Jess's Promise

‘I’m afraid that I don’t know anything about that and nor, unfortunately, does my father. His only function that evening was handing over his key card and the codes for the alarm.’

‘Which makes him as guilty as any man who conspires with thieves and provides them with the means of entry to private property,’ Cesario pronounced without hesitation.

‘He honestly didn’t know that anything was going to be stolen! He’s an honest man, not a thief.’

‘An honest man would not have allowed the men you described into my home to do as they liked,’ Cesario derided. ‘Why did you make this approach to me? What response did you expect from me?’

‘I hoped that you would accept that Dad was entirely innocent of the knowledge that a crime was being planned.’

His sardonic mouth curled. ‘I have only your word for that. After all, there was a robbery and it would not have happened had your father proved worthy of the responsibility he’d been given.’

‘Look, please listen to me,’ she urged with passionate vehemence, her pale grey eyes insistent. ‘He’s not a bad man, he’s not dishonest either, and he’s devastated by the loss that his foolishness caused you—’

‘Foolishness is far too kind a description of what I regard as a gross betrayal of trust,’ Cesario interrupted in flat dismissal of her argument and the terms she used. ‘I ask you again: what did you hope to achieve by coming to see me like this?’

Jess settled deeply troubled eyes on him. ‘I wanted to be sure you heard the full facts of the case a

s they happened.’

Regarding her with hard cynical eyes, Cesario loosed a harsh laugh. ‘And exactly what were you hoping to gain from this meeting? A full pardon for your father just because I find you attractive? Is that what this encounter is all about?’

Her oval face flamed as though he had slapped her, colour running like a live flame below her skin as he made that statement. It had not even crossed her mind that, with the very many options he had, he might still find her attractive. ‘Of course, it’s not—’

Cesario’s handsome mouth curled with scornful disbelief at that claim. ‘Maiala della miseria…at least tell it like it is! While I may lust after your shapely little body, I don’t do it to the extent that I would forgive a crime against me or write off a painting worth more than half a million pounds. You would need to be offering me a great deal more in reparation.’

Jess was gazing back at him in shock, her soft pink lower lip protruding. ‘What sort of a man are you? I wasn’t offering you sex!’ She gasped in horror as she grasped the portent of his words. ‘Of course, I wasn’t!’

‘That’s good, because in spite of the scurrilous rumours the British tabloids like to print about me I don’t pay for sexual favours or associate with the kind of woman who puts a price on her body,’ Cesario declared with an outrageous cool that mocked her seething embarrassment.

‘I really wasn’t offering you sex,’ Jess muttered in repeated rebuttal, shattered by that demeaning suggestion.

A well-shaped ebony brow lifted above heavily lashed dark-as-night eyes that remained resolutely unimpressed. ‘So, I was just supposed to let your father off the hook for nothing? Does that strike you as a likely deal in such a serious situation?’

‘Deal? What deal? You’re talking like my cousins now. You have a sordid mind,’ Jess condemned chokily, her mortification extreme as she snatched up her jacket and began to fight her way into its all-concealing folds. The remainder of her speech emerged in breathless spurts of smarting pride and resentment. ‘For your information, I don’t sleep around and sex isn’t something I would treat like a currency or…or a takeaway meal. In fact…’

Unexpectedly amused by her bristling, blushing fury and the discovery that she was much more of a prude than he had had previous cause to suspect, Cesario was striving not to picture her creamy, curvy little body writhing in ecstasy on his silk sheets because he was well aware that that was most probably a fantasy designed to go unfulfilled. ‘I’m delighted to hear it.’

‘I’m a virgin!’ That admission just leapt off Jess’s heated tongue and she froze, appalled that she had let that little-known fact slip. ‘Not that that has any relevance when I wasn’t offering you sex anyway,’ she continued, striving to bury her too intimate confession in a concealing flood of words. ‘But I admit that I would have offered you virtually anything else to get my father off the hook. I am desperate…’

She lifted her dark head to find Cesario staring back at her with raw incredulity. ‘A virgin—you can’t be at your age!’

Jess dug hands clenched into fists deep into her pockets and tilted up her chin in defiance of his disbelieving scrutiny. ‘I’m not ashamed of it. Why would I be? I didn’t meet the right person, it just never happened, and I can live with that.’

But Cesario was not sure he could live with the new and tantalising knowledge that she had given him. Suddenly he believed he had finally discovered the source of her discomfort in his radius. Naturally he had assumed she was much more experienced with men and he had treated her accordingly that one evening they had shared. He had probably come on too strong, frightened her off…or very probably his notorious reputation with her sex had done it for him, he reflected in sudden exasperation. Jessica Martin was untouched and, although he had never had a virgin in his bed before, he knew there and then that he would still very much like to be the male who introduced her to that essential missing element in her life. Feeling the taut, charged heaviness of sexual response at his groin in answer to that beckoning tide of erotic imagery, he suppressed a curse and straightened, willing his too enthusiastic body back under firm control again.

‘Look, there must be something I can say to you…something I can do to change your mind about Dad’s role in this horrible business,’ Jess reasoned frantically, literally feeling him disengage from her in the remote set of his shielded eyes and the harsh lines of his lean bronzed features. She was on the edge of panicking. He had asked her what she expected from him and she honestly didn’t know. He had not responded with the understanding that she had hoped to ignite with her explanation about her mother’s illness and her father’s deeply troubled state of mind. He had not responded in the slightest: it had been like crashing into a stone wall at a hundred miles an hour. She had crashed and burned, her persuasive abilities clearly not up to so steep a challenge.

Tears had pooled in her eyes and turned them to liquid silver. Cesario was not a man who responded to tears, but he was unprepared for that feminine softness in her. He had always viewed her as a tough little cookie, assured as she was working in what was so often a man’s field, confidently handling his most temperamental stallions while freezing out his every attempt to get closer to her. Yet seeing those tears he still bit back cutting words.

‘Promise you’ll think over what I’ve told you,’ she urged him in desperation. ‘My father is a decent man and he’s made a really appalling mistake that you have suffered for. I’m not trying to minimise the loss and distress that you have undergone, but please don’t wreck his life over it.’

‘I don’t let wrongdoers go unpunished. I’m much more in the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth category,’ Cesario delivered, wondering why she was persisting when he had given her so little encouragement. Had she gone on his reputation alone, she would have been expecting him to build a gallows for her father out on the front lawn to stage a public execution. A hard-hitting businessman, he had never had a name for compassion.

‘Please…’ Jess repeated doggedly, standing by the door as he stopped her advance with one assured hand and reached in front of her to open the door for her with the easy display of effortless courtesy that came so naturally to him. Of course, such smooth civility was totally unfamiliar to her. Her brothers would have broken their necks to get through the door ahead of her and her father had never been taught any such refinements.

‘I’m not going to change my mind, but I won’t call in the police to tell them what you’ve told me until tomorrow morning,’ Cesario intoned, questioning why he was even willing to cede that breathing space.

From the front hall he watched her drive off in her noisy ancient four-wheel drive. There must be…something I can do to change your mind…I’m desperate…I would have offered you virtually anything else to get my father off the hook. And finally he thought about the only thing he really wanted that he couldn’t buy and he wondered if he was crazy to even consider her in that light. Was there even enough time left in which he might fulfil that ambition?