Jack had to rush off then but he offered them dinner to celebrate.
Smooth as silk, Raffaelle thanked him but regrettably had to decline. Apparently he had to be back in London this evening—to attend an irritating business dinner.
Whether there was a business dinner, Rachel did not know. But, of course, her uncle understood. Busy men and all that.
And Raffaelle’s ultimate coup was to gain Jack’s instant agreement that everything here would be taken care of while Rachel was away, because of course Raffaelle wanted her with him.
‘Just be happy, darling,’ Jack said to her, then he kissed her cheek, shook Raffaelle by the hand and left them, driving away while they stood and watched him—with Raffaelle’s arm still exhibiting its possession across her shoulders in a grip like a vice.
Happy was the last thing she was feeling by the time her uncle’s car disappeared out of sight. The moment he turned them to face the house Rachel tried to break free from him but his grip only tightened as he walked them across the cobbles.
The front door opened directly into the farmhouse-style kitchen, heated by the old Aga against the wall. Coming in here should have felt comfortingly familiar to Rachel but it didn’t. The door closed. The arm dropped from her shoulders. Moving like a skittish kitten, she took a few steps away from him then spun around.
‘I …’
‘If you are about to utter yet another lie to me—’ he cut right across her ‘—then let me advise you to keep silent!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
HER heart gave a thick little thump against her ribcage. It was like looking at a complete stranger again—a tall, dark, coldly angry stranger.
‘I was actually about to apologise for the … misunderstanding with Jack out there.’
‘You set me up.’
‘It w-wasn’t like that,’ she denied. ‘Y-you were fishing for information and I stupidly decided to tease you about my relationship with Jack.’
‘I am not referring to your desire to pull my strings by intimating there was another man in your life,’ he said. ‘Though using your uncle like that is unforgivable enough.’
‘Then what—?’ she demanded.
‘Alonso,’ he supplied. ‘The Italian heartbreaker I have been set up to play substitute for in your desire for payback!’
‘That’s not true!’ Rachel protested.
His angry eyes crashed into her like a pair of ice picks. ‘Not only is it true but you are the most devious witch it has ever been my misfortune to come into contact with!’ he incised. ‘This was never just about saving your half-sister’s marriage! You always had this hidden agenda in which I paid for the sins you believe your other Italian lover committed!’
‘No!’ she cried. ‘I’m not that petty! Elise’s problems are serious enough without you adding such a crazy accusation into the mix! And anyway,’ she said stiffly, ‘you are nothing like Alonso. In fact I couldn’t compare the two of you in any way if I tried!’
‘In bed, perhaps?’ he grimly suggested. ‘Did you close your eyes and imagine it was him you were driving out of his head with your thrust-and-grind gyrations and those exquisite little muscle contractions?’
‘No!’ she said hotly. ‘How dare you? That is such a rotten thing to say!’
‘Then who did teach you to make love like that?’ He took a step towards her. ‘How many men, amore, does it take to produce such a well-practised sensualist?’
Blushing hotly, she cried, ‘I’m not listening to this—’
She turned towards the door that led through to the rest of the house. The way he moved so fast to slam a hand against the door to keep it shut had her shivering out a shocked gasp.
‘Answer the question.’ He loomed over her.
Rachel folded her arms. ‘You so love to throw your weight around, don’t you?’
‘Just answer.’
Anger flicked her eyes up to meet his. ‘Why don’t you tell me first—how many women have slipped in and out of your bed to make you such a fabulous lover?’ she hit back. ‘What was that,’ she mocked when he clenched his expression. ‘Do you want to tell me it’s none of my business?’
‘I am thirty-three years old, you are twenty-three.’
‘Meaning the ten year difference justifies the numbers you clearly don’t want to give?’
His shoulders shifted. ‘I do not break hearts.’
Rachel released a thick laugh. ‘You wouldn’t know if you broke hearts! Men like you don’t go into sexual relationships with the care of tender hearts in mind, Signor. They go into them for the sex!’
‘In your experience.’
She tried to push past him, but the muscles in his arm bunched to form an iron bar she could not pass. ‘Yes,’ she hissed out.
‘Gained mostly from this Alonso guy who took only what he wanted from you and trampled on the rest?’
‘Yes!’ she said again. ‘Happy now?’ she demanded. ‘Have you got the required information nicely fixed in your head? I’ve had two lovers. Both Italian. Both with their brains lodged in their pants!’
For some reason she hit out at him, though she didn’t understand why she had. The feeble blow barely glanced off his rock-solid bicep. And she was beginning to tremble now and didn’t like it—beginning to bubble and fizz with anger and resentment and the most horrible feeling of all—humiliation at the way Alonso had treated her!
