Shameful Secret, Shotgun Wedding

by Sharon Kendrick

  She’d put on a simple grey jersey dress and a pair of slouchy black leather boots. She must have quickly washed her face for the smudgy eyes and blotchiness had disappeared—but had added nothing more than a lick of lipstick. Her long pale hair was clipped back at each ear—and the rest fell in a silken tumble around her shoulders. She looked, he thought—utterly delectable.

  ‘Shall we go?’ Cassie questioned.

  He thought that if she’d been a little more experienced, she might have tried to seduce him here—in an attempt to broker further closeness between them—and the fact that she hadn’t tried made him want her. Really want her. He felt the aching at his groin and thought about taking her to bed. Weighed up the novelty and attraction of the idea against the reality of a small and uncomfortable room and the horror of having to be introduced to her flatmates if any of them returned.

  ‘Yes. Let’s go,’ he answered briskly. ‘You must be starving.’

  Cassie nodded. At least he hadn’t changed his mind about lunch—because hadn’t there been a terrible, insecure part of her which had worried that he might have gone by the time she emerged? Simply disappeared, as if he’d thought better of it? She didn’t know what she was going to do—but at least this meal could provide a little distraction, which meant she didn’t have to think about the future for an hour or so. Her dream of a glorious break in London had now turned into a nightmare. Not only had she been sacked—but she had hitched a star to a thoroughly unsuitable man.

  But you haven’t hitched your star to him, Cassie, she reminded herself sharply. He’s simply taking you for a fancy lunch because you lost your job this morning, and afterwards—he’s going to send you on your merry way.

  She picked up her handbag. Well, if this was her first and last experience of being Giancarlo’s lover, then she was going to enjoy her lunch and not ruin it by moping. She would make the most of it—try to turn the memory into something to be cherished—otherwise, wouldn’t it all have been a terrible waste? ‘Yes, I’m starving.’

  The car drove them to the west of the city, to a restaurant overlooking the river—a big, busy place—so heaven only knew how he managed to get a window table at such short notice. But then Cassie noticed the almost unconscious deference of the waiter—to whom Giancarlo said something smilingly in Italian—and realised that she was in the company of a man who would always get anything he wanted.

  She forced herself to concentrate on the green-grey water of the river as it slid past the window and the way the intense light reflected back from its rippling surface—until she was handed a globe of red wine, the colour of rubies.

  ‘And please don’t tell me you never drink at lunchtime,’ said Giancarlo.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Well, today you do. You need a drink.’ He took a mouthful of his own, black eyes capturing hers across the table as he lifted his glass and gave an acid smile. ‘Actually, so do I.’

  Following his lead, Cassie took a sip and made no objection when Giancarlo took over the food ordering. She felt numb—the way your mouth felt when the dentist gave you an injection. She sat perfectly still as olives and water and a basket of rosemary-sprinkled bread began to appear.

  ‘So what will you do?’ he questioned, watching her frozen pose from between narrowed eyes.

  ‘I’ll have to go back to Cornwall, I guess.’

  ‘You don’t sound keen.’

  ‘I’m not. My mother will want to know why the sudden, rather dramatic change of plan. And so will my boss.’

  ‘And you won’t tell them the truth?’

  Cassie gave a hollow laugh. ‘What, that I’ve been sacked and only just managed to avoid being charged for theft?’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘I suppose when you put it like that…’

  She felt like saying that was the more acceptable of two explanations—because even worse was the truth behind her arrest. About not keeping her mind on the job—swayed by the seasoned charms of an Italian billionaire and then losing her innocence to him. Well, her mother was never going to hear about that, either. ‘There is no other way to put it.’

  ‘You could stay and get another job,’ he suggested.

  Cassie shook her head. He just didn’t understand. But then, why should he—when these sort of commonplace problems were completely outside his experience? ‘Three weeks before Christmas?’ she questioned. ‘I don’t think so. Most stores already have their full quota of staff to cope with the holiday rush—and I’m hardly going to be able to dazzle them with a glowing reference.’

