-boy-lost act. He’s also famous for going after women who belong to other men—’

‘But I don’t fancy him…I never have. I imagine half of London has got to snog Ben when he’s drunk. He’s not exactly exclusive,’ Hope pointed out in growing desperation, praying that the very tenor of her comments would force Andreas to see that she had never even thought of Ben Campbell as a potentially fanciable male. All he had ever been on her terms was Vanessa’s rather dissolute and amusing cousin. ‘If you won’t believe me, ask Ben if anything happened tonight.’

Outraged by that suggestion, Andreas vented a harsh laugh of incredulity. ‘Why would I lower myself to that level? Had you been my wife, I would have confronted him. I would’ve torn him apart for daring to lay a single finger on you!’ he proclaimed with a disconcertingly vicious edge to his dark, deep drawl. ‘But you’re not my wife, you’re my mistress and, as such, expendable with the minimum of fuss.’

Ashen-pale beneath the lash of his naked contempt, Hope looked back at him, distraught turquoise eyes sparkling with sudden angry denial. ‘I am not and I have never been your mistress.’

‘Then what are you?’ Andreas purred like a panther ready to flex his claws and draw blood.

‘A woman who fell in love with you and who never stopped to count the cost,’ Hope quantified jerkily, her generous mouth compressing. ‘Some people would judge me harshly enough for that or call me a fool. But that doesn’t make me your mistress—’

‘A lot of women have told me they loved me,’ Andreas murmured with sizzling scorn. ‘Invariably they love what I can give them more.’

Her spine ached with tension. ‘But I’ve never let you give me anything. With the exception of this apartment, I’ve kept your money out of our relationship and I never once looked for or accepted expensive gifts. Don’t try to bundle me up with other women when I’ve always been true to you!’ she told him, hearing the sharp, accusing undertone in her voice and unable to suppress it. ‘And you can also stop insulting me for what I haven’t done and talking at me in that bored, sneering way!’

‘If I stop sneering, I might lose my temper,’ Andreas asserted with a lethal quietness that made gooseflesh prickle at the nape of her neck. ‘Now get out of my way…I’m leaving.’

Hope backed up against the door in a panic. ‘Over my dead body. I won’t let you leave until you listen to me. This is like a living nightmare and I won’t let it happen to us—’

‘There is no us now.’ Without further ado, Andreas lifted her bodily out of his path and strode through the door.

Hope could not believe he was gone any more easily than she could accept what had just happened. Only a few hours earlier when they had left for the party, she had been so happy and secure. To accept that Andreas had dumped her, walked out on her, indeed finished with her absolutely and for ever was more than she could bear to deal with at that moment.

Like someone lost in a strange land, she wandered round the big, empty apartment. Elyssa had told horrible lies about her. Such behaviour was so inexplicable to Hope that for the space of an hour she strove frantically to plan out how she might approach Andreas’s sister and what she might say to persuade the young Greek woman that she had to retract her false accusation. But even an optimist like Hope could not cling to such a remote prospect for long.

After all, even before she had had the misfortune to catch Elyssa in compromising circumstances, Elyssa had made it clear that she despised her. The brunette had too much to lose from telling the truth and had triumphed with her lies. She had managed to destroy Hope’s relationship with her brother and ensure that Hope was banished from his life.

Hope’s hands closed tight in on themselves. She recognised that she was still in a stupor of shock. But she was already thinking that she ought to have told Andreas that she had seen his sister with another man. Whether he believed her side of the story or not, she needed to speak up in her own defence. Yet what realistic chance of success did she have? Any attempt she made to clear her own name would entail accusing Elyssa of, not only being a liar, but also being an unfaithful wife. She shivered at the prospect. Andreas was very proud and protective of his younger sister. Honour and family were all-important to the Greek male. Any attack on Elyssa would outrage him.

She tripped over the black shirt lying discarded by the bed and swept it up, burying her face in its crumpled cotton folds to draw in the scent of Andreas. He was gone. How could someone who felt like the other half of her leave and how could she still function? Terror spread into the void inside her for she could not imagine living without Andreas. A passion of grief dug nasty talon claws into her shrinking flesh. Her aching eyes finally overflowed and she threw herself down on the bed and cried until her throat hurt and she could hardly see through her swollen eyes. In the silence that followed, she was overwhelmed by a terrible sense of loss and emptiness.

In the limo that ferried him back to the town house, Andreas worked his way through two brandies. What Elyssa had seen admitted no possibility of error. Hope’s foolish pleas of innocence had only deepened his anger. He concentrated on that anger, letting it rise like a red mist and suppress all other thoughts. He would prove that she was lying, he decided grimly. Lifting the phone, he called his security chief and, with a perfunctory apology for the late hour, he requested a detailed rundown of Hope’s daily itinerary in recent months.

Somewhere around dawn, Hope had drifted into an uneasy slumber disturbed by dreams. Wakening, she sat up, and as the awful events of the previous night rolled back to her her tummy seemed to roll queasily in concert. In the aftermath of that rare bout of nausea, she stumbled into the shower and slumped. With or without Andreas, her life had to go on, she reminded herself dully. There was no point being wimpy about it. From somewhere she had to find the strength to concentrate on the practicalities of life. She had to find somewhere else to live. It was also time to redouble her so-far-unsuccessful efforts to get a loan that would enable her to set up her own business. When she was finally in a position to design and produce her own small select line of handbags, she would be working night and day. Yes, she would be so incredibly busy she wouldn’t have the time to agonise over Andreas.

She noticed a small decorative gold box resting on a console table in the hall. When he’d arrived the day before, Andreas had tossed something down before he’d hauled her into his arms. As always it would be chocolate, superlative, incredible, melt-in-the-mouth chocolate purchased abroad at an extortionate price. And as well? Opening the box, she lifted out the tiny gold charm that he had included as a surprise. Only it wasn’t really a surprise any more for one by one Andreas had given her an entire collection of unusual charms for her bracelet. This particular one was her name picked out with tiny glittering stones. Some lucky charm this one had proved to be…hope? Without warning her eyes flooded again and she squeezed them tight shut in an agony of loss. Blinking back tears, she realised that misery appeared to have deprived her of her usual love of chocolate. Instead the image of an olive and the prospect of that sharp rather than sweet taste came to mind and her taste buds watered. Bemused, for she had never liked olives, she frowned, but a moment later she headed into the kitchen.

On the way to the airport and a flight to New York, Andreas studied the security reports that detailed Hope’s recent movements. His initial sensation of complete disbelief swiftly mounted to hot-blooded fury. He knew that if he put his private jet on hold he would never make his transatlantic meeting in time. But for once, emotion took strong precedence over efficiency and discipline and he told his chauffeur to turn round and head for the apartment instead.

Hope disposed of the now-empty jar of olives that Andreas had recently disdained to eat. Perhaps being sick had done something odd to her taste buds, she was reasoning in some confusion just as she heard the slam of the front door. Her heart leapt into her mouth and instant optimism seized her in a heady tide. Andreas had come back…Andreas had realised that she could never have been unfaithful to him!

‘I’m down in the bedroom!’ she called when she heard him say her name with all the impatience that was so much a part of his abrasive character.

Pale blonde hair tumbling round her shoulders in silken disarray, Hope focused turquoise eyes bright with expectation on the doorway and wished she had had time to get dressed and do something about the redness of her eyes. Her restive hands fiddled with the sash of her wrap.

Stunning golden eyes blazing, Andreas strode in. Garbed in a dark designer suit that accentuated his superb masculine physique, he looked heartbreakingly handsome. In a gesture of high voltage intensity that she would never have associated with his cool, controlled nature, he pitched a whole handful of documents down on the carpet at her feet. ‘You lying slut!’ he raked at her in raw condemnation. ‘You’ve visited Campbell’s apartment on countless occasions! You’ve even stayed the night there. You’ve been screwing him for months!’

Dumbfounded by the naked aggression of that full-frontal verbal attack, Hope was paralysed to the spot. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she framed in bewilderment. ‘I’ve never been in Ben’s apartment. I don’t even know where he lives.’

‘Like hell you don’t! Take a good look at the quality of the evidence I have!’ Andreas enunciated from between even white teeth.

‘Evidence?’ Hope bent down to lift several of the sheets of paper and frown down at the neat lines of computerised entries. ‘What are these?’

‘Surprise…surprise. You’ve had round-the-clock security for most of the past year. Those are the most recent reports of your activities,’ Andreas informed her grittily.

‘I’ve had round-the-clock security?’ Hope parroted in total astonishment. ‘Are you saying you’ve been having me watched?’

‘I would argue that watched over would be a more fair and accurate description.’

‘Who’s been watching me?’ Hope queried tightly, the physical recoil of genuine revulsion assailing her at the very thought of strangers taking note of her every move while she went about her daily business in sublime ignorance of their presence in her life.

‘One of my own security teams. Top-notch professionals, who can do the job without attracting attention or interfering with your freedom. They don’t make mistakes,’ Andreas declared in a ferocious undertone, ‘so don’t waste your time trying that line on me.’

Hope surveyed him with huge perturbed eyes. ‘I’m horrified that you could have distrusted me to that extent. You actually paid people to spy on me. That’s absolutely horrible.’

The faintest tinge of dark colour demarcated the angular bronzed planes of the aristocratic cheekbones that enhanced his superb bone structure. ‘That isn’t how it was. Anonymous threats were made against me. Naturally I was concerned that through your association with me you could be at risk. I considered it my duty to protect you and I did. End of story.’

Hope wasn’t listening. She was very much shocked by what he had revealed. ‘The very idea that strangers have been spying on me gives me the creeps. I never realised until now just how much I took my right to privacy for granted.’

The confrontation was travelling along unanticipated lines that were utterly infuriating Andreas. How dared she focus on a trivial and obscure angle and ignore the giant sin of her own infidelity? What the hell was her right to privacy worth when set beside the gross betrayal of her affair with another man? Where did she get the nerve to look at him in that reproachful way as if he had done something shameful?

‘Until last night I never once requested a copy of the reports on your movements. I did respect your privacy one hundred per cent,’ Andreas countered with grim exactitude, his sculpted masculine mouth firming. ‘But I wanted to satisfy myself with the proof of your infidelity. The number of visits you have made to Campbell’s apartment corroborated the accusation made against you in full.’

Hope was still studying the papers in her hand. A slight sound was impelled from her parted lips when she recognised the familiar address that appeared several times over in the daily reports. She began to understand how the latest misunderstanding had come about. She breathed in deep, glancing up with rueful turquoise eyes to say quietly, ‘Ben does own that apartment. But he throws a lot of parties and the residents’ committee made life difficult for him. He moved out last year and Vanessa lives there now.’

Andreas was unmoved. Hard-as-granite golden eyes clashed with hers. ‘I don’t believe you. But I’ve no doubt that your best friend would back up a cover story for your benefit.’

On that score he could not have been more wrong. Having grown up with parents who had frequently cheated on each other, Vanessa heartily despised the deceit that went hand in hand with infidelity. She was the last woman alive likely to lie to conceal a friend’s affair.

Taken aback as she was by Andreas’s instant dismissal of her explanation about the apartment, Hope swallowed hard. She was very pale. ‘Vanessa lives at that address,’ she stressed in her determination to make him listen. ‘I hardly know Ben Campbell and I have not been unfaithful to you. I appreciate how dreadful all this must look to you but surely the two years we’ve been together at least buys me the right to a fair hearing—’

Andreas studied her with raw contempt. ‘It buys you nothing.’

He swung on his heel and strode out of the bedroom.

‘Wait!’ Hope called down the corridor after him.

Slowly and with a reluctance she could feel, Andreas turned his arrogant dark head and looked back at her.

Hope snatched in a jagged breath. Her nerves were so fraught that she had to immediately pull in another deeper breath. The terrifying finality and obduracy she saw stamped in Andreas’s lean, hard face frightened her to the edge of panic. She saw that she truly had no choices left. She saw that keeping quiet about Elyssa’s behaviour was no longer a sustainable stance. It was wrong that she should be afraid to tell the truth, she reflected unhappily. Unfortunately, the truth would be most unwelcome to Andreas. He might well dismiss what she said out of hand and hate her even more for making damaging allegations against his sister. But Hope felt that she should not let that daunting awareness prevent her from speaking out in her own defence. After all, she might never have another opportunity. As that reality sank in on her, as she was finally forced to confront the possibility that she might never see Andreas again, Hope was impelled into sudden speech.

‘Let me give you my version of events last night. It was me who walked into a room and saw your sister in a clinch!’ she admitted with all the abruptness of severe stress.

Outrage firing his brilliant gaze, his lean features clenching taut with disgust, Andreas fell very still. ‘Theos…don’t say another word; stop right there—’

Hope thrust up her chin. ‘I can’t. Elyssa came after me and swore that I would suffer if I told you what I’d seen—’

‘How dare you speak of my sister in such a way?’ Andreas was white with anger below his olive skin.

‘I had no intention of telling anybody what I’d seen…to be honest, I just didn’t want to be involved,’ Hope continued doggedly.

‘You’ve said enough to make me your enemy for life. The Nicolaidis family have honour—each and every one of us and I am proud of that,’ Andreas proclaimed in fierce dismissal. ‘It is deeply offensive that you should soil Elyssa’s reputation in a pointless attempt to rescue your own. Were you a man I would not have stood here and let you talk about my sister like that. Don’t take advantage of the fact that you’re a woman.’

‘You’re the one who’s been taking advantage!’ Hope protested, a floodtide of anger and agony breaking loose inside her because he had immediately dismissed her account of what had happened at the party. ‘You’ve called me a liar and a slut…you’re refusing even to listen to my side of the story.’

‘What’s to listen to? What’s to understand?’ Andreas demanded, striding back down the corridor and cornering her against the wall outside the bedroom. ‘You spread your legs for a pretty blond toy boy!’

‘Of course I didn’t!’ Colour had run like a banner into her cheeks. ‘Don’t be crude—’

‘That’s nothing to what I would like to know.’ Andreas slammed his hands to the hall on either side of her head, effectively holding her entrapped. Smouldering golden eyes as dangerous as dynamite challenged her. ‘Did you do it in our bed?’

‘It didn’t happen!’ she cried. ‘I wouldn’t even look at someone else, never mind—’

‘You forget…I saw you looking at Campbell last night,’ Andreas reminded her darkly.

Hope was trembling with the strength of her emotions. Her spine pushing into the wall, she was forced to tip her face up. ‘But I wasn’t looking in the way you mean—’

‘What does he have that I don’t?’ Andreas demanded with savage force. ‘Is he better in bed?’

‘Andreas…’ Hope gasped, fierce embarrassment and dismay at the tenor of that blunt question making her full lower lip part from the cupid’s bow curve of her upper.

‘Is he more inventive? More exciting? Kinky? What did he do that I didn’t do? Didn’t I satisfy you? Tell me…I have the right to know!’ he launched at her, stunning eyes smouldering ferocious gold with dark sexual jealousy and dropping to the luscious pink swell of her mouth.

‘There’s nothing for you to know!’ she cried in despair.

The tension in the atmosphere was electric. At first Hope did not understand its source. There was a warm, heavy feeling low in her tummy, a buzzing vibration of awareness holding her on a dizzy edge. Holding her indeed on the edge of an anticipation that left her mind frighteningly blank.

‘And right now…it’s me you want,’ Andreas purred with silken satisfaction, lifting lean brown hands to skim a blunt masculine thumb over the distended buds of her nipples, which were clearly delineated by the thin wrap.

Hope gasped in helpless response and arched her back. Her entire body felt hot and super sensitive. Recognising her own sexual excitement shook her inside out. ‘Yes, but—’

‘In fact you’re begging for it,’ Andreas husked, dropping his hands to her hips and mating his passionate mouth to hers with a bold hunger that in its very intensity was overwhelmingly erotic.

Fire snaked sinuous seductive forays through her heated flesh. She melted like honey in sunshine, yielding to the plundering thrust of his tongue and the heady intoxication of her own response. In one powerful movement he lifted her off her feet and carried her into the bedroom. As he brought her down on the bed his mouth was still melded to hers with devouring passion.

Just as swiftly he relinquished his hold on her. Still lost in the fever of her own desire, Hope clung to his shoulders to draw him back to her.

With cool disdain, Andreas detached her arms from him and straightened to his full commanding height. Proud, dark head high, he stared down at her with icy derision. ‘It’s over. The instant you let Campbell touch you, it was over. I expect my mistress to preserve her affections exclusively for me.’

Her face drained of colour, Hope thrust herself up into sitting position. ‘I’m not and I never was your mistress!’

From the doorway, Andreas vented a sardonic laugh that scored her tender skin like a whiplash. ‘Of course you were. What else could you have been to me?’

Hurt far beyond his imagining, Hope blanked him out and stared into space. She could no longer bear to see him. She listened to his steps recede down the corridor, the distant slam of the front door echoing through the apartment. It was over and he was gone and without apparent regret. He could never have cared a button for her, she thought in an agony of mortified pain.

CHAPTER FOUR

FRANTIC to conceal the fact that she had been crying, Hope utilised some eye shadow to draw attention away from her reddened lids. ‘Smile…’ she instructed her flushed and unhappy reflection and she practised curving her mouth up instead of down at the corners.

It was seven weeks since she had moved into Vanessa’s spare room. Her friend had been marvellous in every way but Hope knew that misery made other people uncomfortable. Vanessa had told her that the end of a relationship was the perfect excuse for a week of tears and laments, but that after that point it was time to move on. Ever since that week had ended Hope had been pretending that she was well over Andreas and miles down the road to recovery.

