Challenging Dante

by Lynne Graham

  Dante scanned her face with intent gleaming eyes of green. ‘Your lipstick isn’t even smudged,’ he commented with unconcealed satisfaction.

  ‘And what the heck is that supposed to mean?’ Topsy flung back at him, dark hair dancing round her slight shoulders as she tossed her head in annoyance.

  ‘You didn’t let him touch you.’

  Topsy sucked in a deep, angry breath that filled her lungs to capacity. ‘And that is your business because...?’

  ‘Tonight you’re mine,’ Dante informed her with a level of unmistakable assurance that drove her breath right back out of her lungs again, deflating her when she could least afford the weakness.

  A split second later, Dante did nothing to help her condition because he did something even more shocking: bending down, scooping her off her feet as though she were a doll and anchoring both arms tightly round her.

  ‘Have you gone insane? What are you doing?’ Topsy exclaimed, keeping her voice low though because she did not want anyone to come investigating, indeed would have done just about anything to avoid being caught in such a compromising position by anyone living at the castle.

  ‘Stop acting dim—you know exactly what I’m doing!’ Dante asserted, boldly thrusting wide a door and striding into a room she had never entered before for the simple reason that it was his bedroom.

  ‘What on earth do you think you’re playing at?’ Topsy yelped as he put her down on the giant four-poster bed with scant ceremony.

  ‘You went on your date to which I very generously did not object.’

  ‘You’ve got no blasted right to object!’ Topsy hissed back at him full volume. ‘No right at all!’

  His features set rigid, his spectacular bone structure prominent. ‘I want you to spend the night with me.’

  ‘And even if you’d asked like any normal man, the answer would still be no!’ Topsy slung at him furiously, flushed and all of a quiver from the assumption he appeared to have made about her and anything but grateful to be forced to relive those deeply embarrassing and heated minutes in his car, which had led to his misapprehension that she would be so easily available that she would simply fall into his bed the instant he expressed the desire.

  Dante dealt her an incredulous look from scorching green eyes. ‘No?’ he repeated, as though it was a word he had never heard before from a woman in the bedroom.

  Topsy scrambled off his bed, retrieved a shoe that had dropped off and wedged her foot back into it at the same time as she smoothed down her rucked skirt. ‘I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression this afternoon but I’m not going to sleep with you,’ she told him squarely.

  She reminded Dante of a determined little bird rearranging her bright-feathered plumage, her slightly snub nose in the air, her heart-shaped face pink as one of his mother’s precious roses. ‘Yet you want me,’ he breathed between clenched teeth, for all he had thought about all evening when he should have been catching up on work was his fantasy of getting her in his bed where she belonged.

  ‘This afternoon...er...well that was an aberration and entirely your own fault,’ Topsy told him roundly, furious at the situation he had put her in, fighting her mortification that he could have thought she would be that easy. Of course when she hadn’t objected to that shameless little session of intimacy in the car, could she really blame him? And it did not help that when she looked at that gorgeous dark angel face of his she felt breathless and boneless and prone to reliving every madly exciting moment of his touch.

  ‘How was it my fault?’ Dante demanded.

  ‘You shouldn’t be so good at seduction,’ Topsy responded with every evidence of conviction in that belief. ‘If I’d had a moment to stop and consider, it would never have happened and we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.’

  Dante was furious with her for the ambiguous signals she had fed him, but for a split second he was startled to realise he was also on the edge of bursting out laughing at that response. ‘Perhaps we should begin again,’ he breathed instead, his hard mouth curling a little, for he had never said that to a woman in his life before, but then he could also not recall ever being quite so hot to have one.

  ‘No, we’re not going to begin anything!’ Topsy exclaimed, and then bent down as her heel dug into a sheet of paper on the rug, detaching it with careful fingers and lifting it up to see the columns of figures. ‘Oh, that’s wrong...’