  Steak and chips were placed in front of them—but Giancarlo scarcely registered one of his favourite dishes. He looked into her eyes, resenting the renewed striking of his conscience provoked by her pale face and troubled expression.

  ‘You could stay anyway—without working,’ he suggested.

  ‘I can’t stay at the flat without paying rent—it’s not fair to the others—and if I’m not working then I can’t pay rent. What do they call it—a catch-22 situation?’

  He took another mouthful of wine—only now the clarion call of his conscience began to wane as her words took them effortlessly on to more familiar territory. One of funds and finance and supply and demand. Because when he stopped to think about it—didn’t they each have something the other wanted? He had the money to cushion her fall from grace—and she had…His eyes drifted over her face.

  She had plenty. Violet eyes and soft petal lips and a tight, young body which had caused him to act with such uncharacteristic impulse. He felt the familiar arrowing of desire. Because if he was being honest—he hadn’t had enough of Cassandra Summers. And she certainly hadn’t had enough of him.

  He leaned across the table and took her cold and unresisting hand in his, rubbing his thumb over the pulse, which instantly began to skitter beneath the delicate skin. ‘I have a much better idea, cara,’ he murmured. ‘Something which I think could be mutually beneficial to us both.’

  Cassie stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘What sort of idea?’ she whispered, her senses befuddled just by the way he was touching her.

  ‘Why don’t you come and live with me?’

  Cassie’s heart missed a beat. ‘Live with you?’ she repeated dazedly.

  ‘Mmm.’ He saw the flare of hope in her eyes and hurried to make sure she didn’t read too much into his suggestion. ‘I don’t much like the holiday season—but you could provide a very welcome distraction. And in the meantime, you need somewhere to stay.’ Giancarlo’s lips curved into a sensual smile as he lifted her fingertips and warmed them with the brush of his lips. ‘So why don’t you come and stay until Christmas?’

  Chapter Five

  ‘WHAT do you mean, you’re going to go and live with some bloke you’ve only just met?’

  Gavin’s outraged voice made Cassie slowly count to ten as she pulled a dress from the small wardrobe and laid it in her open suitcase. With a smile of confidence she was far from feeling, she turned round to face him.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Gavin,’ she chided gently. ‘Living in your flat was only ever a temporary stay! I’m twenty-one and this is the twenty-first century—why, in some cultures I’d have been married off at the age of fourteen!’

  Gavin’s blue eyes bored into hers. ‘So he’s offering to marry you, is he? This Giancarlo whatever-his-name is?’

  ‘Vellutini. His name’s Vellutini,’ she said, liking the way her lover’s name tasted like velvet on her lips—a soft and sensuous caress, just like his mouth. Until the rest of Gavin’s words broke into her daydream and tainted it with the stark edge of reality. ‘No, of course he isn’t offering to marry me! We’ve only just met.’

  ‘You’ve only just met and yet you’re moving in with him?’

  ‘So I’m being impulsive!’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous.’

  ‘That’s your opinion, Gavin—and I don’t happen to agree with it.’

  ‘You know he’s a billionaire?’

  Cassie stared
at Gavin, her heart missing a beat. ‘I knew he was wealthy—of course I did—but how the hell did you find out a detail like that?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Cassie—don’t be so naïve! You think someone like that doesn’t have a huge profile on the Internet? I looked him up. He’s thirty-five, for heaven’s sake—and he’s an international playboy! While you’re just a sweet, ordinary girl from Cornwall who’s batting way, way out of her league.’ He glowered. ‘A man like that will just chew you up and spit you out when he’s finished with you.’

  Cassie bit back the indignant retort which flew to her lips, telling herself that Gavin only had her best interests at heart. He’d known her since they’d been at school together and she knew he had feelings for her himself. She’d never encouraged those feelings—but in a way that had only inflamed his protective interest in her. Good-looking himself, in a blond and even-featured kind of way, he had no trouble attracting women—but it was the one who eluded him who held the most allure. Maybe that was the case with all men, thought Cassie with a sudden dejection—remembering the almost indecent haste with which she had accepted Giancarlo’s offer to be his mistress. In which case, it didn’t hold out much hope for the future.

