Everywhere they went he took her out into public places—more restaurants, more theatres, nightclubs and private parties—all very select venues where they could be displayed as a couple.
It was almost all glitz and glamour. There were those in his close circle of friends who were the kind of people she could relate to mainly because they were easy to like. Then there were the other kind who hovered on the fringes of it all who would have sold their grandmothers to be included as a member of his inner set.
Then there was the seemingly endless stream of his ex-lovers from all over the world who had no problem with telling her what they used to be to him and thought it fine to discuss the ins and outs of having a lover like him.
‘Have they never heard of the word discretion?’ she tossed at him after one particularly vocal beauty had seen nothing wrong in singing his sexual praises to Rachel—in front of Raffaelle. ‘Or does it stroke your ego to hear someone talk about you as if you were a stallion put out to stud and therefore free to be debated for your sexual prowess?’
‘I don’t like it,’ he denied.
‘Then don’t smile that smug smile while they list your assets.’
‘It is not a smug smile, it is a forbearing one. And you sound like a jealously disapproving wife.’
‘No, just a lover who does not think you are so great in bed that you deserve so much attention,’ she denounced.
‘No—?’
She should have read the intimation in thatno but she missed it.
‘No,’ she repeated.
‘Maybe you found the Italian heartbreaker and sex tutor of innocents a better lover?’
She turned icy eyes on him. ‘If you’re fishing for information, then forget it. Unlike your ex-lovers, this one does not kiss and tell.’
He had been fishing for information, Raffaelle acknowledged. She might be the best lover he’d ever enjoyed but he had no clue as to where she placed him on her admittedly short list.
And he’d accused her of being jealous when he knew that was his issue. Jealous, curious, wary of the way she sometimes looked at him as if he was a being from outer space. Their age difference bothered him. Her youth and her beauty and that softer side she had to her that made some of his previous women appear sex-hardened and clinical. Did she seehim like that: sex-hardened and clinical?
His male friends were drawn to her. He did not like to see it because he knew exactly what it was about her that drew them. They wanted to experience what he was experiencing. They wanted to know what it felt like to simply touch a woman like Rachel and have her melt softly for them.
And she did melt. It was his only source of male satisfaction. In company, out of company, he touched her and she melted. Helooked at her and she melted.
‘Well, remember that I am the lover who takes you to heaven each night,’ he said.
And, like Alonso, Rachel knew that he would break her heart one day.
He obsessed her mind and her body. She hated him sometimes, but her desire for him was stronger than hate. He knew it too and the inner battles she fought with herself turned him on. She watched it happen, watched right up until the moment they reached the lift which would take them into privacy and saw the social face he wore fall away to reveal the hard, dark, sexually intense man.
The lift became her torture chamber. The stinging strikes of his sexual promise flayed her skin. By the time they stepped through his front door she was a minefield of electric impulses, hardly breathing, hyped up and charged beyond anything sane.
Sometimes he would crash into that minefield right there in the hallway. Sometimes he would draw out the agony by making her wait before he unleashed the sensual storm. She learned to live on a high wire of expectation that allowed no respite and little sleep, with him even invading her dreams.
He knew every single sensitive inch of her. Sometimes he would coax her to stretch out on the bed with her arms raised above her and her legs pressed together, then he’d begin a long slow torture that she loved yet hated with equal passion because he would make her come—eventually—with only the lightest stroke of a finger or the gentlest flicker of his tongue. It was an unashamed act of male domination which left her aching because he never gave in to his own need on these occasions or finished such torments off with an intimate, deep physical joining.
Why did he do that? Even after four weeks with him she still did not have an answer to that question.
And then there were those other times. The times when he allowed her to perform the same slow torment on him. He would lie there with his eyes closed and his long body taut with sexual tension while she indulged her every whim.
Being equals, he called it. She called it dangerous, because it had reached a stage where she could not look at him without seeing him lost in the throes of what he was feeling on those occasions. A big golden man, trembling and vulnerable, a slave to what she could make him feel.
The elixir which kept her rooted in their relationship, wanting—needing more.
And other things began to torment her which were far more disturbing than the constant overwhelming heat of desire. She knew she had fallen in love with him. She could feel it tugging constantly at the vulnerable muscles around her heart. If he touched her those muscles squeezed and quivered. If she let her eyes rest on him, those same muscles dipped into a sinking tingling dive.
But Raffaelle was not in this for love. He wanted her, yes. He still desired her so fiercely that she would have to be a complete idiot not to know that he was content to keep things the way they were right now.
If she had any sense she would be walking away from it. Elise and Leo were back in Chicago. Elise was happy, Leo was happy and keeping his pregnant wife and his son close to him; the crisis in their marriage was over.
