Unfinished Business with the Duke

by Heidi Rice

  He cursed. If it hadn’t been for the footman’s well-timed interruption five minutes ago things would have gone a great deal further.

  The second his lips had tasted her warm, fragrant flesh, and he’d heard her breath catch and felt her shudder of response, instinct had taken over—as it always did with Issy. His mouth had closed over her breast and he’d revelled in the feel of her nipple swelling and hardening under his tongue.

  He blew out a breath and adjusted his trousers.

  But Issy had changed. She wasn’t the sweet, passionate teenager who had once adored him, but a vibrant, self-aware and stunningly beautiful young woman—who detested him.

  Gio placed the brandy glass back on the tray, frustrated by the strange little jolt in his chest. He pressed the heel of his hand against his breastbone. He didn’t care what she thought of him. Why should he?

  Women tended to overreact about this stuff. Look at most of the women he’d dated.

  He always made it crystal-clear he was only interested in recreational sex and lively companionship but they never believed him. And recently the triple whammy of career success, reaching his thirties and inheriting a dukedom had only made them harder to convince.

  Angry words had never bothered him before when the inevitable breakup occurred. So why had Issy’s?

  Gio frowned and pushed the hair off his brow.

  Why was he even surprised by his odd reaction? Nothing made sense where Issy was concerned, for the simple reason that he stopped thinking altogether whenever she was around. He was probably lucky the sudden rush of blood from his head hadn’t left him with permanent brain damage.

  Gio brought his feet off the table and rested his elbows on his knees. He poured himself a glass of the iced water and gulped it down. Much more concerning was his idiot behaviour this afternoon.

  He’d decided at an early age never to be controlled by his lust or his emotions—yet he’d been controlled by both as soon as he’d spotted Issy downstairs.

  But then, this wasn’t the first time Issy had torpedoed his self-control.

  Images swirled of Issy at seventeen, her eyes brimming with adulation, her beautiful body gilded by moonlight, the scent of fresh earth and young lust in the air.

  She’d caught him in a moment of weakness ten years ago, but he still didn’t understand why he’d given in to her innocent attempts to seduce him. The way things had ended had been messy and unnecessary—and he had to take the lion’s share of the blame.

  He rolled the chilled glass across his forehead. Damn Issy Helligan. At seventeen she had been irresistible. How could she be even more so now?

  Standing, he crossed to the window and peered out at the tourists and office workers jostling for space on the pavement below.

  Why was he even worrying about this? He would never see Issy again. He’d offered her money, and she’d declined. End of story.

  But then his gaze caught on a familiar shock of red curls weaving through the crowd. With her raincoat barely covering her bottom, and those ludicrous boots riding halfway up her thighs, she stood out like a beacon.

  As he studied her, striding away disguised as a high-class hooker, a picture formed of Issy ten years ago, with the vivid blue of her eyes shining with innocence and hope and a terminal case of hero-worship. He heard the echo of her voice, telling him she would love him forever.

  And the jolt punched him in the chest again.

  ‘Iss, I’ve got dreadful news.’

  Issy glanced over as her admin assistant Maxi put down the phone, peering over the teetering pile of papers on her desk. Maxi’s small pixie-like face had gone chalk white.

  ‘What is it?’ Issy asked, her heart sinking. Had one of the company broken a leg or something equally catastrophic? Maxi was exceptionally calm and steady. Panicking was Issy’s forte.

  Issy steeled herself for very bad news. But, really, how much worse could it get?

  After her aborted singergram a week ago, the singing telegram business had dried up completely. The three grants they’d applied for had been awarded elsewhere, and all her sponsorship requests had come back negative. She’d spent the week frantically cold-calling a new list of potential but even less likely donors, while also arranging the schedule for a season of plays that would probably never go into production. And the boiler had sprung another leak. Not a problem in the height of summer, but come autumn it would be another major expenditure they couldn’t afford. Assuming they still had a theatre to heat.

  ‘That was the bank manager,’ Maxi muttered.

