The Virgin's Sicilian Protector

by Chantelle Shaw

  ‘And what if you fail?’

  ‘I won’t fail.’ The gold flecks in her eyes flashed with determination. ‘I know my designs are good. My Pre-Fall collection received excellent reviews and my Autumn/Winter collection for next year, that I am working on to showcase at London Fashion Week in February, is even better,’ she said passionately.

  Dio, he wanted to burn in her fiery passion. The throb in Santino’s groin intensified as he imagined Arianna’s naked, creamy pale limbs spread across the black glass surface of his desk. It would be easier if he could dismiss her business ideas as unlikely to succeed. Then he could simply invite her to dinner and take her to bed, and he was confident that within a month he’d have grown bored of her, which invariably happened with the women he bedded.

  But his gut told him to put his money into Anna, and his instincts had always proved right in the past, which was how he had become a self-made millionaire. He walked back across the room, picked up her presentation notes that she had left on the desk and dropped them into the wastepaper bin.

  ‘That’s what I think of your business plan,’ he told her, trying to ignore the inexplicable tug he felt in his chest when he studied her crestfallen face. ‘I am prepared to make an investment of half a million pounds in your fashion label, but I want a forty percent stake in the company.’

  He watched her eyes widen. The flush of rose-pink that winged along her exquisite cheekbones made her prettier than ever, and Santino threw himself down into the chair behind his desk to conceal the bulge of his arousal beneath his trousers. ‘Also,’ he said gruffly, ‘you will have to improve your marketing skills. I’ll expect you to meet me twice a week so that we can work on business strategies and promotion ideas.’

  ‘I won’t have time,’ she argued. ‘I was planning to employ staff to deal with PR and the business side of the company, to allow me to focus on my role as creative director.’ Her mouth turned down at the corners and Santino didn’t know whether he wanted to shake some sense into her or kiss the sulky pout from her lips. The latter was a serious contender, he acknowledged heavily.

  ‘You can’t just do the fun stuff,’ he told her impatiently. ‘What I learned from running my delicatessen company is the necessity to know and understand every aspect of the business. Creating a product, whether it is clothes, cars or dog food, is the easy part. The hard work is persuading people to buy your product rather than a competitor’s.’ He stood up to indicate that the meeting was over. ‘I’ll have my legal team draw up a contract for you to sign, and money will be transferred into your business account.’

  Arianna also rose to her feet. She was poised and elegant, making him long to ruffle her and unearth the passionate woman he had discovered in Italy. ‘I realise that I need a better understanding of running a business, and I am willing to learn everything you can teach me,’ she said softly.

  Dio, had he imagined there was a double-edged meaning in her words? Erotic images filled his mind of the things he would like to teach her in his bed. She smiled and Santino’s breath was squeezed from his lungs. It was not the perfunctory smile that had graced the tabloids when she had been endlessly photographed by the paparazzi. It was the smile he had seen once before when they had been on the beach in Positano. Open and unfeigned, it lit up her face and made the gold flecks in her brown eyes gleam with the warmth of the Sicilian sun.

  It hit Santino with the force of a meteor strike that it wasn’t Sicily he had missed for the past four months but Arianna. She held out her hand and, as he curled his fingers around hers, a jolt of electricity shot up his arm and he cursed silently.

  ‘So we have a deal,’ she murmured. ‘Thank you. I promise you won’t regret it.’

  Too late, he thought grimly. He was already regretting his decision to get involved with Arianna’s business. But he could not make it personal, and he was determined to keep their relationship on a professional footing. He didn’t want to feel the confused emotions that she evoked inside him. He did not want to feel, full stop.

  He watched the sexy sway of her bottom beneath her tight-fitting skirt as she walked out of his office and ordered himself to get a grip. But the scent of her perfume lingered in the room for the rest of the day, heating his blood so that he could not concentrate on work. He reminded himself that he could retract his offer to invest in her fashion label. She would find another investor, and he would go back to being comfortably numb, which was how he preferred to live his life.

