by Lynne Graham
Retaining that light hold on her, Luca carried her forward.
‘Darcy...Luca,’ Margo said rather stiltedly.
After waiting in vain for Darcy to make an introduction, Luca advanced a hand and murmured calmly, ‘Luca Raffacani, Mrs Fielding...I’m delighted to meet you at last.’
‘Margo, please,’ her stepmother gushed.
Nina hovered in a revealing little slip dress, her beautiful face etched with a rigid smile while her pale blue eyes ran over Luca as if he was a large piece of her own lost property. ‘I’m surprised...you don’t look remotely like Richard,’ she remarked. ‘I was so sure you’d be horsy and hearty. Darcy always did go for the outdoor type.’
‘Richard?’ Luca queried.
‘Oh, dear, I do hope I haven’t been indiscreet,’ Nina murmured with a little moue of fake dismay. ‘Sorry, but I naturally assumed you would know that Darcy was engaged once before—’
‘Left at the altar too. A ghastly business altogether. That’s why it’s so wonderful to see you happy now, Darcy!’ Margo continued.
Darcy cringed as if her dress had fallen off in public, unable to look anywhere near Luca to see how he was reacting to this humiliating information. Her stepmother took advantage of her disconcertion to rest a welcoming hand on Luca’s sleeve and neatly impose herself between them.
‘Oh, do let us see the ring,’ Nina trilled.
Darcy extended her hand. An insincere chorus of compliments followed.
They moved into a large reception room which was filled to the gills with chattering, elegantly dressed people. Margo turned to address Luca in a confidential aside. ‘I’m really hoping that marriage will give Darcy something more to think about than that pile of bricks and mortar she’s so obsessively attached to. What do you think of Fielding’s Folly, Luca?’
‘It’s Darcy’s home and of obvious historic interest—’
‘But such a dreadful ceaseless drain on one’s financial resources, and a simply huge responsibility. You’ll soon find that out,’ Margo warned him feelingly. ‘Worry drove my poor husband to an early death. It’s always the same with these old families. Land-rich, cash-poor. Morton was almost as stubborn as Darcy, but I don’t think he ever dreamt that she would go to such nonsensical lengths to try and hang on to the estate—’
‘I don’t think we need to discuss this right now,’ Darcy broke in tautly.
‘It has to be said, darling, and your fiancé is part of the family now,’ her stepmother pointed out loftily. ‘After all, I’m only thinking of your future, and Luca does have a right to know what he’s getting into. No doubt you’ve given him a very rosy picture, and really that’s not very fair—’
‘Not at all. I have an excellent understanding of how matters stand on the estate,’ Luca inserted with smiling calm as he eased away from the older woman and extended a hand to Darcy, closing long fingers over hers to tug her close again, as if he couldn’t quite bear to be physically separated from her.
‘That’s right. You work in the financial field,’ Nina commented with a look of amusement. ‘I can hardly believe you’re only a bank clerk...’
‘Neither can I. Darcy...what have you been telling this family of yours?’ Luca scolded with a husky laugh of amusement. ‘Pressure of work persuaded me to take what you might call a sabbatical here in the UK. Meeting Darcy, a woman so very much after my own heart, was a quite unexpected bonus.’
‘How on earth did you meet?’
‘I’m not sure I should tell you...’ Luca responded in a teasing undertone.
‘Feel free,’ Darcy encouraged, already staggered by the ease with which he was entertaining and dealing with Margo and Nina. Yet he had been so very, very quiet with her. But then why was she surprised at that? Her soft mouth tightened. Here he was with two lovely, admiring women hanging on his very word; quite naturally he was opening up and no longer either bored and impatient.
‘OK. It happened in London. She reversed into my car and then got out and shouted at me. I really appreciate a woman with that much nerve!’ Luca divulged playfully, and Darcy’s bright head flew up in shock. ‘You do everything behind the wheel at such frantic speed, don’t you, cara mia? I wanted to strangle her, and then I wanted to kiss her...’
‘Which did you do?’ Darcy heard herself prompt, unnerved by his sheer inventiveness.
