Driven by a need greater than he had ever known, Santino traced his fingers over Arianna’s skimpy bikini pants that sat low on her hips. He felt her stomach quiver but, when he slipped his hand between her legs, she tensed.
‘No.’
The word detonated inside his head and catapulted him back to reality. What the hell was he doing? He could not make love to Arianna. Love played no part in what he wanted, Santino acknowledged. He was desperate to have sex with her, but he must not give in to the desire that ran hot and wild in his veins. He was appalled by his lack of finesse. He’d behaved like a hormone-fuelled teenager and almost lost his self-control. It had never happened before and he was rocked by the effect that Arianna had on him.
He levered himself so that he was sitting upright and lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun while he scanned the empty beach. It was his job to protect her, but if the kidnappers arrived at the secluded bay he would stand little chance of keeping her safe from a ruthless and probably armed gang.
Arianna sat up and ran her fingers through her hair that was drying into tangled curls around her shoulders and made her look younger than did her usual sleek style. Her eyes were huge and dark in her delicate face. Santino dragged his gaze from her pert breasts half-spilling out of her bikini top. ‘I guess this is not the time or the place,’ he muttered.
Her eyes flashed fire at him. ‘You guess right. There isn’t a time or a place when I would agree to have casual sex with you.’
Stung by her snippy tone, he said curtly, ‘That’s not the impression you gave a few moments ago. You wanted me.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Or is that the kind of game you like to play? There is a word for women who deliberately lead men on.’
‘Are you saying that I’m not allowed to change my mind?’ Her voice was sharp, but Santino noticed that her mouth trembled and something tugged in his chest. ‘I admit I got carried away, but I hadn’t expected you to kiss me.’ She looked around the secluded beach and back to him, biting her lip. ‘Why did you bring me here instead of taking me back to the yacht? And why did you send the launch away?’ Her tension was tangible. ‘Did you intend to seduce me? Maybe you think I owe you for rescuing me?’
‘Of course I don’t think that,’ he denied roughly. ‘You were in an emotional state after the incident with the jet-ski and I thought you might want some time to pull yourself together before we returned to the yacht.’
Santino’s jaw clenched as shame rolled through him. He prided himself on his integrity but Arianna’s accusation had hit a mark. She had been traumatised after being thrown off the jet-ski and the accident had brought back memories of how she had nearly drowned as a child. Once again he had been struck by her vulnerability, but that had not stopped him coming on to her. His body still ached to possess her and with a curse he jumped up and ran down the beach, diving into the waves and striking powerfully through the water.
A few minutes later he heard a boat’s engine and saw the launch returning to the little cove. It ran up onto the sand and he waded through the shallows and spoke to the crewman. When he looked back up the beach, he couldn’t see Arianna, and fear gripped him. It would be impossible for the kidnappers to have snatched her in the few minutes that he hadn’t been with her, he told himself.
To his relief he spotted her over by some rocks, but as he walked towards her she backed away from him. ‘I can’t face going on the launch.’ She hugged her arms around her body and her mouth crumpled. ‘I know you must think I’m stupid.’
He frowned. ‘Why do you put yourself down?’ For reasons he could not explain to himself, Santino wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her as he had done after she’d been thrown off the jet-ski. ‘Your fear of drowning is perfectly understandable after your childhood experience. I don’t think you are an idiot, or stupid.’
Santino had a suspicion that Arianna was far more astute than she allowed people to think, but now was not the time to wonder why she played to the tabloids’ opinion of her as an empty-headed socialite. He held out her bag containing her clothes. ‘I sent the crewman back to the yacht to collect your things. Get dressed. We can return to the town via the stairs that climb up the cliff from the beach.’
She stared at him with wide, wary eyes, but then she suddenly smiled. Not the carefully choreographed smile he’d noticed she kept pinned to her face when she had been with her jet-set friends aboard the yacht. The smile she gave him was spontaneous and warm, and it stole his breath. ‘Thank you,’ she said softly.
