Mistress to the Mediterranean Male (Mills & Boon By Request)

by Carole Mortimer

  ‘No. Now I am older I have put the picture together—with the help of people who knew the family at that time. I was barely four years old when she left, and I don’t really remember her. But Francesco was ten, and her leaving hit him hard. He adored her. And of course Papa was a changed man. He took to drinking too much and not wanting his children around. Francesco had to be like both parents rolled into one. He looked after me.’

  She fiddled with the stem of her glass and turned to ask a passing waiter for a refill. ‘What happened was that Papa’s business had hit a rough patch. He could no longer give our mother the magnificent lifestyle she demanded. She went away with someone who could. Falling in love had nothing to do with it. Francesco and I discovered that from the note she left Papa when we were going through his things after he died.’

  She spread expressive hands. ‘Francesco was twenty at that time, and already had females swarming all over him like bees at a honeypot. You wouldn’t believe some of the lengths they went to—one had herself delivered in a big pretend cake, another got into his bed quite naked for him to find! But he ignored them all. He chose the occasional mistress with care, making sure they knew he wasn’t asking for or giving any commitment, and spent all his energies on getting the family businesses more profitable than they’d ever been.’

  ‘So he saw all women as clones of your mother? Only interested in his wealth?’ Anna intuited, her heart aching for the ten-year-old Francesco, whose beautiful, adored mother had deserted him and his little sister with no more thought than as to where her next suite of diamonds would come from. No wonder he found it impossible to believe he could be loved for himself.

  ‘Precisamente! He saw what loving such a self-seeking woman had done to his father, decided it would never happen to him, and became unable to trust any of the female sex. A great big cynic!’ She smiled widely. ‘But no more!’ She put her hand over Anna’s as it lay on the table, patted it. ‘You have taught him how to trust and how to love! And you can’t know how grateful I am to you for that—he so deserves to love and be loved!’

  Unable to sleep, despite the two large glasses of wine with dinner, which she and Sophia had companionably lingered over, Anna stared into the darkness.

  It should have been a relaxing evening. She and Sophia had had fun bathing Sholto, and Sophia had chattered non-stop throughout dinner. Francesco hadn’t put in an appearance—Peggy delivering a message that he’d been called in to head office and would be delayed until late.

  It should have been relaxing. But it hadn’t been. Shocking herself, she’d found she’d really missed him, and when Sophia had opined, ‘When you are married and living in his beautiful palazzo in Toscana it will be different. My brother will not want to work so hard, be away from you and the gorgeous bambino for the smallest moment!’ Anna had had to bite her tongue to stop herself blurting that it wouldn’t be like that.

  Somehow she had to maintain the façade that her marriage to Francesco would be the love-match that so obviously delighted his sister.

  But pretending was hard.

  When at half past ten Sophia had yawned and confessed that the excitement of trousseau-shopping had tired her out, and she couldn’t wait for the morning when the wedding dresses would be arriving from Milan, Anna had gone to bed, too, not wanting to hang around waiting for a glimpse of Francesco because that would make her look needy.

  She’d heard him return just after midnight. Acutely attuned to every move he made, she’d listened to his quiet footsteps, first visiting the nursery and then going to his room at the far end of the corridor.

  Now, her eyes aching with the strain of staring into the darkness, she knew she had to go to him. What Sophia had told her had made a deep impression. It had explained much. Starting with his entrenched view that she, like the rest of the female sex, wanted only to get her hands on his wealth, to enjoy the kind of lifestyle that could be provided by a man with millions behind him.

  Apparently he’d been targeted by gold-diggers since he’d hit his late teens—including the one who’d had herself delivered in a cake, and the other planting herself in his bed. The trauma of his mother’s desertion, and the reason for it, etched on his heart, he’d become wary, distrustful of all females under ninety!

  Hadn’t he accused her of draping herself ‘alluringly’ on his private beach, hoping he’d happen along? Echoes of other distasteful attempts to snare him?

