by Lynne Graham
It was Vitale and he was furious, as she had never seen him before. A dark flush lay along his high cheekbones, only contriving to accentuate the flaming gold of his spectacular eyes. ‘You spilled it all like an oil gusher!’ he condemned wrathfully. ‘Don’t you have any discretion?’
Stiff with discomfiture, Jazz scrambled off the bed in haste. ‘I let one word slip and then there didn’t seem much point in holding back,’ she admitted ruefully. ‘I’m sorry if you didn’t want him to know.’
‘You were too busy flirting with my brother to worry about what you told him!’ Vitale accused fiercely.
Jazz was stunned by that interpretation, particularly when her response to Angel had always been more like a sister with a big brother than anything else. She had never felt the smallest spark in Angel’s radius, while Vitale could set her on fire with a careless glance. ‘I wasn’t flirting with him!’ she replied forcefully. ‘That’s nonsense.’
‘I know what I saw,’ Vitale sliced in with contempt. ‘You were all over him like a rash!’
Anger began to stir within Jazz as she stared up at Vitale, who was towering over her like a particularly menacing stone wall. ‘I didn’t even touch him, for goodness’ sake! What the hell are you trying to imply?’ she demanded.
Already struggling to master a fury unlike any he had ever experienced, Vitale stared down at her, his lean brown hands clenched into fists because he felt incredibly violent. Angel was an incorrigible flirt and women went mad for him. Vitale had never had that freedom, that ready repartee or level of experience, and suddenly that lowering awareness infuriated him. His attention zeroed in on Jazz’s luscious pink mouth and suddenly he wanted to taste that mouth so badly it hurt, his body surging in a volatile wave straight from rage to sexual hunger. His brain had nothing to do with that unnerving switch.
Vitale snatched her up off her feet and kissed her in a move that so disconcerted her she didn’t fight, she only gasped. A split second on, the punishing, passionate force of his hard mouth was smashing down on hers, driving her lips apart, his tongue penetrating that moist and sensitive internal space. She shuddered with reaction, her arms balancing on his shoulders, her hands splaying round the back of his neck, fingers delving into the luxuriant depths of his black hair. A tsunami of excitement quivered through Jazz with every deeply sensual plunge of his tongue. It was like nothing she had ever felt in a man’s arms before and the very intensity of it was mind-blowing because it was everything she had ever dreamt of and nothing she had ever thought she could feel. He could certainly kiss, she thought helplessly, awash with the stimulation spreading through her heated body.
Without warning, it was over and Vitale was setting her back down on the floor, swinging on his heel and walking out again without a word, even closing the door behind him. Jazz almost laughed, her fingers rising to touch her tingling mouth, wild butterflies unleashed in her tummy. Vitale hadn’t said a word, which was so typical of him. He would walk away and refuse to think about it or talk about it, as if talking about it would make it more damaging.
But Vitale was genuinely in shock, throbbing with such raw sexual arousal he was in pain, dark golden eyes burning with the self-discipline it had taken to tear himself away. She tasted like strawberries and coffee but she had engulfed him like too much alcohol in his veins. He felt strangely disconnected from himself because his reactions, his very behaviour, were unacceptable and abnormal. He could barely credit that he had been so angry that he had wanted to smash his brother through the wall, couldn’t begin to explain what had awakened that anger. He loathed every one of those weird feelings and fought to suppress them and bury them deep. He stripped where he stood in his bedroom before heading for the shower.
In comparison, Jazz lay on top of her very comfortable bed and thought about that kiss, the ultimate kiss, which had shot her full of adrenalin, excitement and longing. She felt as if she had been waiting half her life to discover that a kiss could make her feel like that, but it was a terrible disappointment that Vitale had achieved that feat because there would be no interesting future developments happening in that quarter, she reflected wryly. It was just sex, stupid, confusing sexual urges that had neither sense nor staying power, and she should write it off to a silly impulse and a moment of forgetfulness. He wasn’t even the sort of guy she wanted in her life and he never would be. He was too arrogant, too reserved, too quick to judge...but, my goodness, he knew how to kiss...