There were three hundred steps winding up the steep cliff. Santino counted every one of them in an attempt to keep his mind and his gaze from Arianna’s sexy derriere covered in tight-fitting, white denim jeans. They walked back to the car in silence and she didn’t argue when he slid behind the wheel. Earlier he had called Filippo and arranged for someone to collect the four-by-four.
On the way back to the villa he glanced at Arianna and saw that she had fallen asleep. No doubt she was still shocked by the accident with the jet-ski, he thought grimly. The breeze blew strands of her chestnut-brown hair across her face. He recalled those moments on the beach when her body had trembled beneath his touch and his jaw tightened as he forced his gaze back to the road.
Fifteen minutes later he parked in the courtyard at the front of Villa Cadenza and touched her shoulder. ‘Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.’
Her long lashes swept upwards and she regarded him sleepily with her velvet brown eyes. Santino could not bring himself to look away from her, from her mouth that was a sensual temptation even before she ran her tongue over her bottom lip. And the crazy thing was his feeling that it had been a wholly unconscious invitation, as if she was unaware of the effect she had on him.
He ran his hand around the back of his neck and felt the scar left by the bullet that had nearly claimed his life. A permanent reminder of the frailty of humankind. ‘What happened earlier was a regrettable mistake,’ he said curtly. ‘I should not have kissed you.’
Her brows rose. ‘Aren’t all mistakes, by definition, regrettable? And surely you mean two mistakes? You kissed me by the pool this morning and then again on the beach this afternoon,’ she reminded him.
‘The first kiss was instigated by you.’
‘I didn’t hear you complain,’ she said mildly.
He scowled at her. ‘The point I am making,’ he growled, ‘is that it can’t happen again.’
Arianna stepped out of the car and flashed him a brittle smile that made him wonder what had happened to the girl on the beach whose smile had lit up her lovely face, or if she had even existed outside of his imagination.
‘You would be more convincing if you stopped staring at me as if you’re visualising me naked in your bed,’ she murmured, before she sauntered into the house, leaving Santino with a mental picture of her that instantly made him hard. He clenched his hands on the steering wheel while he fought the temptation to go after her and demonstrate that she was nowhere near as immune to him as she pretended to be.
* * *
The discordant sound of voices arguing broke the almost cloistered quiet of the workroom above Rosa’s dress shop. Arianna glanced at her watch and was startled to see that she had been engrossed in her work for the past three hours.
After she’d shown Rosa some sketches of a cocktail dress that she had designed, the seamstress had suggested she should make a toile—a rough model of the dress made from muslin. Usually the toile would be placed on a tailor’s dummy to see how the garment draped. But Arianna planned to make the dress for herself out of mulberry silk, and she had tried the toile on to check the fit before she worked with an expensive fabric.
She moved away from the mirror to look out of the window at the rear of the workroom and her heart sank when she saw Santino standing in the courtyard below. He was having a heated conversation with the manageress of the beauty salon. Damn the man, Arianna tho
ught as she took off the toile and hurriedly pulled on her skirt and top.
At the villa the previous evening she had been furious when she’d discovered that he had confiscated the keys to both of her cars. But her accusation that she was a prisoner in her own home had elicited no sympathy from Santino. ‘You can drive either of your vehicles as long as I accompany you to wherever you are going,’ he’d told her.
But Arianna doubted that he would fall for her excuse of visiting the beauty salon again while she was actually at Rosa’s workroom. Determined that Santino should not find out about her sewing lessons, she had slipped out of Villa Cadenza early in the morning and caught a bus into the town. Using public transport was a novelty that she would need to get used to in the future when she would have to rely on earning her own income from her fashion business.
Santino must have realised that she was missing from the villa and had driven into Positano to search for her. Although her Italian was limited, Arianna gathered that he had accused the manageress of the beauty salon of being involved in her disappearance. As she ran down the staircase from the workroom she fumbled to pull up the zip on her skirt and emerged into the courtyard flushed and breathless. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked Santino crossly.