Unhappily, however, she was finding that maintaining that pretence was the most enormous strain. She assumed that stress had caused the further bouts of nausea she had suffered. Mercifully that sickness had petered out the previous month and, apart from a rather embarrassing craving for olives at certain times, she was fine. If she had a problem, it was with her state of mind. For so long Andreas had been the centre of her universe. Now every day stretched in front of her like a wasteland. Determined to keep up her spirits, she had concentrated on developing a new and much improved business plan. She had visited various financial institutions and was doing her utmost to win a business loan. So far, admittedly, she had not been lucky, but she kept on telling herself that success lay just round the next corner. In the meantime, to meet her bills, she was working in a shop and selling bags at occasional craft fairs.

‘Are you sure you don’t want any lunch?’ Vanessa called from the kitchen.

Hope emerged from her room. ‘No, I grabbed something earlier,’ she fibbed because her friend had begun to nag her about how little she was eating.

Vanessa, who ate like a horse and never put on an ounce, strolled into the ultra-modern lounge. In one hand she held a sandwich the size of a doorstep. ‘So, how did you get on with that bank this morning?’

Hope almost winced. ‘The guy said he’d be in touch but I don’t think I’ll be holding my breath.’

‘Let Ben back your business,’ Vanessa urged impatiently. ‘Your funky handbags are a much better risk than the racehorses he keeps on buying!’

Hope smiled to show that she was appropriately grateful for Ben’s offer of financial assistance. However, her smile was a little tense round the edges, for if being dumped by Andreas had taught her anything it was that caution and common sense should be heeded. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

‘Why not? Five different banks have turned down your loan application,’ the redhead reminded her baldly. ‘Ben’s got money to burn and he’s eager to help. In your position I wouldn’t think twice about it.’

‘Ben’s your cousin. You see him from a slightly different perspective,’ Hope murmured gently.

Hope felt that she had learnt the hard way that there was no such thing as a free lunch. She had lived rent-free in Andreas’s enormous apartment and that had come back to haunt her. Instead of maintaining total independence, she had allowed herself to be seduced by the concept of pleasing Andreas and had become, in his eyes at least, a ‘kept’ woman. As a result, Andreas had found it impossible to see her as an equal. Instead he had regarded her as his mistress: an object and a possession rather than a lover whom he respected. Hope now felt that she understood how rich men looked on less financially successful women. At the same time, she was beginning to value Ben’s friendship and did not want to muddy the waters by borrowing money from him.

Vanessa grinned. ‘Of course. Ben treats me like a mate but he definitely has the hots for you. I think it’s great that he’s finally getting tired of the party girls and wakening up to the idea of a real woman.’

‘I don’t think Ben feels that way about me.’ Hope was emanating embarrassment in visible waves. ‘He likes me and, although he shouldn’t, he feels a little guilty that Andreas made wrong assumptions about how well we knew each other.’

‘Nah…’ Vanessa elevated a mocking brow in disagreement. ‘Ben’s not that nice. He gets a kick out of having rattled Andreas’s cage. We both think Andreas has acted like a callous bastard. But Ben also genuinely wants a chance with you—’

‘Even if that’s true, and I don’t think it is…Ben loves to tease people. Well, I’m not in the notion of anything else right now anyway,’ Hope fielded awkwardly.

Vanessa fixed exasperated brown eyes on her. ‘Ben won’t be interested for ever. Andreas isn’t coming back, Hope. He’s history.’

Hope’s creamy skin was pale as milk. ‘I know that—’

‘I don’t think you do. Have you any idea how worried I’ve been about you? Instead of living in your little world, you should be facing some hard facts—’

‘I think I’ve faced quite a few of those in recent times,’ Hope slotted in ruefully, wishing the other woman would just stand back and give her the time to heal.

‘But let’s recap,’ the other woman said with determination. ‘Andreas accused you of sleeping with Ben and he wasn’t interested in letting you defend yourself—’

‘He believed his sister,’ Hope countered tightly. ‘I can be very hurt about that but I can’t hate him for trusting his own flesh and blood.’

‘I reckon Andreas was ready for a change and his sister’s lies gave him a fast and easy exit.’

Hope thought back to the fierce emotion that Andreas had betrayed at their last encounter and pain squeezed her heart so hard that she could hardly breathe. Had only his ego been stung by the belief that she had betrayed him?

‘Take a look at this…’ Vanessa settled a newspaper in front of her. It was folded open at the gossip page and a photo of Andreas with a beautiful skinny blonde. Hope felt as if someone had pushed her below the surface of a pool without giving her the chance to first take in a breath.

‘I don’t want to look at that,’ she whispered shakily.

The redhead grimaced. ‘I didn’t want to do this to you but you’ve given me no choice. You won’t even open the papers I keep on leaving around for you. But you need to know…Andreas is out partying like mad here in London and in New York. He’s been seen out with a string of gorgeous models and celebrities. He’s not grieving, he’s not sitting in nights missing you—’

‘I get the message…OK?’ Hope breathed chokily. ‘I didn’t expect him to grieve. I doubt if many men grieve over a woman they think slept with some other man and Andreas is too proud.’

‘I just want you to know and accept that you’ve seen the last of him.’ Her friend squeezed her arm in a show of affection. ‘It’ll help you get over him more quickly.’

The doorbell buzzed. Momentarily, Hope shut her eyes: she had been plunged into the most terrifying tide of despair by Vanessa’s lack of patience and tact. In what way was the excruciating spectacle of Andreas in the company of a breathtakingly lovely blonde supposed to help her heal?

‘I’m Vanessa…isn’t it amazing that we’ve never actually met until now? Hope’s not expecting you, is she?’ Vanessa was saying in a curiously loud and incredibly cheerful tone from the hall. ‘She’s only just got out of bed. In fact, she’s wrecked and you’ll be lucky if she can string two words together in a single sentence. She’s been out to dawn every night this week!’

Transfixed by the sound of her friend giving vent to that rolling tide of outrageous lies, Hope lifted her lashes. What she saw paralysed her to the spot: Andreas stood in the doorway. Andreas isn’t coming back…you’ve seen the last of him. Shock seemed to bounce her heart inside her, making it a challenge to catch her breath. Feeling the race of her heartbeat, she trembled. The breeze had tousled his cropped black hair. His lean, strong features were bronzed, his gleaming golden eyes veiled but intent. He looked every inch the heartbreaker he was.

‘Thank you,’ Andreas drawled smoothly as he snapped the door shut in Vanessa’s madly inquisitive face.

‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ Hope framed unevenly and she could have winced at the inanity of unnecessarily stating the obvious.

Andreas watched the light catch the faint track left by a tear on her cheek. Although her eyes still had the luminous intensity of turquoises, her familiar happy glow was gone. In response, the razor edge of his cold, aggressive mood mellowed. If she was miserable, it was only what she deserved. If she was missing him, regretting what she had stupidly thrown away, even better. If she were ready to beg for forgiveness, he would enjoy it even more.

Vanessa poked her head round the door that communicated with the kitchen. ‘Would you like me to stay, Hope?’

For all the world as though she were a little kid in need of support around the grown-ups, Hope reflected in an agony of mortification. Recognising Andreas’s derisive disbelief at that interruption, Hope almost cringed and took immediate action to avoid any further embarrassment. ‘No, thanks. Actually, we’re going into my room.’

‘Don’t be silly, there’s no need for that! Naturally you can stay in here,’ her friend exclaimed in an offended tone while treating Andreas to a sharp and unfriendly appraisal. ‘I just thought you might need support.’

‘I’m fine.’ Mortified as Hope was by Vanessa’s behaviour, she was determined to speak to Andreas in private and without fear of being overheard. She pulled open the door that led into the hall. ‘This way,’ she urged him in a rather harried undertone.

‘We could always go and sit in the limo,’ Andreas drawled sibilantly, flicking a chilling glance at Hope’s friend. An interfering brazen bully, who he could see walked all over Hope in hobnail boots.

‘No, really, that’s not necessary, ‘ Hope declared breathlessly.

It was becoming obvious to Andreas that on one score at least Hope had not lied to him: Ben might own the apartment but his cousin, Vanessa Fitzsimmons, did indeed appear to be the current tenant. Of course the flat could still have been regularly used to facilitate Hope’s affair with Campbell. Only as time passed and his powerful intellect continued to dwell on and question the few facts at his disposal, Andreas was finding it increasingly hard to credit that a lengthy affair had even taken place.

For a start, Hope had appeared to be her usual sunny self right up until the week before his sister’s party. Hope had an honest and open nature and it would be wildly out of character for her to have engaged in long-term serious deception. He found it much easier to believe that she had simply succumbed to temptation that evening. He was also highly suspicious of the fact that the male involved was closely related to her best friend. After all, before he had even met Vanessa, Andreas had guessed that the woman was hostile to his relationship with Hope. Had Ben Campbell been encouraged to target Hope with his attentions? Had Campbell pretended to be a friend to win Hope’s trust and wear down her defences? In short, had Hope been set up to fall?

‘In here…’ Hope pushed open the door of her bedroom and hoped it wasn’t in too much of a mess. Why had Andreas come to see her? Even the most vague and far-fetched possibility that Andreas might want her back reduced her mental agility to zero. Her tummy filled with fluttering butterflies of nervous tension.

Andreas studied his surroundings with eyes so keenly intent and precise that after ten seconds he could have accurately enumerated every visible item right down to the tiny corner of the chocolate wrapper protruding from a drawer. His tension dropped several degrees and his vigilance relaxed as he appreciated that there was nothing in the room that suggested even occasional male occupation. In fact the bed was clearly only occupied by one person. One person with a fondness for cuddly toys. He could not credit that any male would willingly share space with the shabby pink rabbit that had survived Hope’s childhood.

As Hope stepped away from the door the disturbingly familiar scent of her herbal shampoo flared his nostrils. Her pale silky blonde hair shimmered across her shoulders like a fall of satin. His every physical sense suddenly on full alert, he studied her. Her fabulous hourglass curves looked more pronounced than ever but he assumed his memory was playing tricks on him. Of recent he had been surrounded by some very thin women, he reminded himself absently, while he fought the treacherous buzz of his powerful sexual arousal. Such comparisons could only make Hope seem more luscious in contour. Regardless, the bountiful swell of her generous breasts below her pink T-shirt was nothing short of spectacular. His even white teeth gritted.

‘Would you like to sit down?’ she asked nervously, bending down to scoop a pile of magazines off a chair. Her top rode up a few inches at the back to reveal a slender strip of pale creamy skin.

‘No…’ His drawl was thickened by his Greek accent and his hands clenched into defensive fists. He wanted to touch that smooth, tantalising stretch of naked flesh in view. In fact he wanted to do a whole hell of a lot more than just touch Hope. After weeks of enduring a worryingly uninterested libido, he was rampant. He wanted to drag her down on the bed, rip off her clothes and have sex with her. Hot and deep and fast, out of control…mind-blowing as it was only with her.

Rigid with the force of the appetite he was containing and the temptation he was resisting with every aggressive fibre of his body, Andreas backed away until she was out of his natural reach. In an effort to control the biting heat of his unsated hunger, he focused on the magazines she had pushed onto the carpet. Evidently she was still obsessively reading interiors magazines. Publications stuffed with photos of period country dwellings groaning with oak beams and crammed with anachronistic kitchens and bathrooms. She was mad about houses. Her nest-building instincts would have terrified a weaker man. Andreas had contrived quite happily to ignore them. But now a taunting, infuriating voice was coming out of nowhere inside his head and asking him why he hadn’t given her that fantasy and bought her a country house. Had he given her the opportunity to wallow in chintz and walled gardens, he was willing to bet that she would still have been with him.

‘Coffee…?’ Hope mumbled, her mouth running dry at the high-wire tension in the atmosphere. She could not take her eyes from his extravagantly handsome features.

A tinge of dark colour highlighting his striking high cheekbones, Andreas lowered thick black lashes over his brilliant eyes. ‘I won’t be here that long.’

‘Are you sure? I’d like you to stay,’ she heard herself say without any forethought or pride whatsoever. ‘A while…’ she added jerkily, hoping it made her sound a bit less desperate.

His lashes lifted, revealing his sizzling golden gaze. A combination of sexual desire and fierce resentment held him fast. If he dragged her down on the bed, would she say no? She had never, ever said no to him. Like an executioner letting the guillotine blade fall, he clamped down on that dangerous train of thought.

‘I just want to know how you’re doing…’ Hope flinched, thinking of the blonde in that newspaper photo with all her bones on display. She breathed in hurriedly, afraid that he might already have noticed that her stomach was not as flat as it had been. Once comfort eating had kindly bestowed its largesse in less noticeable amounts on her hips and her breasts, but now visible surplus flesh was creeping onto her middle section as well.

‘I’ve only one reason for being here. I couldn’t get in touch any other way,’ Andreas asserted with chilling cool, his beautiful mouth compressed with impatience, his defiant libido willed into subjection. ‘What happened to your mobile phone?’

‘It broke,’ she confided.

‘The number here is ex-directory,’ he pointed out.

‘Why did you want to get in touch with me?’ Her nerves could no longer stand the suspense of waiting.

‘Your brother has left several messages for you on the phone at the apartment. I believe he’s visiting London next week. When he couldn’t raise you on your mobile phone, he got worried.’

‘Jonathan? Oh…’ The colour in Hope’s cheeks evaporated as severe disappointment claimed her. She felt very foolish and rather humiliated. Andreas had had the most pedestrian of reasons for coming to see her and his visit had no personal dimension whatsoever. But she could not have foreseen the likelihood of her brother suddenly trying to get in touch with her. As a rule she only heard from Jonathan with a card at Christmas and a catch-up phone call after New Year. If Jonathan were visiting London, he would be on a business trip, she thought dully.

‘Make sure that you call him. That line has now been disconnected.’

Her brow indented. ‘But why?’

‘The apartment is for sale.’

That news hit her like a slap in the face. It made everything so dreadfully final. The apartment had been her home for two years. For her, it was still a place full of happy memories. Only now was she forced to acknowledge that she had still cherished secret hopes of returning to live there. She tried and failed to find consolation in the evident fact that at least he wasn’t moving some other woman in.

‘Don’t you still need it?’ she prompted tightly.

In silence, Andreas lifted and dropped a broad shoulder in continental dismissal of the topic.

Her turquoise eyes lifted and she noticed the way his gaze was welded to her mouth. Her lips tingled, felt dry. As the tip of her tongue snaked out to provide moisture his golden eyes smouldered and he reached for her in a sudden movement that stripped the breath from her lungs with a startled gasp.

‘A-Andreas…?’ she stammered, feverishly conscious of the lean, strong hands clamped to her wrists and the scant few inches separating their bodies.

‘Don’t make yourself cheap trying to turn me on,’ Andreas delivered with derisive bite, setting her back from him in a mortifying gesture of rejection and releasing her from his hold.

Hope reeled back in shock from that icy rebuff. Somehow, heaven knew how, the distance between them had narrowed. Had she unconsciously drifted closer to him or was he the one responsible? Whatever, she had never been made to feel more humiliated than she did at that moment. ‘You actually think…but I wasn’t trying to—’

‘It’s such a waste of your time,’ he murmured silkily. ‘I’m over you.’

‘I wasn’t trying to turn you on!’ Hope persisted, writhing with horror at the charge. Her temper surged up in response to her discomfiture. ‘It’s ridiculous to accuse me of that. You’re the last guy in the world I’d want to make a play for. You’re lucky that I’m even willing to still speak to you!’

Dark deep-set eyes gleaming gold, Andreas angled his arrogant head high and loosed a derisive laugh that gave her a shocking desire to kick him. ‘And how do you make that out?’

‘Well, for a start, you’ve insulted me beyond any hope of forgiveness. You misjudged me and you dumped me for something I didn’t do. The night of that party, I hardly knew Ben Campbell but you refused to listen to me,’ she condemned with helpless bitterness. ‘When Ben found out what happened between us, he said he was willing to go and speak to you for me—’

Unimpressed, Andreas grimaced. ‘How cheap…is he now wishing he had kept his hands off my property?’

‘I’m not and I never was your property!’ Hope shouted back at him so shrilly and in so much distress that her voice broke. ‘Now get out of here!’

Ben had made a grudging offer to speak to Andreas on her behalf but she had decided that dragging the younger man into her personal problems would have been unfair, embarrassing and probably pointless. Andreas’s derisive crack about Ben had confirmed Hope’s conviction that Ben’s intervention would have been unsuccessful. Andreas believed his sister’s version of events and would discount any other. He had swallowed his sister’s lies hook, line and sinker. Nothing she could do or say would alter that.

‘With pleasure,’ Andreas spelt out.

As Andreas strode to the door it opened, framing Ben Campbell. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked Hope, ignoring Andreas.

Tears were dammed up inside her like a threatening floodtide. She thought if she let them out, she might wash both Ben and Andreas away. For the space of a heartbeat, the two men were side by side. With his slighter build, fair hair and fine features, not to mention his trendy jeans, Ben looked boyish next to Andreas, but the concern in his eyes warmed her. Andreas subjected her to a chilling glance of contempt as if Ben’s mere presence was an offence.

‘I hate you…’ Hope mumbled tautly. ‘I’ve never said that to anyone before…I’ve never felt this way before either. But what you’ve done to me and the way you’ve treated me has changed me.’

‘You shouldn’t be here upsetting Hope. Leave her alone,’ Ben said abruptly.

And the glitter in Andreas’s stunning eyes blazed as hot as the heart of a fire. A satisfied smile driving the inflexible hardness from his shapely mouth, he stepped back and hit Ben so hard that the younger man went crashing out into the hall where he fell back against the wall.

‘Theos…I owed you that,’ Andreas growled with seething emphasis, aggression etched into every taut and ready line of his big, powerful body.

‘How could you do that?’ Hope gasped in horror, appalled at his violence and guilty that she should have been the cause of it.

‘If I wasn’t averse to spilling blood in front of women, I’d kill him,’ Andreas intoned without a shred of shame.

Grimacing, Ben hauled himself up out of his slump with a groan. Flushed with anger, he launched himself away from the wall, but before he could attempt to strike a blow in retaliation Hope had stepped between him and Andreas.

