About the Authors

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen romance reader since her teens. She is very happily married to 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 who knocks everything over, a very small terrier who barks a lot and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

MELANIE MILBURNE read her first Mills & Boon novel at the age of seventeen, in between studies for her final exams. After completing a master’s degree in education she decided to write a novel, and thus her career as a romance author was born. Melanie is an ambassador for the Australian Childhood Foundation and a keen dog-lover and trainer. She enjoys long walks in the Tasmanian bush. In 2015 Melanie won the Holt Medallion—a prestigious award honouring outstanding literary talent.

Also By Lynne Graham

Claimed for the Leonelli LegacyHis Queen by Desert Decree

Brides for the Taking miniseries

The Desert King’s Blackmailed BrideThe Italian’s One-Night BabySold for the Greek’s Heir

Vows for Billionaires miniseries

The Secret Valtinos BabyCastiglione’s Pregnant Princess

Also By Melanie Milburne

The Temporary Mrs MarchettiWedding Night with Her EnemyA Ring for the Greek’s BabyThe Tycoon’s Marriage DealA Virgin for a Vow

The Ravensdale Scandals miniseries

Ravensdale’s Defiant CaptiveAwakening the Ravensdale HeiressEngaged to Her Ravensdale EnemyThe Most Scandalous Ravensdale

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

Castiglione’s Pregnant Princess/Blackmailed into the Marriage Bed

Castiglione’s Pregnant Princess

Lynne Graham

Blackmailed into the Marriage Bed

Melanie Milburne

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-09564-8

CASTIGLIONE’S PREGNANT PRINCESS/BLACKMAILED INTO THE MARRIAGE BED

Castiglione’s Pregnant Princess © 2018 Lynne Graham Blackmailed into the Marriage Bed © 2018 Melanie Milburne

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Castiglione’s Pregnant Princess

Back Cover Text

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

Blackmailed into the Marriage Bed

Back Cover Text

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

About the Publisher

Castiglione’s Pregnant Princess

Lynne Graham

Expecting royal twins can only mean one thing...

She must wear the Castiglione crown!

Royal responsibility has been drummed into Prince Vitale since childhood—but his hunger for Jazmine crushes all sense of restraint. Her unexpected pregnancy revelation leaves Vitale no choice—he knows what he must do. A temporary marriage will legitimize their twins, but when the fire between them fails to burn out, he has to wonder...could Jazz be his permanent princess?

CHAPTER ONE

‘COME ON,’ ZAC DA ROCHA chided his brother. ‘There’s got to be some room for manoeuvre here, something that you want more than that car. Sell it to me and I’ll buy you anything you want.’

Fierce hostility roared through Prince Vitale Castiglione because his Brazilian half-brother irritated the hell out of him. The fact that they were both luxury-car collectors had to be the only thing they had in common. But no didn’t ever mean no to Zac; no only made Zac raise the price. He couldn’t seem to grasp the reality that Vitale couldn’t be bribed. But then, Zacarias Da Rocha, heir to the fabled Quintel Da Rocha diamond mines and fabulously wealthy even by his brothers’ standards, was unaccustomed to refusal or disappointment and constitutionally incapable of respecting polite boundaries. His lean, strong face grim, Vitale shot a glance at the younger man, his brilliant dark eyes impassive with years of hard self-discipline.

‘No,’ Vitale repeated quietly, wishing his older brother, Angel Valtinos, would return and shut Zac up because being rude didn’t come naturally to Vitale, who had been raised in the stifling traditions and formality of a European royal family. A lifetime of rigid conditioning invariably stepped in to prevent Vitale from losing his temper and revealing his true feelings.

Of course, it had already been a most unsettling morning. Vitale had been disconcerted when his father, Charles Russell, had asked both him and his two brothers to meet him at his office. It had been an unusual request because Charles usually made the effort to meet his sons separately and Vitale had wondered if some sort of family emergency had occurred until Charles had appeared and swept his eldest son, Angel, off into his office alone, leaving Vitale with only Zac for company. Not a fun development that, Vitale reflected before studiously telling himself off for that negative outlook.

After all, it wasn’t Zac’s fault that he had only met his father the year before and was still very much a stranger to his half-brothers, who, in spite of their respective parents’ divorces, had known each other since early childhood. Unhappily, Zac with his untamed black hair, tattoos and aggressive attitude simply didn’t fit in. He was too unconventional, too competitive, too much in every way. Nor did it help that he was only a couple of months younger than Vitale, which underlined the reality that Zac had been conceived while Charles Russell had still been married to Vitale’s mother. Yet Vitale could understand how that adulterous affair had come about. His mother was cold while his father was emotional and caring. He suspected that while caught up in the divorce that had devastated him Charles had sought comfort from a warmer woman.

‘Then let’s make a bet,’ Zac suggested irrepressibly.

Vitale was tempted to roll his eyes in comic disbelief but he said nothing.

‘I heard you and Angel talking earlier about the big palace ball being held in Lerovia at the end of next month,’ Zac admitted softly. ‘I understand that it’s a very formal, upmarket occasion and that your mother is expecting you to pick a wife from her selection of carefully handpicked female guests...’

Faint colour illuminated Vitale’s rigid high cheekbones and he ground his even white teeth. ‘Queen Sofia enjoys trying to organise my life but I have no current plans to marry.’

‘But it would be a hell of a lot easier to keep all those women at bay if you turned up with a partner of your own,’ Zac pointed out without skipping a beat, as if he knew by some mysterious osmosis how much pressure Vitale’s royal parent invariably put on her only child’s shoulders. ‘So, this is the bet... I bet you that you couldn’t transform an ordinary woman into a convincing socialite for the evening and pass her off as the real thing. If you manage that feat, I’ll give you my rarest vehicle but naturally I’ll expect an invitation to the ball. If your lady fails the test, you hand over your most precious car.’

Vitale almost rolled his eyes at that outrageously juvenile challenge. Obviously he didn’t do bets. He raked his black glossy hair back from his brow in a gesture of impatience. ‘I’m not Pygmalion and I don’t know any ordinary women,’ he admitted truthfully.

‘Who’s Pygmalion?’ Zac asked with a genuine frown. ‘And how can you not know any ordinary women? You live in the same world I do.’

‘Not quite.’ Vitale’s affairs were always very discreet and he avoided the sort of tacky, celebrity-chasing women likely to boast of him as a conquest, while Zac seemed to view any attractive woman as fair game. Vitale, however, didn’t want to run the risk of any tabloid exposés containing the kind of sexual revelations that would dishonour the Lerovian throne.

In addition, he was an investment banker and CEO of the very conservative and respectable Bank of Lerovia, thus expected to live a very staid life: bankers who led rackety lives made investors unprofitably nervous. Lerovia was, after all, a tax shelter of international repute. It was a small country, hemmed in by much larger, more powerful countries, and Vitale’s grandfather had built Lerovia’s wealth and stability on a secure financial base. Vitale had had few career options open to him. His mother had wanted him to simply be the Crown Prince, her heir in waiting, but Vitale had needed a greater purpose, not to mention the freedom to become a man in his own right, something his autocratic mother would never have willingly given him.

He had fought for his right to have a career just as he now fought for his continuing freedom of choice as a single man. At only twenty-eight, he wasn’t ready for the responsibility of a wife or, even more depressingly, the demands of a baby. His stomach sank at the prospect of a crying, clinging child looking to him for support. He also knew better than anyone how difficult it would be for any woman to enter the Lerovian royal family and be forced to deal with his domineering mother, the current Queen. His unfortunate bride would need balls of steel to hold her own.

At that point in Vitale’s brooding reflections, Angel reappeared, looking abnormally subdued, and Vitale sprang upright with a question in his eyes.

‘Your turn,’ his older brother told him very drily without making any attempt to respond to Vitale’s unspoken question for greater clarification.

Angel was visibly on edge, Vitale acknowledged in surprise, wondering what sensitive subject Charles Russell had broached with his eldest son. And then Vitale made a very good guess and he winced for his brother, because possibly their father had discovered that Angel had an illegitimate daughter he had yet to meet. That was Angel’s biggest darkest secret, one he had shared only with Vitale, and it was likely to be an inflammatory topic for a man as family-orientated as their parent. It wasn’t, however, a mistake that Vitale would ever make, Vitale thought with blazing confidence, because he never ever took risks in the birth-control department. He knew too well how narrow his options would be in that scenario if anything went wrong. Either he would have to face up to a colossal scandal or he would have to marry the woman concerned. Since the prospect of either option chilled him to the bone, he always played safe.

A still-handsome middle-aged man with greying hair, Charles Russell strode forward to give his taller son an enthusiastic hug. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting so long.’

‘Not a problem,’ Vitale said smoothly, refusing to admit that he had enraged his mother with his insistence on travelling to London rather than attending yet another court ceremonial function. Even so, his lean muscular length still stiffened in the circle of the older man’s arms because while he was warmed by that open affection he was challenged to respond to it. Deep down somewhere inside him he was still the shrinking little boy whose mother had pushed him away with distaste at the age of two, telling him firmly that it was babyish and bad to still seek such attention.

‘I need a favour and I thought you could deal with this thorny issue better than I could,’ Charles admitted stiffly. ‘Do you remember the housekeeper I employed at Chimneys?’

Vitale’s eloquent dark eyes widened a little in disconcertion, lush black gold-tipped lashes framing his shrewd questioning gaze. He and Angel had spent countless school vacations at their father’s country house on the Welsh border and Vitale had cherished every one of those holidays liberated from the stuffy traditions and formality of the Lerovian court. At Chimneys, an Elizabethan manor house, Vitale had been free as a bird, free to be a grubby little boy, a moody difficult adolescent, free to be whatever he wanted to be without the stress of constantly striving to meet arbitrary expectations.

‘Not particularly. I don’t really remember the staff.’

His father frowned, seemingly disappointed by that response. ‘Her name was Peggy. She worked for me for years. She was married to the gardener, Robert Dickens.’

A sliver of recollection pierced Vitale’s bemused gaze, a bubble of memory about an old scandal finally rising to the surface. ‘Red-haired woman, ran off with a toy boy,’ he slotted in sardonically.

His tone made his father frown. ‘Yes, that’s the one. He was one of the trainee gardeners, shifty sort with a silver tongue,’ he supplied. ‘I always felt responsible for that mess.’

Vitale, who could not imagine getting involved or even being interested in an employee’s private life, looked at the older man in frank astonishment. ‘Why?’

‘I saw bruises on Peggy on several occasions,’ Charles admitted uncomfortably. ‘I suspected Dickens of domestic abuse but I did nothing. I asked her several times if she was all right and she always assured me that she was. I should’ve done more.’

‘I don’t see what you could have done if she wasn’t willing to make a complaint on her own behalf,’ Vitale said dismissively, wondering where on earth this strange conversation could be leading while marvelling that his father could show visible distress when discussing the past life of a former servant. ‘You weren’t responsible.’

‘Right and wrong isn’t always that black and white,’ Charles Russell replied grimly. ‘If I’d been more supportive, more encouraging, possibly she might have given me her trust and told me the truth and I could have got her the help she and her daughter needed. Instead I was polite and distant and then she ran off with that smarmy little bastard.’

‘I don’t see what else you could have done. One should respect boundaries, particularly with staff,’ Vitale declared, stiffening at the reference to Peggy’s daughter but striving to conceal that reality. He had only the dimmest memory of Peggy Dickens but he remembered her daughter, Jazmine, well but probably only because Jazz figured in one of his own most embarrassing youthful recollections. He had little taste for looking back to the days before he had learned tact and discretion.

‘No, you have to take a more human approach, Vitale. Staff are people too and sometimes they need help and understanding,’ Charles argued.

Vitale didn’t want to help or understand what motivated his staff at the bank or the palace; he simply wanted them to do their jobs to the best of their ability. He didn’t get involved with employees on a personal level but, out of respect for his father, he resisted the urge to put his own point of view and instead tried to put the dialogue back on track. ‘You said you needed a favour,’ he reminded the older man.

Charles studied his son’s lean, forbidding face in frustration, hating the fact that he recognised shades of his ex-wife’s icy reserve and heartless detachment in Vitale. If there was one person Charles could be said to hate it would have to be the Queen of Lerovia, Sofia Castiglione. Yet he had loved her once, loved her to the edge of madness until he’d discovered that he was merely her dupe, her sperm donor for the heir she had needed for the Lerovian throne. Sofia’s true love had been another woman, her closest friend, Cinzia, and from the moment Sofia had successfully conceived, Charles and their marriage as such had been very much surplus to requirements. But that was a secret the older man had promised to take to the grave with him. In the divorce settlement he had agreed to keep quiet in return for liberal access arrangements to his son and he had only ever regretted that silence afterwards when he had been forced to watch his ex-wife trying to suck the life out of Vitale with her constant carping and interference.

‘Yes...the favour,’ Charles recalled, forced back into the present. ‘I’ve received a letter from Peggy’s daughter, Jazmine, asking for my help. I want you to assess the situation and deal with it. I would do it myself but I’m going to be working abroad for the next few months and I don’t have the time. I also thought you would handle it better because you knew each other well as children.’

