by Lynne Graham
‘You have got me if you want me’.
CHAPTER THREE
WITHIN minutes, Lydia’s phone rang.
’Lia…’ Cristiano murmured softly, sounding out and savouring every syllable.
‘It’s Lydia’.
Lia was the name the modelling agency insisted I use, and I never liked it’ she told him flatly, while her heart beat very fast somewhere in the region of her throat. ‘I need you to pay back the money quickly, so that the charity will withdraw their charges. Can you do that’?’
‘lt’s not a problem. Are the police behind your sudden change of heart’?’ Does it matter’?’ No. Winning is all,’ Cristiano conceded without hesitation. |But we can’t reach agreement before we’ve ironed out the finer details.’
Blinking back the hot tears of humiliation washing her eyes, Lydia clutched the phone as though she was hanging off the edge of acuity. That’s not what you said earlier todayl’ ‘You should have been more receptive. The necessary formalities can be dealt with tomorrow. You’ll have to come to London.’
‘What formalities? Now you’re making all sorts of conditions’ she condemned, threading shaking fingers through the hair tumbling over her damp brow. What on earth did he mean by forrmalities’? ‘Yes ‘ But it’s not necessary. You can trust me,’ she framed between clenched teeth, frightened that if he did not speedily repay the stolen money her mother would be tracked down and arrested.
At the other end of the phone, a sardonic smile of disbelief slowly curved Cristiano’s mouth. She was priceless! This was the woman who, while staying below his roof as his latest squeeze, had eloped with another man. This was also the woman who stood accused of defrauding a charity of almost a quarter of a million pounds. Furthermore, loath as he was to recall the fact for he was famous for his astute intelligence when he had first known her he had actually been very impressed by that sweet-little-country-girl act of hers.
She had been a natural at pretending to be what she was not. lf he’d been a tree-hugging, weepy type of guy he would have got all choked up when she walked barefoot through the grass in his roof garden and confided that every day she was in the city she pined for the countryside. She was a real box of tricks, Cristiano reflected grimly.
‘I’ll arrange for you to be picked up and flown to London early tomorrow. Pack light. I’ll be buying you new clothes. And lock up well and say your goodbyes to all,’ Cristiano advised in the same even tone. ‘lf we achieve agreement, you won’t be returning for some time.’
Bright blue eyes wide, Lydia shook her head. ‘Whatever happens, l have to come back here. l rent this place.
‘11 need to sort that out, organise storage ‘ ‘my staff will take care of the boring stuff for you.’
‘But l have relatives here…and if l’m going away, l want to see them before l leave.’
‘l‘11 give you one week after tomorrow, and that’s it.’
Lydia sucked in a sustaining breath. The entire dialogue felt unreal to her. lf she told him how much she hated him he would naturally want to know why. After all, on the face of it, she had walked out on him for another man. As far as Cristiano was concerned she had no particular reason to dislike him. He, on the other hand, would feel he had ample justification for despising her.
‘l can’t believe that this is what you want…you have to hate me,’ Lydia reasoned tautly.
‘How l feel is my business.’
His cool intonation made Lydia feel as cold as though a chip of ice had lodged in her tummy. She shivered in her damp clothes. He wanted revenge. What else could he want’? When she had walked out of his superb country house with Mort Stevens, she had quite deliberately set out to make a fool of him. Now it seemed payback time had arrived.
At seven the next morning she was collected and driven to a private airfield several mites outside town. There she boarded a helicopter with the blue and gold logo of the Andreotti empire. A couple of hours later, she was being escorted from the helipad located on the roof of a contemporary glass and steel oft-ice block in London and ushered straight into a large empty office on its top floor. She smoothed down a ruck in the sleeve of the tatted blackjacked she had teamed with a white T-shirt and a braided skirt.
‘ Andreotti is in a meeting,’ she was informed by a clean-cut young man in a business suit.