All of this should be over now. And, if it wasn’t for the worrying prospect that her period was overdue, she would have no excuse left to call upon which could allow her to stay.
Then it all went so spectacularly pear-shaped that it threw everything they had together into a reeling spin.
They were in Milan when it happened. Raffaelle was tense, distant, preoccupied—busy with an important deal, he said. But Rachel wondered if the stress of waiting to discover if she was pregnant was getting to him too.
He didn’t say so—never mentioned it at all and neither did she.
She knew that she needed to buy a pregnancy test. Putting it off any longer was silly when she was almost a whole week late. She was supposed to be going shopping with one of Raffaelle’s many cousins but Carlotta had rung up to say she couldn’t make it.
On impulse she snatched up her purse and headed out of the apartment. She should have called Tony to get him to drive her, but she didn’t want anyone with her to witness what she was going to do.
She caught a cab into the city, then headed for a row of shops that included a pharmacy. Anxiety kept her locked inside her own thoughts as she walked, but the last thing she expected to happen was to be woken from them by a loud screech of brakes as a glossy red open top Ferrari swished to a sudden stop at her side.
The man driving that car did not bother to open the door to climb out but leapt with lithe limbed grace over the door. ‘Rachel—amore!’ he called out.
Shock held her completely frozen, her blue gaze fixed on his familiar handsome face.
‘Alonso—?’ she gasped in surprise.
‘Si—!’ He laughed, all flashing white teeth, black silk hair and honey-gold beauty. ‘Is this not the greatest surprise of your life?’
CHAPTER TEN
HE BEGANclosing the gap between them, a lean muscled six-foot-two-inch Italian encased in the finest silver-grey suit. A man with so much natural charisma and self-belief that it just would not occur to him that he was anything but a welcome sight to her.
So Rachel found herself engulfed by the pair of arms he folded around her, then found herself being kissed on her cheeks and the tip of her nose, then her surprised, still parted mou
th.
She tried to pull back but he was not letting her. ‘I saw you get out of a cab and I could not believe my eyes!’ he exclaimed. ‘And look at you,’ he murmured, running a teasing set of fingers through the bouncy curls on her head. ‘Still my beautiful Rachel.’ He kissed her mouth again. ‘This has to be the best moment of my day!’
Well, not mine, thought Rachel, still rolling on the shock of seeing him. ‘What are you doing here in Milan?’
‘I could ask the same thing of you.’ He grinned down at her. ‘Though I would have to be blind not to know by now that you have captured the heart of Raffaelle Villani, eh? May good fortune always smile upon the bewitching,’ he proposed expansively. ‘He is totally besotted with you, as I was, of course…’
Across the street, on the shady side, sitting languidly at a lunch table with five business associates, Raffaelle happened to glance outside in time to see Rachel walking by on the sunny side of the street.
A smile warmed him from the inside. She looked beautiful in her simple white top and her short blue skirt which left a pleasurable amount of her long legs bare. And her silky blonde hair was shining in the sunlight, recently cut by an expert so the curls tumbled around her neck and her face like sensual kisses.
It was no wonder other men stopped to admire her as she walked past them, he observed, a smile catching the corners of his mouth as he saw one guy in particular actually spin around to take a second look.
Sorry, but she belongs exclusively to me, he heard himself stake the silent claim. Then he started to frown when another thought hit him. Where was Tony? Where was his cousin Carlotta? Why was Rachel out shopping alone when she knew the rules about going out without protection from the ever-watchful press?
The sound of screeching car brakes diverted his attention. A glossy red Ferrari with its top down had pulled to a sudden stop in the street. Its handsome young owner leapt out with lean grace and approached Rachel with his arms thrown open.
She had stopped to stare at him. What took place next lost Raffaelle the power to maintain a grip on his surroundings. The quiet hum of conversation taking place around the lunch table disappeared from his consciousness as he saw her soft pink mouth frame a name.
The man spoke, his gestures expressive, like the rakish smile he delivered as he gathered her into his arms, then kissed her cheeks, her nose and finally, lingeringly, her parted pink mouth.
A mouth that belonged tohim . A mouth that did not attempt to draw back from the kiss.
So cold he felt frozen now, Raffaelle watched this other man run his fingers through her curls as he talked.
Small, familiar, intimate gestures. Soft parted pink lips that quivered when she spoke back to him.
They knew each other.
His heart hit his gut because it did not take much intelligence to follow the body language and know without a single hint of doubt who the man had to be.
Alonso. The heartbreaker. He was so sure of it he did not even think to question his certainty.