  Santino’s jaw clenched. The SAS had the motto ‘Who Dares Wins’. Was he seriously considering pulling out of a good investment opportunity because he was afraid of getting involved with Arianna? He was confident he could handle his inconvenient attraction to her—and if not, if all else failed, he would have to get his hands on her and resolve his fascination by taking her to bed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THREE FRUSTRATING WEEKS later Santino was forced to admit that he had made a serious error of judgment. However, the problem was not his investment in Arianna’s fashion label.

  The official launch of Anna would be the debut runway collection at London Fashion Week’s spring show, early in the new year. There had been a buzz of interest from fashion journalists in the wake of Arianna’s Pre-Fall showcase, and her client list was growing quickly. So much so that Santino had suggested she should move into a larger studio so that she could employ pattern cutters and seamstresses. At the moment she did everything from designing clothes through to making the final product, and he knew that she often worked until eight or nine o’clock at night.

  In all honesty he had been impressed by her work ethic and drive to succeed. At their twice-weekly meetings, where he was giving her a crash course in business operations and marketing strategy, she had shown that she was fiercely intelligent and quick to learn. Santino realised that he looked forward to those meetings. Arianna’s dry wit often made him laugh. She was also a good listener and he’d found himself opening up to her in a way that he had never done to anyone else.

  He’d told her things that he had buried deep in his subconscious about what he had witnessed in Afghanistan, his ever-present sense of guilt that Mac had lost his legs and other friends he’d served with in the army who had lost their lives.

  ‘I don’t suppose you want to hear all this stuff,’ he’d said gruffly one day the previous week when he’d glanced at his watch and discovered that their meeting had overrun by two hours.

  ‘You should talk about what happened to you in Afghanistan instead of bottling it up.’ Arianna’s gentle reply had made him feel raw inside, and the temptation he felt at every one of their meetings to take her in his arms and kiss her soft, inviting mouth almost overwhelmed him.

  He wondered when she had changed from the spoilt heiress with a scandalous reputation in the press to the hard-working, funny, compassionate woman he had got to know. And then it occurred to him that she hadn’t changed, that this was the real Arianna Fitzgerald, and the shallow socialite he had believed her to be when he’d been assigned as her bodyguard had only existed in the tabloids.

  Santino brooded over this one Friday evening, four days before Christmas, as he drove through an area of London that had the dubious honour of being known as the most underprivileged borough in the capital. The problem was Arianna herself. Or, more specifically, his obsession with her. He thought about her all the time and it couldn’t continue. Having an affair with her seemed the only solution. Admittedly another solution would be for him to take a step back. He could appoint one of his executives at Tiger Investments to teach her about business and marketing instead of doing it himself. His chief finance officer had a Master’s degree in economics. But he’d seen the way that James Norton looked at Arianna. The guy practically salivated over her. Santino flexed his hands on the steering wheel when something hot and corrosive unfurled in the pit of his stomach.

  He did not understand the possessiveness he felt
for Arianna, and the truth was it unsettled him. In the past, women had come and gone from his life leaving no mark on him. He had enjoyed their company fleetingly, enjoyed the sex more, and had never thought of them again after the affair ended. Which brought him full circle, he brooded. The solution to his problem with Arianna was to sleep with her. When they were together in his office he had noticed the loaded glances she sent him when she thought he wasn’t looking at her. Their sexual chemistry had always been off the chart, but in Sicily he had held back because he’d felt responsible for her.

  Following the directions on the car’s satnav, Santino parked in a narrow street lined with Victorian houses that had evidently been turned into flats. He checked the address that the butler at Lyle House had given him when he’d gone to Kensington, hoping to find Arianna. He’d had to cancel their usual Friday morning meeting because he had been delayed on a business trip to Germany. Their next meeting was scheduled for when he returned from New York after the Christmas break. His excuse for wanting to see her was so that he could discuss a promotion idea. But he had been informed by the butler that Arianna had moved out of her father’s house when she had returned to London from Italy at the end of the summer.

