by Lynne Graham
Entranced by Raffaele, she had been convinced he was equally interested when he began dropping in on her outings with his sister. Their entire relationship, if it could even be called that, had taken place over only a couple of weeks. She had assumed he was holding back because he didn’t want to risk spoiling her friendship with Arianna. She had made so many forgiving assumptions, Vivi recalled, nauseated by the memory of how naive and trusting she had been, believing that he was a generally decent man but, for some reason, exceedingly cautious with women.
And then had come the night of the kiss at Arianna’s twentieth birthday party, when he had literally grabbed her out on the terrace where she had been getting some fresh air. He had come out there to lecture her for wandering off alone, as if she were another sister to be schooled and protected like Arianna, and somehow, she didn’t quite know how, he had ended up grabbing her instead with a lack of cool and control that had startled her, had startled them both, she rather suspected. Yet that single kiss, that he had afterwards apologised for and had treated as trivial, had, ironically, been the most stupendously sexy encounter she had ever shared with a man.
CHAPTER THREE
‘WHERE ON EARTH are you going dressed like that?’ Zoe exclaimed with a scandalised look as Vivi slid into her concealing trench coat in the small hall of the house they shared. Instantly, Vivi wished she had got into the coat before her sister could even glimpse what she was wearing and her face burned hot with mortification.
‘I’m dining with Raffaele. I told you that earlier,’ Vivi reminded the younger woman, who bore little resemblance to her, being both small and blonde in colouring.
‘Dressed like that?’ Zoe demanded in disbelief, still staring at the pelmet-length skirt revealing her sibling’s very long and shapely legs, the cropped top that showed off the diamond in her navel and the sky-high heels. ‘That’s the outfit you wore to that insane hen party you went to last winter.’
‘So?’ Vivi flung her hair back in challenge.
‘It’s very provocative,’ Zoe muttered as if Vivi might not have realised that.
‘No, it’s the perfect outfit to put on for a guy who thinks I’m a tart for hire,’ Vivi countered with a defiant lift of her chin.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Vivi!’ Zoe lamented loudly. ‘As he’s met Grandad, he’s got to know how wrong he was by now!’
‘No. This is Raffaele di Mancini, who never ever admits to being wrong about anything,’ Vivi traded with a lethal gleam of threat and resentment in her bright blue eyes.
‘I don’t see how dressing like that and giving him entirely the wrong impression is likely to change that,’ Zoe admitted ruefully.
‘I’m not trying to change anything,’ Vivi riposted. ‘I’m just giving him what he expects and deserves. And I like yanking his chain.’
‘If you’re going to be forced to go through with marrying him, you should be making peace with him,’ Zoe opined worriedly. ‘I was so hoping that our brother-in-law would find a way out of this mess for us...’
Vivi pursed her lips, thinking of her phone call to her sister, Winnie, before she got dressed. Only her grandfather or their foster parents could pay off the mortgage debt being held over their heads. John and Liz didn’t have the money and were too proud and independent to accept the money from anyone else. In popular parlance, it seemed that their goose was cooked as far as wriggling out of the agreement they had made with their grandfather was concerned. He had the sisters tied up tight without wriggle room and with the legal advisers he had on hand that was hardly surprising. Stamboulas Fotakis hadn’t become very rich by leaving anything to chance.
‘And what are you going to do about Jude?’ Zoe continued ruefully.
Vivi compressed her lips with sudden gravity. ‘End it. It wasn’t going any place anyway. I like him and I think he feels much the same as me.’ She shrugged. ‘There’s just something missing.’
A limo picked her up to ferry her out to dinner and she sat in that opulent leather-upholstered interior checking out the bar appointments and the television before topping up her lipstick. While enjoying that luxury, she was filled with gleeful anticipation at the prospect of Raffaele’s likely reaction to being cursed to dine in public with a woman dressed as she was. Raffaele was very old-school and she was convinced they would be meeting at some very exclusive but stodgy and traditional location.