Had they arranged to meet—right here in broad daylight without a care as to who might see them like this?
How long had they been in touch with each other? Each time he had brought her with him here to Milan?
Was she still in love with him?
Dio. While she stood there in his arms, looking up at him like that, was her heart beating too fast and her throat drying up and her blue eyes helplessly drinking him in?
‘Raffaelle…’
The sound of his name being spoken finally sank into his consciousness. Turning his head, he received the impression that it was not the first time one of his lunch companions had said his name.
‘My apologies,’ he said, managing to add a small grimace. ‘My attention strayed for a few moments.’
‘And why not, when the woman is as beautiful as the one seated in the window?’ one of them said smiling.
Seated? Raffaelle turned again to focus on a table by the restaurant’s window where indeed a very beautiful woman sat smiling ruefully back at him.
He had not noticed her before this moment.
He had not noticed any other women for a long time—not since Rachel came into his life.
His gaze flicked away from the smiling woman and across the street again.
He was in shock. He knew that. He knew that several important things were happening inside him even as he watched Rachel’s other Italian lover fold an arm across her shoulders and guide her towards his car.
Car horns were blaring. The street was alive with impatient car drivers trapped behind Alonso’s car.
‘One quick coffee, then,’ Rachel agreed as he swung open the door and helped her inside.
She should not be doing this. But they were drawing too much attention and getting into Alonso’s car seemed the better of two evils if coffee somewhere was the only way she was going to get rid of him.
Alonso joined her in seconds, sliding into the seat beside her and sending her one of his reckless grins as he slipped the car into gear. He drove them away with a panache that completely disregarded the minor chaos he had been causing in the street.
‘Like old times, eh?’ he laughed at her.
And it was, just like old times, when he had used to sweep up in one fast car or another without a care while he waited for her to scramble in next to him. His handsome carelessness used to excite her then. Now it just scared her witless as she glanced quickly around them as they drove off, hoping she did not see a face she recognised in the street—or worse, a camera flashing.
‘Somewhere quiet, Alonso,’ she told him quickly. ‘I can’t afford to be seen with you.’
‘Scared of what your rich new fiancé will say?’
You bet I am, Rachel thought. ‘I call it respect for his feelings.’
‘And a healthy respect for his bank balance too.’
Before she could challenge that last cynical remark, Alonso pulled into one of the less fashionable squares off the main street. Two minutes later they were sitting opposite each other at one of the pavement cafés that lined the square.
Rachel looked at Alonso and saw a man who worked very hard to look, dress, behave like the man he wished he could be but never would be.
And how did she know that? Because she had spent the last month with the genuine article, a man who didn’t need to work hard at being exclusive and special, he just simply was. It was she who, like Alonso, had to work hard at playing the part of someone she was not.
The comparison hit her low in her stomach.
As if he could tell what she was thinking, ‘You have done very well for yourself,’ Alonso said.
Rachel didn’t answer, giving her attention to the waiter who had come to their table. ‘Espresso,’ she told him. ‘N-no, I don’t want anything else.’
Alonso ordered the same, then casually dismissed the waiter with a flick of a hand. Had he always behaved with this much casual arrogance and she had been too besotted with him to notice?
‘Whatare you doing here in Milan?’ She repeated her question from earlier.
Sitting back in his seat and crossing a knee over the other, he said, ‘I moved here six months ago—to a better position, of course.’
Of course, Rachel acknowledged. Alonso had always been ambitiously upwardly mobile. ‘Still selling cars?’
‘Super-cars,cara ,’ he corrected dryly. ‘They are not merely cars but engineering works of art. But let us talk about you,’ he said turning the subject. ‘You must be happy with your new lover. What woman would not be?’ His mouth turned cynical as his eyes drifted over her. ‘No longer the rosy-cheeked innocent up from the country, eh?’
Recalling that innocent young girl Alsono had known last year, with—if not quite straw in her hair as Raffaelle described her—then pretty close to it, made her smile.
‘No,’ she agreed.
Their coffees arrived then, putting a halt on the conversation while the waiter did his thing. Eventually, Alonso sat forward to catch the
hand she’d used to reach for her cup.
‘We had a good time, didn’t we?’ he said softly. ‘I missed you when you left me to go home.’
‘Did you?’ Not so Rachel had noticed.
‘Ah,si ,’ he sighed. ‘I almost came after you but—life, you know, got in my way…’
Another new conquest had got in his way, he meant.
‘And maybe I did you a very great favour,’ he added. ‘For look where you are today—betrothed to man with more connections in this city than any other that I know of. A man in possession of his own bank! I salute you,cara .’
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