  Issy’s heart sank to her toes. Okay, that was worse.

  ‘He’s demanding payment of the interest in ten working days. If we don’t find the thirty thousand to cover the payments we’ve missed, he’s calling in the bailiffs.’

  ‘What the—?’ Issy shouted.

  Seeing Maxi flinch, she held on to the swear word that wanted to fly out of her mouth and deafen the whole of Islington.

  ‘That toerag,’ she sneered. ‘But we paid something. Not the full amount, I know, but something.’ Her fingers clenched so tightly on her pen she felt as if she were fighting off rigor mortis. ‘He can’t do that.’

  ‘Apparently he can,’ Maxi replied, her voice despondent. ‘Our last payment was so low it amounts to defaulting on the loan. Technically.’ She huffed. ‘Toerag is right.’

  ‘Remind me not to send Mr Toerag any more complimentary tickets,’ Issy replied, trying to put some of her usual spirit into the put-down. But her heart wasn’t in it, her anger having deflated like a burst party balloon.

  This wasn’t the banker manager’s fault. Not really. The theatre had been skirting the edge of a precipice for months; all he’d done was give it the final nudge into the abyss.

  Issy crossed to the office’s single dust-covered window and stared at the back alley below, which looked even grottier than usual this morning.

  Maybe a broken leg wouldn’t have been so bad. Three weeks laid up in bed on a morphine drip with excruciating pain shooting through her entire body couldn’t make her feel any worse than she did at this moment.

  She’d failed. Utterly and completely. How was she going to break the news to everyone? To Dave their principal director, to Terri and Steve and the rest of their regular crew of actors and technicians, not to mention all the ushers and front-of-house staff? They’d worked so hard over the years, many of them offering their time and talent for free, to make this place work, to make it a success.

  They’d have to stop all the outreach projects too, with the local schools and the church youth group, and the pensioners’ drop-in centre.

  She pressed her teeth into her bottom lip to stop it trembling.

  ‘Is this finally it, then?’

  Issy turned at the murmured question to see a suspicious sheen in her assistant’s eyes.

  ‘Are we going to have to tell Dave and the troops?’ Maxi asked carefully. ‘They’ll be devastated. They’ve worked so hard. We all have.’

  ‘No. Not yet.’ Issy scrubbed her hands down her face, forced the lump back down her throat.

  Stop being such a wimp.

  The Crown and Feathers Theatre wasn’t going dark. Not on her watch. Not until the fat lady was singing. And until Issy Helligan admitted defeat the fat lady could keep her big mouth shut.

  ‘Let’s keep it quiet for a bit longer.’ No point in telling anyone how bad things were until she absolutely had to. Which would be when the bailiffs arrived and started carting away crucial parts of the stage. ‘There must be some avenue we haven’t explored yet.’

  Think, woman, think.

  They had two whole weeks. There had to be something they could do.

  ‘I can’t think of any,’ Maxi said. ‘We’ve both been racking our brains for months over this. If there’s an avenue we haven’t tried, it’s probably a dead end.’ Maxi gave a hollow laugh. ‘I even had a dream last night about us begging Prince Charles to become our patron.’

  ‘What did he say?’
Issy asked absently, eager to be distracted. Her head was starting to hurt.

  ‘I woke up before he gave me an answer,’ Maxi said dejectedly, giving a heartfelt sigh. ‘If only we knew someone who was loaded and had a passion for the dramatic arts. All our problems would be over.’

  Issy swallowed heavily, Maxi’s words reminding her of someone she’d been trying extra hard to forget in the past seven days.

  Not that. Anything but that.

  She sat back down in her chair with an audible plop.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Maxi asked, sounding concerned. ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet.’

  ‘I do know someone. He’s a duke.’

  ‘A duke!’ Maxi bounced up. ‘You’re friends with a duke, and we haven’t approached him for sponsorship yet?’ She waved the comment away as she rushed to Issy’s desk, her eyes bright with newfound hope. ‘Does he have a passion for theatre?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’ And they weren’t exactly friends either.