But in that assumption she was swiftly proved wrong for the limo drew up outside a familiar building: the town house that was Raffaele’s very imposing London home, which was about twenty times larger than the house she and her sister occupied. Raffaele’s, of course, sat off a dignified residential square with a private park in the centre. To Vivi’s annoyance, nervous perspiration dampened her body because she hadn’t realised she would be anywhere alone with him. Nor was sporting her current outfit in the privacy of his home likely to be the embarrassment for him that she had envisaged.
Raffaele’s day had, for some unknown reason, gone excessively slowly for him. Instead of racing past in its usual whirl of urgent appointments, updates and important meetings it had crawled at a snail’s pace, irritating him, and he awaited Vivi’s arrival with mixed feelings. Tonight, he would get everything sorted out, he reasoned, striving to feel satisfaction over that obvious reality. Tonight, he would do whatever it took to get Vivi to the altar for Arianna’s benefit. So, why the hell was he on edge and counting down the hours?
It was not as if Vivi were any great challenge, he told himself grimly. She was a twenty-three-year-old woman with a reasonable education, quick of wit and temper. No big deal, he told himself even as a weird little voice whispered in the back of his brain...and she wants you.
Madre di Dio...why the hell had his mind gone in that direction? Lots of women had wanted Raffaele and he accepted that a good ninety per cent of those same women wouldn’t have wanted him without the wealth that came with him. That was a fact of life but it was also a fact of life that he had discovered a sexual chemistry with Vivi that had threatened to burn him alive, proving more seductive, more powerful and more dangerous than anything he had ever previously experienced with a woman.
Two years back it had unnerved him just a little to register that a young woman he had believed at the time to be relatively inexperienced could have that effect on him without utilising any obvious wiles. Afterwards, when he had realised how he had been duped, he had been both relieved and enraged and walking away fast hadn’t satisfied his need for retaliation. She had played him for a fool with those shy little upward glances, that breathy little giggle that could turn into an oddly entrancing snort, the violet eyes that roamed over him and lingered with what he had interpreted as rather naive sexual curiosity.
But none of that had been real, he reminded himself stubbornly. It had all been an act of innocence designed to draw him in, and he would’ve fallen for that act if she hadn’t then been exposed for the greedy little schemer she undoubtedly was. Or had been, he adjusted, allowing that the belated discovery that her grandfather was one of the richest men in the world had to have altered her outlook. One thing was certain, Vivi no longer needed to target rich men to improve her lot in life.
He should’ve known better even when he first met Vivi and believed her to be the ordinary girl she pretended to be, he reflected broodingly. His own family history should, after all, have taught him a harsh enough lesson. His parents had been very happily married, giving him an idyllic childhood in his early years. And then his mother had died suddenly from an aneurysm and his father had been distraught and painfully lonely.
That was when Arianna’s mother, Sofia, had sneaked past his once shrewd father’s defences. Matteo di Mancini hadn’t recognised her for the mercenary degenerate woman she was. All the peace had been sucked out of Raffaele’s childhood home with Sofia’s tempestuous arrival. His father had married her in a hurry without getting to know her properly and, instead
of acknowledging his mistake and divorcing her, he had tried to make the best of a bad bargain. The stress of that deeply unhappy second marriage had most probably led to the older man’s premature death from a heart attack.
Grim in the wake of those timely reflections, Raffaele was poised by the fireplace in the formal drawing room when he heard the sounds of Vivi’s arrival...the click of high heels on the limestone floor and the quiet murmur of his elderly butler, Willard, as he took her coat. The door opened and Vivi paused in the doorway and that first glimpse literally took his breath away.
Two years back she had never worn revealing clothes around him and now, all of a sudden and when he least expected such a display from her, she was virtually half naked. Working out the reasons behind that sudden change in approach was beyond Raffaele’s very masculine reaction to the sight of her at that moment. He was mesmerised. Long, long perfect legs showed to advantage in a very short skirt. A diamond twinkled exotically in her pierced navel, the smooth white skin of her midriff and tiny waist exposed while her small but pert breasts, round as ripe apples, pushed against the figure-hugging fabric of her top. Instantly, Raffaele went as hard as a rock but that, at least, kicked his brain back into gear.
