by Penny Jordan
It was one of the pretty black-suited young salesgirls who told Alessandro where he could find Leonora. Having assumed that he and Leonora were lovers, she omitted to mention that Leonora was alone in the private changing suite, so that when he walked in, his arrival masked by the thickness of the dove-grey pile carpet, Leonora was oblivious to his presence.
Alessandro, because of the angle of a long pier glass mirror in the lounge area off the changing room, and because Cristina had fastened back the curtain, was perfectly able to see and study her. Anyone witnessing his reaction could have been forgiven for thinking that he was not pleased with what he saw, since he had started to frown.
The reflection in the mirror showed him a stunningly beautiful young woman, wearing an elegant dress that suited her to perfection. But it was the look in Leonora’s unexpectedly violet-tinged eyes that was responsible for his frown, not her appearance. Alone, and unaware that she was being watched, she wore an expression so open and revealing that it was an intimacy he didn’t want to have—one that rolled his heart over inside his chest, seizing it in a tight fist of compassion streaked with an angry awareness of the knowledge of what he could see so plainly in her face. She looked like a little girl, scarcely able to believe in her own luck, delighted and yet at the same time struggling to balance between something she desperately wanted and some long-held inability to believe she was worthy of such joy.
Leonora could feel her eyes burning with very private tears. She tried to blink them away, and then felt laughter bubbling in her throat as she realised she couldn’t wipe them away without ruining her new make-up or risking getting it on her beautiful dress, since she didn’t have a tissue to hand... Holding the dress to her, she turned round, remembering that there was a box of tissues on the coffee table in the lounge area—and then froze as she saw Alessandro.
Even if he hadn’t already been able to see that her emotions had nothing whatsoever to do with the acquisition of an expensive gown and everything to do with something very private within herself, Alessandro suspected that the intensity of her shocked reaction to his presence would have convinced him on that point.
How long had he been there? He couldn’t have—must not have seen her looking at herself in the way that she had. She could not have borne for anyone to see that, but most of all not him. Her face began to burn, her old tomboy-style defences springing into action.
Not a man who was used to putting the emotional needs of others first, Alessandro surprised himself when he heard himself saying calmly, as he backed out of the room, ‘Sorry—I didn’t realise that you weren’t ready.’
Leonora’s relief was so intense that it dizzied her. He had not seen her. If he had he would not have been able to resist saying something. She knew that from what she had experienced at his hands—and, of course, from her experience of growing up with brothers. She knew other girls who had brothers, of course—some of those girls were eldest sisters and some of them youngest, and their experience did not mirror hers. The elder sisters often mothered their men, and the youngest ones always seemed to attract men who were protective of them and indulgent towards them.
Just as Leonora was nodding her head, not trusting herself to speak, Cristina reappeared, clicking her tongue when she saw that Leonora was on her own and still wearing the cocktail dress.
CHAPTER SIX
SO MUCH HAD happened that it was hard to accept that it was less than twenty-four hours since she had come down these steps, Leonora admitted as Alessandro stood to one side to allow her to precede him up the steps to his private jet.
This time, instead of wearing her pilot’s uniform, she was dressed in her new clothes: designer jeans encasing the slender length of her legs, stiletto heels on her feet and a plain white T-shirt that had cost the earth. Personally she thought it clung far too neatly to her breasts, which was why she was wearing a butter-soft leather jacket over it, despite the heat of the Italian afternoon. Expensive designer sunglasses and the new soft leather bag completed her outfit; the whole look was one that was almost a uniform for well-bred and well-to-do women—one that could be found from Fifth Avenue to Knightsbridge, taking in Paris and Milan on the way.
Below her she could see her new matching leather luggage—white with tan straps, and a logo so small and discreet that it could only be found by the cognoscenti—being loaded, along with two more masculine and rather more travelled versions.
She had been taken off guard when Alessandro had announced that he would be flying them himself to Sicily, and even more surprised when he had informed her that she would be in the cockpit with him, as his co-pilot.
‘Not that you will be doing anything other than acting as a non-flying co-pilot,’ he had told her emphatically.
‘You didn’t have any complaints about my handling of the jet when I flew you out from London,’ Leonora had felt defensive enough to point out. ‘And I am a fully qualified pilot.’
‘For the moment. Had anything happened, the fact that you were illegally flying the plane would have made the insurance null and void, and that alone would have been enough to ensure that you were stripped of your licence for a very long time.’
His warning had sent a cold chill of apprehension icing down Lenora’s spine—and not just because of the threat it had contained. He had made a legitimate point that she, in her determination to prove herself, had overlooked—and it stung her pride that he should have spotted her error and pointed it out to her.
Ascending the steps into the jet behind Leonora gave Alessandro ample opportunity to take in the neat curve of her bottom in the new jeans, as well as the length of her legs. Even with heels on she was still several inches shorter than him and, unlike her bulky borrowed and adapted uniform, her jeans showed off her curves and her femininity.
