by Lynne Graham
‘That was buck stupid when you have no shoes on,’ Rocco pointed out with immense and galling cool.
‘I wish it had hit you!’ Amber launched wildly, but the truth was that she was already calming down out of shock at what she had done. She breathed in slow and deep. ‘I don’t have any life-threatening habits to support either...have you got that straight?’
‘I’m very pleased to hear it. But I do wish you had retained the same exclusive attitude to sex.’
Ignoring that acid response, Amber fought to get a grip on her floundering emotions and understand why Kaye Winton, who had never demonstrated the slightest interest in her private life but whose husband bought their cars through Neville’s business, should have muddied her reputation in such an inexcusable way. Had the other woman somehow sensed in Rocco’s suite the day before that more was going on between Amber and Rocco than she had seen? Amber had never subscribed to the general local belief that Kaye Winton was an air-head. That might well be the impression the brunette preferred to give around men, but Amber was unconvinced and, recalling the manner in which she herself had automatically looked at Rocco for an inspiring excuse or being found upstairs with him, she suppressed a groan.
‘I bet Kaye Winton noticed the way I glanced at you for support yesterday. Strangers don’t do that.’ Amber sighed. ‘But as for the rest of her nonsense...’
It only then occurred to Amber that it was true that she spent regular nights away from the cottage and that it was equally true that she might often have been seen climbing in and out of different cars. Between them, Neville and Opal owned five luxury vehicles. Neville often picked her up on his way home if she was coming over to stay and just as often dropped her back in the morning. Someone watching from an upstairs window would not be able to tell that the driver was always the same man. Even so, she was shattered by the apparent interpretation the brunette had put on what she had seen, yet surprised that the other woman did not appear to have mentioned that Amber was also an unmarried mother.
Amber breathed in so deep, her full breasts strained against the fabric of her sister’s dress which was too snug a fit under that pressure. She glanced across the room. Rocco had his attention riveted to her chest. She reddened, feeling the sudden heaviness of her own swelling flesh, the tautening of her sensitive nipples. ‘Stop it...’ she muttered fiercely before she could think better of it.
‘Tell me how...’ Rocco invited in a raw undertone, fabulous cheekbones taut and scoured with colour, eyes like burning golden arrows of challenge on her lovely face.
‘I need to get dressed for work—’
‘Or you could get undressed for me. In fact, you don’t need to move a muscle,’ Rocco murmured roughly as he closed the distance between them. ‘I’ll do it for you—’
‘But—’
He caught her into the circle of his strong arms and she gazed up at him, heart beating fast and furious in the slight hiatus that followed. She told herself to break away but somehow she did precisely nothing. He lifted her up against him with easy strength. She wrapped her arms round him. He meshed one fierce, controlling hand into the fall of her honey-blonde hair and brought their mouths into hungry devouring collision.
It was like being shot to sudden vibrant life after a long time in suspended animation. With a strangled gasp of shock at the intensity of sensation surging through her quivering frame, she kissed him back with a kind of wild, clumsy, hanging-on-tight desperation. If she stopped to breathe, she might die of deprivation, she might stop feeling everything she had thought she would never feel again. A soaring excitement thrummed low in her pelvis, awakening the dulled ache of a physical craving way beyond anything she could control.
But, breathing raggedly, Rocco dragged his expert sensual mouth from hers and stared down into her shaken green eyes with febrile force. ‘You’re wearing next to nothing under that dress—’
Aghast that he had realised that reality, for she had scarcely clothed herself for entertaining, Amber mumbled in severe discomfiture, ‘Well...er—’
Rocco dumped her down on a hard chair by the table. ‘How many ways did he have you in the Merc? And when the hell did you turn into such a tramp?’ he ground out wrathfully.
‘For your information, that was my brother-in-law driving that car!’ Amber shot at him furiously.
‘Tips you out barefoot at dawn on a regular basis, does he?’
