Thinking she was in some impossibly realistic nightmare, Kelda didn’t bother about proudly holding her ground. She jack-knifed back against the carved wooden headboard and simply gaped at the virile vision of masculinity her crazy mind had conjured up out of thin air. He looked good even in a nightmare, but for some reason he was dressed for riding. Long black boots, thigh-hugging breeches of positively indecently faithful fit and a black cotton sweater that lent him a devilish aspect. He wasn’t real...he absolutely wasn’t real, and if she shut her eyes again he would go away. She did so.
‘Clearly you don’t quite function at the speed of light when you wake up alone,’ Angelo drawled in a tone that sent hideously responsive tremors down her rigid spine. ‘I can change that. And from where I’m standing I’m very well satisfied. You look really hot mistress material. I thought you might look a little worn at this hour without the cosmetic tricks of the trade, cara...’
Kelda’s long lashes swept up like fans. She swallowed hard.
Angelo was leaning in a very familiar way on the footboard, lustrous golden eyes wandering intently over every exposed inch of flesh above the sheet. ‘All those lovers...all those different beds,’ he extended. ‘I was expecting to be just a tiny bit disappointed... but I’m not. You look all dewy and untouched...Madre di Dio, how do you do it? Not, you’ll understand, that I am about to complain.’
Angelo...hot mistress material. Neither subject dovetailed. ‘What are you d-doing in my hotel room?’ she suddenly found the voice to demand explosively. ‘How did you know that I would be here?’
‘Ah, she speaks...shame,’ Angelo sighed with mock regret. ‘Now where do I start? This is not a hotel. It’s a private house. It belongs to me. I came upon it three years ago when I was investing in Max’s villa development. It was going to rack and ruin then but it was so totally private, I had to have it—’
‘Your house?’ Kelda repeated incredulously. ‘This is your house? What the hell am I staying here for?’
‘I brought you here,’ Angelo said softly. ‘It was astonishingly easy. Max St Saviour is a business acquaintance. He’s very happily married and prone to romantic delusions. I had no problem persuading him to approach the Donaldson Agency on my behalf. He thought he was playing Cupid. Did you like the touch about the reduced fee? Now Max didn’t like that bit but I felt it added a dash of authenticity...’
A slow, deep flush of almost uncontrollable rage was reddening Kelda’s complexion. She couldn’t even begin to believe what she was hearing, but there was something frighteningly sincere about the hard dark onslaught of Angelo’s gaze. ‘Are you telling me that there is no assignment...I don’t believe you!’ she snapped.
‘Max couldn’t afford you,’ Angelo said with dulcet emphasis. ‘But I can, and I don’t need to know one end of a camera from another to know exactly what to do with you.’
Kelda’s head was swimming with a mess of utterly bewildered thoughts. There was no assignment? Then why bring her here? Why would Angelo lure her to Tuscany? Why was Angelo surveying her as if she was a cream cake and he was starving for a bite to eat? Angelo had never looked at her like that before...and all the double entendres...what on earth was going on? Had Angelo gone insane? This was not Angelo as she knew him. This was another Angelo entirely.
‘You really are the most spectacularly beautiful creature,’ Angelo murmured in a thickened undertone. ‘And if you stay in that bed much longer, I’m likely to join you.’
Kelda wrenched the sheet so high it came adrift from the foot of the mattress and exposed her bare feet, but she didn’t notice. She couldn’t take her eyes off Angelo’s darkly handsome features. ‘W-what are you talking about?’ she demanded in a near shriek. ‘Have you gone crazy?’
Angelo winced at the ear-splitting decibels. ‘I wish I had volume control on your voice.’
‘Y-you brought me here...all the way to Italy for an assignment that doesn’t exist,’ she recounted, spitting out each work with clarity. ‘What I want to know is why?’
‘I have this feeling that our mutual parents will get on much more happily with you out of the way,’ Angelo drawled. ‘I could quite happily have knocked you on the head and dragged you out of your apartment by the hair forty-eight hours ago. But that would have been foolish. And, cara, I am very rarely foolish—’
‘You are right out of your tiny mind!’ she launched at him in seething bewilderment.
‘No. If you had simply disappeared, questions would have been asked,’ he pointed out speciously. ‘This way you’re here on a perfectly respectable alibi—’
‘But I won’t be here for long! And you’re going to pay for this!’ Kelda spat.
‘I have your passport, your money and your credit cards...not much use, those, are they?’ Angelo remarked silkily. ‘You’re right up to your limit on all of them.’
‘You have my passport...how do you know I’m up to my limit?’ she suddenly heard herself demanding.
‘I am completely conversant with your financial status,’ Angelo admitted unashamedly. ‘And I have to say, in my capacity as a banker, how did you get yourself in such a mess? You are in debt to the tune of thousands!’
Abruptly she turned her head away, utterly humiliated that Angelo of all people should know such things. She had been foolish with her money when she’d first started earning. But when Daisy had divorced Tomaso and had, inconceivably, refused to accept any alimony from him, Kelda had been determined to buy her mother a decent home to live in again.
She had bought Daisy a lovely little cottage not too far from London. It had not come cheap. She had sent her mother off on holiday several times. She had settled her brother’s debts times without number, bought expensive presents for her family and friends. Her apartment had been the only major item she had ever bought for herself. It had never occurred to her that the gravy-train of her high income could come to a sudden frightening halt. But it had and she just hadn’t been prepared for it.
‘You really do need a rich patron, who can settle your debts and pick up the tab for your expensive tastes...someone who would never question the bills,’ Angelo murmured with the soft, smooth delivery of a devil’s advocate. ‘I’m very generous with my lovers...I’ve never had a mistress before...you see, strange as it may seem to you cara...I’ve never had to buy a woman before. But the more I look at you in that bed and contemplate total possession and title, the more I see your investment potential...’
A steel band of tension was throbbing unbearably round her temples and it tightened another painful notch every time Angelo spoke. Perhaps she was very, very stupid but she just couldn’t grasp why Angelo was behaving the way he was. ‘I don’t kn-know you like this,’ she confided without meaning to.
Angelo vented a grim laugh that ironically made her feel much more at home with him. ‘How could you? Much has changed over the past six years
. Does it surprise you to learn that I deeply resented being forced to take responsibility for you when you became my stepsister?’
‘Nobody asked you to take responsibility for me!’ Kelda slung at him.
Angelo dealt her an assessing glance. ‘But there was nobody else to do it. Our parents were abroad so much. And I know for a fact that my father was more than happy to leave you to me,’ he continued drily. ‘Daisy was such an adoring mother that he didn’t want to get into trouble with her for disciplining you. And he would have done, make no mistake. Daisy’s very protective of you. So I got landed with the job nobody else would touch!’