‘I’m so sorry about this. But please don’t sink to his level,’ Hope begged Ben frantically, terrified that masculine pride would press him into a fight that she was certain he would lose.

‘Spoilsport,’ Andreas growled between clenched teeth, outraged by the sight of her rushing to protect the other man, the freezing cool of his innate strong will icing over the outrage and denying it.

‘And to the winner goes the spoils,’ Ben countered, closing his hand over Hope’s to anchor her to his side in a deliberately provocative statement. ‘I don’t need to hammer anyone into a pulp to impress her.’

‘That is fortunate. You’re usually too drunk even to try,’ Andreas riposted with lethal distaste.

Shell-shocked by the amount of bad feeling between the two men, Hope watched Andreas stride out of the apartment and out of her life all over again. He did it without a backward glance or a word. She shivered, feeling cold and crushed and bereft.

With a rueful sigh, Ben released Hope’s limp fingers. ‘I guess I shouldn’t have said that. But Nicolaidis is an arrogant bastard. I couldn’t resist the urge to give him the wrong impression. He deserves to think we’re together.’

Hope tried to twitch her numb lips into a smile of agreement. Ben had got punched because of her. Ben had got punched for being kind and supportive. If he had chosen to save face by implying that they were in a relationship, he had only been confirming what Andreas already believed. Anyway, Hope reflected wretchedly, what did what Andreas thought matter any more?

Vanessa had been right. She had been hiding her head in the sand, living in the past, shrinking from the challenge of the present. Now she had to face the future and accept that Andreas was gone for good. Andreas had moved on. He was seeing other women, taking advantage of his freedom. A brief, shattering image of that lean, bronzed body she knew so well wrapped round that gorgeous blonde in the newspaper threatened to destroy her self-control. If that image hurt—well, it did hurt; in fact it was a huge hurt that hit her so hard she felt traumatised. But the point was, she had to get used to dealing with that hurt.

‘Andreas doesn’t care about what I’m doing any more,’ Hope muttered, wondering if it was possible to teach herself to fancy Ben. Loads of females found Ben madly attractive and witty. He was around a great deal more than Andreas had ever been. Of course, he did party a little too much and too often and in comparison she was really quite a staid personality. But with some give and take, who knew what might be possible? Perhaps she needed to keep in mind just how many compromises she had made on Andreas’s behalf…

When had she ever dreamt of living in the city without a garden and beside busy, noisy roads? When had she dreamt of loving a guy who did not return her love and who made her no promises? A guy who was often abroad and who was so busy even when he was not that she hardly saw him. She might be breaking her heart for Andreas but that did not mean he had been perfect.

He had acted like a Neanderthal if she’d interrupted the business news. He had woken her up for sex at dawn and referred to the candles she had placed round the bath as a fire hazard. He had ignored St Valentine’s Day. He had given her a pen that first Christmas. It had been an all-singing all-dancing pen that was solid gold and jewelled and could be used for writing at the bottom of the sea, but it had still been a pen. She had also been left alone while he’d enjoyed the festive season in Greece. Why had it taken her so long to appreciate that Andreas had treated her rather as a married man would treat a mistress?

He had agreed that they could live at the apartment without servants, but had continued to live as though the servants were still invisibly present. He had never been known to pick up a discarded shirt or bath towel. Like a domestic goddess to whom nothing was too much trouble when it came to the man in her life, she had cooked, tidied and laundered. And not once had he noticed, commented or praised. In fact Andreas was so domestically challenged that when she had asked him to make her a cup of tea he had ordered it in. Her eyes were filmed with tears but she told herself it was regret for the two years she had thrown away on such an arrogant specimen of masculinity. He had not deserved her love and it was time she got over him. If she went out with someone else, wouldn’t that be the best way to speed up her recovery?

Ben regarded her with lazy aplomb. ‘Come down to the cottage with Vanessa this weekend,’ he suggested. ‘There’ll be a crowd. We could have a blast.’

‘Just friends?’ Hope breathed tautly, tempted by the welcome prospect of being able to escape the city for a couple of days.

‘Kissing friends only,’ Ben traded teasingly, but there was an edge of seriousness in his tone.

Hope turned a hot pink and embarrassment claimed her. ‘Thanks, but no, thanks— I don’t know you well enough—’

Before she could turn away, Ben closed a hand over hers. ‘I’m not expecting you to sleep with me yet—’

She was really embarrassed. ‘No? But—’

‘I know my reputation but I’m willing to go slow for you,’ Ben promised.

Evading his eyes, Hope nodded. She did not know what to say. She did not think that there was the remotest chance of her ever wishing to become that intimate with Ben Campbell or indeed anyone else. Yet, without hesitation, Andreas had slammed shut the door on the past they had shared, she reminded herself doggedly. Presumably Andreas suffered from none of her sensitivities. But then Andreas had never loved her. That was the bottom line that she needed to remember, she told herself painfully. Sitting around alone and feeling sorry for herself would not improve her lot or her spirits. Perhaps if she went through the motions of enjoying herself, enjoyment would begin to come naturally.

The following week, Hope met her brother for dinner at his hotel. More than two years had passed since their last meeting. She was grateful that she had not had the opportunity to mention Andreas during the annual phone calls when Jonathan had brought her up to speed on what was happening in his life. At least she did not now have to announce that she had been dumped, she told herself in consolation. Seeing her brother’s fair head across the quiet restaurant, she smiled warmly, wanting to make the most of so rare an occasion.

‘You haven’t got something to tell me, have you?’ Jonathan enquired, arranging his thin features into an exaggerated grimace as he stood up and raising a mocking brow.

‘Sorry?’ Hope stepped back from him with an uncertain look. ‘What’s the joke?’

‘Well, I suppose it’s not that funny.’ Her older brother sighed heavily. ‘But when I first saw you walking towards me, I honestly thought you were pregnant. Don’t you think it’s time you went on a diet?’

Hope reddened with hurt and embarrassment. She had forgotten just how critical Jonathan could be of a body image that was not as lean as his own. His wife, Shona, was a physical education instructor and the couple and their children led a formidably healthy lifestyle. Although it had been some time since Hope had had the courage to approach the bathroom scales, she was already painfully aware that she had put on weight and she could have done without her brother’s blunt comments. At present only the larger sizes in her wardrobe were a comfortable fit. I thought you were pregnant. How could he say that to her? Did she really look that large? Tears burned the backs of her eyes.

‘You’re letting yourself go. It’s time for a wake-up call,’ her sibling continued without a shade of discomfiture. ‘A good diet and exercise regime would transform you. Did I tell you that Shona has opened a fitness salon?’

‘No…’

‘Business is good, very good,’ Jonathan asserted with satisfaction. ‘I’ll get Shona to send you a copy of her favourite diet.’

Pregnant. Hope was lost in her own feverish thoughts. She was thinking of the new bras she had been forced to buy and considering her tummy’s more rounded profile. She was gaining weight in a pattern that was different from her own personal norm. Then there were those secret binges on olives. Hadn’t she once read that some women were afflicted by strange cravings during pregnancy? But aside of all those vague factors, what had happened to her menstrual cycle in recent months?

‘My firm is operating to full capacity. We can hardly keep up with the order book,’ her brother informed her cheerfully. ‘Life has been very good to Shona and I.’

‘I’m happy for you,’ Hope mumbled, transfixed by the alarming awareness that she could not recollect when she had last had a period. It was not something she took a note of or indeed looked for or had ever made welcome. But her cycle had always been a regular one. Yet if her memory served her well, her cycle had not been functioning correctly for several months at the very least. Did that mean that there was a possibility that she could be pregnant?

‘I’ll always be grateful that you had the generosity to allow me to inherit mother’s estate,’ Jonathan added squarely. ‘At the time I needed that inheritance and I was able to make excellent use of it.’

It was only with the greatest difficulty that Hope could keep up with the conversation, for anxiety had turned her skin clammy. She was being forced to acknowledge that there was a distinct chance that she could have conceived while she was still with Andreas.

‘Hope…’ Jonathan prompted.

‘Sorry, I’m a bit preoccupied today,’ Hope apologised weakly. ‘But I was listening. I know you’ll have made good use of that money.’

‘But it’s been on my conscience ever since and it’s only fair that you should get the same opportunity. After all, you cared for our mother for a long time and you sacrificed your education and prospects.’ With a look of distinct pride Jonathan laid a cheque down on the table in front of her. ‘I can now afford to return the original inheritance to you. If you’re still planning to open your own business, a cash injection should help.’

Hope stared down at the cheque open-mouthed and blinked in astonishment. Her sibling had managed to thoroughly disconcert her. Below the level of the table she had splayed her fingers across the soft swell of her stomach while she’d focused on the shattering idea that she could be carrying a baby. But now she had to concentrate on the very large cheque that her brother had just presented her with.

‘My goodness…’ she said shakily.

‘If you’re about to embark on a new business, you’ll need to be super fit,’ Jonathan warned her. ‘I still think a diet should be at the very top of your agenda.’

CHAPTER FIVE

ANDREAS saw the artistic photo of the three handbags first. The shot was part of a feature in a Sunday magazine devoted to Vanessa Fitzsimmons’s deeply trendy photographic exhibition. There was a miniature silver-on-black Hope label in the seam of the tiny lime-green bag and it was a dead giveaway to Andreas. Courtesy of Vanessa, the handbags had been arranged against a rough stone wall as though they were works of art. His handsome mouth curled. He wondered why he was even looking at such superficial rubbish.

Flipping the page, however, Andreas was wholly entrapped by a shot of Hope sitting on a rock by a river. Several other faces that were far more well known on the social scene featured in the same study, which was called simply ‘My friends’ but Andreas initially saw only Hope. A multicoloured gypsy-style top open at her creamy throat, her face bathed in golden sunlight and her turquoise eyes luminous, she looked knock-down stunning. A tiny muscle jumped at the corner of his clenched jaw line. His brilliant dark gaze slashed from Hope to the male standing to one side of her: that smug-looking bastard, Campbell, who had a proprietary hand resting on her shoulder.

A boiling tide of rage filled Andreas. He wanted to smash something. Instead he poured himself a drink. It was only ten in the morning. Self-evidently, he was on edge because he had been working too hard for too long, he reasoned grimly. Rage had no place in his disciplined world. All emotion, irrational and otherwise could be controlled, suppressed and ultimately nullified by intelligence. He drained the glass and smashed the crystal tumbler in the Georgian fireplace. The deed was done before he was even aware of his intention.

Hope emerged from the doctor’s surgery on rather wobbly legs.

Vanessa leapt up and groaned. ‘You are, aren’t you? I can tell by your face!’

Hope nodded and did not speak until they reached the street. She had been told that she was more than five months pregnant and she was in complete shock. ‘The oddest thing is,’ she mused helplessly in the fresh air, ‘I’m a healthy weight for a pregnant woman. I’m not too heavy. Can you believe that?’

‘Andreas Nicolaidis has ruined your life,’ her friend lamented in a tone of unconcealed resentment. ‘You’ve just started seeing Ben, you’re just about to look for business premises and then it all goes pear-shaped on you. How could you be so careless?’

Hope went pink and cast down her eyes. She had not been careless; Andreas had been, though. Several different types of contraceptive pill had failed to agree with her and Andreas had been concerned that she would be damaging her health if she persisted. For that reason, about nine months earlier, he had said that he would take full responsibility in that field. Unfortunately he had been rather forgetful on at least a couple of occasions that came to mind. Certain methods of birth control could put a breaker on spontaneity and Andreas was a very spontaneous guy, she reflected with a pained stab of recollection.

‘So how far along are you?’ Vanessa enquired gloomily.

Hope sucked in her tummy guiltily, for she could see that the sight of her changing shape depressed her friend. ‘I’ll be a mother in just over three months.’

Vanessa stopped dead in the middle of the street and surveyed her in wonderment. ‘But you can’t be that pregnant!’

‘I am…’

‘But how could you not have noticed?’ The redhead gasped, standing back to subject Hope’s stomach to a distinctly embarrassing appraisal. ‘I mean, give your brother a medal. You do look pregnant and yet none of us noticed!’

‘I’ve been wearing loose clothing,’ Hope pointed out. ‘And people only see what they expect to see.’

When she had first fallen pregnant, her life had been incredibly busy and she had been so wrapped up in Andreas that she had failed to notice that her menstrual cycle had come to a mysterious halt. The other signs of pregnancy had also passed her by. Her health had never given her cause for concern and she had shrugged off the slight nausea and the dizziness she had experienced, believing neither symptom worthy of a visit to the doctor. In more recent months her personal woes had acted like a cocoon that had blinded her to everything outside her own thoughts and feelings, she acknowledged ruefully.

‘What are your plans?’

‘I have to tell Andreas.’

Vanessa pulled a sour face. ‘Let Ben know first.’

But Hope did not fall for that suggestion. For the first time in two and a half months, she rang Andreas on his mobile phone and left a message on his voicemail asking if she could see him to discuss something important.

It was three hours before he returned her call. ‘What is it?’ he breathed coldly without any preliminary greeting.

‘I need to see you and I can’t talk about it on the phone. Where are you?’

Somewhere close by, a woman giggled and muttered something in a low, intimate voice. ‘In the UK and busy,’ Andreas said dryly.

She squeezed her aching eyes tight shut. She did not want to speak to Andreas and hear his dark, deep drawl and she especially did not want to listen to another woman speaking to him in the teasing tone of a lover. In fact she really could not bear that torment at all.

‘I’m also leaving for Athens tomorrow morning,’ Andreas informed her coolly. ‘This is your one chance to speak to me. Use it or lose it.’

‘No, I have to see you in person and in private,’ Hope countered tautly. ‘I don’t think that’s such a huge thing to ask.’

‘Perhaps not but the prospect is not entertaining,’ Andreas fielded, smooth and sharp as a shard of glass cutting into tender skin. ‘In short, I don’t want to see you.’

‘Do you expect me to beg you for five minutes of your time?’ Hope demanded painfully, angry, humiliated tears clogging up her throat, for she had not been prepared for that level of bluntness.

‘OK. If you’re that keen, you’ll find me at the gym tomorrow morning at seven.’ He finished the call without another word and left her staring into space.

How was she supposed to tell a guy that cold and unfriendly that she was carrying his child? He was not going to be happy about that. Even when they had still been together, Andreas would not have been happy about that. How much worse would it be to break such shattering news now that they were apart? It had been a long time since they had broken up as well. What male was likely to be even remotely prepared for such an announcement weeks and weeks after the relationship had ended? How could he be so cruel as to demand that she come to the gym where he trained at practically the crack of dawn? He knew the one thing she had always hated was getting out of bed early.

Andreas enjoyed extensive private facilities at an exclusive sports club and visited it several times a week. He had a fitness room at his town house but rarely managed to use it. He had once explained that the club offered him the advantage of sparring with an instructor and training without distractions.

As Hope walked past the limousine in the car park his chauffeur acknowledged her with a polite inclination of his head. What did it matter where she was when she made her announcement? she was asking herself ruefully. His office would not have been any more suitable and she would not have felt comfortable at the town house, which he had never invited her to visit even when they had been together. Furthermore, it was foolish to suspect that some slight was inherent in his suggestion that she meet him at his club. After all, Andreas had very little free time and she had to accept the reality that she no longer enjoyed special status in his life.

The weathered older man presiding over Reception asked to see proof of her identity and then told her where to find Andreas. Smoothing damp palms down over the long black wool coat she wore, Hope pushed back the swing door on the gym.

Clad in black boxing shorts and a black vest, Andreas was pounding a speedball with so much energy that he remained unaware of her entrance. She had always been madly curious about exactly what he did at the sports club. Now she remembered him telling her that he had boxed at university. Her attention clung to him. He looked drop-dead gorgeous, she thought helplessly. Every lean, muscular and bronzed line of his long, powerful physique emanated virile masculine strength. She missed looking at him, being with him, touching him, talking to him. She even missed the pleasure of being able to think about him without feeling guilty.

‘Andreas…’ she croaked.

Although she would have sworn he could not have heard her above the racket of the speedball, his hands dropped down to his sides immediately and he swung round as though his every sense had been primed for her arrival. Veiled dark deep-set eyes with the brilliance of black granite inspected her from below inky, spiky lashes.

It was a bad moment for Andreas. He had picked the club with care. He had thought it an inspired choice of venue where Hope was unlikely to linger or stage an emotional scene. But there she was, garbed in a big black coat and reminding him very much of how she had looked in his overcoat in the barn when they had first met: all silky soft blonde hair and huge bright eyes above that ripe pink unbelievably kissable mouth. That was Ben Campbell’s territory now, came the thought, and he went rigid. He hung onto that alienating awareness and welcomed the return of the cold, bitter aggression that slaughtered at source any suggestion of sexual desire.

‘So…’ Andreas murmured, secure again in his emotion-free zone and cold as a polar winter. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Well, it’s not something you can help me with exactly,’ Hope declared in an odd little breathless voice that made her want to wince for herself. Without warning the entire opening speech she had planned to make had vanished from her memory. Her brain now seemed to have all the speed and creative enterprise of a tortoise trapped upside down.

Andreas discovered that like a schoolboy he was picturing her naked below the coat. Angry colour outlined his proud cheekbones and his beautiful mouth curled. He was well rid of her, he decided furiously. He loathed the effect she had on him. ‘I haven’t got much time here,’ he reminded her flatly. ‘But maybe you just came here to look at me.’

‘No, I came here to tell you something that I find very difficult to say,’ Hope advanced jerkily.

‘At this hour of the day I’m not in the mood for a guessing game!’ Andreas derided and he stripped off the fingerless mitts and flexed long, lean brown fingers.

Hope tried a limp smile. ‘Actually I do wish you would guess but it’s not the sort of thing you’re likely to think of on your own. Although you always look on the dark side of things, so I suppose that ought to provide some guidance.’