So maybe Raffaelle was right: when she’d agreed to hit on him to save Elise’s marriage some subconscious part of her had wanted to pay back Alonso.
‘So I am playing the fall guy.’
He was reading her thoughts. She swallowed tensely.
He turned to push his shoulders and head back against the door. ‘Dio, I cannot believe I fell into this trap.’
Rachel struggled to believe that she had fallen into it all too. ‘I vowed I would never go near another Italian.’
‘Grazie,’ he clipped. ‘I wish you had kept to your vow.’
Rachel turned away and walked over to the Aga and put the kettle on to boil. Why she did it she hadn’t a single clue because she knew she could not swallow even a sip of anything right now.
But at least the move put distance between them. Silence hummed behind her while she removed her coat and laid it over the back of a kitchen chair. Outside a weak sun was trying its best to filter into the room through the window on to scrubbed pine surfaces that had been here for as long as she could remember, yet she still felt as if she were standing in an alien place.
‘Where did you meet him?’
The brusque question startled her into glancing at him. ‘Who—?’ she bit out.
His shoulders almost filled the doorway, his dark head almost level with the top of the frame. His face was still angry, the clenched jawline, the flat mouth, the glinting hard eyes, yet its harsher beauty still riveted her to the spot and claimed her breath and sent the hot stings of attraction streaking through her veins.
‘My heartbreaking rival,’ he provided and moved at last, shifting away from the door to pull out a chair at the table and sit down.
‘In Italy.’ Rachel moved to the sink and began toying with the mugs left there to drain. ‘I was working on a farm just outside Naples—w-work experience,’ she explained. ‘He lived there. We met. Within a week I was moving into his apartment …’ Wildly besotted with him and madly in love. ‘He told me he loved me and, like a fool, I believed him. When it came time for me to come back to England, he said thanks for the great time and that was it.’ She picked out two mugs at random. ‘Do you want tea or coffee?’
‘Coffee—when was this?’
‘Last summer.’ Shifting back to the Aga, she put the mugs down and picked up the coffee jar, then suddenly put it down again.
It had been only last summer when Alonso had taught her a lesson about Italian men she’d vowed never to forget. Yet here she was, involved with another and threatening to make the same mistakes all over again.
‘I need to—do a few
things before I can leave here. Can you make your own coffee—?’
She had disappeared through a door before Raffaelle could say anything—running scared again, he recognised as he sat there listening to her footsteps running up a set of stairs.
Then, on an angry growl, he got up and went to stand by the window. One part of him was telling him to go after her and insist she finish telling him the whole miserable story about her Italian lover—her other Italian lover, he grimly amended. Another part of him was wondering why he was not just climbing into his car, which he could see standing outside on the cobbles, and driving away from this … fiasco before the whole thing leapt up again and bit him even harder!
Because it had bitten him already, a voice in his head told him. She could already be carrying his child.
‘Dio,’ he breathed. He could not remember another time in his life when he had been so thoroughly stung by a woman.
And he did not need all of this hassle. He had many much more important things he could be doing with his time than standing here wondering what she was doing upstairs where he could hear her moving about just above his head.
Leo Savakis was not really his problem—none of this was his damn problem—except for the as-yet-unconfirmed child. He did not need to hang around until they discovered the result of their mindless love-in. A telephone call in a month would make more sense than hanging around her like this.
Yet some deep inner core at work inside him was stopping him from getting the hell out of here.
Lust, he wanted to call it. A hot sexual attraction for a devious female with cute curly blonde hair and the heart-shaped face of an innocent but who made love like the most seasoned siren alive.
He had taught her how to be that person—that other Italian lover had tutored her on how to give the best of pleasures to a man, had then dumped her as if that was all she had been good for—a student of his sexual expertise and a boost for his ego.
And then there was that thing with real teeth which was biting at him. He was used to being desired for himself. He was used to being the favoured one women revolved around, waiting with bated breath to find out which one of them he would choose.
Arrogant thinking? Conceited of him to know that he only had to crook a finger to have them crawling with gratitude around his shoes?
Yes. He freely admitted it. His clenched chin went up.
With Rachel Carmichael he was learning very quickly what it felt like to come in as second best in the heart and mind of a woman.
He did not like it. It gnawed at his pride and his sexual ego. And if he needed to find an excuse for why he was still standing here instead of driving away, then there it was.
There was no way that he was going to accept second best to any other man. By the time this thing between them was over, his Italian rival was destined to be nothing but a vague shadow in her distant memory.
She’d gone quiet.
Raffaelle looked up at the ceiling. What was she doing up there—lying on her bed pining for the heartbreaker?
Rachel was sitting on her bed with her cellphone lying in her palm displaying a text message from Elise.
