‘I don’t snore if that’s what’s worrying you.’
‘You probably aren’t asleep long enough between switchovers of bedmates to get to the snoring stage,’ she muttered.
He laughed as he tossed his jacket over the back of the nearest sofa. ‘You’re really good for my ego, cara mia. You make me sound like some sort of go-all-night superstud.’
She forced herself to look him in the eye. ‘How many would you do in one night?’
He did that little lip-shrug thing again. ‘Depends.’
‘On?’
He undid another couple of the buttons on his shirt. ‘Chemistry.’
‘I guess we’re not talking about the periodic table of the elements.’
His smile crinkled up the corners of his eyes. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll try and tone it down. I might even abstain for the night.’
Lottie gave him a look. ‘Long service leave?’
He screwed up his forehead as if mentally calculating the years. ‘Yep, I reckon I more than qualify.’ He scratched at his chin stubble again. ‘Let me see now...my first time was when I was—’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Please spare me the details.’
He scrubbed a hand through his hair, making it all tousled, which somehow made him look even more lethally attractive. ‘You want something for that headache?’
‘I don’t— I mean, I think I’ll just have a little rest,’ Lottie said, backing away towards the adjoining door. ‘What time will you be finished with your business appointment?’
‘That’s not until tomorrow morning.’
‘But I thought you had to be here by today?’ She frowned as she tried to recall the conversation with her sister. ‘I’m sure Madeleine said you had to be in Monte Carlo by Wednesday.’
‘That’s because I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.’ He rolled back the cuffs of his shirt over his forearms, focusing on the task with what seemed to her a rather pointed concentration.
‘So this appointment is pretty important to you?’
He looked at her then but his expression was difficult to decipher. ‘It’s just something I’ve had my eye on for a while. No big deal.’
‘Is the something you’ve had your eye on female?’ Lottie wished she hadn’t asked but the words had tumbled out before she could stop them.
A light of amusement twinkled in his chocolate-dark eyes. ‘How’d you guess?’
* * *
Two hours later Lottie was led by Lucca into his friend’s exclusive lingerie boutique in one of the cobbled side streets in the centre of Monte Carlo. The friend was female—of course—but at least fifteen years older than Lucca, which somehow made Lottie feel a little less peevish, but only just. He probably routinely slept with women old enough to be his mother. Maybe even old enough to be his grandmother.
Once the introductions and pleasantries were out of the way, Rochelle Talliarde brought out a range of items for Lottie’s inspection. ‘Did you have something particular in mind?’
‘Um...’ It was hard for Lottie not to blush surrounded by such intimate garments, especially with Lucca standing there watching her every move. ‘Something white or cream, I think.’
‘How about this?’ Lucca held up a black lace corset with red bows and leather lacing.
‘It’s not very bridal,’ Lottie said with a note of reproach.
‘Not for Madeleine,’ he said. ‘For you.’
‘Me?’ Her voice squeaked in horror. ‘I would never wear something like that.’
‘I reckon you’d look smoking hot in it.’ His eyes danced with mischief. ‘Why don’t you try it on?’
‘I will do no such thing.’ She turned and picked up the first thing her hand touched and then blushed to the roots of her hair when she realised what it was. She dropped the skimpy scrap of lace as if it were a tarantula.
‘Wow, now we’re talking,’ Lucca said as he picked them up again and dangled them from one of his fingers. ‘Crotchless panties. A bridegroom’s wet dream.’
‘Will you stop it?’ she hissed at him, conscious of Rochelle Talliarde looking on with obvious amusement.
‘We’ll take these and the corset and that oyster-pink ensemble over there,’ he said to Rochelle. ‘Now, let’s get your big sister sorted. What about this? And this? And this?’
By the time every garment was tissue-wrapped and placed in the boutique’s pink-and-black signature bags Lottie had gone way past embarrassment to outright mortification.
‘Madeleine is going to kill me,’ she said once they were out on the street. ‘Poor Edward will probably drop dead with a heart attack as soon as he sees her in that get-up. We’re supposed to be buying a royal wedding night outfit, not an S and M costume for a brothel.’
He grinned down at her. ‘Where’s your sense of fun, mio piccolo?’
She flicked him a disparaging look. ‘You’re utterly shameless.’
‘I know.’ He said it as if it were a badge of honour. ‘It’s my trademark. My brand. Cool, huh?’
She stopped walking to look at him. ‘Wouldn’t you rather be known for something other than a salacious scandal magnet?’
‘Wouldn’t you rather be known as something other than a prudish little goody-two-shoes who doesn’t know the first thing about having fun?’ he countered.
The mockery in his gaze stung her pride more than she expected it to. More than she wanted it to. Her entire body stiffened, like a porcupine extending its needles in self-protection. ‘I’m not a prude.’
‘Yes, you are. And a coward. You got burned once so you’ve locked yourself away up in your princess tower where no one can reach you.’ His mouth lifted in a cynical, teasing curve. ‘You’re scared. That’s why you hide behind that priggish exterior because passion frightens you. Life frightens you. You frighten you.’