Exasperated golden eyes lodged to her anxious face, Andreas murmured dryly, ‘What’s the matter with you? You never used to have a problem getting to the point.’

‘That was back when you looked at me as if I was still a human being instead of a waste of space!’ Hope dared, appalled to find that without even the tiniest warning her eyes were suddenly ready to overflow with tears.

Andreas was in the act of pulling on boxing gloves but he stilled and shot a stern look of gleaming golden enquiry at her. His stomach had performed a back flip and he had broken out in a sweat. ‘Are you ill? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’

‘No…not, not at all,’ she asserted, taken aback by that dramatic flight of fancy on his part.

Relief washing over him, Andreas dragged in a long, deep breath to refresh his lungs. He strode towards the leather punchbag. ‘Then talk before I run out of patience,’ he urged.

‘I’m pregnant.’

Andreas froze two feet away from the punchbag. Stunned by her declaration, he did not turn his arrogant dark head. ‘If that’s a joke, it’s in bad taste and I’m not laughing.’

‘I wouldn’t joke about something like that.’

Andreas discovered that he could not make himself look at her again. He believed he already saw the whole scenario and what he assumed could only leave a very nasty taste in his mouth. Bitter anger slashed through his wall of determined indifference and reserve. Hope had fallen for Campbell. He had come to terms with that. But that Campbell should have stolen her and used her and ditched her again when she proved to be inconveniently fertile enraged Andreas. He did not trust himself to speak. If he spoke he knew he would make comments that she would consider cruel and wounding and that those words would ultimately prove to be of no profit or consolation to either of them.

How the hell could she have been so stupid? Hadn’t she learned anything while she was with him? Of course, she had been able to trust him to look after her, Andreas reflected grimly. She had not had to look out for herself. That was just as well because, in his considered opinion, when shorn of his protective care she had all the survival power of a goldfish swimming with piranhas. She gave her trust indiscriminately. But Campbell had been a very poor bet. He was a spoilt and immature playboy with too much money and no sense of responsibility.

Was it so surprising that Hope should have come back to him for support? What did she want from him? Or expect? Advice? It would be very biased. Money? Suddenly, Andreas was grateful that she was fully covered by her coat. He did not wish to see the physical evidence of her pregnancy. Theos…she had another man’s baby inside her womb! The very concept of that filled him with antipathy and another even more powerful reaction that he flatly refused to acknowledge. Out of disgust and denial rose rage and frustration. An image of Campbell and his pretty-boy looks before him, Andreas pounded the leather punchbag with fists that had the impact of blows from a sledgehammer.

Paralysed to the spot ten feet away, Hope surveyed Andreas with a sinking heart. He was furious and fighting it to stay in control. He was saying nothing because he was too clever to risk saying the wrong thing. She watched him fall back from the punchbag and pull off and discard the boxing gloves. Raking blunt fingers through his short damp black hair, he swore half under his breath and peeled off his sports vest to let the air cool his overheated skin.

‘I need a shower,’ he breathed grittily. ‘Come on.’

He wanted her to accompany him to the shower? Hope would have gone anywhere he asked her to go. Even in such tense circumstances it felt amazing to be with Andreas again. There was an electric buzz in the air. As she preceded him into a luxurious changing area flanked by a walk-in wet room for showering, she was as nervous as a kitten.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything at all?’ she prompted tautly, disconcerted that he should be dealing with her news so much more calmly than she had expected.

Scorching golden eyes lit on her squarely for the first time in several minutes. The burn of his ferocious anger needed no words. Her mouth running dry, she tried and failed to swallow. Hurriedly she tore her gaze from the condemnation in his.

‘I know you have to be very surprised. I was too,’ she muttered, unable to stifle her need to fill every silent, tension-filled moment with chatter. ‘But I’m trying to view this development in a positive light—’

‘What else?’ Andreas ground out in a disturbingly abrupt interruption.

Hope fixed strained turquoise eyes on his lean, darkly handsome features. ‘This baby was obviously meant to be.’

‘That’s a hellish sentiment to throw in my teeth!’ Andreas raked at her, his Greek accent so thick she could hardly distinguish the individual words.

Aghast, Hope fell silent. He bent down and extracted a bottle of water from the mini fridge, wrenched off the lid and tipped it up. He drank thirstily, the strong muscles in his brown throat working. As he wiped his mouth dry again she could not help noticing that his hand was not steady. He was, she registered with a piercing sense of love and empathy, as on edge as she was.

‘Maybe I should go,’ she mumbled. ‘I’ve said what I came to say and I’m sure you must want to think it over in private.’

‘I didn’t intend to raise my voice. Sit down,’ Andreas instructed, grimly acknowledging that the last thing he wanted was to be left alone with the bombshell she had dropped on him.

‘I should leave you to have your shower,’ she said uncomfortably.

‘Sit down,’ Andreas repeated, striding past her to snap shut the lock on the door. His reaction to her suggestion that she depart was instinctive. ‘Please…’

Soothed by the rare sound of that word, Hope became a little less tense. ‘It’s warm in here,’ she remarked and began to unbutton her coat.

‘Keep your coat on!’ Andreas growled as if she had threatened to strip naked, parade around and make a dreadful exhibition of herself.

Andreas decided that an ice-cold shower would settle his tension. He felt as if he were hanging onto his usual cool by a single finger. She was carrying a child and an honourable man did not lose his temper with a woman in that condition. ‘Give me five minutes and then you can have my full attention.’

Hope sat down in her coat. She was overheating but in infinitely better spirits: he had locked the door to keep her with him. She had understood that gesture just as she understood that he needed some time to consider what she had told him. She was well aware that he did not like the unexpected. He liked everything cut and dried and organised. He had never, ever mentioned children to her. It was perfectly possible that he disliked children. Some people did. And even if he did not dislike children, he might still want nothing to do with her baby. He might ask her to consider adoption. He had the right to make his own views known and she had to accept that she might not like what she was about to hear, she told herself firmly.

Andreas stripped off his boxing shorts and strolled into the shower. Hope stared and reddened and glanced away and then glanced back again in a covert but mesmerised appraisal. He was incredibly male and from his wide shoulders, magnificent hair-roughened chest to his lean hips and long, powerful thighs he was quite divinely well built. She had always loved to look at him. But she knew she no longer had the right to do so and that his complete lack of inhibition in the current climate merely emphasised how shattered he was by the news of her pregnancy. Her eyes ached and burned and she averted her gaze from him while he towelled himself dry with unselfconscious grace. She was remembering how happy she had once been and appreciating how desperately fragile and fleeting happiness could be.

Andreas dressed with speed and dexterity in a dark blue suit. Exquisitely tailored to a superb fit on his lean, powerful frame, it was very fashionable in style. He looked sleek and rich and gorgeous and distinctly intimidating.

‘Tell me…what do you want from me?’ he asked softly, opening the door and standing back with innate good manners to allow her to leave first.

Her brow indented, her tension climbing again. ‘I don’t want anything. I have no expectations. I just knew I had to tell you.’

His beautiful stubborn mouth quirked. ‘Thank you for that consideration at least. I would not have liked to find out from someone else. How did Campbell react?’

‘Ben?’ Hope repeated in surprise, struggling to keep up with his long stride as they crossed the foyer. ‘He doesn’t know yet. I don’t know what I’ll say—’

Ebony brows pleating, Andreas stared down at her with incisive dark golden eyes. ‘You chose to tell me…first?’

‘Who else? I mean…strictly speaking, what’s Ben got to do with this?’ Hope asked uncomfortably.

‘He is the father of your baby,’ Andreas drawled flatly.

On the steps outside, Hope came to a sudden halt and stared up at him. As that most revealing statement sank in on her she stiffened in appalled disbelief. ‘My goodness, is that what you think? That Ben is the father? Oh, that’s too much altogether!’ she exclaimed angrily. ‘How dare you assume that? How blasted dare you? I’m very sorry to disappoint you but you are the man who is responsible!’

Andreas vented a rough, incredulous laugh, for he could not believe what she was now telling him. ‘You’ve got to be kidding…is that why you had to see me? You think you can pin this baby on me? What would prove to be the longest pregnancy on record? I dumped you months ago!’

By the time he had finished making that derogatory and insulting speech, Hope was pale as snow. But shocked though she was, she was also furious. ‘I’ve no intention of lowering myself to the level of arguing with you and particularly not in a public place!’ she hissed in a fierce undertone he had never heard her employ before. ‘I’ve done my duty: I’ve told you. I will not tolerate your offensive personal comments—’

‘But what you just said is ridiculous!’ Andreas ground out at a lower pitch, closing a domineering hand to her elbow to herd her in the direction of his limousine. ‘I assume Campbell has shown his worth in the crisis by bolting. But accusing me in his stead is not a win-win tactic.’

In a passionate temper new to her experience, Hope slapped his hand away from her arm and backed off several steps. ‘I’m ashamed I ever loved you and you can stop being so superior about Ben—’

His stunning golden eyes were blazing. ‘Get a grip on yourself.’

‘At least Ben didn’t try to seduce me before we even got out on a first date! At least he’s looking for a girlfriend, not a mistress…you know something?’ Hope demanded shrilly. ‘I wish this was Ben’s baby because I bet he’d be a lot nicer about it than you’re capable of being!’

‘Hope…’ Andreas grated from behind her as she stalked away.

‘Leave me alone…just stay away from me!’ she launched back over her shoulder, not even caring about the fact that her raised voice and distress had attracted attention.

CHAPTER SIX

FOR the second time in as many months, Andreas made a last-minute change to his plans and turned back from the airport.

He did not feel that he had a choice: Hope was seriously distressed. In fact she seemed to be coming apart at the seams. She had slapped out at him, lost her temper and shouted at him, and she had done all of that in front of an audience of interested by standers. It was as though she had had a personality transplant. Yet he knew her as a kind, gentle and unassuming woman, who was slow to anger and blessed with a cheerful outlook on life. Clearly, Ben Campbell was responsible for the appalling change in Hope. He had destroyed her tranquillity and plunged her into so much misery and confusion that she was making wild accusations.

Of course Campbell was the father of her baby! But evidently, Hope did not want Campbell in that role. It seemed obvious to Andreas that Hope’s toy boy had cut and run from the threat of paternity and left her in the lurch. So how was that his business? And why was he getting involved? Hope was in trouble and she had approached him for help. Who else did she have to turn to? Why shouldn’t he demonstrate that he was more of a man when the chips were down than Campbell would ever be?

Back at Vanessa’s apartment, Hope was tumbling a jumble of clothes into a squashy bag and asking feverishly, ‘Are you absolutely sure it’s OK for me to use your family’s cottage?’

‘Stop fussing. My mother’s in Jersey and my aunt, Ben’s mother, is far too grand for the cottage now. At least you’ll keep it aired,’ Vanessa remarked. ‘But is it such a good idea for you to leave London right now?’

‘I need peace…I have to think.’

Vanessa gave her a wry look. ‘Well, not about what you’ll be doing with the baby. You’re crazy about babies, so I feel it’s fairly likely that you’ll be keeping the sprog. This sudden departure from city life, however, feels more like you’re running away—’

Hope lifted her head, turquoise eyes defiant at that charge. ‘I’ll only be at the cottage for a few days. I’m not running away. I just don’t want to see Andreas—’

‘I don’t see him around to bother you. I gather by your attitude that he’s not going to be pitching for the Father of the Year award?’ Vanessa could not hide her curiosity.

‘Not while he thinks Ben fathered my baby—’

‘He thinks Ben knocked you up?’ the redhead queried in lively astonishment.

‘I hate that expression. Please don’t use it—’

‘Didn’t you tell Andreas how pregnant you are?’

‘No, I didn’t stay around to exchange conversation after he had made it clear that he was convinced Ben was the guilty party,’ Hope admitted heatedly. ‘Oh yes, Andreas also accused me of trying to pin my baby on him because Ben didn’t want to know!’

Her friend gave an exaggerated wince. ‘When Andreas gets it wrong, he gets it horribly wrong.’

Hope threaded a restive hand through the pale blonde strands of hair falling across her brow. ‘I tried to understand that he trusted his sister and believed in her. I tried to be fair to him but I don’t feel like being understanding any more,’ she confessed in a driven rush. ‘I’ve put up with enough. I thought that Andreas had a right to know about the baby but now I wish I had stayed away from him.’

‘I have a confession to make.’ Vanessa stretched her mouth into a wry look of appeal. ‘I told Ben about the baby…I know, I know, it wasn’t my business. Unfortunately I let something slip accidentally over lunch and when he picked up on it, I couldn’t lie, could I?’

‘No…you couldn’t lie.’ But Hope guessed that Vanessa had quite deliberately chosen to break the news of her friend’s pregnancy to Ben. Had her friend been afraid that, on the spur of the moment, Ben might say something hurtful? Or had Vanessa decided that it was unfair that Ben should be left in ignorance while Andreas was put in the picture? Whatever, Vanessa had interfered and perhaps she shouldn’t have done. At that moment, however, Hope was guiltily grateful not to be faced with the embarrassing prospect of having to tell Ben that she was expecting Andreas’s child. Informing Andreas had been upsetting enough. Yet Ben, whom she had been seeing for just three short weeks, was entitled to hear the same announcement.

‘Ben was gobsmacked.’ Vanessa heaved a sigh and jerked a slim shoulder. ‘He’s keen on you but I don’t think he has a clue how to deal with this situation.’

‘I’m not stupid. I’m not expecting Ben to deal with it and stay around.’ Hope forced a laugh at the very idea. ‘What guy would?’

Vanessa reflected on that question. ‘A very special one,’ she said finally. ‘But I’m not sure Ben is up for the challenge.’

‘Why on earth should he be? Within another month at most I’ll be a dead ringer for a barrel in shape!’ Hope quipped.

The doorbell went.

Both women stilled.

‘It’s probably for you,’ her friend forecast.

Hope finished zipping her bag and then, tilting her chin, she went to answer the bell.

Andreas levelled steady dark golden eyes on her. ‘Invite me in.’

‘No.’

Andreas angled his handsome dark head to one side. ‘Why not? Is your watchdog home?’

‘That’s no way to refer to my best friend.’

‘Are you saying she has never maligned me?’ Andreas fielded with lethal effect.

Hope flushed to the roots of her hair and deemed it wisest to say nothing. But she did very nearly confide that she had always warmly defended him from every hint of criticism. Only now she felt ashamed rather than proud of her once-unswerving loyalty. After all, that very day she had been forced to appreciate that Andreas had never had a similar level of faith in her. He found it easy to accept that she had done all sorts of unforgivable things, didn’t he?

He believed she had slept with Ben and carried on an affair with the other man behind his back. He believed she had lied about her infidelity and engaged in all the deceits that would have been required to conceal that betrayal. He believed she had made up a nasty, sordid story about his sister, Elyssa, in an effort to save her own skin. He also believed that, having found herself in the family way, she had been desperate enough and foolish enough to try and lie about who had put her in that condition in the first place.

Injured pride and deep pain warred inside Hope and produced anger. ‘Andreas…I don’t see any point in you being here. I’ve nothing more to say to you.’

‘You approached me first.’

‘Yes and I said what I had to say.’ Her heart-shaped face pale with strain, Hope folded her arms in a jerky movement.

‘But I’ve barely got warmed up,’ Andreas fenced, leaning into the apartment to call, ‘Vanessa?’

Startled, Hope exclaimed, ‘Why are you—?’

Her friend strolled out to the hall.

‘I was convinced you would not be far. Hope and I are going out—’

‘No, we’re not. I have a train to catch,’ Hope protested.

‘I should be in Athens right now and you screwed it up for me,’ Andreas delivered, lean, strong face taut with fortitude.

Hope was laced with equal determination. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you. I’m not even speaking to you—’

‘That’s not a problem,’ Andreas drawled, smooth as silk. ‘I’m perfectly happy to do all the talking. I enjoy it when people just listen to me.’

‘I’d know that without even hearing you,’ Vanessa chipped in.

If her friend had been hoping to put Andreas out of countenance, she had misjudged her man. Ablaze with confidence and purpose, Andreas vented an appreciative laugh. ‘Good.’

His amusement cut through Hope’s sensitive skin like a knife. That was how much her current crisis meant to Andreas Nicolaidis. He had refused to credit that the baby was his and he didn’t really need to care about her predicament. She studied him with helpless intensity. Getting by without him was agony and seeing him only increased her craving to be with him again. She had to get over that.

‘I don’t want to see you…or have anything to do with you,’ Hope breathed unevenly, and she reached forward and slowly, carefully closed the front door in his darkly handsome face.

‘I can’t believe you just did that!’ Vanessa gasped, wide-eyed. ‘He’s the love of your life and your idol!’

‘I need to cultivate better taste. That was the first step and overdue.’ Hope retreated back to her bedroom to retrieve her bag. She felt as if she were bleeding to death. She wanted to run out the door and chase after him like a faithful pet. For the very first time she was learning to say no to Andreas and it did not feel good to go against her own nature. In fact it hurt like hell.

Four hours later, she was climbing out of a taxi clutching the key for the picturesque country cottage that belonged to the Fitzsimmons and Campbell families. It lay down a leafy lane and was sheltered by tall, glossy hedges of laurel. Cottage was a bit of a misnomer for a property containing more than half a dozen bedrooms. It was a substantial house.

In the charming bedroom she chose for herself below the overhanging eaves she looked out over the back garden towards the gentle winding river and the open countryside beyond. The silence and the sense of peace were wonderful. Her train had been packed and noisy and she had not initially been able to get a seat. Exhaustion was making her droop.

‘Carrying a baby is a tiring business,’ the doctor had warned her. ‘You have to be sensible and take extra rest if you need it.’

It didn’t help that it had been weeks since she had benefited from an unbroken night of sleep. Bad dreams and worries had haunted her. Shedding her clothes where she stood, she pulled on a thin white cotton nightdress and sank between the sheets on the comfortable bed as heavily as a rock settling in silt.