  Some youths swigging lager out of cans were hanging around the front door. They eyed Santino suspiciously, but his height and build gave him an obvious advantage, and they stepped back to allow him to pass. Loud rock music pounded from one of the flats, and his mouth thinned as he clambered over a ripped-open rubbish bag on the stairs on his way up to the top floor.

  Arianna opened the door when he knocked and looked cautiously round the safety chain. Her eyes widened when she saw him. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I was going to ask you the same question,’ he said tersely as he followed her into the dingy bedsit. There was a bed, a sofa and an old television in the main room and a tiny kitchen and shower room off the passage. ‘Why are you living in this dump?’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s all I can afford. Rents in London are astronomical and I was only able to afford the deposit on this place with some money I inherited from my grandmother. I pay the rent for my design studio from my business account, but the money you have invested in my business is not for my personal use.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to live here,’ he said grimly. ‘Why did you move out of your father’s house?’

  ‘Because I want to be free from Randolph’s attempts to control my life. No one will be able to accuse me of relying on my father or using his money to establish my business. It’s important that my fashion label Anna is completely independent from Fitzgerald Design.’

  He prowled around the cramped room. When he glanced at Arianna, the wary expression in her eyes threw him back to Sicily, when she had crept around Casa Uliveto like a timid mouse. Guilt twisted in his gut as he acknowledged that he’d been excessively harsh because he had felt honour-bound to fight his desire for her.

  ‘Did you want something?’ she murmured. ‘Only it’s late, and I was about to go to bed.’

  Her hair was piled on top of her head and a few stray, damp curls framing her rose-flushed face were an indication that she had recently showered. He lowered his eyes to the man’s shirt she was wearing and wondered if she was naked beneath it. The oversized shirt came down to mid-thigh, and Santino felt a lick of heat run through him as he let his gaze roam over her long legs. He wanted to feel them around his hips. He badly wanted to press his mouth to the fragile line of her collar bone and undo the buttons on her shirt one by one so that he could cradle her bare breasts in his hands.

  ‘Come to New York with me for Christmas,’ he said abruptly. His jaw tightened when she looked startled, and part of him wondered what he was doing. But another part of him that was uncomfortably hard beneath his jeans seemed to be in control of his thought process.

  ‘I—I can’t,’ she faltered. ‘I’ve made other plans for Christmas.’

  Acid seared his insides. ‘What kind of plans? Or perhaps I should ask who you will be spending Christmas with. Is it the lover whose shirt you wear in bed?’

  The gold flecks in her eyes flashed but she replied coolly, ‘Jonny gave me a few of his shirts that he was throwing out. He knows I find them comfortable to sleep in. Not that it is any of your business, but I don’t have a lover.’

  ‘I had dinner with a client at The Dorchester on Tuesday night, before I flew to Germany, and I saw you there with Jonny Monaghan.’ Santino’s breath whistled between his teeth as he remembered how he had been tortured by the idea that Arianna had spent the night at the hotel with the aristocratic Englishman.

  ‘Jonny is my oldest friend. Again it is not your business, but he has been in love with Davina for years.’ She put her hands on her hips and her eyes challenged him from across the room. ‘You know quite well that it was my first time with you. To be honest, I haven’t felt tempted to repeat the experience with anyone else after that unsatisfactory encounter.’

  ‘Unsatisfactory?’ The word felt like a slap and he clenched his hands to stop himself for reaching for her.

  ‘Well, yes, frankly. I don’t know about you but the earth definitely didn’t move for me.’ Beneath her flippant tone there was something else that made Santino furious with himself. He’d known that he had hurt her and now he saw the proof in the faint tremble of her lips before she pressed them tightly together. ‘I don’t know what you want,’ she said in a low tone.