  Already detaching from her hand the sheet that had escaped from the file that had fallen to the floor when he put her on his bed, Dante frowned down at her. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Topsy peered over his arm and stabbed a finger at one column. ‘It’s added up wrong.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t,’ he responded impatiently, setting the document down on the file beside his laptop.

  ‘Dante, I have a doctorate in advanced maths and the one thing I do know is figures and I assure you that that final entry is a mistake,’ Topsy said drily.

  ‘A doctorate in advanced maths?’ Dante echoed, studying her with incredulous eyes while wondering what someone with such a background was doing working for his mother.

  Topsy nodded, wishing she had kept her mouth shut while carefully edging back towards the door.

  Dante stalked her like a fox set on cornering a hen. ‘I don’t want you to leave. I want you to explain why we can’t start again.’

  Topsy groaned out loud. She hated these conversations with men, for in her experience they almost always went the same way and the men got disgruntled, unable to understand why she wouldn’t just drop into bed with them to scratch a sexual itch. ‘Look, all you want is sex and that’s not enough for me.’

  Dante dealt her a pained appraisal, by which time she was plastered up against the back of his bedroom door, one hand curled round the door knob. ‘Doesn’t everybody want sex?’

  ‘I’m not looking for love and marriage either but there has to be something more,’ Topsy contended, because she had considered the subject in depth and had drawn up a list of desirable male attributes, none of which he met.

  An eloquent black brow rose. ‘Something...more?’

  ‘I’m not into casual sex,’ she pointed out, almost adding any kind of sex but holding that revealing admission back. ‘You don’t know me or even care about me and we’re not similar or even complementary in character,’ she pointed out very seriously. ‘I mean, when did you last wear a pair of jeans?’

  Not since his student days. Dante was feeling increasingly like a male version of Alice in Wonderland who had fallen down the rabbit hole only to emerge into an incomprehensible world. ‘Jeans?’ he repeated thunderously at what he saw as yet another red herring. Similar or complementary in character? What planet was she from?

  ‘You toured a building site today in an Armani suit and gold cuff links. I don’t dress up as a rule, don’t like that appearances sort of thing that people get hung up about. What on earth would we talk about or do together?’

  Dante was much more interested in the doing than the talking and he leant forward, bracing his hands on either side of her face. ‘I don’t think entertainment would cause us much of a problem,’ he husked in a low-pitched growl that raised colour in her cheeks again, the clean, spicy, male scent of him entrapping her like a covert spell. ‘Mentioning stuff like clothing is just so superficial—I’m surprised at you.’

  ‘But superficial, ruthless and mercenary is what you are!’ Topsy protested helplessly, feeling crowded at the few inches that were now all that separated their bodies.

  ‘We would have maths in common,’ Dante countered with something that felt dangerously akin to desperation. ‘I’m terrific at maths.’

  ‘Oh...’ Topsy was also thinking about his reputation as a philanthropist, striving to cram him under an acceptable label on her all-important list of ideal male traits. But there was just no way he
would fit there. He wasn’t modest or soothing and she seriously doubted that he could cook or clean. All he had going for him was sex appeal and a very immodest amount of it, she reasoned feverishly.

  Dante skated a fingertip along the sultry line of her luscious mouth. ‘Let me make love to you.’

  ‘Don’t use words you don’t mean. It wouldn’t be making love, it would be grubby sex!’ Topsy snapped bluntly. ‘And I’m worth more than that!’

  Dante frowned, green eyes radiating resolve while his face took on a sardonic edge at her use of that insulting label, ‘grubby’. ‘How much more?’

  ‘You really don’t give up easily, do you?’ Topsy framed, her mouth still tingling from his touch, but his bold determination was starting to intimidate her because he was like a guided missile locked onto target. ‘It’s just we really would be wasting each other’s time.’

  ‘I don’t do grubby, cara mia,’ Dante whispered. ‘I want you to waste my time.’

  ‘My goodness, I’m so tired I can hardly stay awake!’ Topsy lied in dismay, carefully screening her mouth as though she were yawning in a last-ditch effort to conclude the confrontation.

