‘I need to go home,’ she whispered throatily. And the tears were still there! He wanted to kick himself for making them happen. He wanted to say to hell with it all and simply take her back to his apartment anyway!
They came to a stop and the doors slid open, revealing two fellow tenants waiting to enter, their polite expressions trying hard not to notice the buzz of sexual tension bouncing off the mirrored walls of the lift-car.
Giancarlo straightened away from her instantly. Natalia quickly slid herself past both him and the two others with her head lowered so they couldn’t see her pained embarrassment.
He joined her as the lift doors closed again, leaving them alone in the softly lit car park with a double row of expensive cars.
The Ferrari still stood out as different, squatting low and sleek in its reserved slot, like a black cat waiting to pounce the moment it was given the opportunity.
Deactivating its state-of-the-art security, he walked round to the passenger door and opened it for her. She didn’t say a single word but just folded herself into the plush leather seat and waited for him to close the door.
She was staring directly ahead when he climbed in beside her. He adjusted the seat to accommodate his long legs, clipped home his seat belt, and then fired the engine. The car had been parked front end out so all he had to do was put it in gear and they were moving with a low purring growl that made his teeth clench with pleasure because, no matter what Natalia felt about this car, he was Italian, and his Italian blood revelled in that sound like no other.
Except the purr of a woman, he ruefully considered. Then he shut down that line of thinking before it took him places he couldn’t afford to go right now…
Outside in the street it had started raining. Natalia sat watching heavy sheets of the stuff slating down from a leaden sky, and knew she would have been soaked through to the skin before she’d walked ten feet in this kind of downpour.
Which made rather a mockery out of her stiff-faced bid for independence earlier, she acknowledged. Doing it her own way, she would have arrived home looking like a drowned rat and feeling more miserable than she already did!
‘Where to?’ he asked.
‘Chelsea,’ she told him shortly. Then, because she was beginning to feel the unfair sting of her own churlish manner, especially when she remembered that he had arrived at his apartment looking tired, yet here he was, driving her home in weather not fit for dogs, she lightened her tone to add, ‘It’s on the other side of the river. If you—’
‘I know where Chelsea is,’ he cut in levelly.
She floundered into silence again, realising she should have remembered that he was quite familiar with London. Edward had told her once that Giancarlo had worked here in the City for a few years when he’d been just beginning to strike out on his own ‘playing the hot-shot City broker and cutting quite a dash with the ladies,’ Edward had fondly described the Giancarlo of those days. But then, Edward was deeply fond of his wife’s younger brother, she recalled heavily. Which made this other situation that was so quickly developing all the more impossible.
Oh, Edward, she thought sighingly. What am I going to do? What am I going to do—?
No answer came back because Edward wasn’t here, but she was and so was Giancarlo, driving together, through a rainy London evening in a car that turned heads even in this kind of weather—and with an atmosphere inside the car that sang with sexual tension, even though they were both trying to pretend it wasn’t there.
She began feeding him directions once they were nearing their destination, her voice sounding huskily intimate, even to her. The rain stopped quite suddenly as they turned into her street. She directed him to a parking spot by the kerb outside her house and inside she was beginning to tremble slightly as the car stopped and the engine died.
For it was, she realised, the beginning of yet another dangerous situation: the point where she said a polite thank-you and goodnight—or invited him inside.
‘Nice house,’ he commented, pre-empting her need to say anything. He was peering out of the car at the row of tiny cottages. ‘It must cost you something to live here,’ opined the astute banker in him. ‘How many of you share, to rent a place like this?’
Casually said, merely curious more than anything, but still Natalia felt herself stiffening as a hint of warning went chasing down her spine. ‘I don’t rent,’ she answered warily. ‘And I don’t share…’
She doesn’t rent, and she doesn’t share, Giancarlo was slowly repeating to himself, and suddenly felt himself going cold. He wasn’t a fool, he knew the price of property in London, especially in a fashionable area like this. So how did a young woman trained as nothing more than a secretary, earning the salary he knew Natalia Deyton earned, afford to live here?
The answer came back like a stab in the chest. She couldn’t afford it—but Edward could.
He was sitting here with another man’s mistress, staring at another man’s love-nest! And for a terrible moment he thought he was going to be sick!
Edward in there, with Natalia. Edward in there, cheating on his wife—cheating on Giancarlo’s sister—with Natalia! His eyes began to burn into the brick frontage as if he could see every salacious thing they did in there.
‘M-my mother passed away about fourteen months ago, if you recall,’ Natalia was telling him huskily.
His black eyes flashed to her profile on a flare of hope. ‘And you lived here together before she died?’
She went pale. ‘I…n-no.’
The answer gutted him.
‘Sh-she left me well provided for,’ the little liar embroidered her tale of deceit. ‘I just prefer to live alone. W-would you like to come in, h-have some coffee be-before you start back?’ she offered—as a diversion tactic perhaps, to stop him probing any deeper into her financial arrangements?