  Heat rose up her neck and her nipples pebbled painfully as the memory she’d been trying to suppress for a week burst back to life.

  No, they definitely weren’t friends.

  ‘But he is loaded,’ she added, not wanting to extinguish the excitement in Maxi’s gaze.

  Or she assumed Gio was loaded. She had absolutely no idea what he did for a living, or even if he did anything. But he was a duke. And he kept a room at the swanky gentlemen’s club. And hadn’t he said something about renovating Hamilton Hall? Surely it made sense to assume he must be loaded?

  Issy crossed her arms over her chest as her breasts began to throb. Something they’d been doing on a regular basis for days, every time she thought about Gio and his hot, insistent lips… She shook her head. Those thoughts had been coming a lot thicker and faster than she wanted to admit. And not just those thoughts, but other ones—which involved his lips and tongue and teeth and hands on the whole of her naked body, driving her to untold…

  Issy squeezed her pulsating breasts harder as all her nerve endings started to tingle.

  ‘When are you going to see him again? Can you contact him today?’

  She tensed at Maxi’s eager question.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Maxi asked, the light leaving her eyes. ‘You don’t look all that enthusiastic.’

  ‘It’s a long shot, Max. At best.’

  More than a long shot, if she were being totally honest. She’d told Gio she detested him, for goodness’ sake. Like a spoilt child. And, while it had given her some satisfaction at the time, and she doubted he cared what she thought of him, it wasn’t going to make begging him for money any easier.

  Maxi cocked her head to one side, looking concerned. ‘Exactly how well do you know this duke? Because you’ve gone bright red…’

  ‘Well enough.’ Maybe too well.

  She needed a strategy before she saw Gio again. A foolproof strategy. If she was going to have any hope of winning a stay of execution for the theatre—and keeping even a small part of her dignity intact.

  Issy felt as if she’d travelled back in time as she stepped off the train at the tiny Hampshire station of Hamilton’s Cross and walked down the platform. It was a journey she’d done dozens of times during her childhood and adolescence when her widowed mother Edie had been housekeeper at the Hall.

  Seeing her reflection in the glass door of the ticket office—which never seemed to be open then and wasn’t now—Issy congratulated herself on how much her appearance had changed from that dumpy schoolgirl with the fire-engine red hair. The chic emerald silk dress with matching pumps, accented with her favourite chunky necklace and designer sunglasses, looked a good deal more sophisticated than the ill-fitting school uniform, for starters. Teased into a waterfall of corkscrew curls instead of the unruly fuzzball of her childhood, even her vivid red hair now looked more Rita Hayworth than Little Orphan Annie.

  The thought gave her a confidence boost as she headed for the newspaper booth which doubled as a mini-cab office. A boost she desperately needed after spending half the night struggling to figure out a workable strategy for her meeting with Gio.

  If only she hadn’t told him she detested him!

  Unfortunately the strategy she’d settled on—to be businesslike and efficient and not lose her cool—seemed disappointingly vague and far from foolproof as zero hour approached.

  She tucked the stray curls behind her ear and gripped the shoulder strap on her satchel-style briefcase. Full of paperwork about the theatre—including details of the loans, financial projections, the stunning reviews from their summer season and her plans for next season—the briefcase put the finishing touch on her smart, savvy career-woman act.

  Not that it was an act, per se, she corrected. She was smart and savvy and a career woman—of sorts. Unfortunately she was also a nervous wreck—after a sleepless night spent contemplating all the things that could go wrong today.

  Having discarded the idea of informing Gio of her visit beforehand—fairly certain he would refuse to see her—she had surprise on her side. But from what she’d learned about Gio after scouring the internet for information, surprise was about all she had.

  The startling revelation that Gio was now a world-renowned architect, with a reputation for striking and innovative designs and a practice which was one of the most sought-after in Europe, hadn’t helped with her nervous breakdown one bit.

