‘You have got me if you want me’.
CHAPTER THREE
WITHIN minutes, Lydia’s phone rang.
’Lia…’ Cristiano murmured softly, sounding out and savouring every syllable.
‘It’s Lydia’.
Lia was the name the modelling agency insisted I use, and I never liked it’ she told him flatly, while her heart beat very fast somewhere in the region of her throat. ‘I need you to pay back the money quickly, so that the charity will withdraw their charges. Can you do that’?’
‘lt’s not a problem. Are the police behind your sudden change of heart’?’ Does it matter’?’ No. Winning is all,’ Cristiano conceded without hesitation. |But we can’t reach agreement before we’ve ironed out the finer details.’
Blinking back the hot tears of humiliation washing her eyes, Lydia clutched the phone as though she was hanging off the edge of acuity. That’s not what you said earlier todayl’ ‘You should have been more receptive. The necessary formalities can be dealt with tomorrow. You’ll have to come to London.’
‘What formalities? Now you’re making all sorts of conditions’ she condemned, threading shaking fingers through the hair tumbling over her damp brow. What on earth did he mean by forrmalities’? ‘Yes ‘ But it’s not necessary. You can trust me,’ she framed between clenched teeth, frightened that if he did not speedily repay the stolen money her mother would be tracked down and arrested.
At the other end of the phone, a sardonic smile of disbelief slowly curved Cristiano’s mouth. She was priceless! This was the woman who, while staying below his roof as his latest squeeze, had eloped with another man. This was also the woman who stood accused of defrauding a charity of almost a quarter of a million pounds. Furthermore, loath as he was to recall the fact for he was famous for his astute intelligence when he had first known her he had actually been very impressed by that sweet-little-country-girl act of hers.
She had been a natural at pretending to be what she was not. lf he’d been a tree-hugging, weepy type of guy he would have got all choked up when she walked barefoot through the grass in his roof garden and confided that every day she was in the city she pined for the countryside. She was a real box of tricks, Cristiano reflected grimly.
‘I’ll arrange for you to be picked up and flown to London early tomorrow. Pack light. I’ll be buying you new clothes. And lock up well and say your goodbyes to all,’ Cristiano advised in the same even tone. ‘lf we achieve agreement, you won’t be returning for some time.’
Bright blue eyes wide, Lydia shook her head. ‘Whatever happens, l have to come back here. l rent this place.
‘11 need to sort that out, organise storage ‘ ‘my staff will take care of the boring stuff for you.’
‘But l have relatives here…and if l’m going away, l want to see them before l leave.’
‘l‘11 give you one week after tomorrow, and that’s it.’
Lydia sucked in a sustaining breath. The entire dialogue felt unreal to her. lf she told him how much she hated him he would naturally want to know why. After all, on the face of it, she had walked out on him for another man. As far as Cristiano was concerned she had no particular reason to dislike him. He, on the other hand, would feel he had ample justification for despising her.
‘l can’t believe that this is what you want…you have to hate me,’ Lydia reasoned tautly.
‘How l feel is my business.’
His cool intonation made Lydia feel as cold as though a chip of ice had lodged in her tummy. She shivered in her damp clothes. He wanted revenge. What else could he want’? When she had walked out of his superb country house with Mort Stevens, she had quite deliberately set out to make a fool of him. Now it seemed payback time had arrived.
At seven the next morning she was collected and driven to a private airfield several mites outside town. There she boarded a helicopter with the blue and gold logo of the Andreotti empire. A couple of hours later, she was being escorted from the helipad located on the roof of a contemporary glass and steel oft-ice block in London and ushered straight into a large empty office on its top floor. She smoothed down a ruck in the sleeve of the tatted blackjacked she had teamed with a white T-shirt and a braided skirt.
‘ Andreotti is in a meeting,’ she was informed by a clean-cut young man in a business suit.
When his PA slipped back in with a shaken nod of confirmation, and rather pink about the ears, Cristiano knew Lydia had arrived and was exercising her usual stunning effect on the male sex. He was very busy. She would have to wait. Of course, she was only on time because he had had charge of her travelling arrangements, he mused, recalling how her unpunctuality had once infuriated him. He did not like to be kept waiting. Even on their first dinner date she had made a late showing. On arrival, however, she had electrified the restaurant with her beauty, approaching him with a wide, engaging smile of apology in a manner that had magically dispelled his exasperation.
In the act of listening to his whiz-kid executives trade facts and figures with a speed and precision which had never before failed to hold the attention of his mathematical mind, Cristiano found himself wondering what Lydia would be wearing. A split second later he sprang upright, called a break, and strode out of the boardroom into the adjoining office.
Sunlight glistening over her silvery fair hair, which she had contained with a clip, Lydia turned from the window that stretched the entire length of one wall. Her face, with its wide cheekbones and ripe pink mouth, was dominated by eyes as bright a blue as a cloudless sky. She focused on Cristiano’s sudden entry, her heart thudding like crazy.