When his PA slipped back in with a shaken nod of confirmation, and rather pink about the ears, Cristiano knew Lydia had arrived and was exercising her usual stunning effect on the male sex. He was very busy. She would have to wait. Of course, she was only on time because he had had charge of her travelling arrangements, he mused, recalling how her unpunctuality had once infuriated him. He did not like to be kept waiting. Even on their first dinner date she had made a late showing. On arrival, however, she had electrified the restaurant with her beauty, approaching him with a wide, engaging smile of apology in a manner that had magically dispelled his exasperation.
In the act of listening to his whiz-kid executives trade facts and figures with a speed and precision which had never before failed to hold the attention of his mathematical mind, Cristiano found himself wondering what Lydia would be wearing. A split second later he sprang upright, called a break, and strode out of the boardroom into the adjoining office.
Sunlight glistening over her silvery fair hair, which she had contained with a clip, Lydia turned from the window that stretched the entire length of one wall. Her face, with its wide cheekbones and ripe pink mouth, was dominated by eyes as bright a blue as a cloudless sky. She focused on Cristiano’s sudden entry, her heart thudding like crazy.
Her tension rose as though a pressure gauge had been turned up too high. Beneath the current of apprehension lurked an edge of excitement that shocked her. When she had been seeing him, she had often found her responses to him so strong they scared her, and the reminder of that reality was unwelcome.
Sheathed in a stylish business suit that outlined his broad shoulders, narrow hips and long, lean legs in the finest mohair and silk blend wool, Cristiano looked spectacular. He was fantastically handsome, always superbly dressed and immaculate, always intimidating. His dark eyes glinted gold in the bright light. He really did have the most beautiful eyes, she acknowledged grudgingly, and a tiny pulse began to flicker below her collarbone.
The silence pounded and she couldn’t bear it. Tossing back her head, so that a few silver-gilt strands of hair fell free of the clip, she lifted her chin. “So here l am …as ordered.’
‘Yes,’ Cristiano rasped softly. ‘it feels good to have you here.’
She had hoped to discomfit him with her comment, but he betrayed no unease whatsoever. Indeed, something in his rich, dark intonation sent the blood climbing below her fair skin. She had the horrendous suspicion that he was enjoying the situation. Furthermore, he was watching her with the incisive attention of a hunting hawk. When that narrowed golden gaze travelled over her, she was suddenly disturbingly aware of every pulse point in her body.
Cupped in a cotton bra, her breasts stirred beneath her T-shirt, the tender peaks swelling.
‘l can’t believe you really mean to go through with thisl’ she told him breathlessly.
A sinfully attractive smile slashed his well-shaped masculine mouth. ‘Every time l look at you l know 1‘11 be going to go through with it.’
‘But it doesn’t make sense ‘ ‘Makes perfect sense to me, della mien’ Cristiano confided. ‘l want you ‘ ‘But l don’t want you, or this, and l can’t pretend otherwise! ‘ she blistered back at him.
His shimmering gaze intent, Cristiano strolled closer.
‘lf l believed that, you wouldn’t be here.’
‘believe it’ she snapped, infuriated by the way she tripped over the word, standing her ground with difficulty, for her every defence mechanism was trying to drive her into retreat.
‘Since I’m the only rescue option you’ve got, shouldn’t you be trying to persuade me that you’re exactly what 1 want and need’?’ He was
so glaringly right on that score that she was seized by a combustible mix of fear and annoyance. He was her only hope. Suppose he took offence? Suppose he changed his mind? Where would her mother be then?
‘Lydia…’
‘What…?’
Cristiano was so close that she could have stretched out an arm and touched him, so close that she was alarmingly conscious of his sheer height and breadth. Her concentration was gone. There was the faintest tang of some exotic masculine cologne in the air and her heart was beating so fast she could hardly breathe.
Cristiano caught her to him with strong hands and drew her unresisting body into his arms. ‘This is why you’re being rescued” he intoned huskily.
The most delicious tension tautened her every muscle.
She knew it was wicked, but when she studied his lean, darkly handsome face, something wild leapt through her and made nonsense of her resistance. He curved long brown fingers to her cheekbone and let his hungry mouth taste her with a sweet, savouring sensuality that tantalized her. The hand at her hip pressed her into the hard, muscular embrace of his powerful masculine frame, and she gasped beneath the probing exploration of his tongue. A dam of hot dark pleasure overflowed and roared through her in response.