‘Good evening,’ Vivi breathed a tad shakily, because Raffaele staring at her as he was had always disconcerted her. ‘I thought I’d give you a treat.’
But then there had never been a man who disturbed her as much as Raffaele did without even trying. He could lift a well-bred brow or angle up his chin or even widen his eyes slightly as he looked at her and immediately plunge her into discomfiture and the fear that she had done something wrong. She could feel her face colouring up in a horrible blush, because all of a sudden she was feeling horribly self-conscious and underdressed. What had seemed funny and apt back in her bedroom now felt more like self-inflicted humiliation.
‘A treat?’ Raffaele repeated, brilliant dark eyes still locked to her, roving over the magnificent fall of her copper curls, the even more striking contrast of her hair against her translucent skin and the bright blue eyes below her winged auburn brows.
‘Yes. I thought you deserved to get the woman you believe me to be,’ she confided. ‘Only I expected us to be dining out somewhere and I hoped to embarrass you with this get-up.’
‘I’m not embarrassed,’ Raffaele murmured, dry-mouthed. On fire with lust, intrigued by her nerve but decidedly not embarrassed.
Vivi shrugged a slim shoulder. ‘Why would you be in your own home?’ she countered ruefully, her disappointment at that truth so obvious to him that he almost laughed.
‘It’s a shame I don’t have a stripper pole,’ Raffaele breathed tautly, struggling to keep his wholly inappropriate amusement concealed.
Vivi tossed her head, a string of coiling curls cascading against her cheeks before rearranging themselves across her slight shoulders. He remembered running his fingers through that hair when it was smooth and straight without a hint of curl and the pulse tingling at his groin went even crazier.
‘I wouldn’t know what to do with a stripper pole,’ Vivi admitted regretfully.
‘We’ll have champagne...’ Raffaele informed his butler.
‘Champagne? Are we celebrating something?’ Vivi queried.
Raffaele rested eyes that were the colour of burnt toffee on her piquant face. ‘Our upcoming wedding?’ he challenged.
Vivi flung herself down in the corner of a sofa, trying to make herself at home and force herself to relax a little. ‘No can do. I can’t agree to it. I hate you. I can’t possibly do you a favour. It would kill me,’ she told him truthfully as a foaming goblet of champagne was presented to her on an actual silver salver. The whole formal process struck her as surreal because it had not occurred to her that in this day and age anyone outside the royal family lived with such traditional regality.
‘I will change your mind on that score,’ Raffaele assured her confidently.
‘One would have to wonder just how you’re planning to do that,’ Vivi remarked, sipping her champagne, bubbles bursting against her upper lip. ‘I am not a woman who is easily swayed.’
Although, admittedly if she had been the easily swayed type, Raffaele posed mere feet away in a very sharp designer suit, Vivi ruminated, could probably have achieved the feat. It wasn’t fair that he was still downright eye-catching, that his looks hadn’t begun to degrade a little with the hint of a paunch or a receding hairline. No, there he was in all his magnificence, drop-dead, gloriously beautiful and lethal as a toxin to her peace of mind. She crossed her legs in haste, innately aware of the hum starting up between them, a fiercely disconcerting reminder of what proximity to Raffaele did to her. She gulped down her champagne in the hope of cooling the heat flooding her and almost winced as she recognised the tingling of her tightening nipples.
That was what Raffaele did to her and mercifully he was the only man who affected her that way, because she loathed the feeling that she was out of control of her own body. It was unnerving and rather humiliating to be physically crushing on him like a schoolgirl. She smiled stiffly as he refilled her glass, determined not to show her inner turmoil.
‘You have a beautiful body,’ Raffaele said almost prosaically as he straightened again.
‘What on earth are you saying that to me for?’ Vivi demanded defensively.