Lottie hated that he knew so much about her—the real her—on so little an acquaintance. ‘Oh, and I suppose you think you’re the one I should let my hair down for, do you?’ She poked a finger to his sternum. ‘Well, let me tell you something, Lucca Chatsfield.’ Poke. ‘You’re the last man I would ever get messed up with.’ Poke. ‘Because that’s what you do.’ Poke. ‘You mess people up.’ Poke. ‘You play with them and then you dump them. I don’t think that’s anything to be crowing about. You should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.’
He brushed her hand away as if it were an annoying mosquito. ‘I’m not. So get over it.’
Lottie nailed her feet to the pavement. ‘You think I’m scared, but what about you? When are you going to grow up? You’re just a shallow Peter Pan playboy who hasn’t even got the maturity to live off his own means instead of sponging off his family’s fortune like some pathetic blood-sucking parasite.’
The silence was so intense it grew teeth.
‘Are you done?’ His gaze was steely, his jaw like concrete, all except for a nerve that ticked in and out on his left cheek like the flickering of a faulty switch.
Lottie refused to back down. There was something incredibly invigorating about finally getting under his skin. He was always so charming and laid-back. Laughing at life. Mocking it and everyone as if he didn’t care what they thought of him. But underneath that party-boy facade was a proud and angry man.
A bitterly angry man.
‘No, I’m not done,’ she said. ‘It’s time someone told you the truth instead of dancing around you and feeding your ego the way that bunch of social-climbing sycophants you surround yourself with do. Who are your real friends? Who knows you? The real you? Who cares about you more than your money? Who cares about you more than anything else in the world? No one, that’s who. You’re nothing without your family’s money and you damn well know it. That’s why you want it so badly.’
He drew in a breath that widened his nostrils like a thorou
ghbred stallion facing a challenging opponent. He took her arm in a grip that was iron-strong and marched her along the street through the knot of people who had stopped to stare at them. ‘Keep moving and keep your mouth shut,’ he said through tight lips.
She pulled at his grip. ‘Stop it. You’re hurting me.’
He loosened his hold but not enough for her to tug free. ‘I said, Shut the freaking hell up. You’re causing a scene.’
‘You’re not the boss of me.’ Lottie knew she sounded about three years old but she was beyond caring. She even had the toddler pout down pat and the leaden dragging feet.
His eyes cut to hers in a derisive glance. ‘Now look who’s acting immature.’
‘Jerk.’ She poked her tongue out at him. It was probably a bit over the top but it felt so good to spar with him. Her body was zinging with exhilaration. It was like being injected with a heady drug. She didn’t want it to stop. She had never told anyone off in her life. Maybe she should do it more often. It felt good to stand up for herself for a change.
His eyes were like black flint. ‘Don’t get me started on the insults because I bet I know a hell of lot more colourful ones than you.’
He pulled her through the hotel foyer, rudely ignoring the obsequious staff member who spoke to him on the way past. He stabbed at the lift button, and as if they dared not disobey him, the doors instantly sprang open. He pulled her in with him and the doors hadn’t even closed again before he pressed her roughly back against the nearest wall as his mouth came crashing down on hers.
It was nothing like his first kiss. It was not a kiss of seduction but of punishment. It wasn’t meant to induce pleasure but pain. It was as if the fury that was buried deep inside him had finally found a leaky outlet. It was gushing forth like a blown pipe, pouring into her with blistering heat.
Somehow her arms ended up around his neck, her body pressed so tightly against his she felt the swollen length of his erection pounding with want against her belly. She tasted blood, somehow knew it was her own, but instead of trying to escape she kissed him back, using her teeth and her tongue and her lips as if this was the last kiss she would ever have.
The passion that rumbled through her was a scary, out of control entity. It was a wild primitive side of herself she was terrified of letting loose but there was nothing she could do to restrain it. Desire streaked along her veins like a river of fire, making her flesh feel vigorously alive.
His hot breath and his sexy coffee-scented saliva mingled with hers as his mouth devoured hers with primal purpose. The faintly musky and erotic scent of arousal haunted the air. Goose bumps of pleasure prickled out over her skin as his tongue tangled with hers, driving deeper into her mouth, making her whimper breathlessly in pleasure.
One of his hard thighs came between hers, rubbing against her intimately, ruthlessly letting her know what he could do to her with just a single stroke of hard male muscle against her throbbing need. She gasped as she felt the tingling of her inner core, the exquisite tightening of her flesh, the greedy desperate little ache of her tissues that were already wet and weeping with want.
But then he suddenly pulled back from her with a muttered imprecation, putting the width of the lift between them. He swiped the back of his hand across his mouth and then frowned when he saw a small smear of blood on his tanned skin.
His eyes met hers, his expression dark and tight with self-disgust. ‘I’m sorry.’ He grimaced as if it physically pained him to say the words. ‘That was unforgivable.’
Lottie tentatively passed the tip of her tongue over the tiny split in her lower lip. She saw him follow the movement with his gaze, saw the convulsive rise and fall of his throat that signalled his regret even more powerfully than his gruff apology.
But she wasn’t quite ready to forgive him.
Not for kissing her so soundly. But for demonstrating how pathetically weak her resolve was against his practised seduction techniques.
