Harlequin Presents July 2017 Box Set : Sicilian's Baby of Shame / Salazar's One-night Heir / the Secret Kept from the Greek / Claiming His Convenient Fiance (9781460351802)

by Marinelli, Carol; Hayward, Jennifer; Stephens, Susan; Anderson, Natalie

  If Bastiano was to be the new owner, then she was probably about to lose her job anyway, so she let herself into the suite.

  The lights were dimmed and there was soft music playing to welcome him.

  She touched nothing.

  Sophie sat on a chair by a writing bureau and waited as the moments ticked by, but then finally there were voices.

  Voices!

  She stood from the chair and went into a small alcove where the staff would be unlikely to venture.

  Sophie stood in the dark, her heart hammering, realising the foolishness of her actions and anticipating his anger…yet there was also excitement curling in her stomach for finally she would see him again.

  ‘I have no luggage…’ She heard his deep voice tell the butler that there was nothing to unpack, and then a terse, ‘I can pour my own drink!’

  * * *

  Bastiano simply wanted the man gone.

  The butler closed the door and finally there was silence.

  What the hell was he doing here?

  What was he doing, putting in an offer for a hotel he didn’t even want, just to score a point over Raul?

  Raul didn’t want it either.

  He had paid Bastiano a visit the other day. At first Bastiano had assumed he had come to argue over the hotel.

  Instead Raul had asked for Lydia’s address.

  Bastiano’s price?

  The return of his mother’s ring.

  This morning, just as he had finished speaking with the florist to arrange Sophie’s birthday surprise, a packaged had arrived.

  Bastiano hadn’t yet opened it.

  Now, all these years on, he gazed at the ring, remembering Maria trying it on and holding it up to the light.

  Yet memory was not kind.

  Now that he held the ring in his hand, long-buried memories were starting to come back.

  ‘Give me back the ring, Maria.’

  He could hear his younger voice attempting to hold on to his temper as she had claimed his mother’s ring as her own.

  A couple of hours later, still wearing it, she had died.

  He placed it on the gleaming table, for holding it kicked up black dusty memories that were best left undisturbed.

  Bastiano stood and poured a cognac. Looking around the suite, he remembered the last time he had been here, reading the paper, finding out about Raul and Lydia, but then he remembered the hours before that, the bliss of a day away from the world, and so clear were the memories that for a moment he was sure he could recall the scent of Sophie.

  He could.

  Bastiano opened his eyes and wondered if it was Sophie who had prepared the room; as he filled out the breakfast order, he wondered if she might be the one to serve it.

  He hoped so.

  And then he heard a movement.

  Her intention had been to call out, to step out, but now she stood in the dark, terrified by the predicament that she had placed herself in.

  ‘Sophie?’

  She heard her name, he knew she was here and she knew she had to reveal herself.

  ‘I didn’t know how else to see you…’ she started as she stepped from the shadows and walked towards him.

  Her presence was enough for Bastiano to know that this was the real reason he was here in Rome. Sophie was the reason the contracts were unsigned, and that he’d had his lawyers stringing things along, for while he did, there was a chance to see her again.

  ‘If you had wanted to see me then you should have come back that morning,’ Bastiano said.

  ‘I was scared I was about to lose my job!’ She could hear that her voice was raised. There was fear mixed in with desire for, yes, the months that had passed had dimmed her recall of his absolute power. ‘You never told me you were thinking of buying the place. Why did you lie?’

  ‘I never lied.’

  ‘You did.’ Sophie raised an accusing finger. ‘I would have never told you the things that I did—’

  ‘And I knew that,’ Bastiano hotly responded. ‘I wanted to keep us the same.’

  ‘We’re not the same.’ She came right up to his face, and all the hurt and anger she had held in these months flooded out. ‘You’re the rich man and I’m the maid, how could we ever be the same…?’

  ‘You know that we are.’ He too was nearly shouting. ‘In here we are.’

  Weeks and months of denial and anger met now and she loathed his absolute beauty, that, even now, had absolute power over her. And in turn he loathed the chink in his armour that bore her name, because he could not forget and he could not move on.

  He kissed her hard and she fought with herself not to kiss him back.

  ‘What happens when you own it?’ she asked. ‘My job is everything to me…’

  ‘I’m not buying the hotel.’ He stole more kisses and when she pulled back her mouth he simply found it again.

  ‘So why are you here?’

  For this.

  He didn’t say it, but now his mouth did.

  Today had been hell and he craved oblivion. Their teeth clashed as their mouths met once again, and his tongue tethered her fury as she returned his fierce kiss.

  Bastiano went for her uniform and she heard the rip of the buttons and she was kissing him back and crying as she tasted him again.

  ‘Now we are the same,’ he told her as very deliberately he removed her uniform, pushing it down her arms and then past her hips so it fell to the floor.

  ‘No.’

  For he was still the rich man in his expensive suit and she stood in drab underwear, but soon he was removing that too.

  He turned her and kissed her so that her back was to the wall and his suited body pressed against her naked flesh.