Fate had short-changed her, she thought resentfully. She was still a virgin because she had always been waiting to meet a man, who would make her crave more of his touch. She had wanted her first lover to be someone whom she desired and cared about. Unfortunately, desire had evaded her in the invasive groping sessions that had been her sad experience as a student. Even worse, she still remembered the emotional hurt inflicted by her father’s abuse. How could she trust any man when her own father had attacked her? Jazz had been wary of the opposite sex ever since, even though she was now wishing she had a little more sexual experience because then she would have had a better idea of how to read Vitale and deal with him.
Had her crush on Vitale at fourteen made her more vulnerable? Jazz cringed at the suspicion and dismissed it because she hadn’t actively thought about Vitale in years and years. He had only come to mind when she’d seen him in some glossy magazine, squiring some equally superior beauty at some sparkling celebrity event and, like Cinderella in real life, she thought sadly, she had known how impossible her dream had been at fourteen. He was what he was: a prince, born and bred to a life so different from hers that he might as well have been an alien from another planet. He wasn’t a happy prince either, she thought with unwilling compassion. Even as an adolescent she had recognised that Vitale didn’t really know what being happy was.
When she was informed that she had another coaching session late that afternoon, she was incensed to learn that it was in deportment. She put in the time with the instructor and then knocked on Vitale’s office door.
‘Yes?’ Vitale looked up from his laptop and then sprang upright with the perfect courtesy that was engrained in him. Woman enters room: stand, she reflected ruefully, and it took just a little bit of the edge off her temper and the faint unease she had felt at seeing him again so soon after that kiss. It definitely didn’t help, though, that he still looked gorgeous to her from the head of his slightly ruffled black hair down to his wonderful dark deep-set eyes that even now were clearly registering wariness. She knew exactly what he was thinking and almost grinned. He was still waiting to be attacked over the kiss.
‘Deportment?’ she queried drily instead. ‘Don’t you think that’s overkill? I don’t slouch and I can walk in a straight line in heels. What more do you want?’
His dark eyes flared gold and he tensed, reining back all that leaping energy of his. ‘I thought it might be necessary but if it’s not—’
‘It’s not,’ Jazz cut in combatively.
‘Then we can wave goodbye to that session,’ Vitale conceded mildly, watching her walk across his office to look out of the window. She was wearing that damnably ugly skirt and heels again, but had he been of a literary bent he could have written a poem along the lines of what that cheap fabric did to the curve of her little rounded bottom where he had had both hands clasped only hours earlier. It had felt every bit as good and femininely lush as it looked, he acknowledged, thoroughly unsettled by that thought and the pulse at his groin. The effect she had on his body was like a kind of madness, he decided then in consternation.
‘I have some questions about this bet and you may not think I’m entitled to answers,’ Jazz remarked stiffly. ‘Who are you planning to say I am at the ball?’
His winged ebony brows drew together in bewilderment. ‘What do you mean?’
Jazz threw her shoulders back. ‘Well, I assumed you’d be giving me a fake name.’
Vitale frowned, currently engaged in noticing how red and full her lips seemed, wondering if he had been
rough because he had felt rough, drunk on lust and need, out of control. ‘Why would I give you a fake name?’
‘Because if I’m pictured with you anywhere the press might go digging and wouldn’t they just love pointing out that the Prince has a housekeeper’s daughter on his arm?’ Jazz extended stiffly, gooseflesh rising in the claustrophobic atmosphere and the intensity of his gaze.
‘So?’ Vitale prompted thickly, acknowledging that kissing her had been one of the most exhilarating encounters he had ever had and cringing at the awareness. He was an adult man with a great sex life, he reminded himself doggedly. As Angel would say, he really needed to get out more.
‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ Jazz asked in surprise.
‘No. Why would it? I’m not foisting a fake personality or some sort of scam on the public. This bet is for private consumption only,’ Vitale explained. ‘There’s nothing wrong with being a housekeeper’s daughter.’