‘I believe some things should remain private...’ To accompany that low-pitched and sensually suggestive murmur, Luca ran a long brown forefinger along her delicate jawbone in a glancing caress. Darcy gazed up at him, all hot pink and overpowered, every muscle in her slender length tensing. Her tender flesh stung in the wake of that easy touch, leaving her maddeningly, insanely aware of his powerful masculinity.
‘To think I used to believe my little stepsister was painfully shy,’ Nina breathed, fascinated against her will by this show of intimacy.
‘Hardly, when she’s already the mother of a noisy toddler,’ Margo put in cuttingly. ‘Do you like children, Luca?’
‘I adore them,’ he drawled, with positive fervour.
‘How wonderful,’ Margo said rather weakly, having shot her last bitchy bolt and found him impregnable. ‘Let me introduce you to our guests, Luca. Don’t be so possessive, Darcy. Do let go of the poor man for a second.’
Darcy yanked her hand from Luca’s sleeve. She hadn’t even realised she had been hanging onto him. Feeling slightly disorientated, she watched as he deftly reached for the glasses of champagne offered by one of the catering staff.
She studied those lean brown hands, the beautifully shaped long fingers and polished nails. She recalled the smoothness of that fingertip dancing along her oversensitive jawbone, sending tiny little tremors down her rigid spine with an innate sensuality that mesmerised. And for the shocking space of one crashing heartbeat, as she met those astonishing dark golden eyes in concert, there had been nobody and nothing else in the room for her.
‘You’re not making much effort, are you?’ Luca gritted in her ear.
‘I never challenge Margo if I can help it,’ she whispered back. ‘She fights back with my most embarrassing moments. I learnt that lesson years ago.’
‘Strange...you didn’t strike me as a woman who lies down to get kicked.’
Darcy flinched at that damning retaliation. ‘Excuse me,’ she muttered, and hurried off into the cool of the less crowded hall.
‘You won’t hold onto that guy for ten seconds,’ a sharp voice forecast nastily from the rear. ‘I can’t think what he imagines he sees in you, but he’ll soon find out he’s made a big mistake.’
Darcy swung round to face her stepsister. ‘Time will no doubt tell.’
‘Luca’s not even your type,’ Nina snapped resentfully. ‘How long do you think you’re likely to hold off the opposition? He doesn’t look dirt-poor to me either. I know clothes, and what he’s wearing did not come out of any charity shop,’
‘Luca likes to dress well.’ Darcy shrugged.
‘A peacock with a dull little peahen fluttering in his wake?’ Nina sneered. ‘He’ll soon be out looking for more excitement. No, if there’s one thing I’m convinced of now that I’ve seen him, it’s that he’s playing a double game. It has to be the British passport he’s after...why else would he be marrying you?’
Why else? Darcy repeated inwardly as Nina stalked off again. What a huge laugh Margo and Nina would have were they ever to discover that Luca was no more than a somewhat unusual paid employee, prepared to act out a masquerade for six months. And every word her stepsister had spoken was painfully true. In the normal way of things a male of Luca’s ilk would not have looked at her twice.
‘Darcy...’ Luca was poised several feet away, a slanting smile for show on his beautiful mouth and exasperation glittering in his deep-set dark eyes. ‘I wondered where you had got to.’
He could act. Dear heaven, but he could act, Darcy found herself acknowledging over the next few hours. He kept her beside him, dragged her into the conversation and
paid her every possible attention. Yet increasingly Darcy became more occupied in watching and listening to him.
In vain did she strive to recapture the image of the far from chatty male in motorbike leathers. For Luca Raffacani appeared to be a chameleon. With the donning of that dinner jacket, he appeared to have slid effortlessly into a new persona.
Now she saw a male possessed of a startling degree of sophistication and supremely at his ease in social company. He was adroit at sidestepping too personal enquiries. He was cool as ice, extremely witty and, she began to think, almost frighteningly clever. And other people were equally impressed. He gathered a crowd. Far from blending in, Luca commanded attention.
At one in the morning, he walked her into the conservatory, where several couples were dancing, and complained, ‘You’ve been incredibly quiet.’