‘Presumably you wanted me to notice your body or you wouldn’t be showing off so much of it,’ Raffaele countered drily.
‘That wasn’t meant to be personal!’ Vivi almost spat back at him in rebuke. ‘I planned to embarrass you, not show off anything to you!’
‘Relax... I’m enjoying the view,’ Raffaele murmured silkily. ‘It’s time for us to move into the dining room and eat.’
Vivi plunged upright with relief and almost toppled back down again as she rocked inelegantly in the very high Perspex wedges she sported.
To her annoyance, Raffaele stretched out a hand to clasp her elbow and steady her. She felt the heat and strength of those long brown fingers right down to the marrow in her bones, she thought fancifully, while an alarming arrow of awareness sliced through her body and coiled into a ball of heat in her pelvis. She glanced up at him on the way out into the hall and encountered stunning dark eyes that glittered as though shot through with diamonds. He had the most amazingly long, thick lashes, she noted abstractedly, her chest tightening as her breathing shorted out. For a split second, meeting those eyes, she wasn’t even aware of where she was. A terrifying kind of blankness invaded her brain and she drank deep of her champagne again, desperate to do something with her restless hands.
The dining room, as stately as the drawing room, was splendid enough to command her attention. The room exuded discreet Georgian elegance from the marble fireplace to the opulent drapes at the windows and the beautifully set table, gleaming with crystal and silver and ornamented with fresh flowers.
‘This is very formal just for the two of us,’ she muttered, even more ill at ease in her clothing against such a backdrop.
‘I didn’t want to disappoint Willard.’
‘Willard?’
‘My butler here, inherited from my father and nothing will persuade him to retire,’ Raffaele murmured in a rueful undertone. ‘He has no family of his own. Over the years, my sister and I have become his family.’
‘It’s rather sweet that you haven’t forced him into retirement,’ Vivi commented helplessly, betraying her surprise as she looked across the table at him.
‘He was very good to me when I was a child,’ Raffaele admitted grudgingly. ‘But he does enjoy the ceremony of doing things the same way he did them for my father. He doesn’t realise that the world has moved on.’
As Vivi savoured a mouthful of food, she tilted her head back. ‘So, you can be kind. What a shame you weren’t kind to me!’
Raffaele set his teeth together hard. ‘But I am not guilty of having
labelled you a prostitute in the press. That was a tabloid invention for a headline, nothing whatsoever to do with me.’
Vivi shrugged. ‘But you still believed that of me,’ she condemned. ‘Even though you had got to know me as Arianna’s friend.’
‘I thought I had got to know you,’ Raffaele conceded in scathing interruption.
‘You had got to know me,’ Vivi said again steadily as the second course slid before her. ‘You just wanted a scapegoat.’
‘I’m not like that,’ Raffaele said icily.
Vivi rolled her eyes in expressive disagreement and tucked into her food with surprising appetite. When she had agreed to dine with him, she had had a plan in place. For the sake of her self-esteem, she had to clear her own name with him and force him to see that he had got everything wrong. ‘You are exactly like that,’ she disagreed. ‘You make up your mind about something or someone and you don’t revisit the decision.’
‘I have a logical mind,’ Raffaele countered coolly, noting the way her eyes darkened, her colour lifted and her breathing quickened when she began to get angry.
Vivi sucked in a deep breath and riveted his attention to the natural shift of her small unbound breasts beneath her stretchy top. ‘I had only been in that receptionist job for two weeks. It was my very first paid employment and I only took it because I couldn’t get anything better in the short term and I needed to work to pay my rent,’ Vivi told him resolutely.
A sardonic quirk curling his wide sensual mouth, Raffaele struggled to regain his concentration with the taut peaks of her breasts creating indents in the fabric of her top. He wondered if that was the true intention behind her revealing clothing. An aid to distract him rather than an intended embarrassment? It was very basic, he reasoned with clenched teeth, striving not to linger on the view across the table. He was a red-blooded man and she turned him on hard and fast.