‘No, there’s not,’ Jazz agreed with the glimmerings of her first real smile in his presence and the startling realisation that Vitale was not quite the snob she had believed he was. It was as if a giant defensive barrier inside her dropped and, disturbed by the discovery, she quickly turned to leave him alone again.
‘Jazz...once you get clothes delivered tomorrow we’ll be going out to dinner in the evening,’ Vitale informed her, startling her even more. ‘Your first public appearance.’
Dining out with Vitale, Jazz ruminated in wonder as she returned to her room, planning an evening composed of a long luxurious bath, washing her hair and watching something on TV.
CHAPTER FOUR
JAZZ COULDN’T SLEEP. Accustomed to a much more physically active existence, she wasn’t tired and at two in the morning she put the light back on and tried to read until hunger took over and consumed her. She knew she shouldn’t but she loved a slice of toast and a hot drink before bed and the longer she lay awake, the more all-consuming the craving became. Inevitably she got up, raising her brows at her appearance in the faded long tee shirt she wore to bed. No dressing gown, no slippers in her wardrobe but so what? If she was quiet she doubted if she would wake up the very correct Jenkins.
The stairs creaked and she didn’t like moving round in total darkness but a light could rouse someone likely to investigate. By touch she located the door at the back of the hall and through that a flight of stairs, which ran down into the basement area where she assumed the kitchen lay. Safely through that door, she put on lights and relaxed. The kitchen was as massive as a hotel kitchen and she padded about on the cold tiles, trying not to shiver. She located bread and the toaster and milk and then, wonder of wonders, some hot-chocolate powder to make her favourite night-time drink. Jazz was grateful she wasn’t like her aunt, who joked that she only had to look at a bar of chocolate to gain an inch on her hips.
Her toast ready, she sat down at the table to eat with appetite, eyes closing blissfully as she munched hot butter-laden toast, which was the first glimpse Vitale had of her as he strode barefoot through the door.
‘You can’t wander round here in the middle of the night!’ he began impatiently. ‘My security team wakened me.’
‘Your security... What?’ Jazz gasped, startled out of her life by the interruption and even more startled by the vision Vitale made bare-chested and barefoot, clad only in a pair of tight jeans. He was completely transformed by casual clothing, she conceded in awe.
Vitale groaned out loud. ‘The whole house is wired with very sensitive security equipment and I have a full team of bodyguards who monitor it.’
‘But I didn’t see anything and no alarm went off.’
‘It’s composed of invisible beams and it’s silent. As soon as the team established that it wasn’t an intrusion but a member of the household they contacted me, not wishing to frighten you.’
‘Well, I’m not frightened of you,’ she mumbled round a mouthful of toast that she was trying to masticate enough not to choke when she swallowed because, in reality, Vitale was delicious shorn of his shirt and her mouth had gone all dry.
He was a classic shape, all broad shoulders, rippling muscular torso sprinkled with dark curls of hair leading down into a vee at his hips and a flat, taut stomach. Clothed she could just about contrive to resist him, half-naked he was an intolerable lure to her eyes.
‘They saw you on camera, realised that you weren’t fully dressed and surmised that the sudden intrusion of a strange man could scare you.’
‘On camera?’ she repeated in horror, striving to recall if she had scratched or done anything inappropriate while she was in the kitchen, bracing her hands on the table top to rise to her feet and move away from it.
Vitale shifted lean dark hands upward in a soothing motion. ‘Relax, they’ve all been switched off. We’re not being monitored right now.’
‘Thank goodness for that,’ she framed tremulously, the perky tips of her nipples pushing against the tee shirt below Vitale’s riveted gaze. ‘I only got up to get something to eat.’
‘That’s perfectly all right,’ Vitale assured her thickly, inwardly speculating on whether she was wearing anything at all below the nightshirt or whatever it was. ‘But for the future, I’ll show you a button you can press just to let security know someone’s wandering around the house and this won’t happen again.’
‘OK,’ Jazz muttered, still shaken up at the idea that she had been watched without her knowledge by strange men.
Vitale ran a surprisingly gentle hand down the side of her downturned face. ‘It’s not a problem. You haven’t done anything wrong,’ he murmured sibilantly, his accent catching along the edges of his dark, deep, masculine voice.
