by Jennie Lucas
Bella wanted to thump him. She clenched her hands into fists to stop herself from actually doing it. She wasn’t going to touch him if she could help it. Her body had a habit of doing things it shouldn’t do when it came too close to his. Her nails bit into her palms as she tried to rein in her temper. ‘You’re a fine one to talk about morals,’ she threw back. ‘At least I don’t have a criminal record.’
Something hardened in his gaze as it pinned hers: diamond-hard. Anger-hard. Hatred-hard. ‘You want to play dirty with me, princess?’ he asked.
This time Bella felt that tingly sensation at the base of her spine. She knew it had been a low blow to refer to his delinquent past, but Edoardo always triggered something dark, primal and uncontrollable in her. She didn’t know what was it about him that got her back up so quickly, but he needled her like no other person.
He had always done it.
He seemed to take particular delight in getting a rise out of her. It didn’t matter how much she promised herself she would keep a lid on her temper. It didn’t matter how cool and sophisticated she planned to be. He always got under her skin.
Ever since that night when she was sixteen, she had done her best to avoid her father’s bad-boy protégé. For months, if not years, at a time she would keep her distance, barely even acknowledging him when she came home for a brief visit to her father. Edoardo brought out something in her that was deeply unsettling. In his company she didn’t feel poised and in control.
She felt edgy and restless.
She thought things she should not be thinking. Like how sensual the curve of his mouth was, the way the lower lip was fuller than the top one; how his lean jaw always seemed to need a shave. How his hair looked like it had just been combed with his fingers. How he would look naked, all tanned, whipcord-lean and fit.
Like how he always looked at her with that hooded, inscrutable gaze as if he was seeing through the layers of her designer clothes to her tingling body beneath...
‘Why are you here?’ he asked.
Bella gave him a defiant look. ‘Are you going to march me off the premises for trespassing?’
A glint of something menacing lurked in his gaze. ‘This is no longer your home.’
Her look hardened to a cutting glare. ‘Yes, well, you certainly made sure of that, didn’t you?’
‘I had nothing to do with your father’s decision to bequeath me Haverton Manor,’ he said. ‘I can only presume he thought you were never very interested in the place. You hardly ever visited him, especially towards the end.’
Bella’s resentment boiled inside her—resentment and guilt. She hated him for reminding her of how she had stayed away when her father had needed her the most. The permanency of death had made her run for cover. The thought of being left all alone in the world had been terrifying. The desertion of her mother just before her sixth birthday had made her deeply insecure; people she loved always left her. She had buried her head in the social scene of London rather than face reality. She had made the excuse of studying for her final exams, but the truth was she had never really known how to reach out to her father.
Godfrey had come to fatherhood late in life, and after her mother had left, he had not coped well with the role of being a single parent. Consequently their relationship had never been close, which had made her insanely jealous of the way in which her father had fostered his relationship with Edoardo. She suspected Godfrey saw Edoardo as a surrogate son—the son he had secretly longed for. It made her feel inadequate, a feeling that was only reinforced a hundredfold when she found out the way her father had left his estate. ‘I’m sure you worked my absence to your advantage,’ she said, shooting him another embittered glare. ‘I bet you sucked up to him every chance you could, all the while painting me as a silly little socialite with no sense of responsibility.’
‘Your father didn’t need me to point out how irresponsible you are,’ he said with that annoying, trademark lip-curl. ‘You do a fine job of that all by yourself. Your peccadilloes are splashed across the newspapers just about every week.’
Bella simmered with fury even though there was some truth in what he said. The press always targeted her, making her out to be a wild child with more money than sense. She only had to be in the wrong place at the wrong time for some ridiculous story to come out about her.
But things would be different soon.
Once she was married to Julian, the press would hopefully leave her alone. Her reputation would be spotless. ‘I’d like to stay for a few days,’ she said. ‘I hope that won’t inconvenience you?’
Those intriguing eyes glinted dangerously again. ‘Are you asking me or telling me?’
Bella put on a beseeching expression, her hatred of him tightening her spine until she could feel every knob of her vertebrae. It was positively galling to have to ask for permission to stay at her childhood home. That was one of the reasons she had turned up unannounced. She’d figured he might not be able to turn her away with the household staff looking on. ‘Please, Edoardo, may I stay for a few days?’ she asked. ‘I won’t get in your way. I promise.’
‘Do the press know where you are?’ he asked.
‘No one knows where I am,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anyone to find me. That’s why I came here. No one would ever dream of finding me here with you.’
His chiselled jaw was locked like a vice, a muscle on the left side moving in and out like a tiny heart beating under the skin. ‘I’ve a good mind to send you on your way.’
Bella pushed her bottom lip out. ‘It’s about to snow again,’ she said. ‘What if I run off the road or something? My death would be on your hands.’
‘You can’t just turn up here and expect the red carpet to be rolled out for you,’ he said with a look of stern disapproval. ‘You could at least have called and asked if it was all right to stay. Why didn’t you?’
‘Because you would have said no,’ Bella said. ‘What’s the problem with me staying a few days? I won’t get in your way.’