Although he wasn’t going to say so to Leonora, the main reason he had decided to fly the jet himself, with her in the co-pilot’s seat, was that he didn’t want to arouse the curiosity of his pilots over how or why he was suddenly squiring around the sister of one of their number. For another thing, he wouldn’t put it past Falcon to start asking some typically awkward questions as to why, since Alessandro and Leonora shared a passion for flying, they had not shared the intimacy of that passion coming out to Sicily. Falcon knew how much he hated handing over control of anything he could do himself to anyone else, and it was part and parcel of his elder brother’s analytical and protective nature to ask far too astute questions when he suspected that something was being withheld from him.
Had someone told her twenty-four hours ago that she would be seated in the co-pilot’s seat of Alessandro Leopardi’s private jet, with Alessandro himself at the controls, Leonora would have been so filled with excitement and triumph at the thought of getting to show him the excellence and capability of her skills that she would have been overjoyed. But twenty-four hours ago she hadn’t known what she knew now, having met Alessandro Leopardi.
Now she had. Leonora risked a quick, brief look at his profile whilst his attention was focused on the pre-flight checks, her heartbeat suddenly speeding up to a heavy drumroll. Her heart itself did a series of back flips that threatened to leave her severely deprived of oxygen. Speedily Leonora transferred her gaze to his hands, but far from being a safer option this too resulted in her heart doing a spectacular loop the loop as for her eyes only, her memory ran an inner video of those hands on her breasts.
It was all very well telling herself that a bit of role playing would not go amiss, given what lay ahead, but there was certainly no need for her to take things that far, Leonora told herself, hastily reaching for her own headset, ejecting the seriously disruptive images from her head so that she too could concentrate of the pre-flight checks.
He had been right to make it a rule never to employ female pilots, Alessandro decided, as the scent of Leonora’s skin mingling with the perfume she was wearing intrude
d between him and his focus on the familiar pre-take-off routine. And the distraction of her smell was second only to the soft thrust of her breasts beneath the white T-shirt now that she had removed the leather jacket she had been wearing. There was no need to ask him just why it was that the visual impact of natural breasts was so much more effective than the solid unmoving thrust of pumped-up silicon.
If she had removed her jacket in some kind of attempt to soften him up for a fresh attempt to persuade him to give her a job she had made a very big mistake. No way, having felt the impact the sight of that soft jiggle was having on his own body, was he going to risk exposing his pilots to it.
Flying a plane demanded total concentration. Not the distraction of the sight and scent of a sexually alluring woman.
It was warm inside the cockpit, and Alessandro had removed the linen jacket he had been wearing when they boarded the plane. His shirt, short-sleeved and casually open at the throat, pulled against the breadth of his back when he leaned forward, making Leonora foolishly catch her breath and fight to suppress a soft squirm of pleasure at the memory of how it had felt to have the breadth of his shoulders and the heat of his flesh beneath her hands. Today his torso might be covered by the cotton of his shirt, but last night the dampness had moulded cloth to flesh, allowing her to see quite clearly the structure of his muscles and the darkness of his body hair, somehow dangerously erotic in comparison to the waxed torsos of the male models favoured by advertising campaigns.
Guiltily Leonora looked away and felt her face and then her whole body overheat as she realised that in her haste to avoid looking at his torso she had inadvertently allowed her gaze to drop down to the open spread of his legs. Not that she could actually see anything—well, only that he was a man, of course. But it just wasn’t the done thing to stare at the male crotch. Or at least it wasn’t her done thing, but now...
Her mouth had gone dry, and her heart was pounding too fast and too unevenly. Somehow she managed to drag her gaze away, her guilt sending her lurching into a frantically fast burst of speech as she asked, ‘How long is the flight?’
Too long for the kind of intimacy the flight deck was imposing on him, Alessandro admitted to himself, as he shifted slightly in his seat to ease the ache he could already feel pulsing in his groin.
‘An hour—less if we get a tail wind.’
Leonora nodded her head vigorously, to mask the horrified embarrassment she felt at the way in which Alessandro was moving his body as though in warning against her intrusive visual attention.
A voice crackling in the headphones from air traffic control brought her back to reality, and years of training enabled her to focus on what she should be doing.
* * *
They had been in the air for less than fifteen minutes when Leonora had been forced to admit to herself that Alessandro was a first-rate pilot—superbly skilled technically, and in absolute control of both himself and the aircraft. But now, with Sicily spread out below them, offering herself and her beauty up to them, Alessandro’s flying skills were taking second place to Sicily’s beauty. The sight of Mount Etna, so dangerous and yet so compelling, made her reflect on how well suited Alessandro was to the land of his birth.
‘If you look to the east now you will see the castello.’
His unexpected advice had her eyes widening and her breath catching with dismay as well as awe when she saw the size of the castellated fortress on a rocky outcrop, separated from an equally medieval walled town by several acres of olive trees. Beyond the town the land rose towards the mountains, and here and there a small cluster of buildings clung to their steep sides.
Alessandro frowned as he looked down at the mountain villages below them. His father ruled his lands and those who lived on them with a feudal mindset he refused to relinquish. He might like to think of himself as a patriarch revered by his people, but the truth was that he was more of a despot. There were children living in the remote mountain villages on Leopardi land whose families were so poor that they were still forced to leave school to work on land for which they still had to pay Alessandro’s father a tithe.
