by Lynne Graham
Well, she still wasn’t looking to impress him, he acknowledged grimly. Shopping, while being a pastime guaranteed to thrill most women, with Maya was like taking a robot out. She behaved as if she had resolved to do whatever it took to satisfy him while remaining determined not to take the smallest ounce of personal enjoyment out of the experience. Her vital spark was missing and it annoyed him. It hugely annoyed him. He might have told her that they needed to work on their confrontational vibe but, in truth, he enjoyed that vibe. No woman had ever come back at him as Maya did, refusing to please, refusing to accept her place, refusing to flatter his ego.
‘You look good,’ he told her almost fiercely.
Maya stepped daintily off the dais in the flamboyantly high heels he had insisted on. ‘Well, you can tell what sort of women you’re used to,’ she commented half under her breath.
‘Educate me,’ Raffaele urged.
‘Isn’t it obvious? A skirt too short and tight to sit down in comfortably? Shoes I have to totter in? A top that bares far too much flesh?’
‘You’re not endowed enough in that sector to be showing too much flesh,’ Raffaele riposted.
Maya hitched a naked little shoulder. ‘So sorry if I am a disappointment in any department,’ she murmured with a tiny poisonous smile.
‘Sadly for you,’ Raffaele retorted deadpan, resting a big bronzed hand possessively on a slim shoulder, ‘you are exactly what I like most.’
‘Cheap looking,’ Maya said, tossing him a mutinous glance.
And disturbingly, Raffaele laughed with rich appreciation and resisted the urge to ask the designer hovering for an opinion because she wasn’t likely to diss her own designs. He did not go for cheap-looking women...did he? Certainly, nobody could have accused him of going for unadventurous types, he conceded. Possibly he had always instinctively sought out the wilder, freer women, least likely to seek anything other than a bout of exciting sex from him.
No, Maya didn’t fit the mould, but if he toned himself down a little and she relaxed a little, they could meet somewhere in the middle, couldn’t they? Madonna mia... Thunderstruck at the sudden realisation that he was toying with the idea of changing his behaviour to please a woman, Raffaele froze in fleeting consternation. No, that was the wrong reading of the situation, he reasoned speedily. He might never have been in a relationship before, but he was required to make that effort with Maya to attain his ultimate goal. He was engaged in an act of persuasion aimed at coaxing Maya into accepting the necessary status quo. Sì, that sounded much more like him...calculating and logical.
He took her to a private members’ club for dinner. She walked like a queen through the public dining room into the private room he had engaged. A momentary hush fell on their entry. Every eye was on her as diners greeted him with nods and waves, but she looked at no one, little chin held high, clear green eyes blank. He had seen models on catwalks with more expression. It foiled him: he couldn’t tell what she was thinking, and why was that annoying too?
Her slender neck looked bare: she needed jewellery. He recalled his mother’s vast cache of jewels stowed in a bank vault since her death and he thought, why not let Maya wear them? They were unlikely to be worn again in his lifetime because he didn’t ever see himself taking a wife for real. Maya wouldn’t be able to keep the jewellery, of course. He would get that written into the pre-nup already being drawn up for them. He stabbed a button on his phone, speaking to his Italian lawyer as they were ushered to their table.
Maya collapsed down with relief into a chair, flexing her crushed toes in the new shoes, wondering if she dared to slip them off, would she ever get them on again to walk out? Going out with Raffaele was an educational experience, she mused dizzily. People dropped everything to attend to his needs. He had walked into a beauty salon with a busy waiting area and she had been led straight to a stylist. In the same manner, the designer had abandoned someone else to deal with her needs exclusively.
Raffaele was richer than rich, and businesspeople knew it and fawned on him, granting his every demand without protest or delay. No doubt he paid in spades for that kind of service but being in the presence of the power that extreme wealth gave him over others was shocking in its own way, and had taught Maya why he hadn’t expected her to argue with anything. He was much more accustomed to those slavishly eager to please, ready to roll over and perform obediently at his first request.
