A Tainted Beauty

Lily stared into his dark eyes. His soft words were like fingertips whispering erotically over her skin. She should say no. Of course she should—because he was making her want to do things she didn’t want to think about. Things she’d forgotten about. Or, rather, the person she’d forgotten about. The woman she’d been before her fiancé had dumped her. He made her want to wear silk stockings and tiny little scraps of barely there underwear. He made her want to feel his fingers tracking their way over her body and splaying against the cool flesh of her thigh. He made her feel things she’d forgotten she was capable of feeling—like pleasure and desire and a pure, raw yearning. And he might as well have had the word ‘danger’ stamped across his forehead in big red letters. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

Ciro smiled. He loved her hesitation. Loved it. ‘Please.’

‘And I’m just wondering,’ she said slowly, ‘why a cosmopolitan and obviously successful businessman like you is buying a big house in the middle of the English countryside.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘How would I know, when it seems that I’m the last to know anything?’

There was a pause. ‘I’m planning to turn it into a hotel.’

Lily’s eyes widened. A hotel? ‘You’re going to turn the Grange into a hotel?’ she breathed in horror.

‘It will be a beautiful and tasteful hotel,’ he defended. ‘My hotels always are. Ask around if you don’t believe me.’

But taste was subjective, wasn’t it? Lily imagined the bedrooms turned from their faded familiarity into places with horrible swagged four-poster beds. She thought of corporate beige carpeting and those over-the-top hotel displays of flowers, which always made her think of funeral parlours. ‘And that’s supposed to reassure me?’

He felt like telling her that it was not her place to be reassured, yet he wanted her so much that he was prepared to overlook her impertinence. ‘If it means that you’ll have dinner with me, then, yes—be reassured. Come on, Lily. Just one evening. One dinner. What are you so frightened of?’

She wondered what he’d say if she answered ‘everything’. If she told him that the whole world looked a terrifying place just now. That she was worrying about her brother’s future. About how the two of them were going to adjust to living in that tiny apartment.

But hot on the trail of her fears came the realisation that she was becoming a bit of a hermit. She tried to remember the last time she’d been tempted to go out for dinner with a man. Her broken relationship with Tom had damaged her, yes—but wasn’t she in danger of letting the damage deepen if she locked herself away, like some medieval woman in a tower? When had she last done something really reckless, just for the hell of it? Why shouldn’t she spend the evening with Ciro D’Angelo—unless she really thought herself so spineless that she’d be unable to resist falling into bed with him?

‘I don’t want a late night,’ she warned.

Ciro smiled as a feeling of triumph spread through his veins. ‘What’s your number?’

‘407649,’ she said, noticing that he didn’t bother writing it down as he took a card from his pocket and handed it to her.

‘I’ll call you,’ he said.

A figure appeared at the window—a middle-aged woman carrying jars of jam—and Ciro automatically got up to hold the door open for her, noticing her curious glance as she passed. Stepping outside into the sunlit day, his senses began to fizz with excitement. Because for a moment back then, he’d thought that Lily Scott was going to refuse to have dinner with him. A moment when he had tasted the unfamiliar flavour of uncertainty.

Yet wasn’t this the way things were supposed to be, before emancipation had made women almost laughably easy? Before they’d mistakenly thought that behaving as predatorily as men was somehow a good thing. Men used to have to work at getting a woman into bed—this was just the first time in his life that it had ever happened to him.

He shot a last glance towards the tearoom, where he could see Lily’s pink-covered curves in all their splendour and he could feel the powerful arrowing of lust. Was she aware that she had hooked him with a hunger which was tearing at his groin? His mouth flattened with a look which anyone who knew him would have recognised instantly. It was a look which preceded getting exactly what he wanted.

Because no matter how much she tried to resist him, Lily Scott would soon be in his bed.

She was, after all, only human.

CHAPTER FOUR

IT HAD been a stupid thing to agree to and Lily wondered what on earth had got into her. She should pick up the phone and tell Ciro D’Angelo she’d changed her mind. That she hadn’t been thinking straight when she’d agreed to have dinner with him. But what could she possibly say to back that up, which wouldn’t have her sounding like some kind of wimp?

I’m sorry, Ciro—but you make me feel all the things I’ve vowed never to feel again. You make me ache with longing when I look at you—and I don’t do that stuff. Not any more.

But then it passed beyond the time when she could reasonably cancel—especially as her stepmother had come up to her room and started bombarding her with furious but unanswerable questions about why Ciro D’Angelo had asked her out in the first place.

After she’d managed to get rid of her, Lily grabbed a quick shower—only just emerging dripping into a towel, when her brother rang from boarding school. Jonny loved the Grange even more than she did but he spent the entire conversation reassuring her that the new flat was going to be absolutely fine and that she wasn’t to worry about a thing. She realised that at sixteen he was in for something of a shock when he saw their new home for himself. Yet there had been something about his determined bravery which had made her mouth wobble and she’d had to try very hard not to cry. He’d had so much to cope with in his short life, she thought fiercely—and this was just one more thing.

By the time she put down the phone it was getting on for eight and there wasn’t time for much more than a lick of lipstick, or to pile the damp strands of her hair on top of her head in a rapid up-do. She hesitated over what to wear but ended up wriggling into a dress which was always guaranteed to lift her mood, no matter what. She’d made it herself from a vintage pattern in the feminine design of the fifties—the only style which seemed to suit her curvy figure. It was deep-blue and fitted, the sweetheart neckline a little on the low side, but the ankle brushing hemline made the dress feel relatively demure. And that was important on this particular night. She had no intention of giving out the wrong kind of message to Ciro D’Angelo. Of making him think that she would just fall into his arms as she was certain that every other woman did.

Hearing the sound of his car roaring down the drive soon after eight, Lily picked up her handbag, aware of the simmering waves of anger emanating from her stepmother who was standing by the front door like a guard-dog.

‘Do you know what kind of man he is?’ Suzy demanded.

‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me,’ said Lily flatly.