Wakening refreshed the following morning, Hope felt her mood lift in tune with the sunshine filtering through the curtains. It was a beautiful day. She put on a light summer dress, attempted unsuccessfully to suck her tummy in and still breathe, and finally went downstairs to satisfy her ravenous appetite for food. She blessed Vanessa when she found that the fridge already contained a few basic foodstuffs. A local woman acted as caretaker and Vanessa had evidently contacted her.

Hope ate her toast on the sun-drenched terrace beside the river and then allowed herself five olives. She had so many decisions to make. But her friend had been right on one score: whether or not to keep her child was not one of them. She had the lucky advantage of being cushioned by the cash her brother had given her. Only now she was no longer sure of what to do with that money. Perhaps putting it into property might be the wisest move.

Her business plans would have to go on the back burner for a while. Too many new businesses failed. Having a child to care for would change her priorities. She was less keen to take on financial risk. Setting up a viable enterprise to craft handmade bags and employing even a couple of workers would always have been a risky venture. But to set herself such a task with a new baby on the way and single parenthood looming would be downright foolhardy.

Ben arrived when she was working on new ideas for bags, an exercise that never failed to relax her. Lost in creative introspection, she did not hear his car arriving. When she glanced up, she just saw Ben standing at the corner of the house watching her. Thrusting aside her sketch pad, she scrambled up, taut with apprehension. With his fair hair fashionably tousled into spikes and his green eyes usually serious, he had a rakish, boyish attraction, she acknowledged. He wasn’t a bad kisser either. Only her heart didn’t go bang-bang-bang when she saw him and the almost-sick-with-excitement sensation, which she associated with Andreas, did not happen for her around Ben.

‘You didn’t need to come down to see me,’ she said awkwardly.

‘I did.’ Ben dug restive hands deep into his pockets. ‘You should have been the one to tell me about the baby.’

‘Vanessa didn’t give me the chance.’ Hope sighed.

‘This was one of the times when she should’ve minded her own business. She made me feel like I had no place in your life.’ Ben subjected her anxious face to a rueful appraisal. ‘I’m not going to pretend that this development hasn’t knocked me for six…it has. But however this pans out, we’ll still be friends.’

Her soft mouth wobbled and she compressed it. But it was no good—her eyes overflowed and, with a sound that veered between a laugh and a sob, she groaned. ‘The slightest thing brings tears to my eyes at the minute. It’s so embarrassing…please ignore me!’

Ben draped a comforting arm round her shoulders but he did not draw her close as he would have done only days earlier. ‘You’ve had a rough week. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Vanessa says that you and Andreas are engaged in major hostilities. That’s my fault—’

‘How can it possibly be your fault?’

‘I could’ve put him right about us a couple of months back but I didn’t see why I should. I wanted a chance with you and if you stayed with your Greek tycoon, I wasn’t going to get it. I took advantage. I’m admitting it,’ Ben said bluntly. ‘But even I draw the line at continuing to muddy the water when you’re expecting his kid! That has to be sorted out.’

Ben insisted on taking her down to the medieval pub in the village and treating her to lunch. His unexpected plain common sense had left her conscience uneasy. Her own behaviour seemed less sensible. Feeling horribly hurt and humiliated, she had shut the door in Andreas’s face and refused to talk to him. It might have been what Andreas deserved and it might have made her feel less like a doormat, but important issues still had to be resolved. Andreas could not be allowed to retain the impression that Ben might have fathered her child. She was not to blame for the misunderstanding. But for Ben’s sake and for the baby’s, she needed to keep on trying to ensure that Andreas accepted the truth.

Early evening that same day, Andreas brought the powerful Lamborghini to a throaty halt in front of the thatched cottage.

He had leant on Vanessa until she had buckled and told him where Hope was. Hope might well be in need of a break in which to recoup her energies, but he was not willing to accept that she had to be protected from him. Even though he had missed a family christening in Athens, he was feeling good about what he was doing. In fact he was aware of a general improvement in his mood. That was no surprise to him. When had he ever done anything quite so unselfish? Naturally he was proud of himself. Although Hope had no claim on him and even less right to his consideration, he had set aside his perfectly justifiable anger and understandable distaste to check that she was all right.

Hope clambered out of the bath because she was terrified of falling asleep in the water. Wrapping her streaming body in a velour towel imprinted with zoo animals, she padded back into the bedroom. From the low window there she saw Andreas springing out of an elegant long, low silver car. He hit the knocker on the front door.

‘Oh, heck…’ Her first glance was into the mirror to note that, yes, her hair was damp and messy and piled on top of her head where it was anchored by a canary-yellow band. And her face was hot pink. And nobody was ever likely to suggest that her figure was enhanced by a bulky towel in primary colours. Was her tummy really that…? She flipped sideways and wished she hadn’t bothered. Sometimes ignorance could be bliss.

Yet even in profile, Andreas looked stunning, his bold, bronzed features vibrant with dark, intrinsically male beauty. Tall and well built, he emanated powerful energy. Her hand flew up to tug off the band restraining her hair. In a panic, she finger-combed the resulting tangle. The door knocker went a second time. Breathless and reckless as a teenager, terrified he would decide she was out and leave if she did not hurry, she raced down the stairs as though her feet had wings and dragged open the door.

His dark, deep-set gaze narrowed below thick black lashes and roamed from the lush pink cupid’s bow of her mouth to the voluptuous creamy swell of her breasts. Not even the sight of a pink elephant marching across the towel could dim Andreas’s appreciation of her fabulous shape. His eyes flared to smouldering gold.

Her mouth ran dry. ‘How did you find out where I was?’

‘Vanessa told me.’

Hope was amazed. ‘She…did?’

‘I said I was concerned about you. That unnerved her. Suddenly she didn’t want the responsibility of withholding information from me,’ Andreas explained lazily.

‘I’m glad…we do need to talk,’ Hope conceded quietly, backing towards the stairs. ‘If you wait in the sitting room, I’ll get dressed.’

‘Why bother?’ Andreas was tracking her every tiny move with keen male attention.

‘Because I’m not wearing enough clothes,’ she mumbled uncertainly, finding it incredibly hard to concentrate beneath Andreas’s steady appraisal.

‘You’re not wearing any,’ Andreas contradicted huskily. ‘Do you hear me complaining?’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ she begged, her tension rising because she knew she wanted him to talk like that to her. In fact her protest was a truly appalling lie when she knew that more than anything else in the world at that moment she wanted him to kiss her.

Her retreat from the door had exposed the jacket slung down carelessly across the window seat. Andreas treated the garment to a fulminating scrutiny. His hard jaw line clenched taut. ‘Whose jacket is that? Daddy Bear’s?’

Disconcerted, Hope followed the path of his eyes. Her fine brows pleated when she saw that Ben, who had departed a couple of hours earlier, had forgotten to take his jacket with him.

‘Hope?’ Andreas prompted icily. ‘That’s a man’s jacket.’

Never in her life until then had Hope been so tempted to tell a lie for the sake of peace. While she was wondering whether an elderly gardener with expensive tastes could be the likely owner of a designer leather jacket, time ran out.

‘Is Campbell here?’ Andreas slung at her wrathfully. ‘Upstairs in the bedroom?’

Hope exploded into emotive speech, ‘No, of course not. He’s not here but he would have every right to be if he wanted to be! Vanessa may have given me permission to be here but the cottage belongs to her family and Ben’s.’

Andreas paced forward a step. His lean, strong face was set like stone, his brilliant eyes hard as steel. ‘When was Campbell here?’

‘That’s none of your business,’ Hope dared shakily.

His intent gaze flared to a volatile gold. ‘You made it my business again. Either you’re with him or you’re alone. If you’re still with him, I want to know about it!’

‘I’m not discussing Ben with you. You have no right to ask me these questions—’

‘If you’re still involved with Campbell, why did you approach me?’ Andreas launched at her in raw condemnation.

Hope lifted her head high, turquoise eyes dark with stress. ‘This is your baby. It’s got nothing to do with Ben, so just leave him out of things—’

‘That’s a fantasy…I finished with you months ago. How the hell could it be my baby?’ Andreas thundered at her in fierce frustration.

Hope flinched from the violence flaring like a silent lightning strike in the atmosphere. ‘In another week, I’ll be six months pregnant. Six months ago I hadn’t even met Ben Campbell.’

Andreas had fallen very still. He fixed sceptical eyes on her and stared. ‘You can’t be six months pregnant.’

‘The doctor says that some women…of my build,’ she selected with care, ‘don’t look like they’re expecting until the last couple of months.’

His normal healthy colour noticeably absent below his bronzed skin, Andreas coiled his restive hands into powerful fists and half lifted his arms in emphasis. ‘There’s no way you can be six months pregnant,’ he repeated, less stridently it was true, but the repetition of that assurance broke the thin hold she had on her control.

‘Isn’t there?’ Hope gasped, angry pink blooming in her cheeks. ‘You could not be more wrong. Furthermore, if it’s anyone’s fault I’m going to be a mother, it’s yours!’

‘Mine?’ Andreas echoed. ‘You start telling me this crazy story—’

‘What crazy story would that be? You got me pregnant. Who was it who said that he would take care of the precautions?’ Hope shouted at him in a tempestuous fury of frustration and pain. ‘Who assured me that I could safely leave everything to you? And then who didn’t bother when it didn’t suit him? In the shower, in the middle of the night, on the bathroom floor…that time in the limo…’

A slow, dulled rise of blood below his olive skin demarcated the superb slant of his high cheekbones

‘How is it that you took that kind of risk with me? Over and over again? How is it that you then have the cheek to repeatedly insist that some other man must be the father of my child? You’ve got a very short memory, Andreas—’

‘No…I remember that time in the limo,’ Andreas breathed thickly, fabulous golden eyes not quite focused, a frown line between his ebony brows as though he were literally looking back through time. ‘I had flown in from Oslo…I called you to meet me…that…that was pretty much unforgettable.’

Her small fingers curved like talons into her palms. ‘I’m so glad it was memorable enough for you to recall.’

Andreas studied her stomach as covertly as he could. But he could not look away. His baby. It could be; it might be. He was in shock. ‘Now that you’ve said how far along this pregnancy is, I can see there’s a stronger possibility that the baby is mine.’

‘You’re so generous,’ Hope said in a small, tightly restrained voice.

‘I’ll still want DNA testing after the child’s born,’ Andreas assured her, not wishing to seem a pushover while he skimmed his gaze over Ben Campbell’s jacket. His stubborn jaw line hardened. He still had to deal with Campbell. He wasn’t prepared to accept Campbell’s inclusion in any corner of the picture. A miniature Nicolaidis, a son or daughter, his first child, his baby would soon be born. It was amazing how different a slant that put on things.

Pale and stiff, Hope inwardly cringed at the threat of DNA tests. He would take nothing on trust. All over again, she felt hurt and humiliated. ‘That’s up to you but it won’t be necessary.’

‘What’s the state of play between you and Campbell?’

Hope coloured in embarrassment and compressed her lips. ‘Take a guess.’

The inference that her pregnancy had wrecked her affair with Campbell put Andreas on a high. Satisfaction zinged through him in an adrenalin rush. He had to resist the urge to smile in triumph. ‘I imagine you don’t qualify as ideal playmate material with my baby inside you.’

‘Ben doesn’t see me in that light. He’s a friend—’

‘Whereas I never wanted to be your friend,’ Andreas incised with a look of unashamed challenge in his clear gaze. ‘I wanted you in my arms, by my side and in my bed. I didn’t feed you any rubbish lines about friendship.’

‘Nor did you mention the fact that you thought of me as your mistress.’

‘Labels aren’t important.’ Andreas angled back his arrogant dark head, refusing to award her the point. ‘Many women would be proud to be called my mistress.’

‘But you knew I wouldn’t be proud because you never once mentioned that word to me until after we broke up,’ Hope reminded him doggedly.

Andreas strolled with fluid grace across the hall. ‘Don’t argue with me. There is no longer any need. For the moment I will accept your word that the child you carry is mine.’

Hope shifted a casual shoulder as if the matter were immaterial to her. However, grudging though his concession was, it was a source of great relief to her.

‘Why did it take you so long to realise you were pregnant?’ he questioned.

‘I didn’t pick up on the signs. I had too much else on my mind over the last few months.’

‘That’s all in the past,’ Andreas asserted, gazing down at her. She met dark golden eyes and her tummy turned a somersault in response. The beginnings of a smile chased the ruthless quality from his beautifully sculpted mouth. Her heart began to beat to a very fast tempo.

‘You’ve been very unhappy, pedhi mou.’

She nodded in uncertain agreement. She was struggling to drag her attention from him but she was mesmerised by the sexual spell he could cast without even trying. A helpless rush of yearning shimmered through her. It had been so long. Her breasts stirred below the towel, her rosy nipples becoming prominent. An embarrassing ache pulsed between her thighs and her face burned with shamed awareness.

‘I like what I do to you,’ Andreas confessed huskily. ‘But you have very much the same effect on me.’

‘Do I?’ She gave way then to her weakness and let herself touch him again. Her fingers fluttered up to smooth across a hard, taut masculine cheekbone and then flirted with his luxuriant black hair. The wonderfully familiar scent of him that close intoxicated her. Her legs felt wobbly.

‘How could you doubt it?’ He bent down and let his warm tongue delve into the moist centre of her mouth and caress the soft underside of her lips. Way down low in her throat a moan escaped. She stretched up on her tiptoes and kissed him back with fervent, eager need. He reached down and lifted her up into his arms and then he took the stairs two at a time.

She let her hands sink into the springy depths of his hair. Joy was dancing through her in a heady tide of celebration. He laid her down on the bed. Her hunger for his touch felt almost unbearable. He stood over her, discarding his jacket and tie, ripping open his shirt while he kicked off his shoes. His impatience thrilled her. She lay there, anticipation a wicked spiral twisting down deep inside her.

‘I’m so hot for you,’ Andreas growled like a hungry tiger as he came down to her.

She opened her arms wide. He tugged away the towel and she gasped and tried to cover herself again, suddenly remembering that she had rounded up in places she had had no need to fill out and stricken by the fear that he would be repulsed.

‘I’ve died and gone to heaven…’ Andreas groaned, settling that concern instantly with his bold masculine appreciation of the lush swell of her breasts.

He uncrossed her arms to bare her for his scrutiny.

‘Close your eyes…’ she pleaded. ‘I’ve expanded.’

‘Gloriously,’ Andreas declared raggedly, scorching golden eyes glittering with admiration. ‘You look like a pagan goddess…very, very sexy.’

Her spine arched a little. He used his thumbs on the tender crests of her breasts and followed with the sweet, erotic torment of his expert mouth. She whimpered, her hips shifting on the mattress.

‘I didn’t think to ask…’ Andreas stared down at her, taut with sudden anxiety. ‘Can I? Is it safe to make love?’

‘It’s OK…it’s no problem…oh, I want you so much,’ she gasped.

He traced the swollen, sensitive heart of her femininity and she jerked and writhed, losing control as the exquisite sensations came quicker and faster. The most devastating need had taken her over. She was liquid as honey heated to boiling point. He was a fantastic lover and he had primed every sensitised inch of her to the peak of sensual torment. Suddenly he was kissing her again in a deep, wild, drugging melding of their mouths that excited her beyond bearing.

‘Please…please…’ she cried.

He told her in Greek how much he needed her, his hands spread to cup her face. Lean, strong face stamped with desire and an intensity that was new to her, he tipped her back. ‘I’ll be very gentle.’

Slow and sure, he thrust into her hot, damp core, taking her by aching degrees. He stretched her and possessed her with long, hard strokes that drove her out of her mind with incredible pleasure. The tight sensation welling at the heart of her sent her excitement racing higher and higher. The surge of ecstasy she experienced plunged her into sobbing abandonment. It took a long time for the pulsing waves of delight to drain from her languorous body. Full of joy at the wonder of being with him again, she felt her eyes flood with tears and she kept her head buried in his shoulder. But she succumbed to the temptation of pressing tiny little kisses against his damp, bronzed skin, tickling him and making him laugh.

Grinning, Andreas closed both arms round her and breathed in the fresh herbal scent of her hair, revelling in the return of the harmony and satisfaction that had eluded him for months. He smoothed possessive hands over the smooth, soft curves of her highly feminine derrière. He wondered if it would seem uncool and if she would be offended if he examined the tantalising swell of her formerly flat stomach. He decided not to chance it and dropped a kiss down on the crown of her head. The unwelcome recollection of Ben Campbell’s jacket slunk into his mind like a depth charge from the deep.

Had she slept with Campbell in the same bed? What do you think, Andreas? A snide, cynical inner voice mocked. Don’t the guy’s relatives part-own the property? His sleek muscles drew taut. Suddenly a tidal wave of doubts and unease was assailing him. How could he ever trust her again? All men were vulnerable to false paternity claims. Even if DNA testing were to prove the child was not his, wouldn’t she still be able to plead that she had made a genuine error? After all, how could she know for sure that it was his baby? At best she was probably hoping like mad that it was his. The last thing she was likely to do was admit anything that might reawaken his worst suspicions.

In the course of seconds his mood had dive-bombed from the heights to subterranean-cellar level. He had dragged her off to bed as if the past few months could be wiped out. But the bitter memory of betrayal remained. Could he really be contemplating the concept of forgiving her? How could he ever forgive her for what she had done? He knew there were sad guys who did do stuff like that. Sad, weak men who let their even sadder dependency on a lying, deceitful woman overpower their brains and their pride. But he wasn’t one of those guys. His only weakness around her was lust, Andreas reasoned. That was sex, though; that was allowable. He would sleep with her as and when he liked. That was harmless. But forgiveness was impossible.

‘If you pack now, I’ll take you back to London with me,’ Andreas murmured flatly, hauling his long, powerful frame up against the pillows while at the same time shifting her off him onto the mattress. ‘The apartment already has a buyer. I’ll have to find you somewhere else to live.’