Resolve? Ha! What resolve? Armour smarmour. Going into battle with him was like going into a fencing match with a soggy noodle instead of a sword.
Pathetic.
She was pathetic.
The lift doors opening gave her the perfect exit cue.
Lottie turned and walked out with her back stiff and her shoulders neatly aligned, her head at an angle even her overly strict childhood deportment tutor would have been proud of.
It would have been a textbook I’m-having-the-last-word-by-saying-nothing exit if she hadn’t stumbled over the carpet on the way out.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LUCCA RIPPED YET another piece of paper off his sketchpad and scrunching it savagely into a ball, threw it at the wall. It bounced off and landed next to the pyramid of sketches he’d tossed there over the course of the evening.
For the first time in his life he couldn’t get into the zone. Couldn’t centre. Couldn’t anchor down.
Drawing was the music of his soul but tonight the band had packed up and left. Throughout his life, whatever emotions he grappled with, whatever demons he wrestled, whatever ghosts he avoided, he did it with pencil or paintbrush. It was his way of purging himself of every foul feeling festering inside him. The meticulous concentration of miniature work calmed him. Whether he was doing the preliminary sketch, or painting with one of his finest brushes while he worked under a large magnifying glass, the painstaking process calmed him like a lullaby does a fractious child.
But not tonight.
He was angry. Angry at himself. Angry for allowing his control to slip.
Lottie had needled him and instead of laughing it off in his usual I-don’t-give-a-damn manner he had reacted. Let her see a side of him he allowed no one to see.
Her little dig about him sponging off his family’s money seriously annoyed him. Who was she to talk? What about all the silver spoons she’d been fed with over the years? It wasn’t as if she had a big career path all mapped out. She lived her life through other people. Planning their events for them. She had no events of her own.
He had a right to his family’s money. The security of wealth made up for the emotional wasteland of his childhood. The loneliness he had suffered. The shame and hurt of not having a mother who had loved him and his siblings enough to stick around. The wretched disappointment when yet another important event at school ended without either of his parents showing up. He would look at all the other children with their proud and indulgent parents sitting in the school auditorium during a formal assembly or awards night or on the sports field. He would search that sea of beaming faces, hoping for a glimpse of his mother, desperately trying to match a face to the Laurent’s painting that hung at Chatsfield House. He would think it each and every time, even though he had no hooks to hang his hopes on: maybe this would be the day his mother would return. She would come to see him and Orsino. To cheer them on, to be proud of them, to show she still cared about them. His hopes would mushroom up in his chest until he could barely breathe. But then, like a sharp pin piercing the thin skin of a balloon, his hopes would deflate—flat, useless, empty.
He hadn’t made the most of his schooling. He had acted out his frustration, kicked back at authority, deliberately sabotaged his academic potential as a way of punishing his parents for not caring enough to show even a modicum of interest.
He had been lucky to have Orsino, but a twin was not a parent, and nor were older siblings. Antonio and Lucilla, his eldest brother and sister, had filled in where they could, but like Nicolo, and Franco, the next brothers in line, they had issues of their own to deal with.
And then there was Cara, the baby of the family, who had no memory of their mother at all.
Lucca swore as he dragged his hand over his face. He hated thinking about his family. He hated thinking. It stirred up emotions he had long ago buried, shining a bright light on the dark shadows of his hurt. The illumi
nation of his pain made him feel physically ill. He could feel it now...the dead feeling in his muscles, the lethargy that dragged at his limbs. The tightness across his forehead, as if his eyes were being pulled back in their sockets by hot metal wires.
He picked up his phone, scrolled past another couple of missed calls from his brother, but instead of returning the call or distracting himself with social media he found himself scrolling through his photo file instead. He came to the photo of Lottie in the palace gardens. The light had caught the top of her tawny head, dividing her hair into segments like skeins of spun gold. Her skin looked as pure as cream with just a hint of dusky rose on her cheek that was facing the camera. She looked young and innocent, untouched, unsullied by the stain of twenty-first-century humanity.
He picked up a new pencil and turned over a fresh sheet on his sketchpad and started drawing....
* * *
Lottie had been fine about spending the night alone. Perfectly fine. Anyway, it had been exhausting doing loads and loads of shopping. It had been enormously liberating to wander about without a bodyguard, especially since no press had discovered her. With Lucca’s cutting remark about her goody-two-shoes personality still ringing in her ears she had bought outfit after outfit in a range of colours and styles just to prove she wasn’t half the coward he thought she was. She couldn’t wait to see his face when he saw her dressed in hot pink and wearing make-up and with her hair loose. Which was why it was kind of annoying he hadn’t made any contact since their little spat.
It wasn’t as if she’d been expecting him to take her out to dinner or a nightclub or anything. Perish the thought! She was perfectly fine about watching old movies on the large-screen television and ordering room service.
It had been very quiet next door, which was both a relief and a surprise. She’d expected to hear a boozy giggle or two as he brought a nameless girl back from a nightclub. She’d strained her ears for the sound of clinking glasses or the murmur of voices, but instead she had heard nothing, which just showed how incredibly soundproof the walls of Chatsfield Hotels were these days.
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