He jerked his head in her direction, and she was shocked by his strained expression. His skin looked grey beneath his tan, and his hair was dishevelled, as if he’d run his fingers through it many times.
‘Arianna.’ He strode over to her. ‘Are you all right? I feared—’ He broke off abruptly.
She was puzzled. ‘You feared what, exactly?’
He did not reply and there was no clue to his thoughts on his chiselled features. She grimaced. ‘I suppose you were worried that I was up to no good.’
‘Again,’ Santino said drily, and the contempt in his voice brought a flush of colour to her cheeks. His eyes narrowed and she had an odd feeling that he wanted to say something else, but at that moment the door behind her banged shut in the breeze.
Santino looked up at the window of the building that she had exited from and frowned. ‘Why did you leave the villa without me? I told you, it is your father’s wish that I should accompany you whenever you go out.’
‘And I told you that I need some privacy. I’m sick of my father’s attempts to control my life,’ Arianna said bitterly. She stiffened when Santino flicked his hard gaze over her.
‘Did you get dressed in a hurry? Your shirt is buttoned up wrong.’
She looked down at her sleeveless cotton shirt and saw that she had misaligned the buttons in the button holes.
‘Why all the secrecy?’ he demanded. ‘The woman in the beauty salon told me that you didn’t have your nails done yesterday and you weren’t even in the salon. So where did you go?’
He moved towards the door behind Arianna, and she knew that if he opened it he was bound to climb the stairs and discover Rosa’s workroom. She stepped in front of him to bar his way, but he was so much bigger than her, and he would easily be able to push past her. With a deep sense of reluctance she decided that she would have to tell him about her sewing lessons.
‘I came here to meet someone,’ she muttered.
Santino’s gaze lingered on her wrongly buttoned shirt before moving up to her hair that had come loose from her chignon. Strands of hair curled around her face. It had been warm in Rosa’s workroom, and Arianna could feel that her cheeks were pink. He looked up at the window again. From the outside of the building there was no indication that the room on the second story was a workroom. It could be a private apartment above the shop. Santino watched her fasten her shirt properly and his jaw hardened.
‘By “someone” I assume you mean a lover,’ he said harshly. ‘Did you get up from his bed and dress in a hurry before you came down to meet me?’
Arianna was so taken aback by his accusation that she said nothing. Santino continued in a clipped voice, ‘So, did you spend yesterday afternoon with this guy while I sat outside the damn café, drinking endless cups of coffee, and waited for you?’ His green eyes glittered. ‘I suppose that’s why you sneaked out of the villa today?’
‘I did not sneak out.’
Santino had given her a convenient excuse for her trips into Positano and Arianna was under no obligation to tell him the truth. She felt a little pang in her heart, thinking that she must have imagined the gentle concern he had shown her on the beach the previous day. He was constructed of iron and granite and there was no chink in his armour. ‘My personal life is my business and I can do whatever I like, with whomever I like,’ she told him coolly.
‘As your bodyguard, I need to know where you are going and who you are meeting.’
Arianna’s temper simmered. He made her feel like a naughty schoolgirl and she was incensed that he would report her every action to her father. Santino was effectively spying on her and she knew why. No doubt Randolph was anxious to avoid a scandal like the one she had been involved in a year ago, when the tabloids had printed graphic details of her alleged wild night of sex with a famous footballer.
The story had been pure fabrication. She’d danced with the footballer at a nightclub and they had been spotted by the paparazzi leaving the venue together. What hadn’t been reported was that Scott Hunter had flagged down a taxi for her, and she had returned home alone with a blinding headache that had turned out to be the start of a severe bout of the flu.
She lifted her chin and fixed Santino with an icy glare. ‘Do you seriously expect me to give you a list of my lovers?’
‘From what I’ve heard, it’s a long list,’ he said bitingly.
For a split second it crossed Arianna’s mind to tell him that the rumours and gossip about her were untrue. But why would he believe her? It was obvious that he believed the tabloid stories. And why did she care what he thought of her? She didn’t, she assured herself.
