Wife By Contract, Mistress By Demand

Prologue

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

Gabriella raised long, sooty lashes to reveal eyes of so deep a blue they appeared violet, to look across the terrace at Rufus, the man she had fallen in love with a year ago when her mother had married his father, the man her eighteen-year-old heart desperately hoped would fall in love with her, too!

She had heard his hire-car arrive on the gravelled drive at the front of the Gresham family villa in Majorca. She forced down her nervousness and remained stretched out on her lounger soaking up the sun, rather than running to greet him as she wanted to do. Rufus, she had quickly learnt, was not a man that you ran after, but instead waited for him to come to you—even if he was the love of your life and just looking at him made your knees tremble with longing!

He stood in the doorway that led out onto the terrace, having removed the jacket to his light business suit in the intense heat of the early afternoon. His overlong hair was the colour of molasses, glinting golden in the sun, and his eyes—a piercing pale green, Gabriella knew—were hidden behind the black sunglasses he wore.

But his question, and that disapproving slant to his chiselled lips, were enough to tell her that he wasn’t at all pleased at finding her sunbathing alone on the terrace, in a bikini comprised of small scraps of orange material.

Deliberately so. Rufus had a habit of either treating her as an irritating child, or of totally ignoring her altogether. But she so much wanted him to recognize her as a desirable woman.

‘I’m working on my tan, Rufus, what does it look like I’m doing?’ She smiled, at the same time stretching languorously, arching the slenderness of her back, the movement forcing forward the fullness of her breasts, her nipples visibly aroused in her nervousness through the bikini’s orange fabric.

‘I can see that, damn it,’ she bit back scathingly. ‘For goodness’ sake put some clothes on, will you?’ he snapped as he stepped outside onto the terrace.

‘I’m topping up my tan, silly,’ she said poutingly. ‘And why should I bother putting clothes on when there’s no one around to see me but you?’ she added with tentative provocation.

It was one thing wanting Rufus to see her as a desirable woman, something else entirely actually maintaining this provocative pose!

The Gresham family villa, ‘Bougainvillea’, was perched alone on the side of the mountain overlooking the terraced village below, with a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the Mediterranean.

Why bother, indeed? Rufus acknowledged impatiently, grateful for the black shield of his sunglasses that hid his emotions as his gaze swept slowly over Gabriella’s lithely perfect body, already tanned to a golden brown and glistening invitingly from the oil she had smoothed over her torso, arms and those long, long legs.

It was a beautifully slender body, without blemish, that only the very young possessed, and that would be hard for any man to resist.

And Rufus had had plenty of practice at doing exactly that since Gabriella had burst into his life a year ago, making no effort to hide her infatuated interest in him.

An interest, at thirty years of age, he’d had no intention of satisfying!

Or, at least, he hadn’t had any intention of satisfying until he’d walked out onto the terrace a few minutes ago and seen her lying there…

‘Anyone could have walked out here and—’

‘“Anyone” didn’t, you did,’ she reasoned cajolingly. ‘Besides, the women on the village beach won’t be wearing any more than this.’ She frowned.

The village beach, Rufus knew from past experience, would be full of families at this time of day, most of the women wearing bikinis, some even topless, yes—but they weren’t alone with the man they had been shamelessly infatuated with for the last year!

‘Where are your parents?’ he demanded harshly.

A little desperately, he acknowledged with inward self-impatience. At least the presence of his father and Gabriella’s mother, his stepmother, would alleviate this situation. Even if he still found Heather’s role as his stepmother almost as irritating as having this gloriously beautiful creature as his stepsister.

He was only here at all because he had stopped off to visit his father for a couple of days on his way back from a business trip to mainland Spain.

‘James wanted to go into Palma some time today to buy my mother something wildly extravagant for their anniversary, but they should be back in a couple of hours.’ Gabriella sat forward slightly, her violet-coloured eyes smokily inviting now as she looked up at him. ‘They waited in for you this morning, but when you didn’t arrive they checked with the airline and were told that your flight had been delayed for three hours. It’s Margarita’s afternoon off, too.’ She shrugged bare, glistening shoulders. ‘So I said I would stay here and wait for you.’