‘How do you know so much about me and my family?’ Maya enquired over the first course.
‘Aldo gave me a file,’ Raffaele admitted. ‘That’s how he does business. He still has a bee in his bonnet about the fact that his grandson, my father, gave your parents the money to set up home in the UK.’
‘And it was given, not loaned, according to my parents,’ Maya cut in curtly.
‘But it was Aldo’s cash,’ Raffaele retorted with finality. ‘My father cut ties with his family soon afterwards when he married my mother instead of yours as Aldo had decreed.’
‘So, Aldo is bossy like you,’ Maya observed.
‘I’m not bossy.’
‘You so are,’ Maya told him, lifting a fine blonde brow in emphasis.
Raffaele could feel his patience sliding again. ‘Let’s leave how we arrived at this point behind us. They’re not your debts.’
‘But I’m the one paying for them,’ she pointed out helplessly.
‘This topic is closed,’ Raffaele dictated.
Silence fell. Maya dealt him an amused glance and concentrated on her food.
‘Possibly...’ Raffaele breathed tautly. ‘I can be a little too dominant.’
‘Or...’ Maya pondered. ‘You just want to leave the truth behind and make me behave like I’m one of your women.’
‘I do not have women in the plural,’ Raffaele informed her levelly. ‘Why are you so determined to argue with me?’
A faint pink lit Maya’s face and she jerked a slight shoulder and fell silent. She felt an intense need to keep him at a distance. Because she disliked him? Or because dredging her attention from that lean, beautiful face of his across the table was becomingly increasingly difficult? This close he had stunning eyes, dark pools laced with fascinating gold highlights, inky black lashes even better than eyeliner at framing that lustrous gaze. Her breath feathered in her throat, her chest tightening as she felt her nipples stiffen, and a hollow ache stirred between her thighs. She was not so dumb that she didn’t know what was happening to her even if it hadn’t happened to her in a man’s company before...
It struck her as cruelly ironic that that surge of physical attraction should strike with Raffaele Manzini. She had been waiting, wanting to feel that exciting hormonal buzz with a man and take advantage of it to gain some sexual experience. Her face bloomed with colour because that seemed such an obnoxious thought to have, but as it dawned on her that Raffaele Manzini would be her first lover she found herself wishing that she weren’t still a virgin. No man had ever drawn her enough to want to take that final step. Was that why she had been waiting like the Sleeping Beauty, or some such silly creature, for that first love to come along and give her that happy fairy-tale ending?
She almost laughed at how ridiculously naïve she had been for so many years, honestly believing that that one very special guy was going to just magically appear for her. That wasn’t how life worked. Life wasn’t that neat and tidy; it wasn’t like an exam to prepare for and pass. But Maya had never done anything she hadn’t pre-planned because she rarely took risks, had learned at far too early an age that she was the one who had to be mature, sensible and careful to look after her family. There had been no teenaged crushes, no infatuations, no first boyfriend who counted in any meaningful way. The whole sex and romance story had passed her by while she’d worked and studied and passed exam after exam because the academic world was stable and sensible and gave her no nasty surprises.
And it was a very nast
y surprise to accept that she could feel her body burn as though someone had turned a blowtorch on her just because a man smiled. Raffaele Manzini, womaniser that he was, had dynamite sex appeal. It had nothing to do with her brain, it was all physical, meaningless, forgettable, she told herself urgently. He was making conversation, smoothly, entertainingly, sticking slickly to the impersonal because she knew that he had decided that she was prickly and difficult. But she wasn’t, she wasn’t. He...he just made her angry. And why was he surprised by that when he had virtually blackmailed her into agreeing to marry him and have a child for him? Was he so spoiled by her sex that, no matter what he did, he expected admiration and appreciation?
‘I was planning to take you to a club but I think you’d prefer to go home.’