‘Can I assume from your judgemental tone that you are a virgin?’ she asked him sweetly. ‘You have never had a lover because you are saving yourself until you fall in love and decide to marry the lucky recipient of your affections?’ He obviously did not like her sarcasm, and his dark brows drew together in a slashing frown when she continued, ‘Or is this a case of double standards? It’s fine for you to have any number of sexual partners, but if I do the same thing I must be a whore?’
‘This is a pointless conversation,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘For the record, I don’t have any intention of falling in love, and in my opinion marriage is an outdated institution.’ His jaw was rigid and Arianna’s heart gave a jolt when she realised that he was struggling to control his temper. Common sense warned her not to antagonise him further, but the hard gleam in his eyes sent a heady rush of adrenalin through her.
‘Maybe you’re frustrated because you can’t have me?’ she taunted.
He moved faster than she could blink and caught her by her shoulder, pulling her towards him so that her breasts hit the hard wall of his chest and her breath was expelled from her body. She stared into his eyes and realised too late that she had been a fool to play with fire. The heat of his gaze scorched her and the contemptuous curl of his mouth hurt her more than it should.
‘We both know that I could have you any time I wanted,’ he bit out.
She opened her mouth to deny his arrogant claim, but the words were trapped in her throat. His face was so close to hers that the stubble on his jaw scraped her cheek. His warm breath grazed her lips and a quiver of desire ran like molten fire through her as she tilted her head in readiness for his mouth to claim hers. She was unaware of how utterly she betrayed herself. Her entire being was focused on Santino, on her need for him to kiss her, and she stared at him with wide-eyed incomprehension when he muttered something in Italian and thrust her away from him.
‘Somehow the thought that you have come straight from another man’s bed lessens your appeal. It’s like turning up l
ate to a feast and finding only pickings left,’ he drawled. But Arianna sensed from his harsh inhalation of breath that it had cost him to speak in that dismissive manner.
She was tempted to take him upstairs to Rosa’s workroom to prove that he was wrong about her—that there was no mystery lover—and she would enjoy watching him grovel. The satisfactory scene that unfolded in her imagination was spoiled by the realisation that, if she revealed to Santino her plans to establish her own fashion label, he was likely to tell her father.
So she gave an airy shrug of her shoulders and put her hand on the door that led to the stairs to the workroom. ‘You seem to be under the misapprehension that I care what you think about me, Santino. But here’s a news flash—I don’t give a damn.’ She opened the door and threw him a haughty glance over her shoulder. ‘I’ll be busy here for another hour and you can wait for me in the car.’
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS ONLY because the party was for Jonny’s birthday that Arianna decided to attend. Jonny was a good friend, and there were few enough people who she considered to be true and trustworthy friends, she acknowledged ruefully. Having a billionaire for a father meant that she’d had to learn to spot hangers-on and those so-called friends who hoped that an association with her would boost their career or their bank balance. A few times she had been burned, and she would be the first to admit that she had an issue with trust.
The party was a black-tie event taking place at the hottest nightclub on the Amalfi coast. Indira Club was in Amalfi town, along the coast from Positano, and the venue had been hired out exclusively for the party. The guest list was a mix of the great and good—wealthy socialites from across Europe and A-list celebrities who Jonny knew from his reality television show, Toffs. It was inevitable that the paparazzi would be present outside the club in droves—the pap pack hunting the brat pack with their long-lens cameras.
Arianna had made the decision a year ago to step away from the glitzy world she had been part of since she was eighteen. Her brush with death when a bout of the flu had developed into a serious case of pneumonia had led to her re-evaluating her life. It was ironic, she mused, that the best way to get her designs noticed when she launched her fashion company would be to grab the media’s attention any way she could. But establishing her own fashion label was not a whim. She was serious about starting her business, and she had to hope that if the clothes she designed were good enough they would speak for themselves.
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