‘And you’re surprised?’ Darcy stared up at him and stepped back. In the dim light, his lean, dark face had a saturnine quality. Brilliant eyes raked over her as keen and sharp as laser beams. ‘You’re like Jekyll and Hyde. I feel like I don’t know you at all—’
‘You don’t,’ Luca agreed.
‘And yet you don’t quite fit in here either,’ she murmured uncertainly, speaking her thoughts out loud and yet unable to properly put them together. ‘You stand out too much somehow.’
‘That’s your imagination talking,’ Luca asserted with a smoky laugh as he encircled her with his arms.
He curved his palm to the base of her spine and drew her close. Her breasts rubbed against his shirt-front. A current of heat darted through her and she felt her nipples spring into murderously tight and prominent buds. She went rigid with discomfiture. ‘Relax,’ he urged from above her head. ‘Margo is watching. We’re supposed to be lovers, not strangers...’
The indefinable scent of him engulfed her. Clean and warm and very male. She quivered, struggling to loosen her taut muscles and shamefully aware of every slight movement of his big, powerful body. She wanted to sink in to the hard masculinity of him, but she held herself back, and in so doing missed a step. To compensate, he had to bring her even closer.
‘I’ m not a great dancer,’ she muttered in a mortified apology.
‘Dio mio... you move like air in my arms,’ he countered.
And in his arms, amazingly, she did, absorbed as one into the animal grace and natural rhythm with which he whirled her round the floor. It was like flying, she thought dreamily, and the reflection could only rekindle a fairy tale memory of dancing on a balcony high above the Grand Canal in Venice. No wrong steps, no awkwardness, no need even for conversation—just the sheer joy of moving in perfect synchronisation with the music.
‘You dance like a dream,’ she whispered breathlessly in the split second after the music stopped, and she found herself as someone unwilling to awake from that dream, plastered as surely as melted cheese on toast to every abrasive angle of his lean, hard body.
Somehow her arms had crept up round his neck, and her fingers were flirting deliciously with his thick silky black hair. Unnaturally still now, she gazed up at him, green eyes huge pools of growing confusion. Dear heaven, those eyes of his. Even semi-screened with luxuriant black lashes, their impact was animal direct and splinteringly sensual.
As his arrogant dark head lowered, her breath feathered in her throat. But she was still stunned when he actually kissed her. He parted her lips with his and took her soft mouth with a driving, hungry assurance that blistered through every shocked atom of her being with the efficiency of a lightning bolt. In the very act of detaching her fingers from his hair she clung instead, clung to stay upright, vaguely attached to planet earth even though she was no longer aware of its existence.
Heat engulfed her sensation-starved body, swelling her breasts, pinching her nipples into distended prominence and sending a flash-flood of fire cascading down between her quivering thighs. As his tongue searched out the yielding tender sensitivity of her mouth, raw excitement scorched to such heights inside her she was convinced she was burning alive.
Luca lifted his hips from hers, surveyed her blitzed expression and dealt her a curiously hard but amused look. ‘Time to leave,’ he informed her lazily. ‘I believe we’ve played our part well enough to satisfy.’
As Luca spun her under the shelter of one seemingly possessive arm and walked her off the floor, Darcy was in shock. Her legs no longer felt as if they belonged to the rest of her, and she was still struggling to breath at a normal rate. In the aftermath of that passionate kiss she was a prey to conflicting and powerful reactions, the craziest of which was the momentary insane conviction that Luca and Zia’s father could only be one and the same man!
Oh, dear heaven, how could she have forgotten herself to that extent? And the answer came back. He kissed like Zia’s father. Earthquake-force seduction. Smooth as glass. Going for the kill like a hitman, faster on his feet than a jump-jet. She was devastated by the completeness of her own surrender, and utterly dumbfounded by that weird sense of the familiar which afflicted her, that crazy paranoiac sense of déjà vu...
For her Venetian lover had known nothing about her and could never have discovered her identity. Her secrecy that night had been more than a game she’d played to tantalise. She had been honestly afraid that reality would destroy the magic. After all, he had been attracted by a woman who didn’t really exist. And his uninterest in further contact had been more than adequately proven when he’d left her standing on the Ponte della Guerra the following day!