Vitale’s lean, strong, darkly good-looking face had tensed. In truth he had frozen where he stood at the threat of being forced to meet Jazz again. ‘The situation?’ he queried, playing for time.

The older man lifted a letter off the desk and passed it to him. ‘The toy boy ripped Peggy off, forged her name on a stack of loans, plunged them into debt and ruined their financial standing!’ he emphasised in ringing disgust. ‘Now they’re poor and struggling to survive. They’ve tried legal channels and got nowhere. Peggy’s ill now and no longer able to work.’

Vitale’s brow furrowed and he raised a silencing hand. ‘But how is this trail of misfortune your business?’ he asked without hesitation.

‘Peggy Dickens has been on my conscience for years,’ Charles confided grudgingly. ‘I could have done something to help but I was too wary of causing offence so... I did nothing. All of this mess is on me and I don’t want that poor woman suffering any more because I failed to act.’

‘So, send her a cheque,’ Vitale suggested, reeling from the display of guilt his father was revealing while he himself was struggling to see any connection or indeed any debt owed.

‘Read the letter,’ his father advised. ‘Jazmine is asking for a job, somewhere to live and a loan, not a cheque. She’s proud. She’s not asking for a free handout but she’s willing to do anything she can to help her mother.’

Vitale studied the envelope of what was obviously a begging letter with unconcealed distaste. More than ever he wanted to argue with his father’s attitude. In Vitale’s opinion, Charles owed his former employee and her daughter absolutely nothing. By the sound of it, Peggy Dickens had screwed up her life; however that was scarcely his father’s fault.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Vitale asked finally, recognising that how he felt about the situation meant nothing in the face of his father’s feelings.

Yet it amazed Vitale that his father could still be so incredibly emotional and sentimental and he often marvelled that two people as ridiculously dissimilar in character as his parents could ever have married.

‘I want you to be compassionate and kind, not judgemental, not cynical, not cold,’ Charles framed with anxious warning emphasis. ‘And I know that will be a huge challenge for you but I also know that acknowledging that side of your nature will make you a better and stronger man in the process. Don’t let your mother remake you in her image—never forget that you are my son too.’

Vitale almost flinched from the idea of being compassionate and kind. He didn’t do stuff like that. He supported leading charities and always contributed to good causes but he had never done anything hands-on in that area, nor had he ever felt the need to do so. He was what he was: a bred-in-the-bone royal, cocooned from the real world by incredible privilege, an exclusive education and great wealth.

‘I don’t care what it costs to buy Peggy and her daughter out of trouble either,’ his father added expansively. ‘With you in charge of my investments, I can well afford the gesture. You don’t need to save me money.’

‘I’m a banker. Saving money and making a profit comes naturally,’ Vitale said drily. ‘And by the way, my mother is not remaking me in her image.’

Charles vented a roughened laugh. ‘It may be graveyard humour but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you find yourself engaged by the end of that ball next month! Sofia is a hell of a wheeler dealer. You should’ve refused to attend.’

‘I may still do that. I’m no pushover,’ his son stated coldly. ‘So you want me to stage a rescue mission in your name?’

‘With tact and generosity,’ the older man added.

Exasperation leapt through Vitale, who used tact every day of his life because he could never be less than courteous in the face of the royal demands made of him. But no matter how onerous the demand Charles had made struck him, there was, nevertheless, a certain pride and satisfaction to the awareness that his father was trusting him to deal with a sensitive situation. He realised that he was also surprisingly eager to read Jazz’s letter.

Jazz, a skinny-as-a-rail redhead, who had developed a massive crush on him when she was fourteen and he was eighteen. He had been wildly disconcerted that he rather than the friendlier, flirtier Angel had become the object of her admiration and he had screwed up badly, he acknowledged reluctantly, cracking a wounding joke about her that she had sadly overheard. But then Vitale had never been the sensitive sort and back then he had also essentially known very little about women because he had stayed a virgin for many years longer than Angel. But, not surprisingly, Jazz had hated him after that episode and in many ways it had been a relief to no longer be the centre of her attention and the awful tongue-tied silences that had afflicted her in his presence. In the space of one awkward summer, the three of them had travelled from casual pseudo friendship to stroppy, strained discomfiture and then she and her mother had mercifully disappeared out of their lives.

Compassionate... Kind, Vitale reminded himself as he stood outside his father’s office reading Jazz’s letter, automatically rating it for use of English, spelling and conciseness. Of course it had been written on the computer because Jazz was severely dyslexic. Dyslexic and clumsy, he recalled helplessly, always tripping and bumping into things. The letter told a tale of woe that could have featured as a Greek tragedy and his sculpted mouth tightened, his momentary amusement dying away. She wanted help for her mother but only on her own terms. She wanted a job but only had experience of working as a checkout operator and a cleaner.

Per carita...for pity’s sake, what did she think his father was going to find for her to do on the back of such slender talents? Even so, the letter was pure Jazz, feisty and gauche and crackling with brick-wall obstinacy. An ordinary woman, he thought abstractedly, an ordinary woman with extraordinarily beautiful green eyes. Her eyes wouldn’t have changed, he reasoned. And you couldn’t get more ordinary than Jazz, who thought a soup spoon or a fish fork or a napkin was pure unnecessary aristocratic affectation. And she was, evidently, badly in need of money...

A faint smile tilted Vitale’s often grim mouth. He didn’t need a stunning beauty to act as his partner at the palace ball and he was quite sure that if he hired the right experts Jazz could be transformed into something reasonably presentable. Having a partner for the ball to fend off other women would make sense, he acknowledged reluctantly. But shooting Zac down in flames would undeniably be the most satisfying aspect of the whole affair. Jazz might be ordinary and dyslexic but she was also clever and a quick study.

Vitale strolled back to his younger brother’s side with a rare smile on his wide sensual mouth. ‘You’re up next but before you go...the bet,’ he specified in an undertone. ‘Remember that blonde waitress who wanted nothing to do with you last week and accused you of harassment?’

Zac frowned, disconcerted colour highlighting his high cheekbones at that reminder of his rare failure to impress a woman.

‘Bring her to the ball acting all lovelorn and clingy and suitably polished up and you have a deal on the bet,’ Vitale completed, throwing down the gauntlet of challenge with pleasure while recalling the very real hatred he had seen in that woman’s eyes. For once, Zac, the smooth-talking seducer, would have his work cut out for him...

* * *

Jazz straightened her aching back at the checkout because she had worked a very long day. Her schedule had kicked off at dawn with a cleaning shift at a nearby hotel and then she had got a call to step in for a sick workmate at the till in the supermarket where she earned extra cash on a casual basis. Both her jobs were casual, poorly paid and unreliable. But some work was better than no work, she reminded herself doggedly, better than living on welfare, which would have distressed her mother more even though that choice would have left mother and daughter somewhat better off.

But while Peggy Dickens had raised her daughter to be a worker rather than a whinger or a freeloader, Jazz still occasionally let her thoughts drift into a dream world where she had got to complete the education that would have equipped her with a degree that enabled her to chase better-paid jobs and climb an actual career ladder. Unfortunately, the chaos of her private life had prevented her from, what was that phrase...achieving her full potential? Her full pink mouth curled at the corners with easy amusement for who was to say that she was worth any more than the work she was currently doing? No point getting too big for her boots and imagining she might have been more, not when she came from such humble roots.

Her mother had been a housekeeper, who married a gardener and lived in accommodation provided by their employer. Nobody in Jazz’s family tree had ever owned a house or earned a university degree and Peggy had been bemused when her daughter had chosen to continue her education and aim so much higher than any of her ancestors, but her mother had been proud as well.

And then their lives had gone down the tubes again and Jazz had had to put practicality first yet again. Unfortunately, it was virtually impossible to regain lost ground. Jazz had almost had a nervous breakdown studying to overcome the drawbacks of changing schools three times over during her teen years. She had not wept when her parents’ unhappy marriage had finally broken down because her father had often beaten up her mother and had hurt Jazz as well when she had been foolish enough to try and intervene. She had grieved, though, when her father had died unexpectedly only a couple of years afterwards without having once tried to see her again. Evidently her father had never much cared for his only child and that knowledge had hurt. She had been sincerely aghast, however, when her mother, Peggy fell in love with Jeff Starling, a much younger man.

Love could be the biggest risk out there for a woman, Jazz reflected with an inner shiver of repulsion, most especially the kind of love that could persuade an otherwise sensible woman into jumping straight out of the frying pan into the fire.

But there were other kinds of love as well, she reminded herself comfortingly, life-enriching family connections that soothed and warmed, no matter how bad life got. When Jeff’s bad debts had ensured that Peggy and her daughter couldn’t even get a lease on a rental property, Peggy’s kid sister, Clodagh, had given them a home in her tiny apartment. When Peggy had been diagnosed with breast cancer, Clodagh had stepped back from her little jewellery business to shepherd her sister to her appointments and treatments and nurse her tenderly while Jazz tried to keep on earning what little money she could.

Bolstered by those more positive thoughts, Jazz finished her shift and walked home in the dusk. Her phone pinged and she dug it out, green eyes widening when she read the text with difficulty. It was short and sweet, beginning, re: letter to Charles Russell.

Holy Moses, she thought in shock, Charles Russell was actually willing to meet her to discuss her mother’s plight! Ten o’clock tomorrow morning, not much notice, she conceded ruefully, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, could they be?

In desperation, she had written to her mother’s former employer pleading for help. Charles was a kind man and generous to a fault but almost ten years down the road from Peggy’s employment, Jazz had not even expected to receive a reply. That letter had been a long shot, the product of a particularly sleepless night when she was stressing about how she could best help her mother with the stable, stress-free existence she needed to recover from what had proved to be a gruelling treatment schedule. After all, they couldn’t live with Clodagh for ever. Clodagh had sacrificed a lot to take them in off the street, not least a boyfriend, who had vanished once the realities of Clodagh’s new caring role had sunk in. Ironically, Jazz had not thought that there was the remotest possibility that her letter to Charles Russell would even be acknowledged...

A hot feeling of shame crept up inside her, burning her pale porcelain skin with mortified heat because the instant she had posted that letter, she had squirmed with regret over the sacrifice of her pride. Hadn’t she been raised to stand on her own feet? Yet sometimes, no matter what you did and no matter how hard you worked, you needed a helping hand to climb up out of a ditch. And evidently, Charles Russell had taken pity on their plight and maybe, just maybe, he had recognised that he could offer his assistance in some way. With somewhere to live? With employment? Hope sprang high, dousing the shame of having written and posted a begging letter. Any help, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, would be welcome, she told herself sternly.

Stuffing her phone back in her pocket, Jazz unlocked the door of the apartment, suppressing a sigh when she saw the mess in the living and kitchen area. Clodagh wasn’t tidy and she wasn’t much for cleaning or doing dishes or laundry but Jazz did what she could to pick up the slack, always conscious that she lived in Clodagh’s home while remaining equally aware that her neat freak of a mother found it depressing to live in such messy surroundings. But there wasn’t much that could be done to make a one-bedroom apartment stretch to the occupation of three adults, one of whom was still struggling to regain her strength. The treatments might have concluded but Peggy was still in the recovery phase. Clodagh shared the bedroom with her sister but when Peggy had a restless night, Clodagh took the couch and Jazz slept in a sleeping bag on the floor.

‘I had a good day,’ Peggy announced chirpily from in front of the television, a thin-faced, pale and still-frail-looking woman in her forties. ‘I went for a walk in the park after mass.’

‘That’s brilliant,’ Jazz said, bending down to kiss the older woman’s cheek, the baby fine fuzz of her mother’s regrown hair brushing her brow and bringing tears to her tired eyes. The hair had grown again in white, rather then red, and Peggy had refused to consider dying it as Clodagh had suggested, confessing that as far as she was concerned any hair was better than no hair.

Jazz was intensely relieved that her mother was regaining her energy and had an excellent prognosis. Having initially faced the terrifying prospect that she might lose her mother, she was merely grateful to still have her and was keen to improve the older woman’s life as much as possible.

‘Hungry?’ Jazz prompted.

‘Not really,’ Peggy confessed guiltily.

‘I’ll make a lovely salad and you can do your best with it,’ Jazz declared, knowing it was imperative to encourage her mother to regain some of the weight she had lost.

‘Clodagh’s visiting her friend, Rose,’ Peggy told her. ‘She asked me to join them but I was too tired and I like to see you when you come in from work.’

Suppressing her exhaustion, Jazz began to clean up the kitchen, neatly stowing away her aunt’s jewellery-making supplies in their designated clear boxes and then embarking on the dishes before preparing the salad that was presently the only option that awakened her mother’s appetite. While she worked, she chattered, sharing a little gossip about co-workers, bringing her working day home with her to brighten her mother’s more restricted lifestyle and enjoy the sound of her occasional chuckle.

They sat down at the table to eat. Jazz was mentally running through her tiny wardrobe to select a suitable outfit for her morning appointment with Charles Russell. Giving up the luxury of their own home had entailed selling off almost all their belongings because there had been no money to spare to rent a storage facility and little room for anything extra in Clodagh’s home. Jazz had a worn black pencil skirt and jeans and shorts and a few tops and that was literally all. She had learned to be grateful for the uniform she wore at both her jobs because it meant that she could get by with very few garments. Formality insisted on her wearing the skirt, she conceded ruefully, and her only pair of high heels.