A shocking flare of heat rose up from the heart of her as he touched her face and Jazz threw her head back in mortification, her green eyes wide with diluted pupils.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Vitale framed hoarsely. ‘You have the most beautiful eyes... You always did. And I didn’t intend to say that, don’t know which random brain cell it came from.’
An overpowering need to smile tilted Jazz’s tense lips because he sounded so stressed and so confounded by his own words. Beautiful eyes, well, that was something, her first and probably only ever compliment from Vitale, who worked so hard at keeping his distance. But he had touched her first, she reminded herself with faint pride in what felt vaguely like an achievement. Her body was taut as a bowstring and breathing was a major challenge as she looked up into dark, smouldering golden intensity. Ditto, beautiful eyes, she labelled, but she didn’t really think women were supposed to say things like that to men so she kept quiet out of fear that he would laugh.
‘Troppa fantasia... I have too much imagination,’ Vitale breathed, being steadily ripped in two by the conflicting impulses yanking at him. He knew he should let her go and return to bed but he didn’t want to. He was ridiculously fascinated that, even in the middle of the night and fresh from her bed with tousled hair, she looked fantastic. And so very different from the women he was used to, women who went to bed in make-up and rose before him to put on another face to greet the dawn, and his awakening, plastic perfect, contrived, artificial, everything that Jazz was not. Jazz was real right down to her little naturally pink toenails and that trait was incredibly attractive to him. With Jazz what you saw was literally what you got and there were no pitfalls of strategy or seduction lined up to trip him.
‘I would never have thought it,’ Jazz almost whispered, so painfully conscious of his proximity that the little hairs were rising on the back of her neck. ‘You’re a banker.’
‘And I can’t have an imagination too?’ Vitale inserted with a sudden flashing smile of amusement that would have knocked for six the senses of a stronger woman than Jazz.
‘It’s unexpected,’ she mumbled uncertainly, all of a quiver in receipt of that mesmerising, almost boyish grin. ‘You always seem so serious.’
‘I don’t feel serious around you,’ Vitale admitted, tiring of looking down at her an
d getting a crick in his neck. In a sudden movement that took her very much by surprise, he bent, closed his hands to her tiny waist and lifted her up. He settled her down on the end of the table. He was incredibly, ferociously aroused but Jazz seemed curiously unaware of the chemistry between them, almost innocent. No way could she be that innocent, he told himself urgently, because he would never touch an innocent woman and he desperately needed to touch her. His lovers were always experienced women, who knew the score.
‘But then you never know what you’re feeling,’ Jazz quipped. ‘You’re not into self-analysis.’
‘How do you know that?’ Vitale demanded with a frown.
‘I see it in you,’ Jazz told him casually.
Vitale didn’t like the conversation, didn’t want to talk either. He spread his hands to either side of her triangular face and he tasted that alluring pink mouth with unashamed passion.
Jazz was afraid her heart was about to leap right out of her chest, her breathlessness as physical as her inability to think that close to him. She felt nebulously guilty, as if on some level her brain was striving to warn her that she was doing something wrong, but she absolutely refused to listen to that message when excitement was rushing like fire through her nerve endings. Her nipples tightened, her slender thighs pushing firmly together on the embarrassing dampness gathering at the apex of her legs.
‘Per l’amor di Dio...’ Vitale swore, fighting for control because he was already aching. ‘What do you do to me?’
‘What do I do to you?’ Jazz whispered, full of curiosity.
She excited the hell out of him but he was too experienced to let that salient fact drop from his lips. ‘You tempt me beyond my control,’ Vitale heard himself admit regardless and was shocked by the reality.
‘That’s all right,’ Jazz breezed, one hand smoothing up over a high cheekbone, the roughness of his stubbled jaw lending a brooding darkness to his lean, strong face in the dimly lit kitchen, her other hand tracing an exploring path up over the sweep of his long, smooth back. ‘Are you sure those cameras are all off?’ she framed, peering anxiously round the brightly lit kitchen.