Suddenly her legs were like jelly and her breathing was rapid, and she was hanging on to him to stay upright.
Cristiano lifted her off her feet and brought her down on top of his desk. He meshed long fingers into the tumbling hair he had already released to tip her head back and allow him access to her throat. He covered her lowered eyelids, her cheeks, with tiny teasing kisses that made her want to curve round him like a sinuous cat, begging for more.
He let his teeth graze her neck and he tasted her smooth white skin with lips and tongue, lingering in sensitive places, forcing a driven moan from her. Bending her back with astonishing ease over his arm, he pushed the T-shirt out of his path and glided his fingers up over her taut and quivering ribcage to curve his hand to a tiny pouting white breast. Her spine arched and she jerked as if she had been electrified.
The brush of his thumb over the swollen and sensitive tip was a source of seething pleasure. The sound of her own choked cry of response catapulted her back to renewed awareness of her surroundings.
‘For goodness’ sake…,!’ she gasped, pulling away and throwing herself off the desk in such a panic that she over-balanced and went down on her knees on the carpet. He stretched down a hand to help her rise again, but she scrambled up under her own steam and backed away fast. She was in as much shock as if she had been in an accident and her body felt heavy and clumsy and achingly disappointed.
‘Per meraviglia’…you could have broken your ankle.’
Cristiano surveyed her with shouldering intensity and a frown of reproof.
Lydia was all the more shaken by the subtle shift in his manner. Al1 of a sudden his tone was more intimate, possessive. He had kissed her and touched her, and she had encouraged him, and now he was telling her off.
Cristiano elevated a dark brow. ‘Why are you so skittish’? What’s the deal’? If the nervous virgin act is supposed to be sexy, it’s not working, so you can drop it’. ‘No, I am not putting on an act’. Shame and mortification blazed through her slender length like a burning flame.
In her mind it was one thing to submit, but quite another to enjoy being touched by him to such an extent that she had had to knot her fingers into fists by her sides. Desire was in her like a cruel enemy, eager to betray her. And she could not win such a battle, nor even wish in the circumstances that she could. Suddenly she felt as trapped as if she had been put in a dungeon behind a solid steel door.
Pale as milk, she shot him an appalled glance from vivid blue eyes.
‘l can’t do this…1 can’t’
Cursing himself for moving too fast, even while he wondered what had unnerved her to such an extent, Cristiano settled a chair down beside her as if she had not spoken and invited her to sit down. Unwittingly guided back into the safer tracks of polite behaviour, Lydia sank down, closing out her agitated thoughts in a desperate effort to regain her composure.
Cristiano handed her a document. ‘This is the co-habitation agreement that l would like you to sign.’
Her brow furrowed. ‘It’s a…what?’
‘A co-habitation agreement. l haven’t lived with a woman before, and there must be no misunderstanding with regard to the nature of our relationship. It merely defines our arrangement in the simplest terms possible and gives it a business rather than a personal basis,’ Cristiano proffered smoothly.
‘In it, the money which l am to repay the charity on your behalf becomes your fee for assuming the role of my hostess for the next year.
You’re lucky that l’m not including the donation l gave as part of that debt.’
Ludicrously unprepared for what he was telling her, Lydia nodded very slowly. ‘Your…hostess?’
‘A convenient label ‘ Her eyes were widening and her sense of unreality was increasing.
‘You’re giving me an employment contract?’
His lean, strong face was sardonic. ‘Nobody working for me earns that much.’
Lydia flushed red, then white, and focused carefully on the third button on his jacket.
‘l’ m agreeing of my own free will to all your demands…surely it’s not necessary to tie me down to an actual written contract, with rules and conditions? ‘
‘l believe that it is. Trust is a definite issue here.’
Her throat closed over, making her voice a little hoarse as she fought back angry tears. ‘I think you’re determined to make this entire affaires humiliating as you possibly can.’
‘That’ s not the case. I think it s important that you know exactly where you stand with me,’ Cristiano spelt out.