She had not mentioned her letter to either her mother or her aunt because she hadn’t expected anything to come of it and, in the same way, she could not quite accept that she had been given an appointment. Indeed, several times before she finally dropped off to sleep on the couch that evening, she had to dig out her phone and anxiously reread that text to persuade herself that it wasn’t a figment of her imagination.

Early the next morning, fearful of arriving late, Jazz crossed London by public transport and finally arrived outside a tall town house. She had been surprised not to be invited to the older man’s office where she had sent the letter, but perhaps he preferred a less formal and more discreet setting for their meeting. She was even more surprised by the size and exclusive location of the house. Charles Russell had once been married to a reigning queen, she reminded herself wryly. A queen who, on her only fleeting visit to her former husband’s country home, had treated Jazz’s mother like the dirt beneath her expensively shod feet.

But Charles had been infinitely kinder and more gracious with his staff, she recalled fondly, remembering the older man’s warm smiles and easy conversation with her even though she was only his housekeeper’s daughter. Unlike his royal ex-wife and second son, he was not a snob and had never rated people in importance solely according to their social or financial status. A kind man, she repeated doggedly to herself to quell her leaping nervous tension as she rang the doorbell.

A woman who spoke little English, and what she did speak was with an impenetrable accent, ushered her into an imposing hall furnished with gleaming antiques and mirrors. Scanning her intimidating surroundings and feeling very much like an interloper, Jazz began to revise up her estimate of Charles Russell’s wealth.

Another door was cast open into what looked like a home office and a man sprang up from behind the solid wooden desk.

Jazz was so aghast by the recognition that roared through her slender frame that she froze on the threshold of the room and stared in dismay, all her natural buoyance draining away as though someone very cruel had stabbed a pin into her tender flesh and deflated her like a balloon. It was Vitale, not his father, and that had to be... Her. Worst. Nightmare. Ever...

CHAPTER TWO

VITALE STARED, TAKEN aback by the woman in the doorway because she was a knockout, the kind of vibrant beauty who turned male heads in the street with her streaming red-gold curls and slender, supple body. About the only things that hadn’t changed about Jazz were her eyes, green as jade set in a triangular face, skin as translucent as the finest pale porcelain and a surprisingly full pink mouth, little white teeth currently plucking at her lower lip as she gazed at him in almost comical horror.

‘Come in and close the door,’ Vitale urged smoothly, wondering how on earth he was going to teach her to stop wearing her every thought on her face while also wondering why he found that candidness attractive.

Jazz made a valiant attempt to stage a recovery even though every ounce of her hard-won confidence had been blown out of the water. Shock waves were travelling through her slight body. One glimpse of Vitale and her brain was mush at best and at worst sending her back in time to a very vulnerable period she did not want to remember. But there Vitale was, as sleek and drop-dead gorgeous as he had ever been and so compelling in his undeniable masculine beauty that it took terrible effort to even look away from him.

What was it about Vitale, what crazy weakness in her made him seem so appealing? His brother, Angel Valtinos, had been too pretty and vain to draw her and she had never once looked at Angel in that way. But then, Vitale was a much more complex and fascinating creature, all simmering, smouldering intensity and conflicts below the smooth, sophisticated surface he wore for the world. Those perfect manners and that cool reserve of his couldn’t mask the intense emotion he held in restraint behind those stunning dark golden eyes. And he was so sexy. Every sinuous movement of his lean, muscular body, every downward dip of his gold-tipped, outrageously thick black lashes, and every quirk of his beautifully shaped sensual mouth contributed to his ferocious sex appeal. It was little wonder that when she had finally been of an age to crush on a man, her attention had immediately locked onto Vitale, even though Vitale had found it quite impossible to treat her like a friend.

Jazz closed the door in a harried movement and walked towards the chair set in front of the desk. You’re a grown-up now. The embarrassing stuff you did as a kid no longer matters, her defences were instructing her at a frantic pitch, and so intent was she on listening to that face-saving voice that she didn’t notice the edge of the rug in front of her. Her spiky heel caught on the fringe and she pitched forward with a startled cry.

And Vitale was there at supersonic speed, catching her before she could fall and steadying her with a strong arm to her spine. The heat of his hand at her waist startled her almost as much as his sudden proximity. She jerked skittishly away from him to settle down heavily into the chair but her nostrils flared appreciatively. The dark sensual scent of his spicy cologne overlying warm earthy male plunged her senses into overdrive.

Vitale had finally touched her, Vitale, who avoided human contact as much as possible, she recalled abstractedly, striving not to look directly at him until she had got her stupid brain back on line. He would be smiling: she knew that. Her clumsiness had always amused him because he was as lithe and sure-footed as a cat. Now he unnerved her more by not returning to the other side of the desk and instead lounging back against it with unusual casualness, staying far too close for comfort, a long, muscular, powerful thigh within view that did nothing to restore her composure.

Her fingertips dug into her palms as she fought for calm. ‘I was expecting to meet with your father,’ she admitted thinly.

‘Charles asked me to handle this,’ Vitale confided, barely resisting the urge to touch the wild corkscrew mane of flaming ringlets tumbling across her shoulders with gleaming electric vigour. So, he liked the hair and the eyes, he reasoned, wondering why he had abandoned his usual formality to sit so close to her, wondering why the simple smell of soap that she emanated was so surpassingly sexy, wondering why that slender body with its delicate curves, tiny waist and shapely legs should suddenly seem so very tempting a package. Because she wasn’t his type, not even remotely his type, he told himself sternly. He had always gone for tall, curvy blondes, redheads being too bright and brash for his tastes.

On the other hand he had never wanted so badly to touch a woman’s hair and that weird prompting unnerved him into springing upright again and striding across the room. The dulled throb of awakening desire at his groin inspired him with another stab of incredulity because since adulthood he had always been fully in control of that particular bodily affliction.

‘I can’t think why,’ Jazz said, dry-mouthed, unbearably conscious of him looming over her for that split second before he moved away because he stood well over six feet tall and she barely made a couple of inches over five foot.

‘I assure you that the exchange will work out very much to your advantage,’ Vitale husked, deciding that his uncharacteristic interest had simply been stimulated by the challenge that he now saw lay ahead of him: the transformation of Jazz. Number one on the agenda would be persuading her to stop biting her nails. Number two would be ditching the giant fake gold hoop earrings. Number three would be avoiding any shoe that looked as if a stripper might wear it.

Jazz let slip a very rude startled word in response to that unlikely statement.

And number four would be cleaning up her vocabulary, Vitale reflected, glad to so clearly see her flaws so that he could concentrate on the practicalities of his challenge, rather than dwell on any aspect that could be deemed personal.

‘Don’t swear,’ Vitale told her.

Jazz reddened as high as her hairline because she could remember him saying the same thing to her when she was about twelve years old while warning her that once she became accustomed to using such words, using them would become an embarrassing habit. And being Vitale, he had been infuriatingly bang on target with that advice. Using curse words had made her seem a little cooler at school back then...well, as cool as you could be with bright red hair and a flat chest, puberty having passed her by for far longer than she cared to recall, making her an anomaly amongst her peers.

‘You need financial help,’ Vitale pointed out with undiplomatic bluntness, keen to get right to the heart of the matter and remind her of her situation. If he neglected to remind her of her boundaries, Jazz would be a stubborn, defiant baggage and hard to handle.

Living up to that assessment, Jazz flew upright, earrings swinging wildly in the torrent of her burnished hair, colour marking her cheekbones, highlighting eyes bright with angry defensiveness. ‘I did not ask for money from your father!’ she snapped back at him.

‘Employment, a home, the settlement of outstanding loans?’ Vitale reminded her with cruel precision. ‘How could any of those aspirations be achieved without someone laying out a considerable amount of money on your behalf?’

The angry colour drained from her disconcerted face, perspiration breaking out on her short upper lip as he threw her crash-bang up against hard reality, refusing to allow her to deny the obvious. She stared back at him, trapped like a rabbit in headlights and hating him for it. Mortification claimed her along with a healthy dose of shame that she should have put herself in such a position and with Vitale of all people. Vitale, who had never treated her like an equal as Angel had done, Vitale who had never for one moment forgotten that she was essentially a servant’s child, thrown into the brothers’ company only by proximity.

Vitale watched Jazz crash down from fury to bitter, embarrassed acceptance. Sì...yes, he told himself with satisfaction, that had been the right note to sound. She dropped back into the chair, sunset heat warming her cheeks and bowing her head on her slender neck.

‘And the good news is that I’m willing to provide that money if...in return, you are willing to do something for me.’

‘I can’t imagine anything that I could do for you,’ Jazz told him truthfully.

‘Then listen and learn,’ Vitale advised, poised by the window with the light glimmering over his luxuriant blue-black hair, the suave olive planes of his cheekbones taut. ‘At the end of next month my mother is throwing a ball at the palace. Her objective is to match me up with a future bride and the guest list will be awash with young women who have what the Queen deems to be the right pedigree and background.’

Jazz was staring at him now in wide-eyed wonderment. ‘Are you kidding me?’

His sculpted mouth quirked. ‘I wish I was.’

Her smooth brow furrowed as she collided with hot dark golden eyes and suddenly found it fatally difficult to breathe. ‘You’re angry about it.’

‘Oviamente...of course I am. I’m nowhere near the stage in life where I want to get married and settle down. But having considered the situation, it has occurred to me,’ Vitale murmured quietly, ‘that arriving at the ball with what appears to be a partner, whom I’m seriously involved with, would be my best defence. I want you to be that partner.’

‘Me?’ Jazz gaped at him in disbelief, green eyes a pool of verdant jade bemusement as she gazed up at him, soft full pink lips slightly parted. ‘How could I be your partner? I couldn’t go to a royal ball!’

‘Suitably gowned and refined, you could,’ Vitale disagreed, choosing his words with care because the throb below his belt went up tempo when he focused on that soft, oh, so inviting full lower lip of hers. ‘But you would have to be willing to work at the presentation required because you would have to both look like and act like the sort of woman I would bring to a royal ball.’

‘Impossible,’ Jazz told him. ‘It would take more than a fancy dress and not swearing.’

‘It would but, given that we have several weeks at our disposal in which to prepare, I think you could easily do it,’ Vitale declared, shocking her even more with that vote of apparent confidence. ‘And whether you successfully contrive the pretence or fail it, I will still pay you well for trying to make the grade.’

‘But why me?’ Jazz spluttered in a rush. ‘Why someone like me? Surely you have a friend who could pretend to be something more for the evening?’

‘Why you? Because someone bet me that I couldn’t pass off an ordinary woman as a socialite at a royal ball,’ Vitale delivered, opting for the truth. ‘You fit the bill and I prefer to pay for the pretence rather than ask anyone to do me a favour. In addition, as it will be in your best interests to succeed, you will make more effort to meet the standard required.’

Jazz was transfixed by his admission. ‘A bet,’ she echoed weakly. ‘To go to all that effort and put out money simply to win a bet...it would be absurd.’

Vitale shrugged a wide shoulder, sheathed in the finest silk and wool blend, the jacket of his exquisitely well-tailored suit sliding open to reveal his torso, lean, strong muscles flexing below the thin cotton shirt. Her mouth ran dry because he was a work of art on a physical level, every silken, honed line of his lean, powerful physique hard and muscular and fit. ‘Does the absurdity of it have to concern you?’

‘I guess not...’ she said uncertainly, knowing that what was what he wanted her to say, playing it sensibly by ear and reluctant to argue while momentarily lost in the dark, exciting challenge of his hard, assessing gaze.

She had almost forgotten what that excitement felt like, had never felt it since in a man’s radius and had been much too young and naïve to feel its mortifying bite at the age of fourteen. She had experienced what felt like all the sensations of a grown woman while still trapped in the body of an undeveloped child. Unsurprisingly, struggling to deal with that adolescent flood of sexual awakening had made her so silent, so awkward and so wretched around Vitale that she had been filled with self-loathing and shame.

Now that same excitement was curling up hot in the pit of her stomach and spreading dangerous tendrils of awareness to more sensitive places. She felt her nipples pinch tight below her tee shirt and her small breasts swell with the shaken breath she snatched in as she willed the torture to stop. But her body’s reaction to Vitale had never been something she could control and the inexorable pulse of that heat between her thighs made her feel murderously uncomfortable and foolish.

A bet, she was still thinking with even greater incredulity, desperate to stop thinking about her physical reaction to him. Vitale was willing to invest good money in an attempt to win a bet. That was beyond her capacity to imagine and she thought it was very wrong. In her experience money was precious and should be reserved to cover the necessities of life: rent, heat and food. She had never lived in a world where money was easily obtained or where there was ever enough of it. Even when her parents had still been together, having sufficient money simply to live had been a constant source of concern, thanks to her father’s addiction to online betting.

But Vitale lived at a very different level, she reminded herself ruefully. He took money for granted, had never gone without and could probably never understand how bone-deep appalled she was by his light-hearted attitude and how even more hostile she was to any form of gambling.