  And hadn’t he also said, quite unequivocally, that they had to put the past behind them and be civilized? Enter marriage for the sake of their child, with great sex the only thing going for them?

  She slipped out of bed, snatching up the summer-weight coverlet and draping it around her because her nightie, courtesy of Madame Laroche’s excellent taste, was too revealing for a woman who was set on putting the record straight, not on seduction.

  Put the past behind them, indeed! They could try, but it wouldn’t go there!

  His misconceptions about her were one huge stumbling block, and she was going to get rid of it!

  Pushing his bedroom door open before her courage deserted her, she heard the shower in the en suite bathroom. Firmly she told herself she was not going to bottle out, turn tail and scurry back in wimpish haste to her own room. This had to be done if their future relationship was to have any meaning at all.

  So, OK, he had seduced her, used her, dumped her—and had only offered marriage because she had given him the child he openly adored. He certainly didn’t love her—never would. She would have to live with that. What she wouldn’t live with was his jaundiced impression that she was nothing but a greedy schemer.

  The shower stopped. Every last muscle in Anna’s body tensed to screaming point, and her bare toes dug into the pile of the plain fawn carpet. Unlike the room she occupied, this was severely masculine—that was her edgy thought just as a severely masculine male appeared in the doorway.

  Stark naked.

  In a ridiculous reflex action Anna snatched at the edges of the coverlet and enclosed her suddenly quivering body even more tightly. He was shatteringly beautiful. A magnificent torso, smooth and tanned, a stomach taut and flat as a board, a silky line of dark hair running down to cradle his manhood, long lower limbs in perfect proportion to his height.

  She should look away.

  She couldn’t.

  Her throat was too thick to get out the words that would explain her presence here in his room late at night, and they fled her brain completely when he strode towards her, his handsome mouth sardonically amused as he placed firm hands on her narrow shoulders and delivered, ‘We must start on equal terms, cara.’ And he removed the light coverlet from her oddly unresisting hands.

  Hot colour flushed her face. She felt horribly exposed in the thin oyster-hued silk that skimmed her body to display barely concealed bountiful curves that sent dark colour flaring over his hard cheekbones and turned his eyes to smoke.

  ‘What—what are you doing?’ Anna gasped as he slid the thin ribbon straps down over her shoulders, not stopping until the creamy, rose-tipped mounds of her peaking breasts were exposed.

  ‘What do you think?’ Eyes shimmeringly intent, Francesco snatched a ragged breath. ‘I am obliging my eager bride-to-be by taking what she is so enticingly offering.’

  ‘But—’ The vehement denial she’d been about to make was forgotten in a white-hot wash of addictive need as she felt the nightdress slip down over her hips and he took her mouth with ravishing hunger, plundering the sweet interior.

  All control was lost.

  Just as it had been that very first time. That was her helpless thought as honesty belatedly compelled her to admit that maybe this was what she had really come for. Maybe she had cloaked her need with the cover of setting him straight about her ignorance of his high financial status. That surely could have been more sensibly embarked upon in the cool, sober light of morning.

  Her knees shaking beneath her, she deepened her response to his plundering mouth and lifted her
arms, her fingers digging into his thick, still-damp hair. She was hot as a furnace all over, wanting to tell him she had never stopped loving him but not daring because he wouldn’t believe her, gasping convulsively as she felt the burning strength of his arousal against her quivering tummy. She heard him give a raw growl low in his throat as he broke the kiss and swept her up in his arms, to come down beside her on the massive bed.

  He spread the bright shimmer of her hair against the dark cover, his lips on her forehead, on the tip of her small nose, his eyelids lowered over gleaming, sensual silver.

  ‘When I look at you, I want you. I hunger,’ he murmured roughly. He lowered his head to take a pouting nipple between his lips, expert hands shaping her body.

  The sensation made her squirm beneath him, whimpering as his mouth roved from one sensitively peaking tip to the other, until she was driven to plead, with aching desperation, ‘Make love to me, Francesco!’