Yet only he and Luca had ever had such an effect on her, awakening a shameless brand of instant overpowering lust that sent every nerve-ending and hormone into overdrive and paid not the slightest heed to self-control or moral restraint. She breathed in deep to steady herself.
Maybe all Italian men learned to kiss like that in their teens, she told herself grimly. Maybe she was just a complete push-over for Italian men—at least those of the tall, dark, well-built and sensationally desirable variety. Maybe living like a nun and refusing to recognise that she might have physical needs had made her a degradingly easy mark for any male with the right sensual technique.
But what was technique without chemistry? she asked herself doggedly. It was pathetic for her to try and deny one minute longer that she was wildly, dangerously attracted to Luca Raffacani. For what pride had refused to face head-on, her own body had just proved with mortifying eagerness.
As Luca thanked her stepmother for the party, Margo gave Darcy’s hot cheeks a frozen look while Nina surveyed her stepsister as if she had just witnessed a poor, defence-less man being brutally attacked by a sexually starved woman. Darcy’s farewells were incoherent and brief.
The night air hit her like a rejuvenating bucket of cold water. ‘We’ve played our part well enough to satisfy,’ Luca had said, only minutes earlier. At that recollection Darcy now paled and stiffened, as if she had been slapped in the face.
Naturally that kiss had simply been part of the masquerade. He had been acting. Acting as if he was attracted to her, in love with her, on the very brink of marrying her. Oh, dear heaven, had he guessed? Did he for one moment suspect that she hadn’t been acting? How much could a man tell from one kiss? As kisses went, her response had been downright encouraging. Her self-respect cowered at that acknowledgement.
‘That went off OK,’ Luca drawled with distinct satisfaction.
‘Yes, you were marvellous,’ Darcy agreed, struggling to sound breezy, approving and grateful, and instead sounding as if each individual word had been wrenched from her at gun-point. ‘The kiss was a real bull’s-eye clincher too. Strikes me you could make a fortune as a gigolo!’
With a forced laugh, she trod ahead of him, valiantly fighting to control her growing sense of writhing mortification.
‘Say that again...’
Stalking rigid-backed down the pavement, Darcy slung another not very convincing laugh over her shoulder. ‘Well, you’ve got everything going for you in that line,’ she told him with determined
humour. ‘The look, the charm, the patter, the screen-kiss technique. If I was some fading lonely lady with nothing but my money to keep me warm, I would’ve been swept off my feet in there!’
Without warning, a shockingly powerful hand linked forcibly with hers and pulled her round to face him again. Startled, Darcy looked up and clashed with blazing golden eyes as enervating as a ten-ton truck bearing down on her shrinking length.
‘Porca miseria!’ Luca growled in outrage. ‘You compare me to a gigolo?’
Genuinely taken aback by that reaction, Darcy gawped at him. And then the penny dropped. Considering the monetary aspect of their private arrangement, her lack of tact now left her stricken. ‘Oh, no, I never thought... I mean, I really didn’t mean—’
‘That I am a man who would sell himself for money?’ Luca incised in a raw tone that told her he took himself very seriously.
Darcy was so appalled by her own thoughtlessness that her hand fluttered up between them to pluck apologetically at his lapel and then smooth it down again. ‘Luca... honestly, I was just trying to be funny—’
‘Ha...ha,’ Luca breathed crushingly. ‘Give me the car keys.’
‘The—?’
‘You’ve had too much champagne.’
Darcy had had only a single glass. But out of guilt over her undiplomatic tongue, she handed over the keys. He swung into the driver’s seat.
‘You’ll need directions.’
‘I have total recall of our death-defying journey here.’
She let that comment on her driving ability go unchallenged. She did drive pretty fast. And in three days’ time they needed to get married. There was now some source of relief in the awareness that the marriage would be a fake. He had no sense of humour and a filthy temper. Even worse, he brooded. She stole a covert glance at his hard, dark chiselled profile...but, gosh, he still looked spectacular!
In the moonlight, she averted her attention from him, torn with shame at that betraying response. Deep in the pit of her taut belly, she felt a surge of guilty heat, and was appalled by the immediacy of that reaction. He reminded her of Zia’s father... was that the problem? She shook her head and studied her tightly linked hands, but although she tried to fight off those painful memories, they began flooding back...