‘I don’t approve of gambling,’ she admitted tightly, thinking of the families destroyed by the debts accrued and the addicts who could not break free of their dream of a big win.

‘It’s not—’

‘It is gambling,’ Jazz cut in with assurance. ‘You’re betting on the outcome of something that can’t be predicted and you may make a loss.’

‘That’s my problem, not yours,’ Vitale delivered without hesitation. ‘You need to think about how this arrangement would benefit you. I would settle those loans and find a place of your choosing for you and your mother to live. I don’t know what I could offer on the employment front but I’m sure I could provide some help. The decision is yours. I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think it over.’

Her green eyes flared in anger again. ‘You haven’t even told me what would be involved if I accepted!’

‘Obviously you’d have to have a makeover and a certain amount of coaching before you could meet the demands of the role,’ Vitale imparted, marvelling that she hadn’t eagerly snatched at his offer straight away. ‘Right now you’re drowning in debt and you have no options. I can give you options.’

It was the bald truth and she hated him for spelling it out. If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride, she chanted inside her head. Being badly in debt meant that she and her mother had virtually no choices and little chance of improving their lot in life. She swallowed hard on that humiliating reality that put Vitale squarely in the driver’s seat. A makeover, coaching? Inwardly she cringed but it was no surprise to her that she would not do as she was. She would never be good enough for Vitale on any level. She didn’t have the right breeding or background and found it hard to credit that even a makeover would raise her to the standard required by a highly sophisticated royal prince, who couldn’t even drink beer out of a bottle without looking uncomfortable.

‘Yes, if I can trust you, you could give us options,’ she conceded flatly. ‘But how do I know that you will keep your promises if this doesn’t work?’

Vitale stiffened as though she had slapped him. ‘I give you my word,’ he bit out witheringly. ‘Surely that should be sufficient?’

‘There are very few people in this world that I trust,’ Jazz admitted apologetically.

‘I will have a legal agreement drawn up, then,’ Vitale breathed with icy cool. ‘Will that satisfy you?’

Jazz lifted her head high, barely able to credit that she was bargaining with Vitale. ‘We don’t need a legal agreement for something this crazy. You get rid of the loans first as a show of faith,’ she dared. ‘I’m fed up trying to protect my mother from debt collectors.’

‘I don’t understand why you’re even trying to repay loans that were fraudulently taken out in your mother’s name.’

‘It’s incredibly difficult to prove that it was fraud. Jeff died in an accident last year and he wasn’t prosecuted. A solicitor tried to sort it out for Mum but we didn’t have enough proof to clear her name and she won’t declare herself bankrupt because she sees that as the ultimate humiliation,’ she explained, wanting him to know that they had explored every possible avenue. ‘She was ill and going through chemo at the time and I didn’t want to put any more pressure on her.’

‘You give me all the paperwork for the loans and I will have them dealt with,’ Vitale asserted. ‘But if I do so, I will own you body and soul until the end of next month.’

‘Nobody will ever own me body and soul.’

‘Apart from me for the next couple of months,’ Vitale contradicted with lethal cool. ‘If I pay upfront, I call the shots and you do as you’re told, whether you like it or not.’

Jazz blinked in bewilderment, wondering how she had got herself into the situation she was in. He thought he had her agreement and why wouldn’t he when she had bargained the terms with him? Even the prospect of those dreadful loans being settled knocked her for six. A visit or a phone call from a debt collector upset her mother for days afterwards, depriving her of the peace of mind she needed to rebuild her life and her health. How could Jazz possibly turn her back on an offer like Vitale’s? Nobody else was going to give them the opportunity to make a fresh start.

‘You haven’t given me a chance to think this through,’ she argued shakily.

‘You were keen enough to set out your conditions,’ Vitale reminded her drily.

And her face flamed because she was in no position to protest that assumption. The offer of money had cut right through her fine principles and her aversion to gambling. The very idea that she could sort out her mother’s problems and give her a happier and more secure future had thoroughly seduced her.

‘You’ll move in here as soon as possible,’ Vitale decreed.

Her head flew up, corkscrew curls tumbling across her shoulders, green eyes huge. ‘Move in here? With you?’

‘How else can we achieve this? You must be readily available. How else can I supervise? And if I take you to the ball it will be assumed we are lovers, and should anyone do a check, it will be clear that you were already living here in my house,’ Vitale pointed out. ‘If we are to succeed, you have to consider little supporting details of that nature.’

Jazz studied him, aghast. ‘I can’t move in with you!’ she gasped. ‘What am I supposed to tell my mother?’

Vitale shrugged with magnificent lack of interest. ‘Whatever suits. That I’ve given you a job? That we’re having an affair? I don’t care.’

Her feathery lashes fluttered rapidly, her animated face troubled as she pondered that problem. ‘Yes, I could admit I sent the letter to your father and say I’ve been offered a live-in job and my aunt would look after Mum, so I wouldn’t need to worry about her,’ she reasoned out loud. ‘Would I still be able to work? I have two part-time jobs.’

‘No. You won’t have the time. I’ll pay you a salary for the duration of your stay here,’ Vitale added, reading her expression to register the dismay etched there at the news that she would not be able to continue in paid employment.

‘This is beginning to sound like a very expensive undertaking for you,’ Jazz remarked uncomfortably, her face more flushed than ever.

‘My choice,’ Vitale parried dismissively while he wondered how far that flush extended beneath her clothing and whether that scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose was repeated anywhere else on her delicate body. He wondered dimly why such an imperfection should seem even marginally appealing and why he should suddenly be picturing her naked with all the eagerness of a sex-starved teenage boy. He tensed, thoroughly unsettled by his complete loss of concentration and detachment.

‘I’ll say you’ve offered me a job,’ Jazz said abruptly, her thoughts leaping ahead of her. ‘Are there many art works in this house?’

Vitale frowned and stared enquiringly at her. ‘Yes, but—’

‘Then I could say that I was cataloguing them or researching them for you,’ Jazz announced with satisfaction. ‘I was only six months off completing a BA in History of Art when Mum’s life fell apart and I had to drop out. I may not have attained my degree but I have done placements in museums and galleries, so I do have good working experience.’

‘If what you’re telling me is true, why are you working in a shop and as a cleaner?’

‘Because without that degree certificate, I can’t work in my field. I’ll finish my studies once life has settled down again,’ she said with wry acceptance.

Vitale struggled to imagine the added stress of studying at degree level in spite of her dyslexia and all its attendant difficulties and a grudging respect flared in him because she had fought her disability and refused to allow it to hold her back. ‘Why did you drop out?’

‘Mum’s second husband, Jeff, died suddenly and she was inconsolable.’ Jazz grimaced. ‘That was long before the debt collectors began calling and we found out about the loans Jeff had taken out and forged her name on. I took time out from university but things went downhill very quickly from that point and I couldn’t leave Mum alone. We were officially homeless and living in a boarding house when she was diagnosed with cancer and that was when my aunt asked us to move in with her. It’s been a rough couple of years.’

Vitale made no comment, backing away from the personal aspects of the information she was giving him, deeming them not his business, not his concern. He needed to concentrate on the end game alone and that was preparing her for the night of the ball.

‘How soon can you move in?’ he prompted impatiently.

Jazz stiffened at that blunt question. ‘This week sometime?’ she suggested.

‘I’ll send a car to collect you tomorrow at nine and pack for a long stay. We don’t have time to waste,’ Vitale pronounced as she slid out of the seat and straightened, the pert swell of her small breasts prominent in a tee shirt that was a little too tight, the skirt clinging to her slim thighs and the curve of her bottom, the fabric shiny with age. Her ankles looked ridiculously narrow and delicate above those clodhopper sandals with their towering heels. The pulse at his groin that nagged at his usually well-disciplined body went crazy.

‘Tomorrow’s a little soon, surely?’ Jazz queried in dismay.

Vitale compressed his lips, exasperated by his physical reaction to her. ‘We have a great deal to accomplish.’

‘Am I really that unpresentable?’ Jazz heard herself ask sharply.

‘Cinderella shall go to the ball,’ Vitale retorted with diplomatic conviction, ducking an answer that was obvious to him even if it was not to her. ‘When I put my mind to anything, I make it work.’

In something of a daze, Jazz refused the offer of a car to take her home and muttered the fiction that she had some shopping to do. In truth she only ever shopped at the supermarket, not having the money to spare for treats. But she knew she needed time to get her head clear and work out what she was going to say before she went home again, and that was how she ended up sitting in a park in the spring sunshine, feeling much as though she had had a run-in with a truck that had squashed her flat.

‘She’s as flat as an ironing board, not to mention the hideous rag-doll hair but, worst of all, she’s a child, Angel...’

Vitale’s well-bred voice filtered down through the years to sound afresh inside her head. Angel spoke Greek and Vitale spoke Italian, so the brothers had always communicated in English. Angel had been teasing Vitale about her crush and of course Jazz had been so innocent at fourteen that it had not even occurred to her that the boys had noticed her infatuation, and that unwelcome discovery as much as Vitale’s withering description of her lack of attractiveness had savaged Jazz. She had known she wasn’t much to look at, but knowing and having it said out loud by the object of her misplaced affections had cut her deep. Furthermore, being deemed to be still a child, even though in hindsight she now agreed with that conviction, had hurt even more at the time and she had hated him for it. She still remembered the dreadful moment when the boys had appeared out of the summerhouse and had seen her standing there, white as a sheet on the path, realising that they had been overheard.

Angel had grimaced but Vitale had looked genuinely appalled. At eighteen, Vitale hadn’t had the ability to hide his feelings that he did as an adult, and at that moment Vitale had recognised how upset she was and had deeply regretted his words, his troubled dark golden eyes telegraphing that truth. Not that he would have admitted it or said anything, though, or even apologised, she conceded wryly, because royalty did not admit fault or indeed do anything that lowered the dignified cool front of polished perfection.

“Cinderella shall go to the ball,” he had said as if he were conferring some enormous honour on her. As if she cared about his stupid fancy ball, or his even more stupid bet! But she did care about her mother, she reminded herself ruefully, and if Vitale was willing to help her family, she was willing to eat dirt, strain every sinew to please and play Cinderella...even if the process did sting her pride and humiliate her and there would be no glass slipper waiting for her!

CHAPTER THREE

‘I’M ONLY WORRIED because you had such a thing for him when you were young.’ Peggy Starling rested anxious green eyes on her daughter’s pink cheeks. ‘Living in the same house with him now, working for him.’

‘He’s a prince, Mum,’ Jazz pointed out, wishing her colour didn’t change so revealingly, wishing she could honestly swear that she now found Vitale totally unattractive. ‘I’m not an idiot.’

‘But you were never really aware of him being a royal at Chimneys because Mr Russell wanted him treated like any other boy while he was staying there and his title was never used,’ her mother reasoned uncomfortably. ‘I just don’t want you getting hurt again.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Peggy, stop fussing!’ Clodagh interrupted impatiently, a small woman in her late thirties with the trademark family red hair cut short. ‘Jazz is a grown woman now and she’s been offered a decent job and a nice place to live for a couple of months. Don’t spoil it for her!’

Jazz gave her aunt a grateful glance. ‘The extra money will come in useful and I’ll visit regularly,’ she promised.

Her possessions in a bag, Jazz hugged her mother and her aunt and took her leave, walking downstairs, because the lift was always broken, and out to the shabby street where a completely out-of-place long black shiny limousine awaited her. Amusement filtered through her nerves when she saw that the muscular driver was out patrolling round the car, keen to protect his pride and joy from a hovering cluster of jeering kids.

Vitale strode out of his office when he heard the slam of the front door of the town house because somewhere in the back of his mind he couldn’t quite credit that he was doing what he was doing and that Jazz would actually turn up. More fool him, he thought sardonically, reckoning that the financial help he was offering would be more than sufficient as a bait on the hook of her commitment.

He scanned her slim silhouette in jeans and a sweater, wondering if he ought to be planning to take before and after photos for some silly scrapbook while acknowledging that her hair, her skin, her eyes, her truly perfect little face required no improvement whatsoever. His attention fell in surprise to the bulging carrier bag she carried.

‘I told you to pack for a long stay,’ he reminded her with a frown. ‘I meant bring everything you require to be comfortable.’

Jazz shrugged. ‘This is everything I own,’ she said tightly.

‘It can’t be,’ Vitale pronounced in disbelief, accustomed to women who travelled with suitcases that ran into double figures.

‘Being homeless strips you of your possessions pretty efficiently,’ Jazz told him drily. ‘I only kept one snow globe, my first one...’

And a faint shard of memory pierced Vitale’s brain. He recalled her dragging him and Angel into her bedroom to show off her snow globe collection when they must all have been very young. She had had three of those ugly plastic domes and the first one had had an evil little Santa Claus figure inside it. He and Angel had surveyed the girlie display, unimpressed. ‘They’re beautiful,’ Vitale had finally squeezed out, trying to be kind under the onslaught of her expectant green eyes, and knowing that a lie was necessary because she was tiny, and he still remembered the huge smile she had given him, which had assured him that he had said the right thing.

‘The Santa one?’ he queried.

Disconcerted, Jazz stared back at him in astonishment. ‘You remember that?’