His cool detachment was as shocking to Hope as a bucket of icy water drenching her overheated skin. He had cut short the affectionate aftermath of their intimacy, Hope registered with a stark sense of panic and loss. Had she really believed that a nightmare could be eradicated and their former relationship reinstated? Why on earth had she fallen back into bed with him again? After all, she was now painfully aware of the deficiencies of what she had once mistakenly seen as a wonderfully happy relationship. Would she really sink so low as to accept being his mistress?

‘I’m not that fussed about diamonds,’ Hope pronounced grittily.

Halfway out of bed, for he was determined to remove Hope from her present accommodation as fast as he possibly could, Andreas stilled with a frown. ‘Say that again?’

Hope shot him a pained glance. ‘A mistress is supposed to have diamonds but I don’t want any. I never wanted any.’

Andreas deemed silence the best response to those incomprehensible statements. Nor did he see it as the best moment in which to confess that some of the charms on her bracelet were ornamented with diamonds of the very highest quality.

‘You never ate a grain of food in that apartment that I did not pay for…does that make you a kept man?’ Hope enquired curtly.

Stark naked, Andreas swung back at that facetious question. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I bought all the food. My small contribution to our shared life,’ Hope informed him, her turquoise eyes overbright. ‘But you thought you had bought me.’

‘No, I never thought that.’ Andreas frowned. ‘Did you buy the food? I had no idea—’

‘I wish I’d poisoned you when I got the chance!’ Hope hissed and, grabbing up her nightdress, she pulled it over her head, leapt off the bed and vanished into the en suite.

Andreas listened to the bolt shooting home on the other side of the door and swore under his breath while looking heavenward in vague hope of divine intervention. She had seemed perfectly happy, but he was learning that he could no longer depend on that superficial calm. She could fly from apparent tranquillity to screeching fury with him now in the space of seconds. Was that his fault? Campbell’s fault? Was she only back with him because Campbell had rejected her? He could not afford to take anything for granted this time around, he reminded himself harshly.

Hope could not bear to meet her own anguished eyes in the vanity mirror. She had acted like a slut and his coolness afterwards had ensured that she felt like one too. She really hated herself. As long as she behaved like that she would never win his respect. Once again she had been too easy. How could Andreas have sunk so low as to take advantage of her again? And how could she have allowed that to happen?

She had to forget that she loved Andreas. Her baby should be her only priority now. She should never, ever have got back into bed with him again. All that was likely to do was complicate things. Andreas still believed she had slept with Ben. No affair with Andreas had the faintest hope of a promising future. He would not make any commitment to her. Such a relationship would be doomed to failure and their child would also suffer in that breakdown. Sleeping with Andreas had been a serious mistake, but it was not a mistake she had to go on repeating, was it?

Hope emerged from the en suite.

Fully dressed, only his tousled black hair revealing that he had not spent the last hour in the average business meeting, Andreas surveyed her. ‘All I want to do is take you out of here and back to London where you belong.’

‘But I don’t belong there. I always preferred the country and that’s where I’d like to live if I get the chance. Look…’ Hope shifted an awkward hand, inhibited by the need to conceal her true emotions from him with a show of indifference. ‘We slept together and we shouldn’t have. I regret it very much.’

‘You didn’t regret it while you were doing it, pedhi mou,’ Andreas spelt out with dangerous bite. ‘So, what’s changed?’

‘I’m trying to be sensible for the baby’s benefit. I don’t want to be your mistress and I don’t think you’re facing how complicated things could get with a child in the midst of it all.’

Andreas pinned smouldering golden eyes of censure on her and proved that he was not listening. ‘This is about Campbell, isn’t it?’

Hope winced, for with that one question he fulfilled her every fear. ‘It’s not even me you want—’

‘What on earth is that supposed to mean?’

‘I think you just want to take me away from Ben to prove that you can do it. And, yes, you can do it. I’m no good at saying no to you…but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how dangerous you are to my peace of mind,’ she confessed gruffly.

Andreas dealt her a look of stark and savage impatience. ‘This is all nonsense. You fell into my arms…you came back to me—’

‘No…I had sex with you,’ Hope rephrased in a mortified undertone, her face reddening as she pushed out that contradiction.

Andreas studied her in angry disbelief. ‘Don’t be coarse—’

‘You had sex with me. Are you saying that meant anything special to you?’ Hope was striving not to look hopeful.

Put on the spot, Andreas refused to yield. His stubborn mouth firmed. ‘I’m not saying anything right now. It’s too soon.’

Unbearable sadness welled up inside Hope. ‘We don’t have any kind of a future.’

‘If that baby is mine, you’ll have a role to play in my life for years to come,’ Andreas pointed out impressively.

‘A backstage role that you define: a convenient mistress. I don’t want my baby to grow up and despise me. If there’s a chance that I could be the main event in some guy’s life…I want to be free to take that chance,’ Hope answered shakily. ‘And if I end up alone, so be it. I’ll take that risk.’

That was the definitive moment that Andreas appreciated that she had raised the stakes, changed the game, if game it was, and altered the rules without telling him. Either he offered her more or he walked away. He had never surrendered to blackmail in his life. Outrage slivered through him as he angled a brooding glance at the tumbled bed. Just two years ago Hope had been a clueless virgin. But this evening she had had rampant sex with him and then announced that she intended to keep her options open in case some other man presented her with a better deal. For some other man, read Ben Campbell, Andreas reflected in volcanic fury.

‘Please say you understand,’ Hope muttered tautly. ‘I want to try to be the best mother I can be—’

‘Naturally. If your child is mine, I’m willing to acknowledge the blood tie and accept a parental role.’ Andreas refused to think about how the advent of an illegitimate Nicolaidis heir or heiress would strike the more elderly of his conservative Greek family. ‘I will also cover all your expenses and settle money on both of you so that your future is secure. Those arrangements would be separate from any more intimate bonds we shared.’

Hope was very pale and her strained eyes lowered from his to hide her pain. ‘I’m not talking about money, Andreas.’

‘I didn’t suppose you were,’ he drawled flatly, his brilliant gaze cold and level, his handsome mouth set in a hard line. ‘But financial security is the most I intend to put on the table. I have no plans to marry you. Not now, not ever.’

She hadn’t been talking about marriage either. She had been hoping for some verbal acknowledgement of reconciliation between them and the hint that a degree of caring and commitment could exist in the future. But he was not even prepared to concede the possibility that over time something deeper might develop.

‘I wasn’t referring to marriage. There are options which go beyond mistress and don’t stretch as far as matrimony,’ Hope framed with weary dignity. ‘Please don’t be offended but I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’m feeling incredibly tired and I’d like to lie down for a while.’

Belatedly noticing her pallor, Andreas descended from his icy tower of reserve at supersonic speed. Concern in his troubled gaze, he strode across the room. With careful hands he scooped her up and rested her down again gently on the bed. ‘Let me take you back to London with me. You don’t even need to get dressed. I could wrap a blanket round you,’ he heard himself suggesting.

‘Don’t fuss. I’m too tired to go anywhere,’ she muttered sleepily.

‘Theos…I think I should get a doctor to check you over,’ Andreas continued.

‘Don’t be daft. I’m only pregnant,’ she mumbled soothingly, heavy eyelids already drooping.

Andreas had always admired Hope’s robust good health. She was never sick. Any condition capable of flattening her to a bed before nine in the evening was the equivalent of a serious illness in Andreas’s book. She looked exhausted and the translucence of her skin lent her a disturbingly fragile air. Guilt threatened to swallow him alive. He tugged the bedding up over her and tucked her in as she slid over onto her side. He had subjected her to a great deal of stress. That had to stop right now.

He shouldn’t be throwing Ben Campbell up and upsetting her either. But had he been a substitute for Campbell in the bedroom this evening? he wondered rawly. Understandably, Campbell had backed off once he’d realised Hope was carrying Andreas’s child. That would have been a distinct turn-off for the other man. Was the fact that Andreas had been a substitute the reason why Hope had referred to their recent physical encounter as being just sex?

His mobile phone vibrated. He walked out to the landing and pulled across the door before answering it.

‘Where are you?’ Elyssa demanded stridently. ‘You’ve got to come and sort Finlay out!’

Andreas raised a wry ebony brow and said nothing. He had never made the mistake of interfering between his sister and her husband. Elyssa was volatile and could be quite a handful. Finlay might worship the ground his beautiful wife walked on but he was no pushover.

‘This is serious!’ his sister gasped and an uncharacteristic sob broke up her voice. ‘Finlay says he’s leaving me!’

Switching off his phone a couple of minutes later, a grim expression stamped on his darkly handsome features, Andreas strode back into the bedroom.

Hope’s feathery lashes fluttered up on drowsy turquoise eyes. ‘Sorry…did I drift off?’

‘Come back to London with me,’ Andreas urged forcefully. ‘I don’t like leaving you here alone.’

With a shake of her blonde head, she burrowed deeper into the pillow. Andreas adjusted the sheet again and resisted an almost overpowering need to just grab her up and stow her in the front of his car. His life had been so smooth when she had just done as he’d asked. Now everything was a battle and he hated it.

He needed an edge. He needed a country house, something Hope would take one look at and fall hopelessly in love with. Cue: listed building of historical interest, oak beams, walled garden, loads of bathrooms. At least it would be a good investment. He contacted a top city estate agent and passed on his requirements.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE strident call of the phone wakened Hope the following day. In her dream she was wearing a billowing evening frock and drifting gracefully across a vast green lawn towards Andreas, who had never looked more like a movie star. Then all of a sudden the dream turned into a nightmare for Andreas got fed up waiting and walked off. Even though she tried frantically hard to catch up with him, he kept on getting further and further away from her. She sat up with a start and his name on her lips, her heart pounding with panic.

When she snatched up the phone, she somehow assumed that it would be Andreas and was guiltily but deeply disappointed when she realised that the caller was Vanessa. Her friend was so thrilled by the news she had to relate that it was several minutes before Hope grasped what the other woman was talking about. A London fashion designer had seen Vanessa’s photographic study of Hope’s handbags and, having been hugely impressed by Hope’s sense of style, was eager to meet Hope in person and see more of her work.

Hope called the number that Vanessa gave her and agreed to an appointment late that same day. She had to leap out of bed, pack her bag and ring a taxi to take her to the train. Her relaxing country break had lasted less than forty-eight hours. But she was very excited that her designs had attracted the attention of a real trendsetter in the fashion world.

Just before she locked up the cottage, a courier delivered a brand new mobile phone to her courtesy of Andreas. It was her favourite colour of lilac and it was incredibly cute as well as being possessed of every technological development known to man, most of which she would never use, but which Andreas would take the first opportunity to explain and demonstrate in detail. Of course, she knew she shouldn’t accept the phone, but she absolutely craved the sense of connection she experienced at the frequent sound of his dark, deep drawl.

Establishing less fraught relations with Andreas made good sense, she reasoned inwardly. After all, they would soon be parents even if they were no longer together. Her throat filled with an immoveable lump. Had she been a little hasty rejecting him the night before? Hurriedly she squashed that weak rebellious thought.

But there was no denying that the tranquillity she had achieved had been slaughtered by Andreas’s arrival and consequent departure. She felt bereft and empty and unhappy and that made her so angry with herself. She had to learn to live without Andreas. A positive development on the career front that would also keep her busy had never been more necessary.

Her new phone rang. ‘Yes,’ she answered all breathless, and on edge.

‘It’s me…’ Andreas imparted unnecessarily, the dark timbre of his sexy voice shimmying down her sensitive spine.

All of a sudden she was reliving the crash-and-burn effect of his gorgeous mouth on hers, his wildness in bed and the complete impossibility of ever replacing him with anyone even human.

‘I have some family stuff to deal with this evening.’ He sighed with audible regret. ‘But I would like to see you tomorrow.’

She breathed in deep and held her breath to prevent herself from saying yes too quickly. ‘OK…’ she said finally, trailing out the word as if she were still considering the idea.

‘I’d appreciate your advice on a house I’m thinking of buying.’

Hope was vaguely surprised that she didn’t swoon. Andreas wanted her advice? That was a huge compliment. And the advice related to a house? She adored houses. Was he moving? Whatever, it felt marvellous and cosy and confidence-boosting to be approached for an opinion. It was respect…in a small way, she told herself. Suddenly the glitz and the sparkle had returned to her day.

‘What right did Finlay have to take Robbie and Tristram to his mother’s house?’ Elyssa demanded shrilly of Andreas for at least the tenth time.

‘You’re very upset.’ Andreas released his breath in a soundless hiss. ‘Perhaps your husband thought he was doing you a favour.’

Finlay often took his sons to their grandmother’s with Elyssa’s blessing. On this occasion, however, Elyssa was making a drama out of the event. Although Andreas had been at the Southwick home for almost an hour he still had no idea why his sister’s husband had left the marital home. Elyssa had been in hysterics when he’d arrived and it had taken Andreas a phenomenal length of time to calm her down.

‘Isn’t it time you told me why Finlay has walked out?’

‘I don’t know why!’ Elyssa slung petulantly.

‘There has to be a reason,’ Andreas murmured steadily. ‘Why are you so afraid that Finlay might have deliberately removed the children from your care?’

‘Maybe he’s bored with me…maybe he’s got someone else. He could be planning to make up insane lies about me in an attempt to gain custody of my boys!’ Elyssa cast a sidelong glance at her brother to see how he reacted to that very specific concern on her part.

From the outset, Andreas had been aware that his sister was determined to win every possible atom of his sympathy. Now he grasped that he needed to hear the precise nature of what she termed lies. ‘Tell me about the lies,’ he encouraged softly.

Her sullen brown eyes flicked warily back to him. ‘Finlay had the nerve to imply that I was a neglectful mother just because I left the boys with the nanny overnight.’

‘For how long was the nanny left in charge?’

‘Only over a few weekends…and once for a week when I went to Paris.’

Reluctant to risk provoking her hysteria again, Andreas struggled to be tactful. ‘I understand Finlay’s concern. Couldn’t you have taken the children with you?’

‘I’m only twenty-five years old,’ Elyssa responded heatedly. ‘Surely I’m entitled to a life of my own?’

‘You have a good life,’ Andreas told her levelly. ‘Now why won’t you tell me why your husband has left?’

Elyssa tossed her head. ‘I don’t want you preaching at me,’ she warned him thinly. ‘All right… I had an affair.’

Sincerely shocked by that truculent admission, Andreas stiffened. He attempted to keep an open mind. ‘Are you in love with this man?’

Her earlier distress apparently forgotten now that she had confessed, Elyssa rolled pained eyes. ‘It was only a fling. I can’t believe the fuss Finlay is making. As if anyone needs to break up a marriage over a casual affair!’

‘I would if you were my wife,’ Andreas responded without hesitation.

‘You’re Greek…your vote doesn’t count. You’re angry with me but I need you to make Finlay see sense. He has huge respect for you. He’ll listen to you.’

Distaste gripped Andreas. He could see no evidence that Elyssa even regretted her infidelity. ‘How long did the affair last?’

Elyssa gave him a sulky look. ‘I suppose I have to tell you because if I don’t Finlay will…there’s been more than one affair.’

Andreas surveyed the young woman in front of him with incredulous disdain.

Elyssa pouted. ‘I can’t help it if men find me irresistible.’

Her vanity even in the face of the damage she had done was deeply offensive to Andreas. Somehow he had overlooked the reality that his once-vulnerable little sister had grown to adulthood and full independence. It was not a good moment to discover that he did not like the woman she had become.

‘The night that you threw your housewarming party,’ Andreas murmured abruptly as it occurred to him that his sibling was not at all the reliable and truthful witness he had believed her to be, ‘you said that you found Hope with Ben Campbell. Was that true?’

Her surprise patent at that unexpected change of subject, Elyssa coloured. ‘Why are you asking?’

‘That story about Hope was a wind-up, wasn’t it?’ Determined to get the truth out of his sister, Andreas let a deceptively amused smile curve his handsome mouth.

His sister regarded him uncertainly and then she relaxed when she saw the smile. ‘How did you guess?’

At Elyssa’s confirmation that she had concocted the tale about Hope, Andreas fell very still. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘I had to protect myself. She caught me kissing another man. I decided to discredit her before she got the chance to tell anybody what she’d seen.’ Elyssa lifted a shoulder in a careless shrug of dismissal.

Cold condemnation was stamped on her brother’s lean, hard-boned face. ‘I’ll never forgive you for hurting her.’

‘You tricked me into telling you…’ Pale with consternation as that truth sank in, Elyssa started to scramble upright. ‘That’s not fair!’

‘How fair were you to Hope?’

‘Surely you didn’t expect me to like her?’ his sister snapped with furious resentment. ‘From the minute you met Hope Evans, you had no time for me any more. You were always with her playing house. Yet who was she? A vulgar little upstart from nowhere! I couldn’t believe that you would bring a woman like that to my home and show her off!’

‘Your spite turns my stomach,’ Andreas breathed in disgust.

When he emerged from his sister’s home, he did not climb back into the limo. He wanted to walk for a while in the fresh air. Elyssa’s vicious attack on Hope and the jealousy that had powered her abuse appalled him. Nothing could excuse his sister’s cruel lies or her complete lack of guilt. How could he have been so blind to the younger woman’s true nature?

Elyssa had always needed to be the centre of attention. From babyhood she had thrown tantrums to ensure she got what she wanted. Of recent Andreas had become less patient with her constant demands and had encouraged her to rely on her husband for support. Naturally he had wanted to spend more time with Hope. Once or twice he had wondered why his sibling had so little apparent interest in his private life. Now he suspected that Elyssa’s resentment had grown in direct proportion to the longevity of his relationship with Hope. Yet he had failed to notice that anything was wrong. He had also made the fatal mistake of introducing Hope to his sister. It was his fault that Hope had become the innocent victim of her malice. How was he supposed to make that up to Hope?

