A Sicilian Seduction

If anyone could look at her and even vaguely suggest that she was asking for the kind of looks Signor Cardinale had treated her to yesterday, she would call them liars! But she was not seeing that all she had done with her severe cover-up was incite the imagination to wonder what was being hidden…

Which was exactly what Giancarlo began thinking about from the moment she stepped into his office. Natalia’s hair glistened like polished copper, her skin sheened like a pearl. Her body moved with the sensual grace of a born siren—and her eyes would be cutting him into two pieces if he were made of glass.

The woman was not of this world, he grimly decided. She was all fire and ice and dangerous witchery. She filled him with the primitive urge to go over there, pull her into his arms and kiss her senseless.

And she knew it. Look at her! he growled to himself. Standing there with her chin up, just daring him to try it!

‘We are changing location,’ he announced right off the top of his head and with no idea of what he was talking about. All he knew was that he wanted her out of this place before she found a way to get her sticky fingers into Edward’s safe. It had almost ruined his day to come in here this morning and find that she had got here before him. He seemed to have misplaced the piece of paper with the combination number that Edward had given him, and six long weeks of wondering when she was going to grab enough time away from him unseen to crack the darn safe were more than he was prepared to cope with. Though he was going to have his work cut out trying to come up with a valid excuse for making such an impulsive announcement, he admitted.

Still, it had been

worth it just to see that cold, haughty expression she was wearing this morning collapse into a flurry of confusion.

‘What?’ she choked out as if he’d spoken in a strange language.

If he could have any wish granted right now, it would be to have that sensational gasping mouth fixed permanently to his own hungry mouth.

‘I have decided I cannot work here,’ he continued, thinking on his feet and glad he was good at it. ‘It is too complicated trying to run this company as well as my own from here. You saw yourself how much time I spent on the telephone yesterday when I should have been devoting my energies to what is wrong right here.’

Wrong right here… Natalia stared at the hand he was using to punctuate the point with long fingertips stabbing into Edward’s desk, and felt a horrid little flutter of alarm slither down her backbone. ‘Wha-what’s wrong here?’ she stammered out warily.

‘Everything,’ he replied. And she wasn’t even wearing any lipstick, he noted. Did she know he couldn’t stand the taste of lipstick? ‘Even the little information I gleaned from the files yesterday was enough to tell me that this place is in deep trouble.’ She blinked, and he grimaced because that part at least was the ugly truth. ‘The premises may have been thoroughly modernised but its business practices are positively archaic, so I am about to do something about it.’

‘But—you can’t do that!’ she protested. ‘It isn’t your place to mess with Edward’s business!’

‘I can do anything I want, Miss Deyton,’ he corrected her with a haughty incision. ‘I own controlling stock here, in case you have forgotten. When I injected a large amount of cash into this place last year, Edward’s brief was to completely modernise. He seems to have gone as far as refurbishing the premises—and no damned farther.’

‘His son died…’

‘I am aware of that,’ Giancarlo clipped out. He felt his face harden when he recalled where Edward’s energies had gone to salve his grief for his dead son, when they could have been salved by continuing the job he had begun right here, where it mattered. But he hadn’t done that, and everything at Knight’s had simply stagnated while Edward indulged himself in a bit of womanly comfort.

This woman’s womanly comforts. Fire flared up from his heart, diverted to his eyes and spat sparks out over Natalia Deyton. ‘Grief is no excuse for tardy business practices,’ he proclaimed with what even he knew was a gross lack of sympathy.

‘So what is it you intend to do?’ she asked in a tone meant to slay him for his insensitivity.

‘Bring in my team of experts,’ he said, glancing down at his watch and wondering if he could pull this off in the time space he was gunning for. ‘They will arrive late this afternoon and set up a six-week re-educating programme that will haul the staff here into this century. Howard Fiske already knows about it,’ he added with what he now saw as a clever bit of unwitting pre-planning. ‘He is, as we speak, flying to my head office in Milan, to begin his own re-education on how I expect my executives to conduct themselves.’

‘I thought you were Sicilian,’ Natalia murmured, so out of context in his point of view that it stopped his train of thought completely.

‘What has that got to do with anything?’ he demanded.

‘You said Milan,’ she explained with a shrug meant to convey mild indifference. But in truth even she didn’t understand why she said such a stupid thing. ‘I just presumed you lived and worked in Sicily. Edward said…’

She faded out, seeing by his sudden narrowing expression that he didn’t like what was being said here.

‘Edward said—what?’ he prompted grittily.

Another shrug and she was beginning to feel just a little hunted. ‘I only remember him remarking once, about your home in—in Trápani, I think he said,’ she answered warily. ‘He m-made it sound very—beautiful.’

If she’d been looking for a diversion with that last remark, she didn’t achieve it. ‘Quite cosy little chats you two must have indulged in to reach the point where they included me,’ he remarked. ‘Maybe we should sit down and compare notes some time. See if his references to you were as—interesting…’

His tone was cold, and she’d gone quite pale. But the very thought of her having this kind of conversation about him with Edward set his teeth on edge…

Natalia, on the other hand, was kicking herself for starting this at all. She knew his comment about comparing notes was merely his way of getting back at her, because Edward would never have discussed her with Giancarlo. Not during this lifetime anyway.

But she was genuinely regretful for invading what Giancarlo clearly saw as his privacy. And despite knowing she should leave it alone, the words of explanation came anyway. ‘Edward was missing his son,’ she gently explained. ‘He seemed to need to talk about him so I let him. Your home in Sicily came up because I gained the impression that Marco used to spend a great deal of his time there with you. So it was perhaps natural for Edward to refer to that.’

He had stopped looking at her, his eyes becoming hidden beneath the long sweep of his lashes. Anxious because she was concerned that she’d only managed to upset him further, she took an impulsive couple of steps closer to the desk behind which he was standing. ‘Please don’t think he discussed you personally, because he didn’t,’ she assured.