The muscle tapped a little harder in his jaw. ‘I don’t want a bunch of voyeurs lurking about the place,’ he said. ‘As soon as the paparazzi turn up, you can pack your bags and leave. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ Bella said, inwardly seething at his overbearing manner. What did he think she was going to do—call a press conference? She wanted to escape all that and lie low until Julian came back. She didn’t want any more scandals in her life.
‘And nor will I tolerate you bringing friends here to party all hours of the day and night,’ he said, drilling her with his diamond-hard gaze. ‘Understood?’
Bella gave him her best ‘I’ll be good’ face. ‘No parties.’
‘I mean it, Bella,’ he said. ‘I’m working on a big project just now. I don’t want to be distracted.’
‘All right, already. I get it,’ she said, flashing an irritated gaze. ‘So what’s the big important project? Is she female? Is she currently sleeping over? I wouldn’t want to cramp your style or anything.’
‘I’m not going to discuss my private life with you,’ he said. ‘Before I know it, you’d be spilling all to the press.’
Bella wondered who his latest lover was, but there was no way she was going to ask. Asking would imply she was interested. She didn’t want him thinking she spent any time at all musing over what he was doing and whom he was doing it with. He mostly kept his private life exactly that—private. His enigmatic, unknowable nature made him a target for the paparazzi but somehow he managed to keep his head below the parapet. Whereas Bella couldn’t seem to step outside her house in Chelsea without attracting a camera flash from the lurking paparazzi, who always painted her as a professional party girl with nothing better to do than get a spray tan.
Her engagement to Julian Bellamy would hopefully put all that to rest. She wanted a clean slate, and once she was married,
she would have it. Julian was the nicest man she had ever met. He was nothing like the men she had dated in the past. He didn’t attract scandal or intrigue. He didn’t party or drink. He didn’t have a worldly bone in his body. He wasn’t interested in wealth and status, only helping others.
‘Would you bring in my bags for me?’ she asked Edoardo with mock sweetness. ‘They’re in the boot.’
Edoardo leaned against the front fender of her car, one ankle crossed over the other, his arms folded against the broad expanse of his chest. ‘When do I get to meet your new lover?’ he asked.
Bella pushed her chin a little higher. ‘He’s technically not my lover,’ she said. ‘We’re waiting until we get married.’
He laughed again. ‘Holy mother of Jesus.’
She threw him a look. ‘Do you mind not blaspheming?’
He pushed himself away from her car and came to stand close enough for her to smell the heat of his arrantly male flesh: sweat and hard work with a grace note of citrus that swirled around her nostrils, making them involuntarily flare. She took a prickly little breath and stepped backwards but one of her heels snagged on the crushed limestone and she would have fallen but for one of his hands snaking out and capturing her by the wrist.
Her breath completely halted as his long, tanned fingers gripped her like a steel manacle. An electric charge surged through her skin as soon as those calloused fingers made contact with her skin. She felt it sizzling all the way to the bones of her wrist; they felt like they were going to disintegrate to fine powder. She swept her tongue out over her lips as she tried to muster as much icy hauteur as she could, but even so her heart fluttered like a hummingbird behind the scaffold of her ribs as his eyes meshed with hers. ‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?’ she asked.
One corner of his mouth came up in a sardonic smile. ‘Now look who’s blaspheming.’
Bella’s stomach dropped like an out-of-control elevator when his thumb pressed against her leaping pulse on the underside of her wrist. She hadn’t been so close to him in years. Not since that kiss. Ever since that night, she had assiduously avoided any physical contact with him. But now her skin on her wrist felt like it was being scorched. It felt hot and tingly, as if electrodes had zapped the nerves. ‘Get your filthy hands off me,’ she said but her voice came out raspy and uneven.
His fingers tightened for an infinitesimal moment, his unusual blue-green eyes holding hers, sending a riot of sensations tumbling down the length of her spine. She could sense him so close to her pelvis, that essential part of him that defined him as a virile and potent male. Her body felt its primal magnetic pull just as it had all those years ago. What would it feel like to press against him now that she was no longer that gauche, inexperienced, slightly inebriated teenager?
‘Say please,’ he said.
She gritted her teeth. ‘Please.’
He released her and she rubbed at her wrist, shooting him a livid glare. ‘You’ve made me all dirty, you bastard,’ she said.
‘It’s good clean dirt,’ he said. ‘The kind that washes off.’
Bella looked at the cuff of her shirt below the sleeve of her jacket that now had a full set of his dusty fingerprints on it. She could still feel the pressure of his fingers as if he had indelibly branded her flesh. ‘This shirt cost me five-hundred pounds,’ she said. ‘And now you’ve completely ruined it.’
‘You’re a fool, paying that for a shirt,’ he said. ‘The colour doesn’t even suit you.’
She stiffened her shoulders in outrage. ‘Since when did you become a personal stylist?’ she jeered. ‘You don’t know the first thing about fashion.’
‘I know what suits a woman and what doesn’t.’
She scoffed. ‘I bet you do,’ she said. ‘The less clothes the better, right?’