‘When my car breaks down and I’ve spent the night at my sister’s home...yes!’ Amber hissed back. ‘And I wasn’t going to put a pair of dirty workman’s boots on with this dress and without clean socks, was I?’
‘I suppose all these guys in the expensive cars you’ve been seen in are married to sisters of yours?’ Shooting her a look of splintering derision, pallor spread round his ferociously compressed mouth, Rocco strode to the door.
‘Two minutes ago, you didn’t much care!’ Amber heard herself throw at his powerful back in retaliation.
Rocco swung back and surveyed her with shimmering golden eyes. ‘Per meraviglia...who was it who called a halt? I didn’t come here to get laid—’
Enraged by that assurance, Amber threw herself upright again. ‘I’m still waiting to hear why you did come here because I sure as heck didn’t want you anywhere near me!’
‘Then isn’t it strange that you should find it so difficult to say that one little word, “no”?’
Amber paled and turned away, biting her lip to prevent herself from making some empty response which would only prolong her own agony of mortification.
‘After what I heard last night, I was concerned about you—’
Amber whirled back. ‘You concerned about me? Give me a break!’
Rocco stared at her with cold, dark eyes of censure. ‘I would do as much for any ex if I thought they needed a helping hand. And don’t curl your lip like that. I’m serious,’ he spelt out with chilling cool. ‘If you need financial help to get yourself out of what appears to be a crisis period in your life, I’ll give it to you...no questions asked and nothing expected in return.’
The silence hung there like a giant sheet of glass waiting to crash and smash when the seething tension broke. She stared back fixedly at him. A shaken and hollow laugh was wrenched from her convulsed throat. ‘So where were you, Rocco...when I really needed you?’
A tiny muscle pulled tight at the corner of his expressive mouth and he did not pretend not to follow her meaning. ‘I was very angry with you eighteen months ago—’
‘So angry you couldn’t even take a phone call?’ Amber squeezed out the reminder with burning bitterness.
His lean, powerful face clenched. ‘You knew how much I valued my privacy. I won’t apologise for that. You destroyed us when you decided to share salacious details of our relationship with a muck-raking journalist. I could never have trusted you again after that.’
‘I gave no salacious details whatsoever, but those sort of details are fairly easily guessed when it comes to a guy with your reputation...and I did not know I was talking to a journalist—’
‘Amber,’ Rocco incised flatly, ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to prove but it’s way too late to make the attempt.’
But whose fault was it that it was now too late for her to speak in her own defence? Hatred as savage as the hunger he had roused only minutes earlier flamed into being inside her. ‘I’ll never forget what you did to me back then,’ she said without any expression at all, her heart-shaped face pale but composed. ‘You’re right. It’s way too late to discuss any of that now. Go on...take your precious charity and your nauseatingly pious offer of help out of here and don’t you dare come back!’
Stubborn as a rock and contrary in the face of an invitation he should have been all too keen to take in the circumstances, Rocco stood his ground. ‘I wasn’t being pious and I wasn’t offering you charity.’
<
br /> ‘You’re talking down to me, though, and I won’t stand anyone doing that to me.’
‘Better that than dragging you back into bed,’ Rocco murmured in a savage undertone that shook her as he yanked open the door again.
‘I wouldn’t go to bed with you again!’
His arrogant silvery fair head turned back to her, a searing sexual hunger blatant in the all-encompassing appraisal he gave her. ‘If it’s any consolation, no woman ever gave me as much pleasure as you—’
‘Consolation?’ Amber almost choked on that mortifying word and what followed very nearly sent her into orbit with frustrated rage.
‘But I need a woman to be exclusively mine—’
‘Only you’re not so scrupulous yourself,’ Amber heard herself remark. ‘After you dumped me, according to the gossip columns you were like a sex addict on the loose!’
Taken aback, Rocco froze, and then he sent her a smouldering look of what could only be described as sheer loathing.