  But she wasn’t holding out any hope for the future. She wasn’t completely stupid. She was simply being a modern woman and taking the relationship for what it was, like lots of women did. Surely that was enough.

  ‘He’s my lover,’ she told Gavin boldly, because it still sounded like a foreign word. ‘Women do have lovers, you know. And I’m going to live with him for a few weeks.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Then nothing.’ Cassie shrugged with what she hoped was just the right amount of nonchalance. ‘I’ll be going back to Cornwall to carry on with my life while he carries on with his.’

  ‘You think it’ll be that easy, do you?’

  ‘Yes, Gavin,’ she said firmly—because deep down Cassie knew that she wanted this far too much to risk listening to the frightened little voice which made her wonder if he was right. ‘Actually I do.’

  He scowled. ‘Well, you know where I am when you need all the pieces picking up.’

  It wasn’t the blessing she would have chosen but Cassie was determined not to let anything dent her excitement. How could it, when Giancarlo’s unbelievable request over lunch had sent her senses into overdrive? And how could she possibly have resisted when he had made the arrangement sound like the perfect solution—and the only sensible option to take? He had leaned across the restaurant table and his ebony gaze had washed over hers, making her feel weak and warm inside and overwhelmed by an irresistible urge to have him kiss her again.

  ‘I am feeling a little guilty, mia bella,’ he had murmured. ‘As if I had sat you down for a sumptuous banquet and then whisked you away after the first course. If I’d known that you were inexperienced, I would have—’

  He had paused at this point, leaving Cassie to peer at him anxiously. ‘Would have what?’

  ‘I made an assumption that there had been other lovers before me,’ he said, quickly skating over the question. ‘Why wouldn’t I have done? A woman of your age is usually experienced. And a man makes love differently if a woman is innocent. The pace is different—and so are his expectations. Your introduction to sex is not what I would have wished—despite the fact that I gave you much pleasure.’ Dark eyes had glittered with a message which had made her heart race. ‘So come and stay with me and I will show you even more. How does that sound?’

  Cassie had blushed. It had sounded like heaven, even when he had said something else—something which would have had any sensible woman running for the hills.

  ‘You know that this—arrangement—is of a purely temporary nature, bella? That it ends when it ends—and that means it’s over. I need to be honest with you about that.’

  Was that honesty or was it cruelty? Cassie didn’t care. She could handle it because she wanted him far too much to listen to the voice of reason. As she hugged Gavin goodbye and ran outside her Greenford flat to find Giancarlo’s car sitting purring at the kerbside she couldn’t quell a great surge of exhilaration. Because this was the most exciting thing to have ever happened to her and she was going to enjoy every second of it.

  Ignoring the nagging little voice which questioned whether this was going to be a romantic high-point from which she would never recover, Cassie settled back in the car as she was driven to Giancarlo’s house.

  The door was opened by Gina, a careful smile on her face—her expression impossible to read behind the trendy, black-framed spectacles.

  ‘Hello, Cassandra,’ she said. ‘I understand that I am to welcome you. Giancarlo won’t be back from the office until six—but he said you were to settle yourself in. Shall I show you to your dressing room—so that you can unpack—or would you prefer me to do that for you?’

  Cassie hesitated. Gina didn’t sound at all fazed by the fact that a stranger was moving into her well-ordered house. Did she have to cope with this scenario on a regular basis? she wondered. And the last thing she wanted was the elegant housekeeper giving her rather humble clothes the once-over. But she hid all her misgivings behind an equally careful smile. ‘Thanks—but I can unpack myself.’

  She followed Gina upstairs to a previously unseen room which led directly off the master bedroom—one containing shelves, cupboards, floor-length mirrors and another swish en-suite bathroom. It was ridiculously large for her meagre amount of belongings but, once Gina had gone, she unpacked. And once she’d put away her few bits and pieces and placed a framed photo of her parents on the window sill it felt a lot more like home.