‘lf you break the agreement, you will have to pay back the money.’
Lydia was aghast at that information. |But that would be impossible! Do you think I’d be here now if I had an alternative’?’
‘1 know,’ Cristiano confirmed without remorse. But I want to be assured of your loyalty.’
My…loyalty’?’ she queried uncertainly, clutching the thick document while she strove to work out exactly what he meant.
His brooding dark eyes took on a derisive light. ‘Your track record on that score is abysmal. Tell me, out of interest,’ he murmured, there you shagging Mort Stevens the entire time l was seeing you?’
Feverish pink stained her porcelain-pale complexion.
‘How can you ask me that’? Of course l wasn’t… l mean, nothing happened ‘
‘Even as a kid, l didn’t go for fairy stories,’
Cristiano sliced back very drily, his attention welded to the soft fullness of her lower lip. ‘We need to move on and fast.
l have to get back to work.’
She bit her lip painfully at that tone of dismissal.
l’ve made an appointment for you to see a solicitor so that you can enjoy independent legal advice,’ Cristiano continued. ‘lf you decide to sign the contract, do so before three this afternoon. You’ll then be returned to the airport for your journey home by private plane. A limo is waiting now to take you to the solicitor. Any questions?’ She was intimidated by his inhuman detachment.
‘You said something about a year. ls that how long you expect this arrangement to last?’
Cristiano shrugged with fluid ease of movement.
‘A day, a week, a month… A year is your limit, not mine. lf you’re still with me then, and l doubt it, you’ll be free at the end of that period to renegotiate your terms.’
Lydia could not credit what she was hearing. Even the use of that horrible word ‘renegotiate’ demeaned her. Was his opinion of her so low that he assumed she was content to accept money in return for her sexual favours’? But taking off with Mort Stevens had given him that impression, and she had only herself to blame for that. Her conscience reminded her that while that might be true, it was never too late to sp
eak up and tell the truth even if she was only prepared to offer a part of the truth.
‘can l say just one thing’? And will you listen?’
Recognizing that a last-minute plea was about to come his way, Cristiano hardened his heart against her deceptive appeal. With that gorgeous face and lithe, shapely body, she was every guy’s fantasy, he acknowledged with bleak conviction. Add to that an air of vulnerability that implied she was a deeply sensitive soul and she became lethal. This time around, however, he had no intention of swallowing her sweet bait and being played for a fool.
He consulted his watch.
‘You have one minute.’
‘ I just think l should warn you that I’m not what you think I am… ‘
Yet, now that she had the opportunity she had sought Lydia was having difficulty finding the right words.
‘You’re expecting a woman with a lot more knowhow than me. I doubt that I can be what you want-‘ ‘You’ll be exactly what l want because you don’t have a choice. Don’t embarrass me with this bull ‘gioia mia’.
Cristiano sent her a winging glance of scornful amusement that rubbed her raw as an acid bath. ‘Next you’ll be fluttering those phenomenal eye lashes and swearing that you’re a virgin untouched by human hand !
Lydia was rigid her eyes as bright a blue as a peacock feather against the hectic flush that had climbed her cheeks as he spoke.
‘And what if l wasn’t?’
Cristiano threw back his arrogant dark head and laughed with sardonic appreciation.
‘I can safely promise you that if you turn out to be a virgin I’ll marry you! ‘
‘ls that a fact? Well l wouldn’t have you for a husband if you were the last man alive on this earth!
She bit out fiercely as she stalked to the door.
‘Do you hear me’?’
‘Don’t forget your deadline.’
While Lydia waited for the lift she was conscious of being watched by a bunch of male executives chatting in the hall. Did others already suspect that she might be Cristiano Andreotti ‘s latest acquisition? Her lovely face heated all over again and a hard knot of chagrin and misery formed in her tummy. She had thrown proud words with no substance behind them because he had made her feel such an idiot when he laughed at her but of course he would never marry her or even offer to do so. Men didn’t marry women they could buy or women they despised. Yet when she had been seeing him she had dreamt of the impossible and that lowering memory hurt almost as much as his derision.