Damn, damn, damn. Not even the Gresham Majorcan cook and housekeeper was here to act as chaperone!

‘Don’t look so disapproving, Rufus.’ Gabriella looked a little uncertain as she obviously sensed his displeasure. ‘Or is it just that you’re feeling a little hot and dusty from travelling?’ she considered concernedly. ‘Why don’t you go for a swim?’ she suggested with that naturally husky voice that alone could send a shiver of awareness down Rufus’s spine.

Gabriella Maria Lucia Benito.

Daughter of Heather and the deceased Antonio Benito.

Apart from that deep violet of her eyes, Gabriella had inherited all of her colouring from her Italian father, her hair a glorious swathe of tumbling black curls that fell femininely down the long length of her spine, her skin naturally olive in complexion, but tanned a sleek mahogany from the weeks she had already spent at the villa.

But as far as Rufus was concerned, her mother, who had been living in rented accommodation with her young daughter and had had to work as James’s secretary in order to support them both, had only married his father because he was a millionaire many times over and the owner of the prestigious Gresham’s, a London-based store that had a worldwide reputation for exclusivity.

Heather’s daughter, the beautifully stunning, exotically sensual Gabriella, as far as Rufus was concerned, had just as calculatingly decided that he, James’s only son and heir, would make an equally suitable husband for her!

There was only one problem with that line of thinking—Rufus had little intention of ever marrying again. He had tried that once, only to discover that Angela was solely interested in the Gresham money, too, walking out after only a year of marriage, and leaving their two-month-old daughter behind when she did.

Their divorce, six months later, had been messy and very public, resulting in Rufus giving Angela half his vast personal fortune in order to maintain custody of the baby daughter he knew Angela had no interest in anyway.

And into that maelstrom had walked Gabriella Maria Lucia Benito, when his widowed father, obviously having learnt nothing at all from Rufus’s experience, had announced in the same breath that he intended both retiring as Chairman of Gresham’s, in favour of Rufus, and marrying the attractive fifty-year-old widow who had been his secretary—his secretary, for heaven’s sake; how clichéd was that?—for the last year, bringing with her a seventeen-year-old daughter from her previous marriage.

Tall, with a natural grace of movement, Gabriella, in her fitted tee shirts and tight, tight jeans, had taken one look at Rufus, it seemed, and thereafter done everything in her youthful power to tempt him into acknowledging her as a woman every time he visited his father at Gresham House in Surrey, her hungry violet gaze seeming to follow him everywhere.

But Rufus’s own experience with Angela—even if he ever did contemplate getting married again, which was highly unlikely, to give his now two-year-old daughter a mother—meant that Gabriella Maria Lucia Benito, no matter how alluring, would be the very last girl he would choose. One grasping gold-digger in the family—her mother!—was quite enough, thank you.

But, he decided with another sweeping glance at Gabriella she was without doubt a beautiful girl.

‘I think I might just take a dip in the pool,’ he murmured throatily, starting to unbutton his shirt. ‘The parents will be gone another couple of hours, you said…?’

‘Yes,’ Gabriella confirmed huskily, watching covertly as he stripped the shirt from his darkly tanned and muscled torso before unbuckling the belt on his trousers, unzipping them to drop them down onto the terrace exposing long and powerful legs.

The black fitted boxers he wore made more than adequate swimming trunks. But she blushed as she took in the dark hair on his chest, that moved down in a vee before thickening again, and her eyes widened as she saw the evidence of his arousal.

Rufus wanted her!

Gabriella swallowed hard, slightly breathless as her gaze returned to the hard, uncompromising planes of his face, those pale green eyes still hidden behind the dark glasses.

Dropping down onto the side of her lounger, the touch of his thigh searing hers, Rufus drawled, ‘Would you rub some oil on my back for me?’

Her hands shook slightly as she tipped some of the oil into her palms before moving to touch the broad width of his shoulders, loving the way his muscles tensed and flexed as she smoothed the oil into his skin, fingers softly kneading as she moved down the length of his spine.