  Sophie closed her eyes and drank in his scent, recalling her silent desire to know this man less restrained. And now she knew, for the sound of his zipper and his ragged breath in her ear turned rage to desire, and it was she who held his head now, kissing him back hard as he wrapped her leg around his waist.

  ‘Never let me down,’ she begged, and her words were nonsensical for even as he drove into her, even as he consumed her, Sophie knew she was opening herself to hurt, and that tomorrow the countdown would resume and abstinence must surely start over again.

  He placed one hand on the wall behind her while the other dug into the cheek of her buttock. He was as coarse in delivery as her violent need required. She did not understand how the woman who had trembled and hidden only a matter of moments ago now coiled naked around him.

  Now they were the same.

  Matched in desire and lost in lust.

  ‘I thought of you…’ he told her, and whether or not she believed him those words tipped her.

  He felt the shift and lifted her other leg, so she was wrapped firmly around his hips and their kisses were intense as he spilled deep inside.

  ‘You’re going to get me fired,’ Sophie whispered as their bodies began to relax and now, slowly, he let her down.

  ‘Never,’ Bastiano said. ‘Are you supposed to be working now?’

  ‘Not until morning.’

  ‘Good,’ he told her. ‘Then we have all night.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘YOU PREPARED MY SUITE,’ Bastiano said as they stepped into the master bedroom and he saw the gorgeous night view of Rome.

  ‘I did.’

  Sophie did not feel disadvantaged at being the one who was undressed, for indeed she got to slip straight into bed and to lie watching as Bastiano got undressed.

  ‘I wanted you to remember me when you came in.’

  ‘I don’t need a view to remember you.’ It was undoubtedly the most romantic thing he had ever said but she appeared not to notice its significance. In fact, S
ophie thought she was being fed a line and lay there sulking as he went and had a quick shower.

  ‘You got my flowers.’ He could see the tiny rose that was now knotted in her hair but as beautiful as her flowers had been, Sophie was not going to let him off that easily.

  ‘Three months late.’

  ‘You were the one who didn’t come back,’ Bastiano pointed out, taking his time to dry himself.

  ‘And you were the one who failed to tell me you were thinking of buying the place. Can you imagine how it felt to find out?’

  ‘I meant to tell you before you left for work,’ he admitted.

  ‘I was scared for my job and I kept thinking of all the things I’d told you.’

  ‘Sophie, I was hardly sitting taking notes.’ He got into bed and the soapy clean scent of him was divine. ‘I wasn’t even thinking about the hotel, I was just…’ And it was he who was quiet then because now he allowed himself to look back properly at that perfect day.

  ‘I thought you were staying for another night,’ she said. ‘You were booked in until the Monday.’

  ‘I left angry,’ he admitted. ‘I found out…’ Bastiano shook his head, not wanting to bring up the feud with Raul.

  He was tired of it.

  But Sophie had long since guessed the reason he had walked.

  ‘You found out about Raul and Lydia?’

  He looked over and gave her a slow smile. ‘Nothing gets past you.’

  ‘With the right education, I’d have ruled the world.’ Sophie smiled and then told him how she knew. ‘I saw their picture in a screwed-up newspaper, I guessed you had seen it.’

  ‘I had.’

  They lay together and he pulled her close so that she lay in the crook of his arm, and it was such a nice place to be.

  ‘He came to see me the other day. We hadn’t spoken for fifteen years. I thought it was to argue over the hotel but he wanted to find out where Lydia lived.’

  ‘Did you tell him?’

  ‘For a price,’ Bastiano said, and thought of the ring.

  ‘Why do you two hate each other so?’

  ‘We always have,’ Bastiano told her. ‘Our families have always been rivals.’

  It was the easy version of the story.

  It was too complex a conversation for ships that passed in the night, yet they lay there and stared out at the view, Sophie nestled in the crook of his arm. This was more than a casual encounter, Bastiano knew.

  Sophie had arrived with no warning.

  She had stepped onto the stage of his life, but there was so much debris, so much damage, and he did not know how to clear it. He told her a little of the complicated version.

  ‘We used to be friends,’ he admitted. ‘When we were growing up our families frowned on it but we didn’t care, and as teenagers we thought we could take on the world. Then Raul left for university.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I worked in my uncle’s bar.’ There was no point prettying it up—he and Raul had been enemies for a reason. ‘After he left I slept with his mother.’ He awaited her recoil or the uplift of her head and narrowing eyes but she just lay there. ‘We had an affair, and when it was exposed she died in a car crash.’

  ‘How old were you?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘Seventeen. I wasn’t exactly innocent before that, though. In the end I tried to persuade her to leave her husband and come away with me but she refused. Raul believes I as good as killed her.’

  ‘Were you the one driving?’

  He frowned at Sophie’s question.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then, how could it be your fault?’

  Sophie lifted herself up on her arm and he glimpsed again her absolute refusal to simply acquiesce.

  ‘Her husband had found out about us.’

  ‘How old was she?’

  ‘Thirty-four,’ Bastiano said. He had thought Maria closer to her forties at the time but really she had not been much older than he was now.

  Sophie’s lip curled. ‘Poutana.’