He phoned her five minutes later. ‘I have to see you.’

‘Why?’ Hope said a little prayer that he would answer that he was missing her.

‘Something’s happened. I don’t feel right about waiting until tomorrow to discuss it with you,’ Andreas admitted. ‘It’s late…you could stay the night.’

‘At the town house?’

‘Yes.’

Hope entered a large tick on the mental scorecard she was running on him. ‘That would be OK,’ she said as lightly as she could. ‘But I couldn’t actually stay with you…if you know what I mean.’

‘I’ll send the car to pick you up.’

A manservant ushered her into the elegant hall of the big Georgian terraced house and into an imposing drawing room where Andreas awaited her. He looked very serious and her apprehension shifted up another notch on the scale.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked immediately.

Andreas read the strain in her clear turquoise eyes and reached for both her hands. ‘Stop worrying right now,’ he told her firmly. ‘I think that what I have to say qualifies as good rather than bad.’

‘That’s great.’ Some of her tension evaporated. Her hands trembled in the grip of his and she tugged them free again. Either she was his mistress or she tried to be a friend, even though he had once told her that he didn’t do friendship with women. She could not be a mixture of both and there had to be boundary lines. So this was not the moment when she should be noticing that the dark stubble beginning to shadow his sculpted mouth and hard jaw line made him look outrageously sexy. In fact just thinking that forbidden thought made ready colour warm her complexion.

With a distinct air of concern, Andreas urged her down onto a sofa. ‘You look tired.’

Hope decided being pregnant was deeply unsexy. Only three months ago, he would have urged her down onto a sofa solely to take rampant, masculine advantage of her horizontal state. But now he was more keen for her to rest.

‘Tonight I found out something that shocked me.’ Lean, strong face taut, Andreas launched straight into the confession he knew he had to make. ‘As you’ve probably already worked out, Elyssa has been having affairs with other men. This evening, I also learned that my sister lied when she claimed to have seen you in Ben Campbell’s arms at her party.’

Hope closed her eyes and breathed in slow and deep. Relief made her feel dizzy. That part of the nightmare was over: Andreas was finally accepting that she had told him the truth all along. ‘I’m glad. I really thought that I was going to have to live with that nonsensical story for ever.’

‘I wish I could tell you that Elyssa is very sorry for what she’s done. But I’m afraid my sibling appears rather lacking in the conscience department,’ Andreas derided harshly. ‘Before tonight, I had no idea that Elyssa resented your place in my life.’

‘She called me your whore at the party,’ Hope mused with a little shiver of reluctant recall.

Andreas groaned, his vexation unconcealed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I knew how fond you were of her and telling tales would only have made her dislike me even more. I suppose that even then I wasn’t sure that you would take my word over hers…’ Hope worried at her lower lip and let her pent-up breath escape softly. ‘Of course, by the end of the evening I found that out for a fact.’

Andreas tensed at that reminder. ‘I thought I knew Elyssa inside out but I had idealised her. I wasn’t seeing her as she really was…spoilt, selfish, shallow in her affections,’ Andreas enumerated with a heavy regret that she could feel. ‘OK. I admit it. I didn’t want to see those traits in my closest relative—’

‘You were proud of her…it was natural that you would want to think only good things about her,’ Hope told him gently. ‘I don’t hold that against you. You had no reason to doubt her word if she hadn’t lied to you before.’

Andreas rested his brilliant dark eyes on her heart-shaped face. ‘You’re being very generous about this.’

‘I don’t think so. I just want to be fair.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, pedhi mou. I don’t know where to begin apologising for some of the things I’ve said or for the way I’ve treated you,’ Andreas admitted with roughened honesty. ‘But I was so angry that that whole week is virtually a blank. It was a very unfortunate coincidence that you had indicated your dissatisfaction with our relationship shortly before that party.’

That angle had not occurred to Hope before and she was dismayed that she had not guessed that he would inevitably forge a link between those two apparent events.

Andreas spread lean brown hands, his darkly handsome features clenched taut. ‘I thought you weren’t happy with me any longer. It made the idea that you had sought consolation with someone else seem much more likely.’

‘Yes, I imagine it would have done.’ But Hope also felt that, having known her so well, he should at least have cherished some doubt of her guilt. But then she had long since reached her own conclusions as to why he had been so quick to misjudge her and saw no good reason to share those thoughts. ‘Well,’ she added with a typically warm and soothing smile, ‘I’m grateful that you know nothing happened between Ben and I…’

‘That night anyway.’ Andreas could not silence that qualifier. He was fishing, he knew he was, regardless of his awareness that he had no right to ask her what had happened since then between her and the other man. But he was unable to resist his own powerful need to know.

Tensing below that laser-sharp dark golden appraisal, Hope lowered her uneasy gaze to her linked hands where they rested on her lap. Hot pink was blooming over her cheekbones. It was dreadful but she felt as though every kiss she had exchanged with Ben were written above her head in letters of fire and shame. They had really been very innocent kisses but anything she had shared with Ben ought to remain private. In any case Andreas was not entitled to that sort of information, she reminded herself sternly. After all, could she believe that he had behaved in an equally innocent manner with the beautiful, sophisticated women he had been seen out with in recent times? No, she could not credit that. She had lain awake a lot of nights while she’d struggled not to torment herself with agonising images of Andreas making the most of his newfound sexual freedom.

As Andreas watched her fair skin turn pink a cold, heavy sensation settled like concrete in his stomach. He knew how unreasonable he was being but he had very much hoped to hear her say that, challenging though the circumstances had been, she had stayed loyal to him in spite of everything. Intelligence told him that was unlikely. Intelligence told him that blush was as good as a signed confession in triplicate. She had slept with Campbell. Of course she had.

Andreas endeavoured to put the entire controversial subject out of his mind. He was a pragmatic man. What had been done could not be undone. He offered Hope a soft drink, which she declined. He poured a whisky that he drank down in two minimal gulps. Pragmatic though he believed himself to be, he was assailed by another unfortunate reflection: there was no point hoping that at some future stage she would tell him that Campbell had been absolute rubbish in bed. She was not that kind of woman. He would never, ever know whether she compared them.

‘I feel that I should make an effort to clear the air,’ Hope remarked hesitantly, fixing anxious turquoise eyes on Andreas.

‘As regards what…exactly?’

‘As regards Ben,’ Hope proffered gently.

Andreas froze. His imagination went into a loop. In the name of honesty, she was about to talk like a canary, telling everything right down to the tiniest and most insignificant detail. He wanted to know but feared that knowing would torture him. He breathed in deep. ‘Hope…’

‘No, please let me say what I want to say first,’ Hope interrupted apologetically. ‘Ben’s been so very kind to me. I want you to understand that he’s a much nicer person than people seem to appreciate. I think you’d really like Ben if you got to know him…’

That was the moment when Andreas knew that he should have drunk all the whisky in the decanter in the hope of anaesthetising his sensibilities into a stupor. Hope was engaging in a more refined form of torture than he had even envisaged. She was keen for him to get to know Ben. In the eternally sunny world she inhabited they were probably all destined to become the very closest of mutually supportive friends. There was just one small problem. He could not think of Ben Campbell without wishing to wipe him with maximum violence from the face of the earth.

‘I’m fond of Ben and he’s been a terrific friend.’

‘That’s cool,’ Andreas breathed between clenched teeth.

‘I would like him to stay a friend,’ Hope advanced.

Valiantly, Andreas shrugged while conceding that the eating of humble pie was his equivalent of eating rat poison. But he had screwed up badly. She was expecting his baby and he had put her through hell and this was his penance. Presumably, if he agreed with even the most fanciful and unreasonable requests and expectations, all her fears would be soothed and everything would finally go back to normal. Normal. That was his only ambition. ‘Why not…?’

Hope wondered why he was so tense. Was he annoyed because she had said earlier that she believed that she ought to sleep alone? The belief was not set in stone. She was open to clever argument and even downright seduction. Had she hurt his feelings with her embargo? His ego? Was that why he was chucking whisky down his throat as if there were no tomorrow? What was wrong? As a rule, he was a very occasional drinker.

‘You should go to bed,’ Andreas suggested rather abruptly. ‘We have an early start in the morning.’

‘Oh, my goodness, I never even asked you about the house—’

Andreas opened the door into the hall. ‘It’ll keep until tomorrow.’

Hope swallowed back a yawn. In truth she was very tired. ‘I haven’t even told you my own news yet.’ She laughed on the way up the imposing stairs. ‘Guess what? I’ve been discovered by the fashion world. I met Leonie Vargas this afternoon and I’m being offered the chance to design bags for her next collection!’

‘That’s great.’ Andreas thought about what he knew about Leonie Vargas. In his conservative opinion, she was a very eccentric lady who wore even stranger outfits. Even so she had become spectacularly rich designing clothes for the young and hip. Hope had really found her niche, Andreas thought with satisfaction and considerable relief. The Vargas woman would probably be delighted with a bag that resembled a tomato. His biggest fear had always been that Hope would meet with the kind of rejection that crushed a vulnerable creative personality.

‘See you in the morning…’ Hope whispered, hovering within reach.

Andreas resisted temptation. She had taken the trouble to warn him off before she had even agreed to stay. In the light of that prohibition, testing the boundaries would be a bad move. Tomorrow, however, after he had proposed and she had the engagement ring on her finger, he would probably bulldoze down the boundaries. Gently bulldoze, he adjusted, thinking about the baby. In any case he still had one or two arrangements to put in place for the next day.

Hope surveyed the beautifully decorated guest room. She had finally made it into the town house. A barrier had been crossed. But she remained far more aware that she had been carefully kept from the same door for two years.

Since Andreas had dumped her she had learned some hard lessons. Andreas had always viewed her as his mistress, probably still did and was very unlikely to ever see her in any other light. For the moment, her pregnancy had brought down several barriers but she suspected that in time the same barriers would be reinstated. So, although she was horrendously weak where he was concerned and changed like the wind according to the level of his proximity, she needed to be sensible and keep her distance.

When Andreas had told Hope that he wanted her opinion on a house, she had had no real idea what to expect. But she had nonetheless assumed that he would only be interested in a city property within easy reach of his office. Instead she was tucked into a helicopter and informed that their destination lay outside London. Mesmerised by his pronounced air of mystery, she was a really good sport about the fact that the seat belt had to be loosened to fit her.

When the helicopter came in to land at Knightmere Court, Andreas was experiencing the high of a male convinced that he had picked a sure-fire winner. He had picked Knightmere from a selection of six large country properties. It ticked every box on the list of desirable qualities he had drawn up and Hope was already staring out the window with an appropriately transfixed expression pinned to her face.

‘My goodness…’ Hope exclaimed weakly as he lifted her out of the craft.

Andreas took her on a very brief outside tour just to ensure that she got a tantalising flavour of the extensive grounds, which included a knot and topiary garden, the all-important walled garden and a park as much ornamented by a pedigree flock of sheep as by the trees. He drew her attention variously to the dovecote, the clock tower and the lake in the distance. He had picked a building that fairly bristled with historic features.

‘The estate comes with a considerable amount of land, sufficient to ensure that the superb views will remain unaltered,’ Andreas informed her, having read and inwardly digested every packed and detailed page of the glossy sales brochure.

Hope blinked and wondered what was the matter with him. She was not aware that he had ever shown any interest in country life. But his disinterest in his surroundings embraced city living too, she reflected with a slight frown. As long as the luxury comforts, services and privacy he took entirely for granted were available, Andreas was maddeningly indifferent to his home environment. Yet now all of a sudden he sounded rather like an enthusiastic estate agent.

Round the next corner she was treated to her first full view of the south front of the ancient Tudor manor house. ‘My goodness…’ she said again, utterly charmed by the soft mellow colour of the bricks and the latticed windows sparkling in the sunshine. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Indoors you’ll have to exercise your imagination,’ Andreas remarked, nodding acknowledgement of the discreet older man who appeared at the entrance and spread the door wide for them. ‘Knightmere has been empty for more than three years, although it has been extensively renovated.’

‘Was it originally owned by one particular family?’

‘Yes. The family line died out with an elderly spinster. A foreign businessman bought it but the repairs took longer than expected and he never lived here. He’s now moved abroad again and the house is back on the market.’

‘Wouldn’t this place be too far from the city for you?’

‘I’d use the helicopter.’

Her turquoise eyes were perplexed. ‘It’s just not the sort of property that I would’ve expected you to be interested in. I thought possibly you were thinking of converting it into a hotel or apartments or something—’

‘No.’

‘Then if you bought it, this would actually be your home?’

‘My country home and where I would spend most of my time…yes,’ Andreas confirmed. ‘I like space around me.’

‘There’s certainly plenty of that,’ Hope conceded. ‘It’s a huge house. How many bedrooms are there?’

‘A dozen or so.’ Andreas shifted a casual shoulder. ‘But I have a large family circle. On special occasions those rooms would be easy to fill.’

Hope scanned the panelled walls, massive overhead oak beams and the huge elaborate fireplace, which bore the carved date of a year in the sixteenth century. She was fascinated. ‘This must have been the Great Hall. It’s so old and yet so wonderfully well preserved,’ she whispered in frank awe of her surroundings.

Andreas surveyed her rapt profile and decided it was a done deal; she was reacting exactly as he had hoped. He allowed her to roam where her fancy took her and watched her enchantment grow. No nook and no cranny remained unexplored. An ancient range had been left intact at one end of the vast kitchen and she went into raptures over it and the beautifully carved free-standing units. Inspecting a procession of stream-lined opulent bathrooms almost emptied her of superlative comments.

Andreas walked her back outside through the courtyard. ‘Do you think I should buy it?’ he asked, confidence riding high.

‘Oh, yes…it’s fantastic,’ Hope murmured dreamily.

Andreas pushed open the cast-iron gate into the walled garden, which was a riot of early summer roses and lush greenery. ‘Close your eyes,’ he urged softly. ‘I have a surprise for you.’

Obediently she let her lashes dip and then lifted them again at his bidding. A traditional canvas canopy screened the sun from the tumbled cushions that were piled invitingly on the elegant striped rug spread across the manicured grass. A wicker hamper sat invitingly open with linen napkins, a chrome wine cooler and crystal glasses already lined up in readiness. It was a picnic Nicolaidis style, she registered in wonderment, so perfect in presentation and backdrop that she felt as if she had wandered into a picture in a magazine. It would no doubt knock her homemade picnics of the past into a cocked hat.

Her generous smile lit up her lovely face. ‘Oh, this is a glorious surprise.’

‘I wanted to do something special that you’d really appreciate, pedhi mou.’

Her mobile phone rang. Wishing that she had thought to switch it off, she dug it out. It was Ben. Ready embarrassment coloured her cheeks and she half turned away to speak. ‘Ben…hi.’

Ben was ringing to congratulate her on the offer she had received from Leonie Vargas.

‘Don’t mind me,’ Andreas breathed very dryly.

‘Could I call you back later?’ Hope asked Ben in a whisper that sounded to her own ears like a shout. ‘I’m so sorry but I can’t really chat right now.’

As she put the phone away again the silence fairly bulged with hostile undertones. Andreas was furious. At the optimum wrong moment, Campbell phoned. Was he expected to accept that? Being haunted by the ex-boyfriend? With difficulty he suppressed his annoyance by reminding himself that Hope was friendly with everybody she met.

‘Let’s eat,’ Andreas suggested.

The hamper was packed to the brim with delicious items. Hope sipped fruit juice and ate until she could eat no more. She told him what Leonie Vargas was like in the flesh and made him laugh. Resting back against the tumbled cushions, she relaxed and feasted her eyes on his lean, powerful face.

Andreas stretched out a lean, long-fingered hand to her. ‘Come here…’ he urged huskily.

A quiver of forbidden excitement tugged at her. After a split second of hesitation, her hand reached out to close into his. He tugged her close, leaning over her to scan her with brilliant golden eyes. ‘Let’s get married and make Knightmere our home,’ he murmured smoothly.

CHAPTER EIGHT

HOPE’S mouth ran dry and shock tore through her tensed body. Andreas had taken her by surprise. She closed her eyes tight against the intrusion of his and let herself savour just for a moment the sheer joy of actually being asked to be his wife. There was nothing she wanted more but she knew that it would not be right for her to say yes unless he said the right words. Unfortunately those same words were words she had long since accepted that she would never hear from him.

‘Why?’ she questioned tightly. ‘Why are you asking me to marry you?’

His ebony brows pleated. ‘Isn’t that obvious?’

The first twist of disappointment tore at her and she opened strained turquoise eyes. ‘You’re thinking about the baby.’

‘Of course. No Nicolaidis that I know of has ever been born outside the bonds of matrimony,’ Andreas informed her with considerable pride.

His reasons for asking her to become his wife were fairly piling up, Hope conceded unhappily. One, she was pregnant. Two, he was keen to respect the conventions.

‘It’s only two days since you told me that you would never marry me,’ Hope reminded him very quietly.

‘That was when I was still under the impression that you had been unfaithful,’ Andreas asserted without discomfiture. ‘I think we should go for a quick, quiet ceremony and throw a big party afterwards. What do you think?’

Slowly, Hope withdrew her fingers from his and sat up. ‘I think you’re not going to like my answer.’

Andreas misunderstood. ‘If you prefer a more traditional wedding, I don’t mind. Have as many frills as you like. How we do it isn’t important as long as we do it before the baby’s born.’

Hope pushed herself upright. ‘I’m afraid the answer has to be…no.’

‘No?’ She saw that it had not once occurred to Andreas that he might meet with rejection.

‘I love the house, love the picnic—’ Love you too, Hope reflected painfully but kept that admission to herself ‘—but unfortunately you don’t want to marry me for the right reasons.’

Utterly taken aback by that criticism, Andreas sprang upright, dark golden eyes incredulous. ‘What are the right reasons?’

‘If you don’t know, there’s no point in me spelling them out for you,’ she said heavily.