‘I would but not dressed like this,’ Maya confessed. ‘I’ll tell my family lies tomorrow, not tonight. I’m too tired this evening to tell smiling, soothing lies.’
‘I’ll take you back to my apartment to change. Your clothes are there,’ Raffaele admitted.
‘Why are they at your apartment?’ Maya asked as she stood up, wincing as she forced her feet back into the new shoes again.
‘Obviously because I thought you’d spend the night with me,’ Raffaele confessed without hesitation. ‘Why would we wait for a ring to get this show on the road?’
Even in her heels she had to tilt her head to look up at him. He had to be six feet four or five. His confession had blown her resolve to be polite and pleasant right out of the water again because it told her so much that she didn’t want to see in him. ‘You are unbelievable,’ she snapped at him, bristling with distaste. ‘I only met you properly for the first time this morning!’
‘Believe me, it feels like I’ve known you a lot longer,’ Raffaele murmured, sincere for once because he couldn’t quite credit that it had only been a few hours since their first meeting. In the strangest way, in a way he couldn’t possibly explain, he felt ridiculously comfortable with Maya even though she had sat there damning him with her eyes and acting moody as hell.
But Maya was only winding up, her temper like petrol on a bonfire as she studied his ridiculously beautiful and insouciant face. ‘And you thought I would be willing to fall into bed with you immediately?’ She gasped incredulously.
‘A guy can hope—that’s not a crime,’ Raffaele fielded, shifting to ease the pressure on his jeans because there it was again, that spear of unholy lust that she roused without even trying, without even touching him. The sexual charge of her blew him away.
‘You don’t hope, you expect!’ Maya corrected angrily, gathering her bag in a quick angry movement and clutching it to her chest. ‘Sex and baby-making is off the table until we’re married.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
Maya stalked forward, green eyes bright as emeralds. ‘Why doesn’t it surprise you?’
‘Because you don’t trust me, you don’t trust anyone,’ Raffaele told her softly. ‘I’m like that too. And on top of not trusting, you’re...inhibited.’
‘I’m not inhibited!’ Maya snapped at him.
Raffaele took her hand and pressed her back against the wall. ‘If you’re not, kiss me.’
‘I’m not kissing you!’ Maya spat.
‘But secretly you know you want to,’ Raffaele purred, leaning down to steal a tiny kiss from her pink pouting mouth, lingering to nibble on her full soft lower lip, sending a shattering flood of sensation snaking right down into her pelvis. ‘One kiss...that’s all... I promise not to try to take it any further.’
‘OK...one kiss,’ Maya conceded in a deliberately bored tone. ‘Then you let go of me and you don’t forget about those health checks.’
He kissed her and the world fell away. She hadn’t believed that could happen, but it did. Her fear surged beneath the drowning electrifying pleasure that consumed her when his tongue licked against hers, unexpectedly subtle, incredibly sexy in technique, like nothing she had ever experienced before in her life, and for the first time ever she wanted more, arms travelling round him, hands smoothing over a broad, warm, strong back before sliding down to curve to lean hips.
‘I won’t forget about the health checks,’ Raffaele breathed, lifting his head, dark eyes flaming bright as the sun with hunger. ‘Stay the night with me,’ he urged. ‘I’ll use protection.’
Maya returned to planet earth again, unnerved by his physical effect on her, trembling, all hot and flustered in a way she wasn’t used to being. ‘No, thanks. I want to go home, please,’ she said as tightly as a little girl trying to show that she could be polite even in trying circumstances.
‘Stay the night with me. I’ll use protection.’
Raffaele had knocked her straight back down to reality again. Nothing romantic or special there, she mocked herself for the quivering hunger still tugging at her unrepentant body. Raffaele was just like all the other men she had met, wanting more what he couldn’t have. Reluctance only heightened her appeal with such men.
‘As you wish...’ Raffaele gritted his teeth. ‘But I don’t understand you.’
‘Of course, you don’t. I’m not the type of woman you’re used to,’ Maya pointed out drily as she opened the door to leave. ‘I’m not anyone’s one-night stand.’