  ‘Hey!’ He rose to Maria’s defence, as he always had. ‘We were in…’ Bastiano halted but a little too late, for Sophie knew what he had been about to say.

  ‘In love?’ she sneered, and then shook her head. ‘That’s not love.’

  ‘How would you know?’ he demanded.

  ‘I know what love isn’t,’ Sophie responded hotly. ‘I left home because, for all my lack of experience in the matter, I believed that love should make you smile.’

  ‘Perhaps—if you live on the cover of a chocolate box.’

  ‘So, if it was love, why didn’t she leave her husband?’

  ‘She was very religious,’ Bastiano said. ‘When Maria was growing up she wanted to be a nun.’

  Sophie gave a derisive snort. ‘Why wasn’t she one, then?’

  ‘Because at sixteen she got pregnant with Raul.’

  Bastiano reached over and turned out the light but, far from annoyed at her scathing assessment of Maria, he was actually touched that somehow, on rather black evidence, she was defending him.

  They lay in silence but far from sleep.

  It was difficult to speak of that time but it was also hard to hear.

  ‘It was Raul you fought with?’ she asked.

  ‘After the funeral.’ Bastiano nodded. ‘That was the easy part—the next day we found out she had left money in her will to be divided between him and me. He thinks I knew that she had money…’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No,’ Bastiano said. ‘Raul told me he’d watch me go under, he said I was nothing without her money.’

  ‘So she left you enough to buy the Grande Lucia?’

  ‘No.’ He gave a low laugh at the thought. ‘I bought a derelict building…’ He thought of how the Old Convent had been then. ‘There were no roads to access it. There weren’t many tourists then in the west and I bought it for a song. I’ve bought a few more since then.’

  ‘You could have blown that money,’ Sophie said. ‘Instead, look at all you have done.’

  She did not know the scope of his wealth, just that he could consider the purchase of this hotel, which told her how much Bastiano had done with the start he felt he had not deserved.

  In Sophie’s mind he had earned every cent.

  ‘Last month,’ Sophie said into the darkness, ‘when I called home, my brother told me that Luigi had taken to drink.’

  Bastiano said nothing.

  ‘It’s my fault apparently.’ She turned and saw his strong profile and that his eyes were open but he did not look at her. ‘As I said to my brother, I’m quite sure there was a problem long before he had me to blame it on.’

  ‘You certainly take no prisoners.’ He looked at her then and she heard rather than saw his smile. ‘Were you always tough?’

  ‘I had to learn to be,’ Sophie told him, ‘and fast. I have five brothers and all of them would be perfectly happy to have me pick up after them. I pick up after myself, unless, of course, I am being paid.’

  * * *

  Bastiano slept, but Sophie lay there awake, troubled by her own words on the subject of love.

  He made her smile.

  Oh, not in a chocolate box way.

  Just the thought of him, and the memory of them, had elicited more smiles in the last three months than she had collected in a lifetime before that.

  And the world turned too fast when they were in bed, for when she reached for water, Sophie could make out the outline of the Colosseum when before it had been wrapped in darkness.

  As she lay back down he pulled her in so that her head lay on his chest and she watched the sky, willing morning not to come.

  His hand was on her arm and she toyed idly with the snake of
black hair that had entranced her when she had gone to reach for the plate that first morning.

  There was no reason now not to move the sheet, no reason left to be shy, and so she slipped her hand lower, feeling him grow hard under her fingers.

  Her face felt warm on his chest and his hand was still on her shoulder as she slid down.

  She had no real idea what she was doing, but he rose to her palm as if to greet her. She felt the warmth nudge her cheek and as she kissed just the tip and then knelt and ran her tongue down the side, he grew to the length of her face. This she knew, for she worked her tongue up and down, absorbed in the task at hand.

  Bastiano moved the hair from her eyes.

  And then as she ventured deep he took her hair and coiled it around his hand, just so that he could see her.

  Usually he preferred a curtain of hair, but with Sophie he liked watching the stretch of her jaw and then the tease of her tongue.

  He liked watching while she closed her eyes and they were lost to each other, utterly oblivious to a world waking up outside.

  So oblivious that the sound of the main door opening went unheard.

  Bastiano moaning her name did not.

  ‘Sophie…’

  One hand was stroking her bottom, the other wrapped in her hair, and she was lost in the moment as he came to her mouth.

  And Inga stood there, jealousy rising like bile as she saw Sophie’s uniform a puddle on the floor.

  Sophie, always sweet and smiling, and yet so judgmental of Inga, was at it too.

  And with their soon-to-be boss—Bastiano Conti.

  Oh, the two of them were not quite finished yet and remained oblivious to her arrival in the suite, but Inga’s eyes lit on a ring, and she knew exactly how she would punish Sophie for her hypocrisy.

  She slipped the ring into the pocket of Sophie’s discarded uniform and quietly wheeled the trolley back out, then she took out a pen and changed his breakfast order to seven.

  ‘Hey.’ Inga wheeled the trolley back to the kitchen and spoke with the chef. ‘Signor Conti’s breakfast is not due for another hour. Luckily I noticed.’

  Very lucky.

  For some.

  Explain that, Sophie!