‘It stayed with me. I’ve never seen a snow globe since,’ Vitale told her truthfully, relieved to be off the difficult subject of her having been homeless at one stage, while censuring himself for not having registered the practical consequences of such an upsetting experience.

‘So, when do the lessons start?’ Jazz prompted.

‘Come into my office. The housekeeper will show you to your room later.’

Jazz straightened her slender spine and tried hard not to stare at Vitale, which was an enormous challenge when he looked so striking in an exquisitely tailored dark grey suit that outlined his lean, powerful physique to perfection, a white shirt and dark silk tie crisp at his brown throat. So, he’s gorgeous, get over it, she railed inwardly at herself until the full onslaught of spectacular dark golden eyes heavily fringed by black lashes drove even that sensible thought from her mind.

‘First you get measured up for a new wardrobe. Next you get elocution.’

‘Elocution?’ Jazz gasped.

For all the world as though he had suggested keelhauling her under Angel’s yacht, Vitale thought helplessly.

‘You can’t do this with a noticeable regional accent,’ Vitale sliced in. ‘Stop reacting to everything I say as though it’s personal.’

‘It is freaking personal when someone says you don’t talk properly!’ Jazz slashed back at him furiously, her colour heightened.

‘And the language,’ Vitale reminded her without skipping a beat, refusing to be sidetracked from his ultimate goal. ‘I’m not insulting you. Stop personalising this arrangement. You are being prepared for an acting role.’

The reminder was a timely one, but it still struck Jazz as very personal when a man looked at her and decided he had to change virtually everything about her. She compressed her lips and said instead, ‘Freaking is not a bad word.’

Vitale released a groan, gold-tipped lashes flying high while he noticed the fullness of her soft pink lips even when she was trying to fold them flat, and his body succumbed to an involuntary stirring he fiercely resented. ‘Are you going to argue about everything?’

Common sense assailed Jazz and she bent down to rummage industriously in her carrier bag. ‘Not if you settle these loans,’ she muttered in as apologetic a tone as she could manage while still hating him for picking out her every flaw.

Vitale watched her settle a small heap of crumpled papers on his desk while striving to halter her temper, a battle he could read on her eloquent face. He supposed he could live with ‘freaking’ if he had to. For that matter he knew several socialites who swore like troopers and he wondered if he was setting his expectations rather too high, well aware that if he had a flaw, and he wasn’t willing to acknowledge that he did, it was a desire for perfection.

‘After elocution comes lessons in etiquette,’ he informed her doggedly, suppressing that rare instant of self-doubt. ‘You have to know how to address the other guests, many of whom will have titles.’

‘It sounds like a really fun-packed morning,’ Jazz pronounced acidly.

Amusement flashed through Vitale but he crushed it at source, reluctant to encourage her irreverence. Of course, he wasn’t used to any woman behaving around him the way Jazz did. Jazz had smoothly shifted straight back into treating him the same way she had treated him when they were teenagers and it was a disorientating experience, but not actively unpleasant, he registered in surprise. There was no awe or flattery, no ego-boosting jokes or flirtatious smiles or carefully choreographed speeches. In the strangest way he found her attitude, her very refusal to be impressed by his status, refreshing.

Later that same day, Jazz got a break at lunchtime. She heaved a sigh over the morning she had endured; lessons had never before made her feel so bored and fed up because all the subject matter was dry as dust. For the first time, however, she was becoming fully aware that Vitale occupied a very different world from her own and the prospect of having to face weeks of such coaching sessions made her wince. But if that was what rescuing her mother demanded from her, she would knuckle down and learn what she had to learn, she conceded reluctantly. A sheaf of supporting notes in front of her, she stroked coloured felt-tipped pens through salient points to highlight them, a practice she had used at university to make reading less of a challenge for her dyslexia. It would be easier for her to ask for spoken notes that she could listen to but she absolutely hated asking for special treatment that drew attention to her learning disability, particularly when it would only remind Vitale of yet another one of her flaws.

Her room, however, was beautiful, she allowed with a rueful smile that took in her silk-clad bed, the polished furniture and the door into the en-suite bathroom. She might as well have been staying in a top-flight exclusive hotel because her surroundings were impossibly luxurious and decidedly in the category of a major treat. The lunch, served in a fancy dining room, had been excellent as well, she was thinking as she sped downstairs for the afternoon session of coaching, wondering what was next on the agenda.

‘Jazz?’ a voice said in disbelief.

Jazz stopped dead mid-flight and stared down at the tall dark man staring up at her from the foyer, swiftly recognising him from his high public profile in the media. ‘Angel?’ she queried in shock.

‘What the hell are you doing in my brother’s house?’ Angel demanded bluntly, scanning her casual jeans-clad appearance with frowning attention.

Trying to think fast, Jazz descended the stairs, wondering what she was supposed to say to Vitale’s half-brother. Were the two men still as close as they had been as kids?

‘I think that’s a secret so I’d rather not go into detail,’ she parried awkwardly. ‘How are you?’

‘That’s OK, Jenkins,’ Angel addressed the older man still standing at the front door as if in readiness for the Greek billionaire’s departure. ‘You can serve coffee in the drawing room for Jazz and I.’

‘Where’s Vitale?’ Jazz enquired nervously.

‘Out but we must catch up,’ Angel said with innate assurance while the older man spread wide the door of what she assumed to be the drawing room.

‘Who’s Jenkins?’ she asked to forestall further questions when the door was closed again.

‘Vitale’s butler. This is a pretty old-fashioned household,’ Angel told her cheerfully. ‘Now tell me about the secret because I know my brother better than anyone and Vitale does not have secrets.’

‘I can’t... Don’t push me,’ Jazz protested in desperation. ‘My mother and I are in a bit of a pickle and Vitale is helping us out.’

‘Charitable Vitale?’ Angel inclined his head thoughtfully. ‘Sorry, that doesn’t wash.’

‘I contacted your father first,’ Jazz admitted, hoping that fact would distract him, because Angel was displaying all the characteristics of a terrier on the scent of a juicy bone.

‘Tell me about your mother,’ Angel invited smoothly.

Jazz gave him a brief résumé of their plight and confided that she had told her family that she was working for Vitale even though she strictly wasn’t. ‘But if it hadn’t been for the b-bet—’ she stumbled helplessly at letting that word escape ‘—Vitale wouldn’t have needed me in the first place.’

‘Bet,’ Angel repeated with a sudden flashing smile of triumph. ‘Zac, our kid brother, I surmise. And what is the bet? Vitale tells me everything.’

And since she had already given away half the story she gave him the whole. Angel gave her a shattered appraisal before he dropped down beside her on the sofa and burst out laughing, so genuinely amused at the prospect of her being coached for a public appearance at a royal ball that she ended up laughing too. Angel had always been so much more down-to-earth than his brother.

That was the point when Vitale entered the room, seeing his brother and Jazz seated close and laughing in a scene of considerable intimacy. That unanticipated sight sent a current of deep-seated rage roaring through Vitale like a hurricane.

‘Jazz...you’re supposed to be with Jenkins right now, not entertaining my brother!’ he bit out rawly, dark golden eyes scorching hot with angry condemnation on her flushed face.

‘Jenkins?’ she queried, rising upright.

‘Table manners,’ he extended crushingly, sending a tide of red rushing across her stricken face and not feeling the slightest bit guilty about it.

Jazz fled, mortified that he would say that to her in front of Angel as if she were a half-bred savage, who didn’t know how to eat in polite company. Was she? Ridiculous tears prickled at the backs of her eyes and stung. Did Vitale remember her as having had dreadful table manners when she was younger? It was a deeply embarrassing suspicion.

‘Well, wasn’t that unroyal eruption educational?’ Angel quipped as he sprang upright and studied Vitale with a measuring scrutiny. ‘Yes, she’s turned out quite a looker, our childhood playmate.’

* * *

Jazz was only a little soothed to learn that Vitale’s butler had been co-opted into teaching her about the right cutlery to use, rather than her manners. Furthermore, for once, she was receiving a lesson she needed, she acknowledged grudgingly, when she was presented with a formal table setting in the dining room that contained a remarkably bewildering choice of knives, forks and spoons. When that was done, she returned to her room and was seated against the headboard, reading a book she had got in a charity shop, when the door opened with an abrupt lack of warning.

It was Vitale and he was furious, as she had never seen him before. A dark flush lay along his high cheekbones, only contriving to accentuate the flaming gold of his spectacular eyes. ‘You spilled it all like an oil gusher!’ he condemned wrathfully. ‘Don’t you have any discretion?’

Stiff with discomfiture, Jazz scrambled off the bed in haste. ‘I let one word slip and then there didn’t seem much point in holding back,’ she admitted ruefully. ‘I’m sorry if you didn’t want him to know.’

‘You were too busy flirting with my brother to worry about what you told him!’ Vitale accused fiercely.

Jazz was stunned by that interpretation, particularly when her response to Angel had always been more like a sister with a big brother than anything else. She had never felt the smallest spark in Angel’s radius, while Vitale could set her on fire with a careless glance. ‘I wasn’t flirting with him!’ she replied forcefully. ‘That’s nonsense.’

‘I know what I saw,’ Vitale sliced in with contempt. ‘You were all over him like a rash!’

Anger began to stir within Jazz as she stared up at Vitale, who was towering over her like a particularly menacing stone wall. ‘I didn’t even touch him, for goodness’ sake! What the hell are you trying to imply?’ she demanded.

Already struggling to master a fury unlike any he had ever experienced, Vitale stared down at her, his lean brown hands clenched into fists because he felt incredibly violent. Angel was an incorrigible flirt and women went mad for him. Vitale had never had that freedom, that ready repartee or level of experience, and suddenly that lowering awareness infuriated him. His attention zeroed in on Jazz’s luscious pink mouth and suddenly he wanted to taste that mouth so badly it hurt, his body surging in a volatile wave straight from rage to sexual hunger. His brain had nothing to do with that unnerving switch.

Vitale snatched her up off her feet and kissed her in a move that so disconcerted her she didn’t fight, she only gasped. A split second on, the punishing, passionate force of his hard mouth was smashing down on hers, driving her lips apart, his tongue penetrating that moist and sensitive internal space. She shuddered with reaction, her arms balancing on his shoulders, her hands splaying round the back of his neck, fingers delving into the luxuriant depths of his black hair. A tsunami of excitement quivered through Jazz with every deeply sensual plunge of his tongue. It was like nothing she had ever felt in a man’s arms before and the very intensity of it was mind-blowing because it was everything she had ever dreamt of and nothing she had ever thought she could feel. He could certainly kiss, she thought helplessly, awash with the stimulation spreading through her heated body.

Without warning, it was over and Vitale was setting her back down on the floor, swinging on his heel and walking out again without a word, even closing the door behind him. Jazz almost laughed, her fingers rising to touch her tingling mouth, wild butterflies unleashed in her tummy. Vitale hadn’t said a word, which was so typical of him. He would walk away and refuse to think about it or talk about it, as if talking about it would make it more damaging.

But Vitale was genuinely in shock, throbbing with such raw sexual arousal he was in pain, dark golden eyes burning with the self-discipline it had taken to tear himself away. She tasted like strawberries and coffee but she had engulfed him like too much alcohol in his veins. He felt strangely disconnected from himself because his reactions, his very behaviour, were unacceptable and abnormal. He could barely credit that he had been so angry that he had wanted to smash his brother through the wall, couldn’t begin to explain what had awakened that anger. He loathed every one of those weird feelings and fought to suppress them and bury them deep. He stripped where he stood in his bedroom before heading for the shower.

In comparison, Jazz lay on top of her very comfortable bed and thought about that kiss, the ultimate kiss, which had shot her full of adrenalin, excitement and longing. She felt as if she had been waiting half her life to discover that a kiss could make her feel like that, but it was a terrible disappointment that Vitale had achieved that feat because there would be no interesting future developments happening in that quarter, she reflected wryly. It was just sex, stupid, confusing sexual urges that had neither sense nor staying power, and she should write it off to a silly impulse and a moment of forgetfulness. He wasn’t even the sort of guy she wanted in her life and he never would be. He was too arrogant, too reserved, too quick to judge...but, my goodness, he knew how to kiss...

Fate had short-changed her, she thought resentfully. She was still a virgin because she had always been waiting to meet a man, who would make her crave more of his touch. She had wanted her first lover to be someone whom she desired and cared about. Unfortunately, desire had evaded her in the invasive groping sessions that had been her sad experience as a student. Even worse, she still remembered the emotional hurt inflicted by her father’s abuse. How could she trust any man when her own father had attacked her? Jazz had been wary of the opposite sex ever since, even though she was now wishing she had a little more sexual experience because then she would have had a better idea of how to read Vitale and deal with him.

Had her crush on Vitale at fourteen made her more vulnerable? Jazz cringed at the suspicion and dismissed it because she hadn’t actively thought about Vitale in years and years. He had only come to mind when she’d seen him in some glossy magazine, squiring some equally superior beauty at some sparkling celebrity event and, like Cinderella in real life, she thought sadly, she had known how impossible her dream had been at fourteen. He was what he was: a prince, born and bred to a life so different from hers that he might as well have been an alien from another planet. He wasn’t a happy prince either, she thought with unwilling compassion. Even as an adolescent she had recognised that Vitale didn’t really know what being happy was.