Falcon had sworn to abandon the practice once he inherited, but in the meantime there was unrest in one of the villages in particular. Alessandro’s sympathies lay entirely with the villagers, but at the moment it was the absorbed, marvelling look on Leonora’s face that caused him to circle round so that she could have a better view.
Their shared role on the flight deck had been unexpectedly harmonious—a good omen for the weekend and for his determination to ensure that everyone, but most of all his father, would be forced to recognise that there was nothing and no one he could not have exclusively to himself if he chose to do so.
After a textbook-perfect descent onto what Alessandro told Leonora was his own private airfield, the jet hummed gently to a halt. Sharp bright sunshine burned down onto the runway, turning it blindingly white under a pure blue sky.
The first thing Leonora noticed, as she stepped out onto the steps rolled into place by immaculately turned-out ground staff in overalls bearing the Avanti Airlines logo, was the scent of citrus mingling with the hot, acrid smell of aircraft fuel, exhaust fumes and hot metal. The heat of the sun, so much stronger here than it had been in Florence, had her reaching immediately for her sunglasses and mentally thanking Cristina for warning her that she would need a hat to protect her head if she went out in the heat of the day.
Some men were unloading their luggage, and Alessandro had joined her on the metal platform at the top of the steps. As they stood together in silence, an immaculately polished limousine, with a small pennant fluttering on its bonnet, slid through the dusty afternoon to come to a halt with its passenger door exactly in line with the steps. A uniformed chauffeur emerged from the driver’s seat and went to open the rear passenger door, facing them. The man uncoiling himself from inside the car was tall and dark-haired, and his physical resemblance to Alessandro was unmistakable as his air of authority, Leonora recognised.
Uncertainly, but automatically, she turned to look at Alessandro. She could see his chest expand as he breathed in and then exhaled with perfect control, and his mouth was chiselled and hard as he told her in a clipped voice, ‘It seems that Falcon has come to welcome us in person.’
Falcon. The name suited him, Leonora acknowledged. Every bit of him exuded an aura that spoke of total power allied to total self-control, underscored with something that suggested that he could be very dangerous if provoked. And yet for all his power and good looks he did not send her heart into freefall, or force the muscles of her lower body to clench in agonised denial of the intimate sensual ache he had caused in them, in the way that Alessandro could and did.
Leonora found herself reluctant to descend the steps. Because she didn’t want to be here and was being forced to do so? Or because she feared that the man standing impassively waiting for them might see through their deceit and Alessandro would punish her for that by sacking Leo?
Without realising what she was doing she backed into Alessandro, trembling slightly as she did so. Automatically he reached out to steady her, placing his arm round her waist and turning her into his own body, holding her so that she was practically leaning against him, the hard muscles of his thigh pressed between her own jean-clad legs.
Leonora felt shock seize her breath, causing her to tremble even more at the unexpectedly sensual intimacy of his hold. She was torn between pulling back and—shockingly—wanting to lean closer, to be closer, to bury her face against his shoulder so that she wouldn’t have to face the scrutiny of the man waiting for them.
Panic filled her. She gave in to it, turning her face towards him as she whispered shakily, ‘I can’t do it. He—your brother will know. I...’
Alessandro’s arm tightened round her.
He should be used by now to the effect his elder brother had on women. There was no
real reason why he should feel such a fierce, primeval surge of male possessiveness. He felt nothing for Leonora, after all, and she would be a fool to risk her brother’s dismissal by flirting with Falcon.
‘Falcon is merely a man, not a magician. He cannot read minds or hearts, no matter how much he sometimes wants others to believe that he can. Like any other man he will believe what he sees—and this is what he will see.’
He pulled her closer and bent his head, and her eyes betrayed her as she looked up at him, offering him free access to her lips as though she wanted his kiss. His hand cupped the side of her face. To protect her from the sun and his brother’s gaze or to hold her captive? Alessandro didn’t know—and as soon as his mouth covered hers he discovered that he didn’t really care.
Why was it with this woman that where there should have been suspicion, the belief that she was putting on an act to entice him, instead the sensation of her mouth trembling with excitement beneath his own made him believe in her, made him feel both powerful and vulnerable? And so aroused that he was drawing her in close against his body and holding her tighter, deepening the kiss, probing that soft, trembling mouth mindlessly and seamlessly, for all the world as though he had her to himself and they were alone in a place where nothing mattered other than the way she was making him feel.
This wasn’t real. It was a role Alessandro was playing—that was all. Leonora tried to remind herself, but her body wasn’t listening to her mind. Instead it was reacting to the fact that she was in the arms of a man who was kissing her with fierce, compulsive desire. But Alessandro did not desire her, and she must not let her mouth soften under his or her body melt into his. She must not put herself in a position where she could and would be humiliated and hurt.
Hurt?
It was the frantic trembling of Leonora’s body and the agitated pressure of the hand she lifted to his chest to push him away that wrenched Alessandro back to reality.