  ‘Don’t you?’ He was unaware that he had moved towards her, drawn by some force of magic that he could not resist. He was so close to her that he could feel the warmth of her skin from her recent shower. The evocative scent of her perfume made him feel drunk with desire. He watched her eyes darken when he stretched out his hand and removed the clip from her hair so that her chestnut curls tumbled around her shoulders. She did not resist him when he pulled her into his arms.

  ‘Then let me show you,’ he growled against her lips before he covered her mouth with his and kissed her as he had longed to do since he had put her on a plane in Sicily.

  * * *

  Arianna knew she should not open her mouth to Santino’s demanding kiss but she couldn’t help herself. It was madness, but she didn’t care. Months of missing him so much that it had been a permanent ache in her heart, and the last three weeks of frustrated longing for his touch, meant that she was helpless beneath the onslaught of his passion. The fierce glitter in his green eyes revealed a hunger that he could not hide. The hard length of him pressed up against her pelvis made her arch into him, needing to be even closer to the power and glory of his muscular body.

  She told herself it was the shock of his unexpected visit that clouded her judgement and made it impossible for her to think when her entire being was focused on the feel of his lips sliding over hers. When he pushed his tongue into her mouth she shook with a need that only this man had ever evoked in her. She slid her arms up to his shoulders, anchoring herself to his strength while her heart soared.

  His kiss was everything she had dreamed of on the lonely nights since she had left Sicily. He was everything she wanted—so handsome it hurt her to look at him, so strong and yet so exquisitely gentle as he feathered kisses over her cheek and nuzzled the sweet spot behind her ear.

  Her breasts felt heavy and molten heat pooled between her thighs. He tasted like heaven and when she held his face between her hands the rough stubble on his jaw felt abrasive against her palms. He sank a hand into her hair and clamped his other arm around her waist as he lifted her off her feet and carried her the short distance over to the bed.

  ‘I want you,’ Santino said hoarsely. ‘And I know you want me. Your body betrays you so beautifully, cara.’ He ran his hand down the front of her shirt and unerringly found the hard point of her nipple. She shuddered when he rubbed his thumb over the taut peak. But the arrogance she had heard in his voice sent a chill through her as she remembered how he had rejected her
with brutal indifference.

  What kind of a fool was she to allow herself to be so vulnerable again? Where was her self-respect that she had fought so hard for?

  She stiffened and pulled out of his arms. ‘I do want you, it’s true,’ she said huskily. It was pointless to deny it after she had kissed him so eagerly. ‘But I’m fairly certain, taking into account my limited knowledge of these things, that I don’t want sex without strings. I’m sure it works for some people, but I waited until I was twenty-five to lose my virginity, and I want something more than casual sex.’

  The stunned expression on Santino’s face would be hilarious, Arianna supposed, if she didn’t feel like crying. If she achieved nothing else in her life, at least she could claim the accolade of being the only woman to have turned him down. It didn’t feel as good as she might have thought.

  He made a frustrated sound. ‘What are you hoping for, Arianna? A declaration of love?’ His tone was scathing. ‘Or are you holding out for a ring on your finger?’

  She gave his questions serious consideration. ‘Not the first necessarily, and then only if it was an honest declaration. As for marriage...’ She grimaced. ‘My parents’ miserable attempt at marriage was not a good advertisement. I stopped believing in fairy tales a long time ago. But friendship, mutual liking and respect are things I will hope for in any relationship I might have.’

  ‘I do respect and like you,’ he insisted. His tone was so grim that he might have been announcing the outbreak of a war. ‘But I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, and I have no intention of ever falling in love.’

  Arianna tried to ignore the pang her heart gave. ‘Why not?’ She wished she knew what he was thinking but his chiselled features gave nothing away. ‘What are you afraid of?’

  He swore. ‘Love is a pretty word for lust. What we have going on between us is real and honest.’