Reeling in shock from that revealing appraisal, Amber went white and she could not drag her stricken gaze from his lean, strong face. ‘Rocco...?’ she whispered unsteadily.
‘You did that to me,’ he imparted with savage condemnation.
The door thudded shut on his departure, leaving her trembling and in more confusion and turmoil than she had ever thought to experience again.
CHAPTER FOUR
AN HOUR later, just as Amber was ready to go outside and start work, a brisk knock sounded on the cottage door.
She was stunned to find Kaye Winton waiting outside. The brunette, clad in a skin-tight green leather skirt suit, her beautiful face stiff, took advantage of Amber’s surprise and strolled in uninvited.
‘I’m going to lay this on the line,’ Kaye told her curtly. ‘If I catch you coming on to one of our guests again, I’ll inform my husband.’
Amber gave her an incredulous look. ‘Coming on to one—?’
‘Rocco Volpe. Oh, I don’t blame you. In your position I might have done the same. Rocco’s a real babe and some catch,’ Kaye cut in with a tight little smile, green as grass with envy and resentment. ‘But you needn’t think I didn’t work out that when I interrupted you both yesterday, you were walking out of his bedroom—’
Amber found herself in the very awkward position of being guilty as charged on that count of inappropriate behaviour. And while she had initially intended to confront the other woman about the hatchet job done on her own reputation, nothing was quite that simple. Admitting that Rocco had repeated the brunette’s allegations to her would reveal that Amber was much more intimate with Rocco Volpe than she was prepared to admit. Indeed, so fraught was the entire situation with the risk that she could end up losing her job or, at the very least, be forced into making personal confidences in her own defence, Amber had not yet decided what to do for best.
‘Mrs Winton, I—’
‘I did my best to limit the damage last night and turn his attention away from you,’ Kaye revealed, surprising Amber with that blunt admission. ‘When all’s said and done, Rocco’s just another testosterone-charged bloke on the lookout for sexual variety, but he’s not going to find it with our gardener. Is that quite clear?’
‘I believe you’ve made yourself very clear,’ Amber said grittily, fingernails biting into her palms to restrain her from saying anything she might later come to regret.
The other woman nudged the tiny toy train lying on the tiled floor by the table with the toe of her stiletto-heeled shoe. ‘I forgot about your kid...where do you keep him, anyway? Does he only visit you? Now that I think about it, I’ve never laid eyes on him.’
‘I’m sure you’re not interested.’ Having wondered why Kaye had neglected to inform Rocco that Amber had a baby, Amber concealed her relief at the casual admission that the other woman had simply forgotten Freddy’s existence. It was hardly surprising, though, when at the outset of her employment Harris Winton had warned her that he didn’t expect to see her using the grounds of the house outside working hours.
Kaye shrugged her agreement. ‘You’re taking this well—’
‘Maybe...maybe not.’
Opening the door again, the brunette dealt her a wry glance. ‘I’ve done you a favour. My husband would have sacked you yesterday. Harris has Victorian values on staff behaviour.’
Since it was a well-known fact that Kaye Winton had once been a lowly groom working at the riding stables owned by her husband’s first wife, Amber could barely swallow that closing comment.
‘Men...’ Kaye laughed in frank acknowledgement of that hypocrisy. ‘Can’t live with them, can’t live without them!’
It was noon when Kaye’s husband, Harris, finally came in search of Amber. A small, spare man with a very precise manner, he was much quieter than usual and he cut short his usual lengthy inspection tour by pointing out that he had guests staying. As the rain was coming on heavily by then, Amber was unsurprised at his eagerness to head back indoors again. Resigning herself to a day spent skidding on muddy lawns and getting soaked to the skin, for the rain always found its way through her jacket eventually, Amber got on with her work. Around lunchtime she went back to the cottage and made herself a sandwich before returning outside.