  ‘Tired?’ Dante repeated, unimpressed, but he retreated a disconcerted step.

  Mercifully he had moved just enough to unblock the door and Topsy flipped round and opened it fast. ‘Night, Dante!’ she called over her shoulder and sped off fast.

  Dante swore and not under his breath. She was a tease, nothing but a tease, he reckoned furiously. Maybe it was an act, designed to lure him in deeper and increase his desire for her. He could not remember when a woman had last knocked him into pursuit mode. In fact he could not recall ever having to pursue or persuade a woman. He needed a cold shower. He flicked a glance at the empty bed and cursed again. Jeans...similar or complementary characters? Superficial, ruthless, mercenary? Self-evidently, she was a nutcase. Furthermore, ruthless was a compliment, not a personality trait worthy of censure. He had had a narrow escape, he told himself impatiently, and if she was playing some childish girlie game with him, she would soon discover that she was indeed wasting her time for he wasn’t that desperate. She exasperated him. He headed for the cold shower with anger in his glittering eyes. There was a world of women out there, beautiful, sophisticated women, who didn’t talk rubbish, insult him or lead him on only to change their minds at the last possible moment.

  * * *

  Having climbed into her comfortable bed, Topsy checked the list in the back of her diary that she had written when she was eighteen and trying to make sense of the almost incomprehensible dating scene at university. She had never fit in, never met her soul mate but had truly believed that he was out there somewhere. Dante met only one of her listed requirements: he was clever. But clever wasn’t quite the right word, she reflected ruefully: conniving and unscrupulous came closer to how she would have described him. And she had no regrets, she told herself urgently. She was much too sensible to surrender her virginity to a male who only awakened her hormones and didn’t give a damn about her.

  A little voice in the recesses of her less scrupulous conscience pointed out speciously that Dante was very probably very good in bed and would almost certainly make a great first lover. After all, it wasn’t as if she were looking for love or commitment, so perhaps it was a little unjust to blame him for a flaw she suffered from herself. Some day she would fall in love and want commitment, but she imagined that day was very far away and she fiercely suppressed that dangerous little voice in her brain.

  Tomorrow, she would be lunching with Mikhail, who was as devious and manipulative as any Machiavelli when it came to delivering what would please her sister Kat most. Topsy knew she would have to keep her wits about her and make sure that she stood her ground.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Dante used the back stairs to return to his bedroom after a heavy workout session in the basement gym. On edge after a restive night, a freezing-cold shower and the conviction that he had been manipulated by some means he had yet to identify, he was not in a good mood. Almost more infuriatingly when he had finally risen early to concentrate on work instead, he had discovered that she had been correct about that figure being wrong in the file. Yet she had only glanced at the page! How could she possibly have recognised a mistake that fast? He was about to stride through a doorway when he heard Topsy’s distinctive voice and Vittore’s, both of them talking in low voices somewhere out of his view.

  ‘I can’t make it today,’ Topsy was telling the older man. ‘I should have told you last night but I couldn’t mention it in front of Sofia.’

  ‘Of course not. We’ll have to go to Florence some other day.’ Dante’s stepfather sighed. ‘As long as Sofia doesn’t realise what we’re up to, we have nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Would she be annoyed?’ Topsy prompted.

  ‘Are you joking?’ Vittore groaned. ‘After the last time, she said she’d kill me! I have to get it right this time.’

  While Dante hovered with a frown, the voices died away as the couple retreated. What the hell was all that about? His original notion that Topsy might be involved with his stepfather had dwindled, but after that cosy exchange suspicion ran rampant through him again. Why were Vittore and his wife’s secretary whispering in corners? Why were they meeting up in Florence in secret? How could that be innocent? What had to be hidden from his mother? After the last time, she’d kill me! A previous act of infidelity, Dante decided in disgust. Was that what Vittore had been referring to?