  CHAPTER TEN

  IN A tangle of limbs and rumpled sheets Francesco slept, while Anna, her cheek against the warm satin of his impressive chest, listened to the steady beat of his heart, breathed in the intoxicating male scent of him and tried to hold onto the magic.

  The magic of pretending they were back where they once had been, in those lost enchanted days beneath the hot Italian sun, when she’d been so ecstatically happy, believing he meant it when he vowed he loved her as much as she loved him.

  She’d known he was a fantastic lover—had first-hand unforgettable experience—but tonight had been something else. Something driven. He had dominated her, thoroughly possessed her, and the ecstasy he had given her had been so intense she’d thought she might die of it.

  Sex slave.

  Reality hit hard. Made her eyes well with tears, her throat tighten. She’d once told herself she hated him. But she didn’t. For her sins, she couldn’t stop loving him, but that didn’t mean she had to leap into bed with him with shamefully eager wantonness. Especially as she knew darn well that he didn’t love her, actually despised her for what he thought she was.

  ‘What is wrong, amante?’

  So he hadn’t been asleep! His voice shook her rigid—purring with contentment, his accent more pronounced than usual, reeking with the dominant male satisfaction of knowing his sex slave was his for the merest crook of his little finger!

  ‘Your beautiful body has gone quite tense,’ he drawled, with a lacing of amusement. He rolled over onto his side, his long, muscular, shatteringly sexy body partly covering her. ‘I shall relax you,’ he stated, with indolently sensual intent, a long-fingered hand sliding over her tummy, where the muscles tensed, down to the apex of her thighs.

  Something fierce and hot shot through her responsive body, melting her bones. He could always make that happen. And she was always helpless, the fire in her greedily leaping to reach the fire in him.

  ‘No!’ Desperate to save herself from once more shaming herself by demonstrating what a complete and utter pushover she was—his for the taking whenever he wanted her—Anna shot up against the heaped pillows. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’

  ‘Get what?’ Vibrant amusement still glimmered in his hooded eyes. He was still looming over her. She flattened her palms against the solid wall of his chest, pushed with all her might—and didn’t budge him an inch.

  Emotionally all over the place, she blurted, not caring how much of herself she was revealing, ‘I love you!’

  Stinging silence met her self-betrayal. Then, eyes suddenly hostile, Francesco pulled away from her, clipping, ‘There’s no need to say that. What we just shared was great sex. Don’t spoil it by lying.’

  Infuriated, she slid off the bed in haste, to put distance between them, her heartfelt but probably misguided confession embarrassing her. ‘Lying’s your territory, not mine!’ she charged heatedly, humiliation washing over her—because she’d bared her soul to him and he’d unforgivably accused her of lying, of putting a pretty gloss on their troubled relationship. A gloss he found distasteful because he judged it to be insincere.

  ‘Meaning?’ His voice was black ice.

  ‘Pretending to be a practically penniless peasant, not coming clean about who you were.’ She confronted him, snatching the coverlet from the floor, where he’d dropped it, and wrapping it with savagery around her nakedness. Voice spiked with bitterness, she put in with derision, ‘The cheap and nasty chain you wore was a nice touch! A very convincing stage prop! Does deceit come naturally to you, or did you have lessons? Don’t you dare accuse me of lying!’

  Heading for the door as fast as her feet would carry her, she paused, dragged in a giant breath and imparted, ‘I came here to make you understand that I’m not one of the gold-diggers you’re so wary of. I had no idea you could pay off the national debt and still have change!’ she exaggerated wildly, and gave a ‘so there!’ flounce as she turned again for the door.

  She was stopped in her tracks when he launched at her, ‘You knew. You’d seen photographs of me in the press. You admitted it, if you remember. And if your father was expecting to entertain your new “penniless peasant” of a lover, why did he ask me for a million sterling five minutes after I crossed the threshold? Your big mistake was in not advising him to wait patiently for the plums to fall into his lap.’