  Six o’ clock seemed like ages away and she took a long bath and washed her hair, luxuriating in the scent-filled steam from the bathroom, and was just sitting wrapped in a towel in front of the dressing table when the door opened—and in walked Giancarlo.

  It was the first time she’d seen him since lunch yesterday—and her heart began to pound with a trembling kind of excitement as she turned round to find his gaze raking over her. For a moment he didn’t say anything—just studied her from between narrowed eyes—and Cassie sat frozen like a statue. What if he was now regretting his decision—if the reality of coming home and finding her in situ was threatening his bachelor independence?

  She swallowed. Say something. Don’t just sit there. ‘H-hello.’

  Once more he allowed his eyes to rake over her—at the soft white towel covering her pink-flushed skin and her hair trailing in damp tendrils all the way down her back. He had been distracted all day—wondering if he had taken leave of his senses in giving her access to his house—before reminding himself that she had nowhere else to go. But now that he had seen her again, his reservations dissolved. God, she was beautiful.

  The swift and heady rush of desire heated his veins as he walked towards her and repeated her trembled little greeting, and yet something in her big violet eyes made his voice gentle as he leaned over her. ‘Hello,’ he said as he bent his head to whisper a kiss on her bare shoulder. ‘Is this the way you’re always going to greet me when I get home from work?’

  ‘Do you like it?’ she whispered, closing her eyes as she felt the soft, seductive graze of lips.

  ‘Yes, I think we can safely say that I like it, cara. I like it very much. Though I think we could improve on it even more.’ His hand moved round to give a little tug of the knot which constrained the towel so that it fell away—revealing her rosy-tipped breasts, the slender dip of her waist and the rounded curve of her pale hips. She looked like a still-life painting come to glorious life, he thought as he let his fingers drift downwards to cup one breast.

  Cassie’s eyes opened wide as she saw the image reflected back from the mirror—his olive fingers contrasted against the paleness of her own skin. She could feel the insistent peaking of her nipple against his palm and the warm heat in the pit of her stomach as his lips grazed over her damp hair. Restlessly, she wriggled—tried to turn to have him kiss her pro
perly—but he wouldn’t let her. ‘Giancarlo,’ she breathed.

  ‘Stay,’ he commanded as his fingers continued to stroke her.

  ‘But it’s—’

  ‘Stay!’

  Despite her erotic imprisonment, she felt a hot, fierce heat shoring up inside her—building and building as he reached further down, his fingers tangling in the soft fuzz of hair at the juncture of her thighs and the honeyed moistness it concealed. She squirmed as he moved against her heated flesh and gasped his name as she felt the heat now spiralling upwards—like a great, strong tidal wave which was carrying her in its rush. It had happened to her when he had taken her to bed—but he had been there with her, not fully dressed like this, as if she were some kind of erotic puppet and he were pulling the strings. As if he were not part of what was happening to her. But then those new and extraordinary sensations began to engulf everything else—so that the world seemed to be composed of nothing other than sheer delight.

  ‘Giancarlo,’ she gasped, closing her eyes as she felt it about to happen.

  ‘No, watch,’ he urged. ‘Watch yourself in the mirror, mia bella. Watch how beautiful you look when you experience pleasure.’

  Obediently, Cassie’s lids fluttered open to see that her eyes were dark with desire. Glancing upwards, she met his mocking reflection in the mirror—felt control slipping away as his fingers continued their insistent dance. And then desire dissolved within her—leaving her helpless to do anything but watch herself orgasm. She saw the involuntary jerk of her body and the way that the high colour in her cheeks seemed to spread all over her breasts—as if someone had washed them in rose-pink paint.

  Weakly, she clutched onto his arm until the spasms had died away—feeling as if she might float away if she let go of him—but now Giancarlo had moved forward and he lifted her up into his arms. And she thought how decadent it seemed that he was still in his work suit while she was completely naked.