Raffaele breathed in so deep that he thought the top of his head ought to go flying off. ‘We’re getting married within the next week.’
Beneath his disbelieving gaze, Maya grimaced. ‘I wasn’t expecting it to be quite that soon—’
‘Let’s move,’ Raffaele urged, planting a hand to her rigid spine, watching male heads turn to watch her progress, those endless perfect legs, that shimmering cloud of naturally fair hair. The whole time he was thinking, She may not know it yet but she’s mine, will be absolutely totally mine. He marvelled at that thought, smiled with amusement at it, could not get over quite how invested he was becoming in the project to acquire her grandparents’ company.
CHAPTER FOUR
RAFFAELE LIVED IN a breathtaking penthouse apartment with a fabulous view of London at night.
Maya, concentrating on the need to escape his company, spared it barely a glance, wincing in her tight shoes as she walked down a tiled corridor to the bedroom he had indicated and shutting the door firmly in his lean bronzed face.
Kicking off the shoes with relief, she scrambled to get into her own clothes again and walked into the adjoining bathroom to do what she could to scrub off the cosmetics she rarely wore. She did not want her family to suspect anything was amiss. Luckily, she had not yet got around to mentioning the job she had already found in London and she would tell them instead that she had got a fabulous job in Italy with Raffaele Manzini. Her story would all tie in nicely together then, with Raffaele starring as the kind and generous guy he, most certainly, wasn’t. By the time she finished telling them that he was also writing off their debts, her parents would be extravagantly happy, and it was many months since she had seen them in that state and she couldn’t wait to see their faces. That was the pay-off, she reminded herself firmly, her family’s security and contentment would be her reward for what she was doing but, no, she wasn’t planning to act the martyr even inside her own head.
But she didn’t feel the same about lying to her sister because she had never lied to her sister before; she’d possibly told the odd fib to save Izzy from hurt feelings but never anything more than that because, as twins, they were so close. She winced, reckoning that this time around she didn’t have much choice.
Raffaele felt a little like he had as a child when he had tried to capture a summer dandelion clock floating through the air and signally failed. He didn’t understand Maya. She didn’t like him. She might be as hungry for him as he was for her, but she wouldn’t break even one of her doubtless lengthy list of rules to have him. For that reason and for the unavoidable truth that Maya’s liking and acceptance were important to him for the fore
seeable future, he would make an effort with a woman for the first time in his life, only there was just one small problem: he hadn’t a clue how to do that. He frowned, exasperated by the uncharacteristic uncertainty engulfing him.
* * *
‘What sort of clothes do I like?’ Maya echoed dimly, several days later, stretching back on her bunk bed with her phone cradled close. ‘I’ve never really thought much about it. Students only dress for important interviews. I like elegant and feminine, not fussy and frilly, though, and never ever short, tight or revealing. Why on earth are you asking?’
‘I have a wedding dress to choose since you said you don’t care what you wear.’
‘I wasn’t being awkward,’ Maya said apologetically, wondering why she got on with Raffaele so much better on the phone than she did in person. ‘I mean...it’s not a real wedding, that’s what I meant.’
‘But we want it to look real,’ Raffaele countered. ‘Aldo’s coming, so are some of my friends.’
That was all news to Maya, and it disconcerted her. ‘Oh...er...well—’
‘Want to join me today?’ Raffaele pressed. ‘You could pick your own dress.’
His dark deep voice purred down her spine like a caress and she rolled her eyes at the thought. He had rung her every day, asked her out every day while chattering about completely inconsequential things. What on earth was he playing at? Why was he bothering? What nefarious purpose was his uncharacteristic niceness supposed to achieve for him?
‘I’m taking my brother out to the British Museum...sorry—’ She would have loved to see her sister, Izzy, but knew that would be unwise with all that was going on and the fictions she had had to tell her family. Besides, Izzy had gone strangely quiet herself recently.