  Absolutely stunned, Anna could only stare as he leant over and switched off the bedside light, plunging the room into darkness. Sounding ice-cool, he advised, ‘Face up to what you are. I have. After all,’ he added, dry as dust, ‘you’ve got what you set out to get. Cut the histrionics and we might make a reasonable attempt at a future life together. Go to bed.’

  Anna headed for the nursery next morning feeling as if she were sleepwalking. Her head was pounding and her puffy eyes bore witness to a prolonged crying jag.

  She’d spent the rest of the night after Francesco had so calmly dismissed her wondering if it could possibly be true. Had Dad really brazenly asked him for a million pounds? The very idea made her stomach roll over.

  Remembering his crazy idea of starting a safari park, in yet another ridiculous scheme to recoup the money he’d lost, she had sickly acknowledged that it could be so.

  She had no idea how he’d known the Italian owned much more than the shirt on his back. She certainly hadn’t. But, he had as good as accused her of putting her father up to asking for such a massive amount, and no amount of denials on her part would make him believe her.

  Her last hope of gaining his respect, if not his love, had vanished. And she didn’t know how she could spend the rest of her life with him, loving him, needing him, knowing he thought so badly of her.

  He was right about one thing. The sex was out of this world. And at the moment everything in that department was fine for him. But he didn’t love her, never would, and the time would inevitably come when he looked for new challenges. And then she would have nothing of him. They would be just two strangers with nothing to bind them but their child. And when their child was grown, setting out on his own, she would have nothing. She really didn’t think she could face such a future.

  Yet how could she deprive darling Sholto of two parents who loved him to bits. Not to mention all the massive advantages of being the son of Francesco Mastroianni? How could she refuse to go through with the marriage and then live with the dreadful and pressing fear that her baby’s father would do all within his limitless power to claim him?

  Not forgetting her parents. Despite Mum being too feeble to put her foot down, to take control of the family finances before things had got so way out of hand, and despite Dad being so ebulliently sure that he knew better than a coachload of financial advisors, she loved them both. Refuse to marry Francesco and the years that were left to them would be lived in grinding poverty.

  Her headache was getting worse by the second. Determined to stop going over and over her dreadful situation, at least for as long as it took to bath and feed little Sholto, she put a pallid smile on her face and opened the door.

  ‘For on
ce I beat you to it.’ Francesco’s lithe lean body dwarfed the nursing chair. Sholto, wearing a fresh white sleeper suit, was cradled in his arms, blissfully asleep. ‘I changed and fed him,’ he claimed proudly. ‘It is not so difficult.’

  ‘So I see,’ Anna mumbled, through lips that felt as stiff as cement. Last night might not have happened, she registered. Things had been said by both of them, accusations hurled like bricks. And now they had to be forgotten. He was being civilised!

  Sex was the only level on which she could fleetingly reach him. She couldn’t touch him on any emotional level. He had put his distaste for what he thought she was to one side for the sake of Sholto’s future well-being. All his emotions were centred on his tiny son, as he now demonstrated as he ran the back of a forefinger softly over the baby’s downy cheek and imparted, ‘After the marriage we will spend most of our time at my home in Tuscany, where he will have all the freedom and space to run and play in air that is not polluted. I will teach him to fish and ride, and he will grow tall and strong.’

  Easing himself from the low chair, he laid the contented baby back in his cot, straightened and announced, ‘We will have a nanny.’

  Just like that! Rebellion sparked inside her, but she was careful to keep her voice low and level as she asked, ‘Don’t I have a say in that? I don’t need a nanny to look after him.’

  Already she was feeling dreadfully deprived of the only time she now found anything approaching real happiness. That precious early-morning hour spent bathing, dressing, playing with and feeding her baby. How intolerable it would be to have a hired nanny—no matter how good her references, how kind she was—taking over!

  Was he intending to completely sideline her? Turn her into a cipher, a creature of no importance, only useful in his bed—until he tired of her?

  ‘Perhaps not,’ he conceded. ‘But consider—when you are pregnant again you will be grateful for just a little help. Especially when you have a newborn and an energetic toddler to entertain. And maybe another on the way in the blink of an eye?’