  He did not like to think that his mother would even consider forgiving and forgetting such a betrayal, but he could not overlook the fact that she had spent many years married to a man who had forced her to close her eyes to his infidelity and accept it. His parent could be slipping back into that unfortunate pattern, refusing to see the truth that this time around she had no reason to feel that she had no choice but to accept such behaviour.

  * * *

  It was ten minutes to midday and Topsy was dressed for lunch in Florence, her curvy figure simply clad in a green sundress with shoestring straps. Tense though she was, Vittore had contrived to put a smile on her face. That cliché about try, try, try again when you got it wrong might have been specially coined for Sofia’s husband. Vittore wanted to give his wife a piece of jewellery that she would actually like and wear and, since Vittore had a natural love of bling and sparkle while Sofia preferred plain and elegant, her bridegroom had repeatedly got his gift choices wrong. That was why Topsy was to accompany Vittore to the design studio to choose a piece that her employer might genuinely appreciate for her birthday.

  Topsy joined Sofia to briefly discuss the floral arrangements for the fancy-dress ball and then headed downstairs, stiffening as the ancient bell over the massive gothic front door rang noisily and checking her watch: it was five to twelve. When she saw the hulking bodyguard on the step, she recognised him as Danilo, the head of Mikhail’s security, and, while she wondered if the forbidding older man had been sent to collect her in an effort to daunt her, her soft mouth firmed.

  ‘Where’s your luggage?’ Danilo enquired with a frown.

  Topsy’s heart sank. Had she misunderstood Mikhail? Was he expecting her to simply pack up and go home with him to London? Her chin came up. ‘I’m coming back here after lunch. I’m not leaving.’

  Danilo made no comment, which didn’t surprise her because he was not a chatty man. He stood out on the step instead wielding his mobile phone and talking in Russian, undoubtedly checking up on his employer’s expectations.

  As she lifted her handbag from the hall chair where she had left it earlier she saw Dante poised in the doorway of his study, lean, strong, dark face taut. At the sight of him, her heart jumped as though someone had closed a hand round the organ and squeezed. His straight dark brows were low over dazzling green eyes thickly enhanced by lashes black as coal as
he gazed back at her. He was so beautiful. Without warning she was reliving the touch of his finger on her lips the night before, the little bristles of dangerous pleasure that had travelled down her spine to warm secret places, making her breasts ache and her knees tremble. Colour washed her cheeks, a hunger she couldn’t deny stirring like a threatening storm.

  ‘Are you ready to leave?’ Danilo prompted impatiently.

  Topsy spun back to the older man and walked out of the door. Unfortunately the heat of the summer sun did nothing to cool her overheated skin.

  The limo had barely driven off when Dante crossed the wide hall, inclining his arrogant dark head in acknowledgement of the younger man waiting by the car that had just drawn up outside. He had decided to have Topsy followed. He wanted to know who she was meeting in Florence and why she had been shaken by the invitation. The more he learned about her, the closer he might come to working out what was going on at the castle. Everybody around him was acting weird, he thought impatiently. His mother was lying about on a chaise longue like some fragile Victorian lady suffering from a decline, while Vittore was whistling under his breath and whispering in dark corners with the hired help.

  * * *

  Topsy’s brother-in-law looked grim when he greeted her at the door of his hotel suite. A waiter was already setting out food from a heated trolley and hovering. With a flick of an imperious hand, Mikhail dismissed him and urged Topsy to sit down.

  ‘So, what’s going on? What are you up to?’ he asked Topsy baldly before she even got her bottom onto a seat.

  ‘That’s my business,’ Topsy replied quietly as she tucked into her starter.

  ‘If it threatens Kat’s peace of mind, it’s mine,’ Mikhail overruled without hesitation. ‘She’s pregnant again, by the way.’

  That announcement took Topsy by surprise because her sister suffered from fertility problems and having had IVF to conceive her twins had tried it again but, sadly, without success. ‘Oh, my goodness, that’s wonderful news!’ she exclaimed, knowing how much her eldest sister had longed for another child. ‘But...er...how?’