‘Are you still determined to keep your options open? Is that what this is all about?’ Andreas ground out.

Her brow indented. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’

‘Or are you punishing me for listening to my sister three months ago and letting you down?’ Andreas demanded in a raw undertone.

Hope studied him with pained intensity. ‘I wouldn’t behave like that. But I am afraid that you were so willing to believe Elyssa’s lies because you wanted your freedom back—’

‘I always had my freedom. I made a free choice to be with you!’ Andreas contradicted.

‘And when I made the mistake of reminding you that we’d been together almost two years, you were in no mood to celebrate.’ Hope sighed. ‘There was no question of your making a commitment to me then—’

His even white teeth gritted. ‘Everything’s changed since then—’

‘Yes. But you don’t need to put a ring on my wedding finger because I fell pregnant,’ Hope told him gently.

‘How are you planning to manage without me?’

Hope lost colour at that crack. ‘Are you saying that if I don’t marry you, you’ll break up with me again?’

An electrifying silence fell.

His beautiful dark deep-set eyes struck sparks from hers. ‘No, I’m not saying that. I’d have to be a real bastard to abandon the mother of my child in any circumstances.’

‘For goodness’ sake, I know you’re not that.’ Hope felt as though she were standing on the edge of a chasm in the middle of an earthquake. If she wasn’t careful she might tumble into the chasm and lose everything. Was she being foolish? Should she be willing to settle for a marriage of convenience with a guy who didn’t love her? Or was it that she was more scared of Andreas marrying her and then regretting it?

While she was frantically questioning whether or not she was making the biggest mistake of her life, Andreas closed his arms round her. ‘I made you happy before…I can do it again,’ he intoned fiercely.

‘I know, but—’

‘Theos…Just you try and find this same fire with someone else!’ He bent his arrogant dark head and crushed her ripe mouth under his, unleashing a passion that took her by storm. His lips were firm and warm and wonderful on hers and she could not get enough of his kisses.

Breathless and trembling, she knotted her fingers into the shoulders of his jacket to hold him close. She did not want to set him free to find someone else. She did not want to be alone.

‘Andreas…?’ she framed through reddened lips, turquoise eyes clinging in urgent appeal to his. ‘Don’t get the wrong idea about what I’m about to say. I’m not suggesting that I be your mistress. But could we live together instead of getting married?’

Andreas was a long way from happy with that proposition. His smoothly laid plans had been derailed when he’d least expected it. He felt hollow, bewildered by his failure, quite unlike himself.

Had he rushed her too much? He always moved fast and made decisions at the speed of the light but she did not. Once, though, she had had touching faith in him and his judgement. Now, however, she was wary, unsure of herself and of him. For the first time he recognised how much he must have hurt her when he’d dumped her. He could hardly blame her for being afraid to trust him again.

He saw that there had been a fatal flaw in his approach. He had put more effort into marketing the house than himself. Having recognised the problem, he saw the solution and came up with a fresh strategy. That disturbing sense of disorientation that had afflicted him mercifully vanished. All he had to do was demonstrate that he would make a perfect husband and a fantastic father.

‘Andreas…’ Hope prompted worriedly, afraid she had offended him.

The brooding light in his dark reflective gaze ebbed and his slow, charismatic smile curved his handsome mouth. ‘I’ll buy the house this afternoon. How soon will you move in?’

She blinked, thrown by his immediacy. ‘Whenever you like.’

‘I like it best when you’re not out of my sight for longer than five minutes, pedhi mou,’ Andreas told her, tugging her up against his lean, powerful frame and anchoring her below one strong arm while he called the agent to negotiate.

‘No, you’re not to look at that,’ Andreas scolded, flipping an offending newspaper out of her reach six weeks later.

‘Why not?’ Hope watched him lounge back against the crisp white pillows. The sheet had dropped to below his waist, exposing the hard, hair-roughened expanse of his bronzed torso and the sleek, muscular strength of his superbly fit body. He looked breathtakingly handsome.

‘There’s an entry about us in the gossip column…I don’t want you lowering yourself to look at trash like that,’ Andreas delivered in a tone of finality.

Unimpressed, Hope put out her hand. ‘Give it to me,’ she told him.

A raw masculine grin slashed his beautiful mouth. ‘No…’

‘Stop being bossy!’ Levering herself up, Hope flung herself across him in an effort to wrest the paper from him. Laughing with rich appreciation, he caught her in his arms and pressed her gently back against the pillows. Teasing golden eyes met hers. ‘Behave yourself!’

‘You can’t censor what I read—’

‘If there is the tiniest risk that something might upset you it’s my duty to protect you from it. I’m Greek. You’re my woman and I look after you. Learn to live with what you can’t fight,’ Andreas warned with unblemished good humour.

‘I’ll just walk down to the village and buy another copy.’

‘You’re supposed to be taking it easy.’ Frowning, Andreas handed the disputed item over. ‘That was blackmail.’

‘I know.’ Far from ashamed of herself, Hope wriggled up again, snuggled back into him for support and opened the paper. Sometimes it was rather sweet to be treated like impossibly fragile spun glass, but other times it made her feel horribly like a burden. It was bad enough that he should be full of energy and vitality while she was falling asleep in the middle of the day. In addition, anything more intimate than a hug was off the menu as well. When her cautious gynaecologist had said that her exhaustion could become a source of concern, Andreas had decided that sex was absolutely out of the question.

Having leafed through the newspaper, Hope found a most unflattering photo of herself that seemed to concentrate rather cruelly on her pregnant stomach. She looked like a large woman overfilling a little black dress, an archetypal ship in full sail trundling across the pavement. The photo had been taken two days earlier as they’d left the well-known restaurant where Andreas’s grandfather, Kostas, had entertained them to dinner and initially trying questions. She had soon warmed to the blunt-spoken older man, however. Kostas Nicolaidis had made it clear that, although he would much prefer them to marry, he was overjoyed that she was carrying his grandson’s baby and that Andreas was finally settling down.

‘Oh, no…’ Hope exclaimed, aghast, as she started reading the article beside the photo.

‘So what’s wrong with my grandson that you won’t make an honest man of him?’ Kostas had asked baldly, and there were those exact same words in print, clearly overheard and passed on to the columnist. Below the execrable title, BAG LADY REFUSES NICOLAIDIS HEIR, virtually every female that Andreas had ever dated was listed, the suggestion being that he had been turned down because no sane female would seek to tie down a rampant womaniser.

‘Kostas will be thrilled. He loves to see his name in newsprint,’ Andreas commented cheerfully.

‘But I look simply huge!’ she wailed in embarrassment.

Andreas stretched appreciative hands across the rounded swell of her stomach, stretched them just a little more and contrived to link his fingers. ‘You look fantastic, really, really pregnant now. Ripe like a peach, pedhi mou.’

‘Very round and squashy?’ Hope refused to be comforted. ‘Aren’t you angry that everybody knows that you proposed and I said no?’

‘You must be kidding.’ Andreas laughed off that idea with disconcerting verve.

Her brows pleated, for she had assumed that he would be furious that something so private had been accidentally brought by his grandfather into the public domain. ‘You don’t mind?’

‘Not in the slightest,’ Andreas asserted silkily. ‘And when you get to meet the rest of my relatives this weekend you’ll understand why. I’m the golden boy because I tried to get a wedding ring on your finger and you’ll be—’

‘The horrible witch who doesn’t appreciate you!’ she slotted in, cringing at that new awareness.

‘Nonsense. My great-aunts will be very keen to talk me up. You are destined to spend the entire weekend listening to stories that represent me as Mr Wonderful—clean-living, kind to old ladies and animals and stupendous with children. I’ll bet you right now that nobody mentions my late father and his three divorces. He’s the family skeleton and would give the wrong impression.’

An involuntary gurgle of laughter escaped Hope and she relaxed. The past six weeks had been just about the happiest and busiest of her life. They had managed to move into Knightmere the previous month. Andreas had pulled strings, called in favours and brought in an interior design firm as well as a project manager to ensure that the wonderful old house had been made habitable in the least possible amount of time. A full quota of domestic staff had been hired and Hope had been left with little more to do than design bags.

That had proved to be just as well because pregnancy was slowing her down. Just occasionally her worries got on top of her. Had saying no to the proposal been the right thing to do? He had not mentioned the subject since, which suggested that he was quite content with things as they were. How could a guy so gorgeous cheerfully settle for a woman who was the shape of a very ripe peach? Was it guilt that was making Andreas so perfect? Guilt that he had misjudged her and left her alone for several months?

Perfect was not an exaggeration of his attitude towards her or his behaviour. He had begun working much shorter hours and cutting down on his trips abroad. He had attended all her pre-natal appointments with her. He had read a book on pregnancy with the result that he descended into pure panic if she experienced the slightest twinge of pain in any part of her body. When she’d got a cramp in her leg one evening he had wanted to take her to Casualty and when she’d refused he had sat up all night watching over her. He had also been pleasant to her friend, Vanessa, and had tolerated her receiving regular phone calls from Ben, who had been travelling round Europe for several weeks.

In addition, Andreas had been kind, affectionate, supportive and, as always, wonderfully entertaining. Being sexy came naturally to him so she didn’t count that. But although he could well have aspired to sainthood, not one word had Andreas said about love. So there it was, Hope thought heavily. She had to accept that she just did not have what it took to inspire Andreas with love. As long as there was no other woman out there who had the power that she lacked, she supposed she was all right. After all, she loved him and she was living with him and she would soon give birth to his child. Wasn’t it rather greedy to want more?

‘I have a couple of things I need to deal with at the office before we leave for Greece. I’ll meet you at the airport at six,’ Andreas murmured above her head, wishing he could take her to the office with him and then frowning in bemusement at the seriously uncool and embarrassing oddity of that last absentminded thought.

He assumed that he was always stressing about her because she was pregnant. She was always on his mind. When he was away from her, he found it particularly difficult to concentrate on work. Reading that gruesome book had been a serious error. He had not slept for a couple of nights after it and the worst thing of all had been the necessity of keeping quiet about the concerns that had been awakened by what he had read. He had dumped the book. He didn’t want her reading scary stuff of that nature.

‘Hope…?’ Andreas probed.

He tugged her to one side and bent over her. She was fast asleep. He listened to hear her breathing just in case it didn’t sound normal. With great care he settled her down on the pillows. He would warn the housekeeper to check on her.

Hope was really annoyed when she realised that she had drifted off and missed Andreas’s departure. Having completed her packing the day before, she donned the lilac tunic and cropped trousers she had decided to travel in. Andreas phoned an hour later.

‘Make sure you eat some lunch,’ he instructed.

‘Stop fussing…’ She walked over to the window of the room that she used as a design studio. It overlooked the courtyard where a car was pulling up. It was a Porsche and she grinned when she saw a familiar tousled blond head emerging from the driver’s seat. ‘Oh, my goodness, Ben’s here…sorry, I have to go!’ she told Andreas in a rush.

In his London office, Andreas stared fixedly down at the phone in his hand. She had been so overjoyed to see Campbell she had ended the call. He endeavoured to return his attention to the report on his desk. Campbell had been out of the country for weeks. Hope seemed to think he simply enjoyed travel but Andreas suspected that Ben had gone abroad in an effort to come to terms with losing Hope. Now Campbell was back and what was his first action? He went to see Hope in the middle of the day when he knew he was most likely to find her at home and on her own.

Andreas breathed in deep but the sick sense of rage threatening him did not abate. He leapt upright. Exactly what was he going to do? Go home. He rang his helicopter pilot and told him he needed to get there as soon as possible. Would it look odd if he just arrived back at Knightmere? He raked an uneasy hand through his cropped black hair. Hope might think he didn’t trust her. He did trust her, he trusted her absolutely. But how could he possibly trust Ben Campbell?

Campbell might try to make a move on Hope. A guy didn’t get over losing a woman like Hope that easily. Andreas knew that from painful personal experience. He had dumped Hope and lived in hell for endless weeks that were a blur of alcohol and misery. He did not want to go through that again ever. If Campbell attempted to lure Hope back to him, he was going to get a fight he would never forget.

On the top of the Nicolaidis building, Andreas boarded the helicopter. He felt out of control. That unnerved him. But he was quick to assure himself that there was no way he would lose his temper and get physical with Campbell. Hope would not like that and he was determined not to do or indeed say anything that might distress her. Possibly he should tell her how her seeing Campbell made him feel. He felt angry. He felt jealous. He felt threatened. Of course, he felt threatened! He was on like…continual probation. She wouldn’t marry him. The one thing that would give him a sense of security, she denied him and she would not tell him why.

Maybe he should make a special effort to explain just how important she was to him. That was something he had always been careful to keep to himself, but now he was afraid that he had kept quiet for too long and missed his chance. She was very, very important to his peace of mind. He could not bear the idea that anything might ever harm her. He thought he was incredibly lucky to have got a second chance with her. Was that love? How was he supposed to know what love was? Before he had met her, he had never been in love. He was morosely convinced that Campbell wouldn’t hang back from saying he loved her.

Hope tensed when she saw the helicopter coming in to land. Why had Andreas changed his plans and returned to the house? Was it because he was unhappy about Ben coming to visit? She really hoped it wasn’t that.

‘Andreas…’ she murmured as he strode into the drawing room, his lean, strong face shuttered and taut. ‘Did you forget something?’

‘Ne…yes,’ he breathed in Greek, his eyes smouldering gold as his expressive mouth curved into a smile that was purely for her.

‘Let me introduce you to our visitors,’ Hope said warmly.

Visitors in the plural? Disconcerted, Andreas turned his head and saw to his surprise that Ben had his arm wrapped round a tiny exquisite brunette. A perceptible air of intimacy clung to the other couple.

‘Of course, you know Ben…this is Chantal,’ Hope informed him.

Andreas extended a hand to Ben and kissed the brunette on both cheeks French style.

‘I’m afraid we have to make tracks,’ Ben told them. ‘My mother’s expecting us this afternoon.’

Having watched them drive away, Andreas closed a hand tightly over Hope’s. ‘I was really scared that Campbell was back to make a play for you,’ he admitted half under his breath.

Hope dealt him a startled glance. ‘Andreas…at this moment, I’m the size of a medium-sized house,’ she pointed out gently. ‘I don’t think there’s much risk of any guy making a play for me right now.’

‘I’ve had a problem handling your friendship with him.’ Dulled colour scored his high cheekbones. ‘If you hadn’t been pregnant, you’d probably still be with him—’

‘No, slow up there!’ Hope inserted in dismay. ‘As far as I’m concerned I’m with you by choice and our baby has very little to do with it.’

‘But you had something good going with Campbell—’

‘I liked him very much but he’s not you and he was never going to be.’

Encouraged by that statement, Andreas bit the proverbial bullet. ‘I’ve been jealous as hell—’

Hope looked up at him in amazement. ‘But why? There’s no need. I had only started seeing Ben when I found out I was expecting. It’s not as if I slept with him or anything like that!’

The silence sizzled.

‘You…didn’t sleep with him?’ Andreas prompted fiercely. ‘Have you any idea how much knowing that means to me?’

‘If you had asked, I would never have lied. You didn’t ask.’

Andreas flexed lean brown fingers, shrugged broad shoulders, compressed his beautiful mouth and nodded into the bargain. It took all those separate gestures to express the intensity of his response. ‘It always meant a lot to me that I had been your only lover—’

‘You never said.’

‘I took you for granted. You were there. Life was good and then…pow! It’s gone,’ he breathed in a roughened undertone, pulling her close as though to combat that unhappy memory.

‘Elyssa,’ she sighed.

‘Her lies tore me apart. I have never been so wretched in all my life. I didn’t understand what you meant to me until you were gone,’ Andreas confessed raggedly above her head, his strong arms tightening expressively round her. ‘Then I couldn’t admit to myself that I hated my life without you in it.’

‘Honestly?’ Her head came up, turquoise eyes focusing on him.

‘Honestly.’

‘But what about all the women you were seen about with?’

Andreas grimaced. ‘Window dressing.’

Hope snatched in a stark breath. ‘Did you undress any of the windows?’

Andreas winced. ‘Couldn’t…’

Her eyes rounded. ‘Couldn’t?’

‘I couldn’t because…’ Andreas dragged in a sustaining breath before he pushed himself on to the crux of the matter. ‘I couldn’t because I only turn on for you. Didn’t you notice how hot I was for you at the cottage?’

‘You’ve been faithful.’ A huge sunny smile lit up her heart-shaped face.

‘I’ll always be faithful…’ Andreas hesitated. ‘I love you, pedhi mou.’

Her lashes fluttered up on wide, disbelieving eyes.

‘It’s true…I do!’ Andreas stressed as if she had argued the score with him. ‘When I feel this weird, it’s got to be love!’

‘You love me…’ Hope felt buoyant with happiness. ‘I love you too—’

‘So why won’t you marry me?’ Andreas demanded fiercely. ‘Being single is driving me mad!’

‘Oh, I think I could do something about that and save your sanity for you,’ Hope whispered teasingly. ‘If you love me—’

‘I love you like crazy!’ Andreas launched, cupping her cheekbones with his spread fingers.

‘I’ll marry you just as soon as you can get it organised,’ she told him happily. ‘That was what I was waiting and hoping for. I didn’t want you to marry me unless you loved me.’

Andreas did not let the grass grow under his feet. The relatives assembled to meet Hope that weekend extended their stay and got treated to a big splashy wedding in Athens. Hope’s grasp of the Greek language was finally revealed and much admired. Hope took centre stage in a pink off-the-shoulder dress and a bag in the shape of a lucky horseshoe. Vanessa acted as her bridesmaid. Ben attended with Chantal. The paparazzi turned out in large numbers but were prohibited any wedding pictures by tight security arrangements.

The happy couple returned to Knightmere for their honeymoon because the bride did not feel up to anything more strenuous. When she lamented that truth, Andreas just laughed and reminded her that they had their whole lives in front of them.

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