Well, no, he would not like to come in! They would not carry him dead over the threshold of that—den of sin! he thought through the roaring in his ears. ‘It is late,’ he refused, amazed at how even his voice sounded. ‘And it has been a long day. I think we are both tired…’
She looked so relieved that he had to presume she’d been terrified of him walking in there and discovering some little piece of evidence that would lead him to Edward.
‘Then I’ll say thank you, for bringing me home.’ She didn’t push the issue, found a brief smile—and was reaching for the door catch when he stopped her.
‘Have dinner with me,’ he said gruffly. ‘Tomorrow night.’
She turned a puzzled frown on him. He didn’t blame her—he was confused himself! All he knew was that things had changed. He wanted her out of that house and in his bed in his apartment before another day went by!
‘I will be out all day tomorrow,’ he went on, thinking on his feet again. ‘I have meetings to attend in the City, so I won’t see you unless you wait for me to get in tomorrow. So I am asking you to have dinner with me,’ he repeated.
‘What—like a date?’ she asked, looking into his eyes with her own so wide and seductively vulnerable, he hated himself for the blast of heat he felt where he shouldn’t!
‘Yes, a date,’ he confirmed, gruffly and suggestively. ‘One where we get to know each other outside the work environment, and explore the—possibilities to what we know is already here…’ He touched her soft and crushable lower lip with a finger. The warm flesh pulsed in instant response. ‘Bring a change of clothes with you tomorrow, change at the apartment to save us some time…’ In a minute, he thought fiercely, she will be licking that finger, and Dio, but he was burning for her to do it! ‘It will be good, hmm?’
She knew what he was saying, the sultry look in her deceitful eyes told him so, as did the sensual pulse in the air surrounding them. And as his body throbbed and his anger roared and his eyes burned with his intentions, he felt that softly pulsing lip move on her answer.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Triumph sang in his blood. After tomorrow night she would not be
sleeping in Edward’s cosy little love-nest ever again! She was his for the taking, and he was going to take her! By the time this thing was over Natalia Deyton was going to belong to him body and soul, Giancarlo vowed.
Body and wretched lying soul…
CHAPTER SIX
BY SEVEN-FIFTEEN the next evening, Natalia was standing in the bedroom of Giancarlo’s apartment, hurriedly putting the finishing touches to her make-up before she found herself somewhere to go to wait for him that wasn’t so—thought provoking.
She couldn’t believe an apartment of this size and class had only one bedroom and bathroom in it! A bachelor pad, he had dryly described it. One with hardly any doors and no locks on the few that it did have!
He had not arrived yet, and her tummy was fluttering with a nervous anticipation that was making it impossible for her to put her lipstick on straight. Sighing, she grabbed a tissue to wipe it away, then tried again.
It had been a strange day all told, she reflected. Disturbingly quiet without him here, yet she’d been feeling his presence everywhere from the moment she’d stepped out of the lift this morning.
No, before that, she amended, recalling the private taxicab that had arrived at her front door early this morning, arranged by him, to transport her here with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of comfort. The man certainly knew how to make an impression, she mused dryly. First with the door-to-door transport, then with the concierge waiting in the foyer to hand her the necessary security access card so that she could activate the lift, and an apology from Mr Cardinale for not being here today. ‘I am instructed to inform you that he will be here to collect you at seven-thirty…’
Seven-thirty had seemed a comfortingly long way off then—but the man himself hadn’t. From the moment she’d stepped out of the lift she had felt him everywhere she went in the apartment. Here in the bedroom, for instance, where she’d come first to hang up the suit bag carrying her clothes for tonight. The first thing to hit her had been the clean-scented smell of his soap permeating out from the connecting bathroom. And the evidence of his occupation lay everywhere she happened to look, like the loose change on the bedside table and the black cotton robe tossed casually on the bed.
A bed she couldn’t so much as glance at without feeling her skin prickle as her mind shot off to places it shouldn’t.
‘Oh, heck,’ she cursed softly, and made herself finish the job she had started before her nerves completely got the better of her. It had been bad enough taking a quick shower in his bathroom, hurrying herself through the chore with her senses on edge, tautly aware of the lack of a lock on the door and listening out for the sound of him returning early, terrified he would catch her there naked yet wickedly turned on by the idea at the same time. In fact she’d shocked herself by how vivid that fantasy had been.
She ought to be ashamed of herself. The note he’d left her had invited her to feel free to use the apartment as her own—but it had not given her permission to weave fantasies about him in his shower!
But then, it had been a week for heightening the senses. Yesterday she had spent in a constant state of high anxiety not knowing what he was going to come at her with next. Today, even though he had been physically absent, he had hovered silently in the background of everything she’d done, like the warm breath of a prospective lover on her nape, making his desires felt.
Oh, stop it! she scolded herself and began feeding her cosmetics back into their bag with impatient fingers. It was the sheer volume of work he’d left for her to do that made it feel he were breathing down her neck! she told herself crossly.
So much work, in fact, that she decided he must have stayed up all night to produce it! Letters to type. Memos to create and wing off to all the separate departments in Knight’s, carefully spelling out his directives and what he expected back from each and every one. Then there was the pin number he had left her, to enable her access to the Cardinale Group computer mainframe. A long list of jobs regarding all his other business interests had given her a daunting insight into how powerful a man he actually was.