His eyes glinted as they did a lazy sweep of her form. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’
Bella felt her skin tingle all over as if he had physically removed her clothes, button by button, zip by zip, piece by piece. She couldn’t stop herself from imagining how his work-roughened hands would feel on the softer smooth skin of her body. Would they catch and snare like a thorn on silk? Would they scratch or would they caress? Would they...?
She pulled back from her wayward thoughts with a hard mental slap. ‘I’m going inside to say hello to Mrs Baker,’ she said and swished past him to go to the front door.
‘Mrs Baker is away on leave.’
Bella stopped as if she had suddenly come up against an invisible wall. She turned around to look at him with a quizzical frown. ‘So who’s doing the cooking and cleaning?’ she asked.
‘I’m taking care of it.’
Her frown deepened. ‘You?’
‘You have a problem with that?’ he asked.
Bella blew out a little breath. She had a very big problem with it. Without Mrs Baker bustling about the place, she would be alone in the house with Edoardo. She hadn’t planned on being alone with him. It was a very big house, but still...
In the past he had lived in the gamekeeper’s cottage. But, since her father had left him Haverton Manor, he had the perfect right to live inside the house. He managed her father’s investments and operated his own property-development business out of the study next to the library. Apart from the occasional business trip abroad, he lived and worked here.
He slept here.
In her house.
‘I hope you don’t expect me to take over the kitchen,’ Bella said, shooting him another glare. ‘I came to have a break.’
‘Your whole life is one long holiday,’ he said with a sneer that boiled her blood. ‘You wouldn’t know how to do a decent day’s work if you tried.’
Bella gave her head a little toss. She wasn’t going to tell him about her plans to help Julian fund his mission work with a good chunk of her inheritance. Edoardo could jolly well go on thinking she was a flaky airhead just like everybody else. ‘Why would I need to work?’ she asked. ‘I have millions of pounds waiting for me to collect when I’m twenty-five.’
The muscle near his tightly set mouth started hammering again and his eyes turned to blue-green granite. ‘Do you ever spare a thought for how hard your father had to work to make his money?’ he asked. ‘Or do you just spend it as fast as it’s dropped in your account?’
Bella gave him another defiant look. ‘It’s my money to spend how I damn well like,’ she said. ‘You’re just jealous because you came from nothing. You got lucky with my father. If it hadn’t been for him, you’d be pacing a prison cell somewhere, not playing lord of the manor.’
His eyes glittered with sparks of acrimony. ‘You’re just like your gold-digging bitch of a mother,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know she was here a couple of days ago?’
Bella tried to disguise her surprise. And hurt. She hadn’t seen or heard from her mother in months. The last time she had heard from Claudia was when she’d called to say she was moving to Spain with a new
husband—her second since her divorce from Bella’s father. Claudia had needed money for the honeymoon. But then, Claudia always needed money, and Bella always felt pressured into giving it. ‘What did she want?’ she asked.
‘What do you think she wanted?’ he asked, that hard gaze glittering with cynicism.
Bella gave him an arch look. ‘Maybe she wanted to check you were still managing my assets properly.’
A frown suddenly pulled at his brow. ‘If you want a blow-by-blow inspection of the books, then all you have to do is ask,’ he said. ‘I’ve offered to meet with you more regularly but you’ve always refused. The last three meetings, you didn’t even have the decency to show up in person.’
Bella felt a little ashamed of herself. She had no question over his management of her father’s estate. The profits had steadily grown from the moment he had taken o
ver the share portfolio in the months before her father had died from cancer. His street-smart intelligence and clever intuition had saved her assets where other investors’ had been lost during the economic turmoil of the past few years.
A couple of times a year he would insist they meet so he could go through the estate books with her. At first she had suffered those meetings, all the while sitting silently seething at how he was in control of her life. But even in that large, swanky London office he had seemed a little too close to her. The last meeting she had attended in person, her mind had wandered off into dangerous territory as she sat staring at the dark pepper of stubble around his mouth as he patiently explained the stocks and shares. She had tried to focus but within seconds she had started gazing at his hands as he had turned the pages of the meticulous report he had prepared. He had looked up at one point and locked gazes with her. She still remembered the throb of that silence. She had felt it deep inside her body.
She could still feel it.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Bella said. ‘I’m sure you’re doing all you can to keep things in order.’
There was a tight little silence.
‘Are you expecting your boyfriend to join you?’ he asked.
Bella tucked a strand of hair back behind her ear that the chilly breeze had worked loose. ‘He’s away on a mission in Bangladesh,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d come here until he gets back.’
‘London nightlife losing its appeal?’ he asked.
She gave him a brittle glare. ‘I haven’t been to a nightclub in ages. It’s not my scene any more.’
‘Prayer meetings more your thing?’
Oh, how she hated him for his mockery. ‘I bet you’ve never got down on your knees in your life,’ she tossed back.
His eyes slid to her pelvis and back with deliberate slowness. They seemed to burn with a secret erotic message as they met hers. ‘Say the word, princess, and I’ll be on my knees before you can say “heavens above.”’