The Italian's Inexperienced Mistress

Angelo heard her sob and he sprang out of bed. Outrage powering him, he pulled on his boxers. So, let her cry, get it out of her system. She was overwrought.

He always gave women in tears the widest possible berth. I don’t even like you! ‘Gwenna…’ Angelo reached the bathroom door without having taken a conscious decision to move in that direction and knocked once. ‘Open this door.’ Her eyes wet, Gwenna sucked in a ragged breath and turned on the bath taps to drown him out. Womanising louse, all sweet-talk one moment, ice-cold, heartless and utterly immoral the next. How could she have just sleepwalked into becoming the mistress of such a man? Angelo rapped on the door again. ‘I want to know you’re okay. And I want to know right now .’ Blocking him out because she had absolutely nothing left to say to him, Gwenna slid into the warm bathwater. The hint of an intimate ache between her thighs made her pale and, reaching hurriedly for the soap, she washed with helpless urgency. Tears inched down her quivering cheeks and she dashed them away with a furious hand. Why was she crying? She never, ever cried! Angelo tried the handle one more time and then pulled on his clothes in haste.

He kicked the door at the weakest point beneath the lock and it burst open, slamming back against the wall. She was in the bath, drenched blue eyes enormous with fright, honey-blonde waves of hair cloaking her and trailing in the water.

‘I’m sorry if I scared you but you should have unlocked the door,’ Angelo murmured with measured quietness. ‘I was concerned.’ Trembling, Gwenna stared at him, absorbing the sight of his shirt hanging loose, disclosing a muscular wedge of bronzed hair-roughened chest. Shock was rippling through her. He had called her bluff. He had kicked in the door. She couldn’t believe he had done that. She tipped up her chin to snatch a glance at his lean strong face and then hurriedly jerked her head away, out of breath and more tense than ever.

Angelo crouched down by the side of the bath. ‘Look at me…’ ‘Do you have to be so intimidating?’ she muttered tautly, sitting knees to chin in the water, naked and cornered.

‘I’m trying bloody hard not to be!’ Angelo flared back at her. ‘Stop cringing…you don’t have to be afraid of me.’ Gwenna dropped her head. How could she not be afraid? ‘I would never harm you.’ Gwenna thought about the kind of harm that had a more lasting effect than mere bruises.

Frustration was roaring through Angelo. She wasn’t listening to him. She often gave him the impression that she was only giving him part of her attention. Not in bed though, he reminded himself with grim satisfaction. But the rest of the time? Either he got the feeling she was holding back or she was lost in her own little world and he didn’t like either sensation. ‘I want to understand why you

blew up over the watch.’ Gwenna studied the clear water lapping round her legs and compressed her full ripe mouth. ‘Dad was always giving stuff like that to my mother.’ His brows pleated. ‘So? He was her husband.’ Gwenna was surprised enough to look up again. She had forgotten that he had moved down to her level and she collided unwarily with lustrous dark eyes the colour of autumn. A very dangerous man with strikingly beautiful eyes that made her heartbeat race. She shut her eyes tight in self-reproach. What was the matter with her? ‘Gwenna,’ Angelo chided huskily. ‘I thought women loved to talk about themselves. What’s wrong with you?’  ‘My father wasn’t married to my mother,’ she admitted flatly.

Angelo frowned. ‘I don’t follow.’ Gwenna reddened. ‘Mum had an on-off affair with Dad that dragged on for years and years. He was married to his first wife then.’ ‘I wasn’t aware that your father had been married twice.’ ‘Yeah, well, why would you be?’ Gwenna was mortified by the need to explain the unpalatable facts. ‘When Mum fell pregnant with me she thought he would leave his wife, who couldn’t have children. But he didn’t. Sometimes we didn’t see Dad for months on end and then he’d come visiting with extravagant pressies. My mother liked things like that…I don’t.’ ‘But your father must’ve raised you…you have his name,’ Angelo pointed out flatly.

‘Mum died when I was eight and I went to live with Dad and he adopted me. His first wife wasn’t happy about that and they divorced.’ ‘I had no idea.’ Angelo was furious that the confidential report he had had done on Hamilton had omitted such highly relevant details. He was astonished by the reality that her mother appeared to have been yet another one of the older man’s sadly deluded female victims. But no sooner had that angle occurred to Angelo than he reminded himself that she wasstill Donald Hamilton’s only child with the taint of his blood in her veins.