Never had she been more conscious of the vast gulf that had opened up between herself and Rocco. There he was snug indoors on his fancy country-house weekend, being waited on hand and foot, entertained, fed like a king by special caterers and lusted over by his shapely hostess. And here she was, in the most subservient of positions with a list of instructions from her employer that she would be lucky to complete in the space of a month, never mind over the next week!
In addition, Rocco hated her. So why was that making her feel as if the roof of the world had fallen in around her? She relived that look of his at the outset of the day...violent loathing. She shivered. He went out pulling women as if he had only days left to live and went out hell-raising for an entire six months before sinking into curious obscurity and then he had the neck to say to her, ‘You did that to me!’
Louse! Not the guy she recalled, but then there was no denying that she had had a very rosy and false image of Rocco until reality had smacked her in the teeth. That first night they’d met they had stayed up talking until way past dawn in a variety of public places. Her brain had been in a tailspin. She had let him take her home for breakfast and he had seduced her into bed with him. Well, possibly, she had been fairly willing to be seduced for the first time in her cautious existence. After all, she had only been in love once before Rocco and that had been nothing but a great big let-down.
She grimaced, recalling Russ, whom she had fallen for the year before she’d met Rocco. Meeting Opal over dinner one evening, Russ had taken one stunned look at her beautiful sister and had barely noticed Amber’s existence from that point on. Sitting there like a third wheel while the man she’d thought she’d loved had ignored her and flirted like mad with her sister, Amber had stopped thinking he was special. That very night, Amber had been planning to surrender to Russ’s persuasions and acquire her first experience of making love. But by the time Russ had finished raving about how gorgeous and how totally fabulous and fascinating Opal was, Amber had known she never, ever wanted to see him again. Opal turned heads in the street with her flawless ice-blonde perfection. As Amber had learned to her cost, a lot of men couldn’t handle that.
Rocco had never got the chance to make the same mistake.
Their first day together, Rocco had woken Amber up about lunchtime and told her that he had been looking for someone like her all his life. Well, all his life from the night before, she could only assume in retrospect. Rocco, who had stood outside his own locked bathroom door swearing that it was so romantic that she had fallen into his bed within hours of meeting him, declaring that he did not have one-night stands, that he would neve
r, ever think of her in that light and finally, in desperation, apologising for not having kept his far-too-persuasive hands off her. On the other side of the door, she had been biting back sobs of chagrined self-loathing and struggling into her clothes with frantic hands.
‘I’m not letting you go,’ Rocco told her when she emerged. ‘I’m hanging onto you.’
Three months of excitement and joy, interspersed with occasional violent rows that tore her apart at the seams, followed. No longer did she want to work endless overtime: she wanted to be with Rocco but she valued her career. Rocco offered her a position on his own staff at much more than she was earning. She didn’t speak to him for two solid days. Such a casual proposition insulted all that she had achieved on her own merits. Rocco had made the very great error of allowing her to see how unimportant and small that job of hers was on his terms.
Crazy about him, she stopped having lunch and taking breaks at work and socialised equally crazy hours, burning the candle at both ends. She fell asleep on him once over dinner in a busy restaurant.
‘Such a compliment,’ Rocco quipped.
When she appeared in photos by Rocco’s side in the gossip columns, she began receiving pointed cracks and knowing looks from her male co-workers. One of the directors provoked a chorus of sniggers the day he thanked her for giving Woodlawn Wyatt so much free publicity. Her working environment was one where men lived in eager hope of seeing a manipulative woman using her body to get ahead. Having an affair with a wealthy and powerful international financier was not the ticket to earning respect.
‘Why won’t you give me the chance to meet Rocco?’ Opal demanded of Amber repeatedly. ‘A quick drink early some evening...an hour, no big deal, Amber.’
Amber viewed her sibling’s pure, perfect face and her heart sunk for she knew she could not compete. Not in looks, not in wit, not in any field. ‘It’s not cool to confront guys with your family. It might give him the wrong message—’