When she was informed that she had another coaching session late that afternoon, she was incensed to learn that it was in deportment. She put in the time with the instructor and then knocked on Vitale’s office door.

‘Yes?’ Vitale looked up from his laptop and then sprang upright with the perfect courtesy that was engrained in him. Woman enters room: stand, she reflected ruefully, and it took just a little bit of the edge off her temper and the faint unease she had felt at seeing him again so soon after that kiss. It definitely didn’t help, though, that he still looked gorgeous to her from the head of his slightly ruffled black hair down to his wonderful dark deep-set eyes that even now were clearly registering wariness. She knew exactly what he was thinking and almost grinned. He was still waiting to be attacked over the kiss.

‘Deportment?’ she queried drily instead. ‘Don’t you think that’s overkill? I don’t slouch and I can walk in a straight line in heels. What more do you want?’

His dark eyes flared gold and he tensed, reining back all that leaping energy of his. ‘I thought it might be necessary but if it’s not—’

‘It’s not,’ Jazz cut in combatively.

‘Then we can wave goodbye to that session,’ Vitale conceded mildly, watching her walk across his office to look out of the window. She was wearing that damnably ugly skirt and heels again, but had he been of a literary bent he could have written a poem along the lines of what that cheap fabric did to the curve of her little rounded bottom where he had had both hands clasped only hours earlier. It had felt every bit as good and femininely lush as it looked, he acknowledged, thoroughly unsettled by that thought and the pulse at his groin. The effect she had on his body was like a kind of madness, he decided then in consternation.

‘I have some questions about this bet and you may not think I’m entitled to answers,’ Jazz remarked stiffly. ‘Who are you planning to say I am at the ball?’

His winged ebony brows drew together in bewilderment. ‘What do you mean?’

Jazz threw her shoulders back. ‘Well, I assumed you’d be giving me a fake name.’

Vitale frowned, currently engaged in noticing how red and full her lips seemed, wondering if he had been rough because he had felt rough, drunk on lust and need, out of control. ‘Why would I give you a fake name?’

‘Because if I’m pictured with you anywhere the press might go digging and wouldn’t they just love pointing out that the Prince has a housekeeper’s daughter on his arm?’ Jazz extended stiffly, gooseflesh rising in the claustrophobic atmosphere and the intensity of his gaze.

‘So?’ Vitale prompted thickly, acknowledging that kissing her had been one of the most exhilarating encounters he had ever had and cringing at the awareness. He was an adult man with a great sex life, he reminded himself doggedly. As Angel would say, he really needed to get out more.

‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ Jazz asked in surprise.

‘No. Why would it? I’m not foisting a fake personality or some sort of scam on the public. This bet is for private consumption only,’ Vitale explained. ‘There’s nothing wrong with being a housekeeper’s daughter.’

‘No, there’s not,’ Jazz agreed with the glimmerings of her first real smile in his presence and the startling realisation that Vitale was not quite the snob she had believed he was. It was as if a giant defensive barrier inside her dropped and, disturbed by the discovery, she quickly turned to leave him alone again.

‘Jazz...once you get clothes delivered tomorrow we’ll be going out to dinner in the evening,’ Vitale informed her, startling her even more. ‘Your first public appearance.’

Dining out with Vitale, Jazz ruminated in wonder as she returned to her room, planning an evening composed of a long luxurious bath, washing her hair and watching something on TV.

CHAPTER FOUR

JAZZ COULDN’T SLEEP. Accustomed to a much more physically active existence, she wasn’t tired and at two in the morning she put the light back on and tried to read until hunger took over and consumed her. She knew she shouldn’t but she loved a slice of toast and a hot drink before bed and the longer she lay awake, the more all-consuming the craving became. Inevitably she got up, raising her brows at her appearance in the faded long tee shirt she wore to bed. No dressing gown, no slippers in her wardrobe but so what? If she was quiet she doubted if she would wake up the very correct Jenkins.

The stairs creaked and she didn’t like moving round in total darkness but a light could rouse someone likely to investigate. By touch she located the door at the back of the hall and through that a flight of stairs, which ran down into the basement area where she assumed the kitchen lay. Safely through that door, she put on lights and relaxed. The kitchen was as massive as a hotel kitchen and she padded about on the cold tiles, trying not to shiver. She located bread and the toaster and milk and then, wonder of wonders, some hot-chocolate powder to make her favourite night-time drink. Jazz was grateful she wasn’t like her aunt, who joked that she only had to look at a bar of chocolate to gain an inch on her hips.

Her toast ready, she sat down at the table to eat with appetite, eyes closing blissfully as she munched hot butter-laden toast, which was the first glimpse Vitale had of her as he strode barefoot through the door.

‘You can’t wander round here in the middle of the night!’ he began impatiently. ‘My security team wakened me.’

‘Your security... What?’ Jazz gasped, startled out of her life by the interruption and even more startled by the vision Vitale made bare-chested and barefoot, clad only in a pair of tight jeans. He was completely transformed by casual clothing, she conceded in awe.

Vitale groaned out loud. ‘The whole house is wired with very sensitive security equipment and I have a full team of bodyguards who monitor it.’

‘But I didn’t see anything and no alarm went off.’

‘It’s composed of invisible beams and it’s silent. As soon as the team established that it wasn’t an intrusion but a member of the household they contacted me, not wishing to frighten you.’

‘Well, I’m not frightened of you,’ she mumbled round a mouthful of toast that she was trying to masticate enough not to choke when she swallowed because, in reality, Vitale was delicious shorn of his shirt and her mouth had gone all dry.

He was a classic shape, all broad shoulders, rippling muscular torso sprinkled with dark curls of hair leading down into a vee at his hips and a flat, taut stomach. Clothed she could just about contrive to resist him, half-naked he was an intolerable lure to her eyes.

‘They saw you on camera, realised that you weren’t fully dressed and surmised that the sudden intrusion of a strange man could scare you.’

‘On camera?’ she repeated in horror, striving to recall if she had scratched or done anything inappropriate while she was in the kitchen, bracing her hands on the table top to rise to her feet and move away from it.

Vitale shifted lean dark hands upward in a soothing motion. ‘Relax, they’ve all been switched off. We’re not being monitored right now.’

‘Thank goodness for that,’ she framed tremulously, the perky tips of her nipples pushing against the tee shirt below Vitale’s riveted gaze. ‘I only got up to get something to eat.’

‘That’s perfectly all right,’ Vitale assured her thickly, inwardly speculating on whether she was wearing anything at all below the nightshirt or whatever it was. ‘But for the future, I’ll show you a button you can press just to let security know someone’s wandering around the house and this won’t happen again.’

‘OK,’ Jazz muttered, still shaken up at the idea that she had been watched without her knowledge by strange men.

Vitale ran a surprisingly gentle hand down the side of her downturned face. ‘It’s not a problem. You haven’t done anything wrong,’ he murmured sibilantly, his accent catching along the edges of his dark, deep, masculine voice.

A shocking flare of heat rose up from the heart of her as he touched her face and Jazz threw her head back in mortification, her green eyes wide with diluted pupils.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Vitale framed hoarsely. ‘You have the most beautiful eyes... You always did. And I didn’t intend to say that, don’t know which random brain cell it came from.’

An overpowering need to smile tilted Jazz’s tense lips because he sounded so stressed and so confounded by his own words. Beautiful eyes, well, that was something, her first and probably only ever compliment from Vitale, who worked so hard at keeping his distance. But he had touched her first, she reminded herself with faint pride in what felt vaguely like an achievement. Her body was taut as a bowstring and breathing was a major challenge as she looked up into dark, smouldering golden intensity. Ditto, beautiful eyes, she labelled, but she didn’t really think women were supposed to say things like that to men so she kept quiet out of fear that he would laugh.

‘Troppa fantasia... I have too much imagination,’ Vitale breathed, being steadily ripped in two by the conflicting impulses yanking at him. He knew he should let her go and return to bed but he didn’t want to. He was ridiculously fascinated that, even in the middle of the night and fresh from her bed with tousled hair, she looked fantastic. And so very different from the women he was used to, women who went to bed in make-up and rose before him to put on another face to greet the dawn, and his awakening, plastic perfect, contrived, artificial, everything that Jazz was not. Jazz was real right down to her little naturally pink toenails and that trait was incredibly attractive to him. With Jazz what you saw was literally what you got and there were no pitfalls of strategy or seduction lined up to trip him.

‘I would never have thought it,’ Jazz almost whispered, so painfully conscious of his proximity that the little hairs were rising on the back of her neck. ‘You’re a banker.’

‘And I can’t have an imagination too?’ Vitale inserted with a sudden flashing smile of amusement that would have knocked for six the senses of a stronger woman than Jazz.

‘It’s unexpected,’ she mumbled uncertainly, all of a quiver in receipt of that mesmerising, almost boyish grin. ‘You always seem so serious.’

‘I don’t feel serious around you,’ Vitale admitted, tiring of looking down at her and getting a crick in his neck. In a sudden movement that took her very much by surprise, he bent, closed his hands to her tiny waist and lifted her up. He settled her down on the end of the table. He was incredibly, ferociously aroused but Jazz seemed curiously unaware of the chemistry between them, almost innocent. No way could she be that innocent, he told himself urgently, because he would never touch an innocent woman and he desperately needed to touch her. His lovers were always experienced women, who knew the score.

‘But then you never know what you’re feeling,’ Jazz quipped. ‘You’re not into self-analysis.’

‘How do you know that?’ Vitale demanded with a frown.

‘I see it in you,’ Jazz told him casually.

Vitale didn’t like the conversation, didn’t want to talk either. He spread his hands to either side of her triangular face and he tasted that alluring pink mouth with unashamed passion.

Jazz was afraid her heart was about to leap right out of her chest, her breathlessness as physical as her inability to think that close to him. She felt nebulously guilty, as if on some level her brain was striving to warn her that she was doing something wrong, but she absolutely refused to listen to that message when excitement was rushing like fire through her nerve endings. Her nipples tightened, her slender thighs pushing firmly together on the embarrassing dampness gathering at the apex of her legs.

‘Per l’amor di Dio...’ Vitale swore, fighting for control because he was already aching. ‘What do you do to me?’

‘What do I do to you?’ Jazz whispered, full of curiosity.

She excited the hell out of him but he was too experienced to let that salient fact drop from his lips. ‘You tempt me beyond my control,’ Vitale heard himself admit regardless and was shocked by the reality.

‘That’s all right,’ Jazz breezed, one hand smoothing up over a high cheekbone, the roughness of his stubbled jaw lending a brooding darkness to his lean, strong face in the dimly lit kitchen, her other hand tracing an exploring path up over the sweep of his long, smooth back. ‘Are you sure those cameras are all off?’ she framed, peering anxiously round the brightly lit kitchen.

‘All of them,’ Vitale stressed, but he strode back to the door to douse the strong overhead illumination, plunging them into a much more welcoming and more intimate space only softly lit by the lights below the cupboards.

Her hand slid back to his spine. His skin was hot, faintly damp but it was his eyes she was watching and thinking about, those beautiful black-fringed eyes singing a clear song of stress and bewilderment and the glorious liberating message that he wasn’t any more in charge of what was happening between them than she was.

‘I want you, bellezza mia,’ he growled all soft and rough, sending shimmying awareness right down her taut spine just as he reached down and lifted her tee shirt and whipped it off over her head.

Jazz loosed a startled yelp and almost whipped her hands up to cover her naked body, but in that same split second of dismay she asked herself if she wanted to be a virgin for ever and if she would ever have the chance to have such a skilled lover, as Vitale was almost certain to be, again. And the answer to both questions was no. He wasn’t going to want a shy woman, was he? And he had to know all the right moves to ensure the experience was good for her, hadn’t he?

‘You are so beautiful,’ Vitale almost crooned, his hands rising to cup her delicate little breasts, which were topped with taut rosy tips that he stroked appreciatively with his thumb.

And that fast, Jazz had no desire to either cover up or breathe because the fabulous joy and satisfaction of being deemed beautiful by Vitale overwhelmed her. In gratitude, she stretched up to find his mouth again for herself, nibbling at his lower lip, circling slowly with newly discovered sensuality while all the time he was stroking and rolling and squeezing the peaks of her breasts that she had never known could be so responsive to a man’s touch. Little fiery arrows were travelling down to the heart of her, making her hips shift and squirm on the table as the heat and tightness increased there. And then, with what felt like very little warning to her, a climax shot through her like an electric charge, making her cry out in surprise and pleasure.

‘And as responsive as my most erotic dream,’ Vitale husked, wrenching at the zip of his jeans.

A lean brown hand pried her legs apart while she was still in a sort of blissful cocoon of reaction. Vitale pulled her closer and tipped her back to facilitate his intentions. A long finger traced her entrance and eased inside. He uttered a hungry groan of appreciation because she was very wet and tight and then he froze. ‘I’ll have to take you upstairs to get a condom,’ he bit out in frustration.

‘I’m on birth control,’ Jazz muttered helpfully. ‘But are you...safe?’