No wonder she had become so obsessed by his presence, she told herself. He’d even emailed her at precisely one o’clock, ordering her to stop and make herself some lunch!
Then, halfway through the afternoon, the package had arrived by special courier. Her fingers went still, her eyes flickering up to catch their darkened expression in the mirror as she replayed that moment when she’d been handed the glossy white garment box—with the Taylor-Gant name inscribed in gold on the lid—and instantly known what had been inside it.
‘Consider these homework,’ the accompanying note said, scrawled in his bold black mocking hand. ‘I trust your good judgement as to which set you choose to wear tonight.’
Inside the box had been no less than three different sets of underwear. A sheer black lace set, a flimsy white silk set and a daring set in come-and-get-me red. All of which were so sensually provocative that she’d actually blushed as she’d visualised him choosing these things for her to wear!
But she was wearing the white set, which was telling her something she had no wish to dwell upon right now.
A telephone began to ring. Almost jumping out of her skin as the sound pierced the silence, she turned rather dazedly to look for the nearest extension line. She found it next to the bed, and went to answer it warily, knowing somehow that it had to be him.
‘Did you carry out all my instructions?’ his low, dark, huskily intimate voice murmured enquiringly, and made her instantly aware of delicate white silk lovingly moulding her body.
‘I finished all the work you required me to do,’ she replied coolly, refusing to take up the bait.
He laughed softly and the sound sent her legs weak.
‘Where are you?’ she asked, glancing down at her watch to see that it was exactly seven-thirty.
‘Right here in the foyer,’ he told her. ‘Awaiting my date—are you coming down?’
Coming down? She frowned. ‘Don’t you need to change first?’
‘Would you like me to come up?’
‘No!’ she cried, not understanding why she was being handed this reprieve from the one moment she had been dreading all day, but more than willing to accept it. ‘I just need a few minutes and I will come down to you.’
Already beginning to panic, she put down the phone, then turned in an anxious daze to gather the last of her things together. She would have to collect them tomorrow, she told herself as she stuffed her day things into the suit bag with fingers that trembled in her urgency. For it wouldn’t be practical for her to come back here tonight just to collect them.
Who needs a practical excuse to come back here? a little voice inside her head mocked.
Ignoring it, she turned to take a last quick glance at herself in the mirror. What she saw reflected back at her set her nerve-ends singing. Was that her—was it really her?
Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were too bright—and the dress was an absolute disaster! It was too short, too tight, too—everything! she decided, giving a wriggling tug at the stretchy fabric in an effort to cover up some more leg. The dusky-blue silk-knit settled back to its original position the moment she let go of it—leaving her standing there staring at it in despair. She had deliberately chosen this particular dress because she’d thought it had all the right qualities to look elegant and demure with its long sleeves and what she’d remembered as a modest V neckline.
So how was it that she hadn’t remembered how it clung to her body like a second skin? Or that the V dipped too low into her cleavage and her legs suddenly looked twice as long as they were!
And I should have put my hair up! she realised as panic put its foot on the throttle and went raging through her at full pace. Leaving it down to hang loose over her shoulders made her look—slinky, she saw in growing horror.
Had she time to stand here messing with it? The overriding fear of him losing patience and coming up here to find her told her she hadn’t even got t
ime to panic like this!
‘Oh,’ she groaned. This was all his fault! The wretched man had been slowly driving her out of her mind all day.
Then—no, she amended that as she shuffled her feet into three-inch high-heeled shoes and made a grab for her evening jacket. He had been driving her out of her mind from the first moment she’d set eyes on him two days ago!
Was it only two days? It felt like for ever, she thought tensely as she snatched up her evening purse and left the bedroom.
She was hurrying past the kitchen opening when she spied the ice bucket sitting on one of the units with the bottle of champagne standing in it—and pulled to a stop, then closed her eyes on the unwanted reminder of this particular instruction he’d emailed her.
Five o’clock on the dot, she recalled with a tense little quiver. ‘You may stop being the efficient Miss Deyton now and turn yourself into the very desirable Natalia for me. PS. Put the champagne on ice,’ leaving her in no doubt as to his expectations later tonight.
But what really bothered her was—she’d done it. What did that tell her about her own expectations for tonight?
But—no. Grimly she blocked out that thought. They were going out for dinner, she told herself firmly as she stepped into the lift and pressed for the foyer. Dinner, she repeated. Nothing more, nothing less. When it was over she would go home to her own house and her own bed, and Giancarlo Cardinale would be drinking his champagne alone.
A promise she forgot the moment she set eyes on him. The lift doors came open as he was turning round to face them. She gained a very vague impression of subtle lighting and white tiled flooring, then—nothing.
He went still. So did she, the breath dying in her throat. He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and a dark tie, all of which looked as if he had put them on only minutes ago. His face was clean-shaven, his hair as smooth as silk. He looked lean and dark and frighteningly special—and his eyes were so hot they made her flesh burn…
A Sicilian Seduction Page 8