  Okay, Gio was definitely rich. That had to be a plus, given the reason why she was here. But the discovery that the wild, reckless boy she had idolised had made such a staggering success of his life had brought with it a strange poignancy which didn’t bode well for their meeting.

  And that was without factoring in the way her body had responded to him a week ago. Which, try as she might, she still hadn’t been able to forget.

  She was here for one reason and one reason only, and she was not going to lose sight of that fact. No matter what. Or the theatre’s last hope would be dashed for good.

  She had to stick to her plan. She would promote the theatre and do her absolute utmost to persuade Gio that investing in a sponsorship would give his company added profile in the British marketplace. If all else failed she’d remind him that he had offered her financial help. But under no circumstances would she let their history—or her hormones—sway her from her goal. No matter what the provocation—or the temptation.

  ‘Good Lord, is that you, Issy Helligan? Haven’t you grown up!’

  Issy beamed a smile at the short, balding man sitting in the mini-cab cubicle. ‘Frank, you’re still here!’ she said, delighted to see a familiar face.

  ‘That I am,’ the elderly man said bashfully, as his bald patch went a mottled red. ‘How’s your mother these days? Still living in Cornwall?’

  ‘That’s right, she loves it there,’ Issy replied, grateful for the distraction.

  ‘Awful shame about the Duke’s passing last summer,’ Frank continued, his smile dying. ‘Son’s back you know. Doing up the Hall. Although he never saw fit to come to the funeral. ’ Spect your mother told you that?’

  Edie hadn’t, because her mother knew better than to talk to her about Gio after that fateful summer.

  But the news that Gio hadn’t bothered to attend his own father’s funeral didn’t surprise Issy. He and his father had always had a miserably dysfunctional relationship, evidenced by the heated arguments and chilly silences she and her mother had witnessed during the summers Gio spent at the Hall.

  She’d once romanticised Gio’s troubled teenage years, casting him as a misunderstood bad boy, torn between two parents who hated each other’s guts and used their only child as a battering ram. She’d stopped romanticising Gio’s behaviour a decade ago. And she had no desire to remember that surly, unhappy boy now. It might make her underestimate the man he had become.

  ‘Actually, I don’t suppose you know whether Gio’s at the Hall today? I came to pay him a visit.’

  According to the articles she’d read, Gio lived
in Italy, but his office in Florence had told her he was in England. So she’d taken a chance he might be at the Hall.

  ‘Oh, aye—yes, he’s here,’ said Frank, making Issy’s pulse skitter. ‘Came in yesterday evening by helicopter, no less—or so Milly at the post office says. I took the council planners over to the Hall for a meeting an hour ago.’

  ‘Could I get a lift too?’ she said quickly, before she lost her nerve.

  Frank grinned and grabbed his car keys. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

  He bolted the booth and directed her to the battered taxi-cab parked out front.

  ‘I’ll put your journey out on the house, for old times’ sake,’ he said cheerfully as he opened the door.

  Issy tensed as she settled in the back seat.

  No way was she going to think about old times. Especially her old times with Gio.

  She snapped the seat belt on, determined to wipe every last one of those memories from her consciousness.

  But as the car accelerated away from the kerb, and the familiar hedgerows and grass verges sped past on the twenty-minute drive to the Hall, the old times came flooding back regardless.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ten Years Earlier

  ‘I CAN’T believe you’re really going to do it tonight. What if your mum finds out?’

  ‘Shh, Melly,’ Issy hissed as she craned her neck to check on the younger girls sitting at the front of the school bus. ‘Keep your voice down.’

  As upper sixth-formers, they had the coveted back seat all to themselves, but she didn’t want anyone overhearing the conversation. Especially as she didn’t even want to be having this conversation.

  When she’d told her best friend about her secret plan to loose her virginity to Giovanni Hamilton two years before, it had been thrilling and exciting. A forbidden topic they could discuss for hours on the long, boring bus ride home every day. And it had had about as much chance of actually happening as Melanie’s equally thrilling and exciting and endlessly discussed plan to lose her virginity to Gary Barlow from Take That.