‘Yes because I’ve never had sex without a condom,’ Vitale confided, but the temptation to try it without that barrier was huge. He tried to argue with himself but, poised between her legs, craving the welcome her slender, lithe body offered his raging arousal, he realised it was a lost battle for him before it even started.

With strong hands he eased her closer still and she felt him, hard and demanding against her most tender flesh, and both nerves and eagerness assailed her. Her whole body came alive with electrified longing as if that first redemptive taste of pleasure had ignited an unquenchable fire of need inside her. He sank into her by easy degrees, groaning something out loud in Italian as she buried her face against a satin-smooth brown shoulder, barely crediting she was making love with Vitale, every sense she possessed rioting with sensation, the very smell and taste of his skin thrilling her.

And then he slammed right to the heart of her and a stinging pain made her grit her teeth and jerk in reaction. Withdrawing a little, Vitale paused for an instant, pushing up her face and looking down at her with what appeared to be brazen incredulity, and she knew then that at the very least he suspected he had been her first lover and he wasn’t pleased. But she ignored that unwelcome suspicion and wriggled her hips with feminine encouragement, watching him react and groan with a newly learned sense of empowerment.

‘Don’t stop,’ she told him.

And for the very first time ever, Vitale did exactly as she told him. He sank deeper again, stretching the tender walls of her heated core with hungry thoroughness and, that instant of pain forgotten, Jazz craved his contact. He gave her more, picking up speed, hard and fast until he was pounding into her and her excitement climbed with his every fluid, forceful thrust. It was much wilder and infinitely more uninhibited than she had dimly expected from a man as reserved as Vitale; indeed it was passionately explosive. She reached another climax and her body convulsed around his, the whole world, it seemed, erupting around her as he shot her into a deeply erotic and exhilarating release. A faint ache pulled at her as he withdrew and zipped his jeans.

‘Diavolo!’ Vitale exclaimed, stepping back from her while she fumbled for her tee shirt and hurriedly pulled it on over her head with hands that felt clumsy and unable to do her bidding. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were a virgin?’

Fixing her face to a determined blank, Jazz slid off the table, only just resisting a revealing moan as discomfort travelled through her lower body. ‘We’re not having a post-mortem,’ she parried sharply, mortification engulfing her in an unanticipated tide that threatened to drown her. ‘You’re not entitled to ask nosy questions.’

She had had sex on a kitchen table with Vitale and she couldn’t quite believe it but she certainly knew she didn’t intend to linger to discuss it!

For a split second of frustration, Vitale wanted to strangle her. Her hectically flushed face was mutinous and furious and she was pointedly avoiding looking at him, which annoyed the hell out of him even though he didn’t understand why. After all, he didn’t want a post-mortem either, didn’t have a clue why or how what they had just done had happened and could think of at least ten good reasons why it shouldn’t have happened.

He watched her limp across the tiled floor as if she had had a run-in with a bus instead of her first experience of sex and he felt hellishly guilty and responsible. He experienced a sudden, even more startling desire to scoop her up and sink her into a warm reviving bath...and then have sex with her again? As if that were likely to improve anything, he reflected sardonically, raking unsteady fingers through his tousled black hair. What the hell was wrong with him? His brain was all over the place and he couldn’t think straight but he knew he had just enjoyed the best sex of his life and that was downright terrifying...

* * *

Jazz had informed Vitale that there would be no post-mortem but, seated in a bath at three in the morning, Jazz was unhappily engaged in staging her own. Had she actually thought of what they had done as ‘making love’? Yes, she had and she was so ashamed of herself for that fanciful label because she really wasn’t that naïve. It had been sex, pure and simple, and she knew the difference because she wasn’t a dreamy teenager any longer, she was an adult. Or supposed to be, she thought with tears stinging the backs of her eyes and regret digging wires of steel through her shrinking body.

Of course, they would both pretend it hadn’t happened...a moment of madness, the mistake swiftly buried and forgotten. After all, this was Vitale she was dealing with and he wasn’t going to want to talk about it either. On that front, therefore, she was safe, she assured herself soothingly. It was his fault in any case—he had had no business parading around half-naked in jeans and tempting her into that insanity. She hugged her knees in the warm water and sighed. She had done a stupid, stupid thing and now she had to live with it and with Vitale for weeks and weeks, being all polite and standoffish, lest he think she was up for a repeat encounter. Running away or hiding wasn’t an option.

A knock sounded lightly on the door and she almost reared out of the bath in her horror because she abruptly appreciated that Vitale was not running true to form. In a blind panic she snatched at a towel and wrapped it round her, opening the door the merest chink to say discouragingly, ‘Yes?’

Vitale discovered that he was immediately possessed by an impossibly strong urge to smash the door down and he gritted his teeth on yet another unfamiliar prompting to act unreasonably and violently. ‘Will you please come out? You have been in there for ages.’

From that point he wasn’t the only individual valiantly gritting teeth. Her flushed face frozen as he had never seen it before, Jazz emerged from the bathroom, noting that he had put on a black shirt. ‘I didn’t know you were waiting,’ she said dulcetly, leaning heavily on her one and only elocution lesson.

‘Look, don’t go all girlie on me. I don’t expect that from you,’ Vitale countered crushingly. ‘I only want the answer to one question.’

Jazz tried to unfreeze a little and look normal, or as normal as she could feel being confronted by Vitale when she was wearing only a towel. ‘OK.’

‘Why is a virgin on birth control?’ he asked gravely.

‘I don’t really think that’s any of your business. It was for...well, medical reasons,’ she told him obliquely, unwilling to discuss her menstrual cycle with him, her colour heightening until she felt like a beetroot being roasted and wanted to slap him for it.

‘It will be very much my business if you get pregnant,’ Vitale breathed witheringly.

‘It’s so like you to look on the dark side and expect the very worst,’ Jazz replied equally witheringly. ‘It’s not going to happen, Vitale. Relax and go back to bed and please forget this ever happened for both our sakes.’

‘Is that what you want?’ Vitale wanted to rip off the towel and continue even though he knew she was in no condition to satisfy him again. It had nothing whatsoever to do with his brain. It was pretty much as if his body had developed an agenda all of its own and he couldn’t control it.

‘We just had a sleazy encounter on a kitchen table in the middle of the night. What do you think?’ Jazz enquired saccharine sweet.

Vitale was receiving a strong impression that anything he said would be taken down and held against him. Sleazy? That single descriptive word outraged him. He swung on his heel, his lean, powerful body taut, and left the room and just as quickly Jazz wanted to kick him for giving up on her so easily. Her thoughts were a turbulent sea of conflict and confusion and self-loathing, sending her seesawing from one extreme to the other. No sooner was he gone than she wanted him back and she flung off the towel and climbed into bed, hating herself. It was so typical of Vitale to worry about the fact that he hadn’t used contraception. Now he would be waiting on that axe to fall and that was a humiliating prospect, even though it also reminded her that she hadn’t yet taken her daily pill. She dug into her bag and took it before switching off the light.

What was done was done and it had been amazing, she thought ruefully, but it was better not to think about that imprudent sudden intimacy that had changed everything between them. Now she was no longer thinking about Vitale as the boy he had once been, but Vitale, very much a man in the present and that switch in outlook disturbed her, made her fear that somewhere deep down inside her there was still a tiny kernel of the fourteen-year-old who had believed the sun rose and set on Prince Vitale Castiglione...

CHAPTER FIVE

‘WOMEN MY AGE don’t wear clothes like this,’ Jazz was saying by late morning the next day, appalled by the vast collection of garments, all distinguished solely by their lack of personality. ‘I’m not your future wife or one of your relatives. I’m supposed to be only a girlfriend. Why would I be dressed like an older woman?’

‘I want you to be elegant,’ Vitale responded, unimpressed by her reasoning. He wanted every bit of her covered up. He didn’t want her showing off her shapely legs or her fabulous figure for other men to drool over. Recognising Angel’s appreciation of the beauty Jazz had become had been quite sufficient warning on that score. ‘I imagine you would prefer to show more flesh.’

That was the last straw for Jazz after a trying few hours of striving to behave normally when she did see Vitale between coaching sessions. Temper pushed up through her like lava seeking a crack to escape. ‘Where do you get all these prejudices about me from?’ she demanded hotly. ‘I don’t wear revealing clothes. I never have. And as you know I haven’t got much to reveal!’

‘You have more than enough for me, bellezza mia,’ Vitale breathed half under his breath, heat stirring at his groin as he thought about the delectable little swells he had explored the night before.

Jazz flinched and acted studiously deaf in receipt of that tactless reminder. He was no good at pretending, she recognised ruefully. ‘This stuff is all so bland,’ she complained instead, fingering a pair of tailored beige trousers with a curled lip. There was a lot of beige, a lot of navy and a lot of brown. He was even biased against bright colour. ‘If this is your taste, you certainly didn’t miss out on a chance of fame in the fashion industry.’

Vitale reached a decision and signalled the stylist waiting at the far end of the very large room. ‘Miss Dickens is in charge of the selections. By the sound of it, she will be ordering a more adventurous wardrobe,’ he declared, watching the slow smile that lit up Jazz’s piquant little face while smoothly congratulating himself on knowing when to ease up on exerting control. ‘But pick out something here to wear tonight.’

Jazz chose a fitted navy dress and shoes and lingerie as well as a bag.

‘Thanks!’ she called in Vitale’s wake as he left her alone with the stylist to share her own likes and dislikes.

His arrogant dark head turned in acknowledgement, brilliant dark-fringed eyes a fiery gold enticement, and desire punched her so hard in the chest that she paled, stricken that she could have made herself so vulnerable. Putting such pointless thoughts from her mind, she concentrated on choosing clothes and particularly on the necessary selection of a spectacular gown for the royal ball.

After asking for lunch to be served in her room she was free to go home and visit her family for a few hours, and it was a welcome break from the hothouse atmosphere of Vitale’s imposing London home. Her mother and her aunt were baking and Jazz sat down with a cup of tea and tried to feel normal again.

But she didn’t feel normal after she had put on the navy dress over the silk lingerie, her feet shod in hand-stitched leather sandals with smart heels. Although she had never bothered much with make-up she made a special effort with mascara and lipstick, knowing that that was one thing she did need that Vitale probably hadn’t thought about: make-up lessons.

‘No, I like you the way you are,’ Vitale asserted, startling her in the limo on the way out to dinner. ‘Natural, healthy. You have beautiful skin... Why cover it?’

Jazz shifted an uncertain shoulder. ‘Because it’s what women do... They make the most of themselves.’

Vitale studied her from his corner of the limo. She looked stunning, the dark dress throwing her amazing hair into prominence and emphasising her delicate figure and long slender legs. He willed his arousal to subside because he had made decisions earlier that day. He was going to step back, play safe, ensure that there was no more sex, no more blurring of the lines between them, but he only had to look at her to find his resolution wavering.

That had never happened to Vitale before with a woman. He had never succumbed to an infatuation, had always assumed that he simply wasn’t the emotional type. His affairs were always cool and sexual, nothing extra required or needed on either side. Naturally he had been warned since he was a teenager that he would, in all likelihood, have to marry for dynastic reasons rather than love and he had always guarded himself on the emotional front. What he felt for Jazz was desire, irresistible burning desire, and there was no great mystery about that when it was simply hormones, he told himself soothingly.

A current of discreetly turned heads and a low buzz of comment surrounded their passage to their table in the wildly exclusive restaurant where they were to dine. Vitale’s gaze glittered like black diamonds when he saw other men directing lustful looks at Jazz. For the moment, Jazz was his, absolutely his, whether he was having sex with her or otherwise, he reasoned stubbornly.

Jazz sat down, surveying the table to become belatedly grateful for Jenkins’s lesson in cutlery clarification. ‘So, tell me what you’ve been doing since you left school?’ she invited him cheerfully. ‘Apart from being a prince and all that.’

They talked about being students. Vitale admitted that banking had been the only viable option for him. He also told her that he had a house in Italy where he planned to take her before the ball.

‘For how long?’ she asked, her lovely face pensive in the candlelight, which picked up every fiery hue in her multi-shaded red mane of hair for his appreciation. ‘I like to see my mother regularly.’

‘A couple of weeks, no more. When this is over, after the ball—’ Vitale shifted a fluid, lean brown hand in emphasis ‘—I will pay for you to finish your degree so that you can work in your chosen field.’

‘That’s a very generous offer but you’re already covering quite enough in the financial line,’ she began in surprise and some embarrassment.

‘No. I tricked you,’ Vitale divulged, disconcerting her even more with that abrupt confession of wrongdoing. ‘My father is settling your mother’s loans. He wanted to. It makes him feel that he has helped her.’

‘You...tricked...me?’ Jazz gasped in disbelief that he could quietly admit that.

‘Being a bastard comes naturally. I needed you to accept the bet and I used your need for money to win your agreement,’ Vitale pointed out levelly. ‘I feel that I owe you that amount of honesty because you have been honest with me.’

