The Italian's Token Wife

He felt a kick in his stomach. Her mouth simply made him want to slide his hand beneath that fall of hair and bring his own mouth down…

‘You like?’

It was Olivia’s deliberately arch, openly teasing voice that brought him back. But only momentarily. His eyes slid back to the woman he hardly recognised, moving from her face to drink in the rest of her. She was as slender from the front as the back—not scrawny. Dio, how could he have thought her scrawny? She was like a willow, pliant and graceful. The simple, superbly cut line of her shift delineated each breast, not full, but high and softly rounded…

He could not take his eyes off her.

And she was staring back at him. Staring with that same expression of stunned disbelief as his. He wondered why. Then he stopped wondering and went back to working his eyes down her slender body, right down her gazelle-like legs and then back up to her face again.

Absently he felt a slight kiss brush against his cheek, heard a soft, ‘Ciao, Rafaello—enjoy…’ as Olivia slipped past him, but he paid no attention.

‘Magda?’ His voice husked, as if it were not working quite properly.

She bit her lip, and with that familiar gesture he suddenly accepted that this really, truly was the poor dab of a creature he’d so arrogantly made use of for his own self-obsessed ends and treated with total indifference as a god-sent tool, ideal for his single purpose—to confound his father.

Emotions warred within him. Some familiar, some completely new. Up to now, the best emotion he’d been able to come up with for her had been pity—a sort of careless, almost contemptuous pity for so unlovely and wretched a member of her sex. Pity shot with guilt that he’d exposed her to the vituperation of his father, his lashing out at her, forcing a knowledge upon her that had been vicious in its cruelty.

He had never meant her to realise why he had chosen her. Never meant her to have that cruel truth thrown at her.

The twist in his guts came again.

You thought that you could just pay her, and she’d put up and shut up.

Well, he knew better now. His father had held a mirror up to him, and the sight had not been pleasant. Hearing his own litany of condemnation echoed by his father had made him realise, horribly, for the first time, just how callous he had been.

But he intended to make it up to her. To prove his father wrong. To prove himself wrong!

And, Dio, how he was being proved wrong!

The emotions battled inside him. The guilt was becoming familiar now, but the second was completely new—and blew him away.

It was desire.

Magda was reeling. Reeling and whirling in a kind of white-out blur of emotions which were swirling inside her head so tempestuously she could scarce make sense of them. She caught at one, the easiest one to catch, and knew that it was shock, sheer shock and disbelief, that Rafaello di Viscenti—beautiful, arrogant, breathtakingly gorgeous Rafaello di Viscenti, who was as far removed from her as if he were one of the gods of old—was looking her over as if she were…as if she were a woman—a real, flesh-and-blood female with face and hair and breasts and limbs—all the accoutrements of a woman. A woman worthy of looking over.

It was as if she’d just snapped into existence for him. As if before, as she had known with a shame that only a plain, undesirable female could know, she had simply not existed as a female to him at all. All she had been to him was something it would not occur to him to look at, and when he had he’d left her feeling that she was covered in slime. Repulsive to him.

But now—now it was as if someone had truly sprinkled fairy dust over her and brought her to radiant life in his eyes. She was there, in front of him—a living, breathing woman. And he was looking her over. Very, very thoroughly.

And that lit the fuse for the second emotion that was sending her reeling. The impact of being inspected, head to toe, by Rafaello di Viscenti, as a fully paid-up member of the female sex worthy of his attention was just devastating—like being caught in a beam of high-power light that licked like flame all over her.

The moment seemed to go on for ever and ever, and then dimly Magda became aware that someone was standing beside them, deferentially proffering two large leather-bound menus. The man murmured something and Rafaello dragged his eyes from Magda and took the menus, replying distractedly.

‘What would you like to eat?’

There still seemed to be a husk in his voice that Magda had never heard before, and it served to send a little tingle up her spine. But then her whole body was tingling.

And not just because she’d been caught in Rafaello di Viscenti’s devastating eyeline. The three hours she’d spent in Olivia’s clutches had been the most extraordinarily terrifying and exhilarating experience. She had simply yielded to the other woman’s smiling enthusiasm and let herself be stripped naked, hair unpinned, inspected, tut-tutted over, before being worked on in a major, major way.