Her tension rose as though a pressure gauge had been turned up too high. Beneath the current of apprehension lurked an edge of excitement that shocked her. When she had been seeing him, she had often found her responses to him so strong they scared her, and the reminder of that reality was unwelcome.
Sheathed in a stylish business suit that outlined his broad shoulders, narrow hips and long, lean legs in the finest mohair and silk blend wool, Cristiano looked spectacular. He was fantastically handsome, always superbly dressed and immaculate, always intimidating. His dark eyes glinted gold in the bright light. He really did have the most beautiful eyes, she acknowledged grudgingly, and a tiny pulse began to flicker below her collarbone.
The silence pounded and she couldn’t bear it. Tossing back her head, so that a few silver-gilt strands of hair fell free of the clip, she lifted her chin. “So here l am …as ordered.’
‘Yes,’ Cristiano rasped softly. ‘it feels good to have you here.’
She had hoped to discomfit him with her comment, but he betrayed no unease whatsoever. Indeed, something in his rich, dark intonation sent the blood climbing below her fair skin. She had the horrendous suspicion that he was enjoying the situation. Furthermore, he was watching her with the incisive attention of a hunting hawk. When that narrowed golden gaze travelled over her, she was suddenly disturbingly aware of every pulse point in her body.
Cupped in a cotton bra, her breasts stirred beneath her T-shirt, the tender peaks swelling.
‘l can’t believe you really mean to go through with thisl’ she told him breathlessly.
A sinfully attractive smile slashed his well-shaped masculine mouth. ‘Every time l look at you l know 1‘11 be going to go through with it.’
‘But it doesn’t make sense ‘ ‘Makes perfect sense to me, della mien’ Cristiano confided. ‘l want you ‘ ‘But l don’t want you, or this, and l can’t pretend otherwise! ‘ she blistered back at him.
His shimmering gaze intent, Cristiano strolled closer.
‘lf l believed that, you wouldn’t be here.’
‘believe it’ she snapped, infuriated by the way she tripped over the word, standing her ground with difficulty, for her every defence mechanism was trying to drive her into retreat.
‘Since I’m the only rescue option you’ve got, shouldn’t you be trying to persuade me that you’re exactly what 1 want and need’?’ He was
so glaringly right on that score that she was seized by a combustible mix of fear and annoyance. He was her only hope. Suppose he took offence? Suppose he changed his mind? Where would her mother be then?
‘Lydia…’
‘What…?’
Cristiano was so close that she could have stretched out an arm and touched him, so close that she was alarmingly conscious of his sheer height and breadth. Her concentration was gone. There was the faintest tang of some exotic masculine cologne in the air and her heart was beating so fast she could hardly breathe.
Cristiano caught her to him with strong hands and drew her unresisting body into his arms. ‘This is why you’re being rescued” he intoned huskily.
The most delicious tension tautened her every muscle.
She knew it was wicked, but when she studied his lean, darkly handsome face, something wild leapt through her and made nonsense of her resistance. He curved long brown fingers to her cheekbone and let his hungry mouth taste her with a sweet, savouring sensuality that tantalized her. The hand at her hip pressed her into the hard, muscular embrace of his powerful masculine frame, and she gasped beneath the probing exploration of his tongue. A dam of hot dark pleasure overflowed and roared through her in response.
Suddenly her legs were like jelly and her breathing was rapid, and she was hanging on to him to stay upright.
Cristiano lifted her off her feet and brought her down on top of his desk. He meshed long fingers into the tumbling hair he had already released to tip her head back and allow him access to her throat. He covered her lowered eyelids, her cheeks, with tiny teasing kisses that made her want to curve round him like a sinuous cat, begging for more.
He let his teeth graze her neck and he tasted her smooth white skin with lips and tongue, lingering in sensitive places, forcing a driven moan from her. Bending her back with astonishing ease over his arm, he pushed the T-shirt out of his path and glided his fingers up over her taut and quivering ribcage to curve his hand to a tiny pouting white breast. Her spine arched and she jerked as if she had been electrified.
The brush of his thumb over the swollen and sensitive tip was a source of seething pleasure. The sound of her own choked cry of response catapulted her back to renewed awareness of her surroundings.
‘For goodness’ sake…,!’ she gasped, pulling away and throwing herself off the desk in such a panic that she over-balanced and went down on her knees on the carpet. He stretched down a hand to help her rise again, but she scrambled up under her own steam and backed away fast. She was in as much shock as if she had been in an accident and her body felt heavy and clumsy and achingly disappointed.
‘Per meraviglia’…you could have broken your ankle.’
Cristiano surveyed her with shouldering intensity and a frown of reproof.
Lydia was all the more shaken by the subtle shift in his manner. Al1 of a sudden his tone was more intimate, possessive. He had kissed her and touched her, and she had encouraged him, and now he was telling her off.
Cristiano elevated a dark brow. ‘Why are you so skittish’? What’s the deal’? If the nervous virgin act is supposed to be sexy, it’s not working, so you can drop it’. ‘No, I am not putting on an act’. Shame and mortification blazed through her slender length like a burning flame.