‘So, you’re saying your father would always have helped?’ Jazz prodded in even greater surprise because she wasn’t, once she thought about it, that shocked to discover that Vitale could be extremely calculating and shrewd. She didn’t, however, feel that she was in a position to complain or protest because if he had used her to suit his own purposes, she was also most assuredly using him. Having already received a discreet cheque in payment for her supposed salary, she had given it in its entirety to her mother. No, she wasn’t proud that she had accepted money from a man she had also slept with, but she really could not bear to watch her mother scrimp and struggle. Being seriously poor had taught Jazz a lot of tough life lessons.

‘Papa feels very guilty about your mother. He was concerned that there was a possibility of domestic abuse in your parents’ marriage...’ Vitale volunteered very quietly after their plates had been cleared away.

Jazz turned sheet white and her fingers curled into the tablecloth, scrunching it. ‘There was,’ she conceded, thrown back in time to a period she rarely revisited. ‘My father was violent when life didn’t go his way and he took it out on us.’

Vitale was appalled and then shocked that he was appalled because he had heard of such situations, but then he had never personally known anyone who confessed to being a victim of domestic abuse. ‘You...as well as your mother?’

‘On several occasions when I tried to protect Mum. Poor Mum got the worst of it,’ Jazz conceded heavily. ‘Dad was hooked on online gambling and when he lost money he took it out on his family with his fists.’

A very real stab of anger coursed through Vitale at that news. He was remembering Jazz as a tiny child and a skinny teen and realising that she knew what it was to live in fear within a violent home where she should have been safe. His strong jawline was rigid. ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that experience.’

Jazz pursed her lips and sighed. ‘I think that was why Mum ran off with her second husband, Jeff. He was supposed to be her escape but he was more of a dead end. He wasn’t violent, just dishonest. But you know, the older I get, the more I realise that many people have had bad experiences when they were young,’ she told him in an upbeat tone. ‘It doesn’t have to define you and it doesn’t have to hold you back and make you distrust everyone you meet. You can move beyond it. I know I have.’

Vitale stretched out a hand and squeezed hers to make her release the tablecloth and she laughed and let go of it when she appreciated what she had been doing, her lack of self-pity and her strength delighting him.

‘I have the mother from hell,’ he confessed unexpectedly. ‘Controlling, domineering, very nasty. If she has a heart, I’ve never seen it. All she cares about is the Lerovian throne and all the pomp and ceremony that go with it.’

Jazz smiled, pleased that he trusted her enough to admit that. ‘You’re very lucky to have such a pleasant father, then,’ she pointed out.

‘Sì...’ Vitale confirmed, startled that he had spoken ill of his mother for the first time ever and quite unable to explain where those disloyal words had come from. There was something odd about Jazz that provoked him into acting against his own nature, he decided darkly. Maybe it was simply the fact that she was so relaxed in his company that she broke through his reserve. Was that why he was acting out of character?

As for the problem that was his mother, he had only told the truth, he reasoned ruefully. Sofia Castiglione was feared even by the royal household. It was not disloyalty to tell the truth, he acknowledged then, while marvelling that in admitting that salient fact to Jazz he felt some of his tension drop away.

Outside the restaurant, the limousine awaited them, two security guards forcing a man with a camera to back off. The flash of a photo being taken momentarily blinded her as Vitale guided her at speed back into the limo.

‘Who is she?’ another voice shouted.

‘Who am I?’ she teased Vitale with amusement as she settled back into her seat.

‘A mystery redhead. I will not give out your name. I have no intention of doing the work of the paparazzi for them,’ Vitale supplied, his attention locked to her small, vivid face, so pale against the backdrop of that mass of vibrant hair, fine freckles scattered across her diminutive nose. Hands off, he reminded himself doggedly even as he ached.

‘Do you want a drink?’ he enquired as they entered the house.

‘No, thanks. I’m sort of tired,’ she admitted, because she had had little sleep the night before, but she was not about to allude to that reality when Vitale was behaving like a perfect gentleman who had never once touched her. ‘Goodnight.’ She kicked off her shoes inside her room, feeling oddly lonely, and wriggled down the zip on her dress to peel it off and hang it up with the care demanded by a superior garment. She stripped and freshened up before reaching for the silky robe she had taken from the clothes selection earlier that day and that was when someone rapped on the door and it opened almost simultaneously.

Vitale strode in, leant back against the door to close it again and said thickly, ‘I don’t want to say goodnight...’

Surprised in the act of frantically tying the sash on her robe closed, Jazz literally stopped breathing. Smouldering dark golden eyes assailed hers in an almost physical assault and her heart started banging inside her chest like a drum. ‘But we—’

‘We are both single, free to do whatever we like,’ Vitale incised, suppressing every thought he had had, every decision he had made only hours earlier in favour of surrendering to the hunger that had flamed up inside him the instant she’d tried to walk away from him.

Air bubbled back into her lungs and she snatched in a sudden deep breath. ‘But,’ she started afresh, inexplicably feeling that she had to be the voice of reason.

Vitale prowled forward with the grace of a jungle cat. ‘Is there anyone else in your life?’

‘Of course not. If there had been, last night wouldn’t have happened,’ she protested.

‘Then I don’t see a problem, bellezza mia,’ Vitale proclaimed in a roughened undertone as he teased loose the knot in the sash in a very slow way. ‘Let’s keep it simple.’

Simple? But it wasn’t simple, she wanted to scream while knowing that he was taking his time with the sash to give her the opportunity to say no if she wanted to. But she didn’t want to say no, didn’t want him to leave her again and that disturbing awareness shook her up. Her heart was thumping so hard she could’ve been in the last stage of running a marathon and all she could see was Vitale ahead of her, those scorching dark golden eyes with a black fringe of gold-tipped lush lashes that a supermodel would have envied. Somehow, he was her finishing line and she couldn’t fight that, didn’t have that amount of resistance when he was right there in front of her, wanting her, needing her, Jazmine Dickens, against all the odds...

He eased the robe off her slight shoulders and let it drop and when her hands whipped up to cover herself, he groaned and forestalled her, trapping her small hands in his. ‘I want to see you, all of you.’

Her hands fell away, green eyes wide with uncertainty, and he lifted her up, threw back the covers on the bed and laid her down.

‘You’re wearing too many clothes,’ she told him shakily.

Vitale dealt her a slanting grin that lit up his lean, darkly handsome features like the sunrise. He undressed with almost military precision, stowing cuff links by the bed, stacking his suit on a chair, peeling off snug black briefs that could barely contain his urgent arousal. A slow burn ignited in her pelvis, her nipples tinging into tight buds, a melting sensation warming between her thighs.

It was only sex, she bargained fiercely with the troubled thoughts she was refusing to acknowledge, only sex and lots of people had sex simply for fun. She could be the same, she swore to herself, she would not make the mistake of believing that what they had was anything more serious than a casual affair. That was what Vitale had meant when he said, ‘Let’s keep it simple...’

He joined her on the bed, all hair-roughened brown skin and rippling muscle, so wonderfully, fundamentally different from hers, the sexual allure of his body calling to her as much as her body seemed to call to him. He kissed her and the fireworks started inside her, heat and longing rising exponentially with every searing dip of his tongue inside the moist interior of her mouth.

Her entire body felt sensitised, on an edge of unbearable anticipation.

‘I want to show you the way it should have been last night,’ Vitale husked. ‘Last night was rough and ready.’

‘But it worked,’ she mumbled unevenly, running a forefinger along the wide sensual line of his lips, revelling in the freedom to do so.

‘You deserve more,’ Vitale insisted, bending his arrogant dark head to catch a swollen pink nipple in his mouth and tease it. ‘Much more...’

And much more was very much what she got as Vitale worked a purposeful passage down over her slender length, pausing in places she hadn’t even known had nerve endings and dallying there until she was writhing in abandonment, before finally settling between her spread thighs and addressing his attention to the most sensitive place of all.

Self-consciousness was drowned by excitement, sheer physical excitement that she could not restrain. He used his mouth on her, circling, flicking, working her body as though it were an instrument and her pleasure grew by tormentingly sweet degrees until the tightness banding her pelvis became a formless, overwhelming need she could no longer withstand. When he traced the entrance to her lush opening, her spine arched and she cried out as a drowning flood of pleasure surged through her slight body and left her limp.

‘Much better,’ Vitale pronounced hoarsely, staring down at her enraptured expression with satisfaction. ‘That’s how it should have been the first time and if you’d warned me—’

‘You probably wouldn’t have continued,’ Jazz interrupted, tying him back down to earth again with that frank assessment.

‘You don’t know that,’ Vitale argued fierily, pushing back her slim thighs and sliding between them, the urgency in his lean, strong body unashamed.

Jazz looked up at him, wondering how she knew it, but know it she did even though it wasn’t very diplomatic to drop it on him like that when he was so hopeless at grasping the way his own mind worked. ‘I suspected it,’ she admitted.

‘Nothing short of an earthquake would have stopped me last night!’ Vitale swore vehemently, finally surging into her moist, tender sheath with a bone-deep groan of appreciation. ‘You feel glorious, bellezza mia...’

And the powerful surge of his thick, rigid length into her sensitive core felt equally glorious to Jazz, stretching the inner walls, filling her tight. Her eyes closed and her head rolled back on the pillow as she let the pulsing pleasure consume her. Ripples of delight quivered through her and she arched up her hips, helpless in the grip of her need. Nothing had ever felt so right or so necessary to her. He ground his body into hers and she saw stars behind her lowered eyelids. She began to move against him, hot and frenzied as he slammed into her, primal excitement seizing her with his heart thundering over hers. And then she reached a ravishing peak and rhythmic convulsions clenched her womb as he shuddered over her with an uninhibited shout of satisfaction. A rush of sensation washed her away in the aftermath of lingering pleasure.

‘It’s amazing with you,’ Vitale gritted breathlessly, releasing her from his weight.

Jazz stretched out her arms and tried to snatch him back. ‘Don’t move away.’

‘I’m not into hugging.’

‘Tough,’ Jazz told him, snuggling up to him regardless. ‘I need hugs.’

Vitale’s big body literally froze, tested out of his comfort zone.

‘It’s called compromise and we are all capable of it,’ Jazz muttered drowsily against his chest, one arm anchoring round him like an imprisoning chain. ‘I’m not telling you I love you because I don’t. I’m just fond of you, so don’t make a fuss about nothing.’

In a quandary, Vitale, who had been planning to return to his own room, lay staring up at the ceiling. He had to stretch away from her to switch off the light, but she hooked him back with the efficiency of a retriever picking up game even though from the sound of her even breathing he knew she was definitely asleep.

She was so blunt, he reflected helplessly, wondering if he should simply push her away to make it back to his own bed. He was relieved that she had no evident illusions about their relationship and wasn’t thinking along the lines of love because he didn’t want to hurt her. Seducing a virgin was a dangerous game, he acknowledged, wondering why she had still been untouched, wondering why he was even interested because his interest in his lovers was usually very superficial. He didn’t quite know how he had ended up having sex with her again and wondered if it mattered. He decided it didn’t and if he slept with her, he could have her again in the morning, so staying put made very good sense...

* * *

‘Could we just rough it for a night?’ Jazz asked hopefully a week later.

Vitale frowned. ‘Rough it?’

‘Instead of going to some very fancy restaurant, we could go to a supper club I know that does ethnic dishes. It’s cheap but the food’s great.’ Studying his unenthusiastic expression, Jazz grimaced. ‘Vitale, just for once can we go off the official map?’

‘I don’t follow an official map,’ Vitale argued, meeting hopeful eyes and simply wanting to see the liveliness return to her lovely face, which was telegraphing her conviction that he would refuse her suggestion. ‘All right, just this once but if either of us get food poisoning, you’re dead!’

‘We’re not going to get food poisoning,’ she assured him with a confident grin.

They ate a delicious and surprisingly elaborate five-course meal in a private city garden and Vitale drank out of a bottle without complaint and watched Jazz sparkle across the table. He was more relaxed than he could ever remember being with a woman. She had so much verve and personality he couldn’t take his eyes off her and the awareness that he was taking her home to bed gave him a supreme high of satisfaction.

A week later she dragged him out to the flower market on Columbia Road and he took a photograph of her, her slender figure almost lost in the giant armful of flowers he had bought her. They walked along the South Bank and he watched street performers entertain for the first time ever, laughing when she called him a stuffed shirt for admitting that.

‘You can’t always have been so sensible, so careful about everything you do and say,’ she remarked with a frown.

‘I learned to consider everything I did and said when I was very young,’ Vitale confided. ‘As a child, I was always trying to please my mother but eventually I gave up. I don’t think she much likes children...or maybe it was only me.’

Jazz was shocked. ‘You don’t think she liked you even as a child?’

Vitale frowned. ‘If being a queen hadn’t demanded that she produce an heir I don’t think she would ever have had children. I was a typical little boy—noisy, dirty and always asking inconvenient questions. She often cut short the time she was supposed to spend with me because I irritated her.’

‘But you were only being a normal kid,’ Jazz contended feelingly, catching his taut fingers in hers to squeeze them and gazing up at his shadowed features. ‘That wasn’t about you, it was about her and her flaws, not yours. Obviously she didn’t enjoy being a mother but that wasn’t your problem and you shouldn’t let it make you feel guilty or responsible. You’re an adult now and you don’t need her the same way.’

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