Thank you for doing this for me. I will love you always. Leo is over the moon about the baby. He’s taking us to Florida on a long overdue holiday. I could not be happier. He sends you his congratulations! Tell R thanks for his understanding. Have a great time playing the rich man’s future bride!
What a wonderful game, Rachel thought bitterly. What a great way to waste several weeks of her life.
If she still had a rich future husband to play the game with, that was. He could have come to his senses and made his escape while she was up here moping—driven away in a cloud of dust and offended pride!
Getting up, she walked over to the window that overlooked the courtyard. The silver Ferrari still sat there glinting in the shallow sunlight. Relief was the first emotion she experienced—for Elise’s sake, not her own, she quickly told herself.
Then the bedroom door suddenly opened and she turned to see him standing there, filling the gap like he had filled the other door downstairs and her senses responded, reaching down like taunting fingers to touch all too excitable pleasure points and she knew she was relieved he was still here for no one else’s sake but her own.
‘Ciao,’ he murmured huskily.
‘Ciao,’ she responded warily, searching his face for a sign that another battle was about to begin and feeling the taunting brush of those fingers again when she saw that anger had been replaced by lazy sensual warmth.
‘Need any help?’ he asked lightly.
‘Doing what?’ Rachel frowned.
‘Packing.’ Walking forward, his gaze flicked curiously around a room made up of countrified furniture complete with chintzy soft furnishings. ‘I see no sign of it happening yet,’ he observed. ‘But then—’ his eyes came back to hers ‘—maybe you have other ideas for how we can spend the rest of the afternoon—?’
It was like being tossed back into the pit of writhing snakes again.
Switch off the anger and let desire rush back in, she reasoned. ‘I d-don’t think—’
‘Good idea—let’s both not think.’ He moved in closer. ‘That small flowery bed looks the perfect place to spend a few hours thinking of nothing at all but this …’
But this—but this … His arms came around her and his mouth took over hers. No one needed to think about doing this, although—
‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Y-you should …’
‘Be turned off you because you keep showing me different faces?’
His fingertips combed through the curls on her head as if to remind her of one of those changes she had made once already today and—damn her, but Rachel felt herself almost purring into his touch like a cat stroked by its beloved master.
He saw it and, on a soft laugh, caught her full, softly rounded, inviting mouth. It was one of those bewitching, tasty, compulsive kisses that clung, tongue tip to tongue tip. She swayed closer and his hands caught her waist to feel the slender arching of her spine for a few seconds before he gently but firmly drew her back.
‘You get to me, Rachel, you really get to me. Though God knows why you do, because I certainly don’t.’
‘Not your usual type?’ She could not resist the dig because while he frowned at her she was tingling in places that should not do that—the nerve-endings along the length of her inner thighs and between her legs.
He shook his head. ‘Not my usual anything,’ he muttered. ‘You answer back, you disrespect, you lie and you cheat without batting an eye.’
‘I don’t cheat—!’ she protested.
‘Then what do you call the woman I first met last night with the long straight hair and the couture dress?’
A cheat. He was right.
‘Well, this is the real me,’ she said as she took a step back from him. ‘The one with curls and jeans and—if you give me the chance—the one constantly fighting with dirt beneath her chipped fingernails …’ She looked down at her nails, frowning now because they looked so different from what she was used to seeing: clean, well manicured and—pink. ‘I am not made to be a femme fatale, Raffaelle. I wasn’t even that good at it last night, only you didn’t notice it because you were seeing what you’d been conditioned to expect to see at a function like that.’
‘You were damn good at what came afterwards,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’ll take a rain-check on the femme fatale bit if I can have more of that.’
Her chin went up, blue eyes coolly challenging. ‘And the cheating face I’m supposed to show to the real world? Does it pop on and off according to what you require from me?’
To her surprise he let loose one of those lazy sexy smiles that melted the hardness out of his face. ‘I think I like the idea of that. I will keep the sensual curly-haired Circe all to myself while the rest of the world gets the femme fatale.’
‘Complete with fake ring to go with the fake relationship.’ Rachel heaved out a sigh
. ‘We shouldn’t be doing this at all.’
‘Too late for regrets, cara. We have been over this already. We are both into this up to our necks.’
‘Not the sex part.’
‘Yes, the sex part!’ he contended. ‘It is here. We have it. And since it is the area where you really do get to me, we keep it.’
‘If I say no?’
His laugh was derisive. ‘You would have to want to say no and you don’t.’ He lowered his head to toy with her lips again. Electrifying, seducing. ‘Do you—?’ he challenged her for an honest answer.
Since her lips were clinging and her hands had already found their way beneath his T-shirt to the satin tight warmth of his skin she could not very well give any other answer than a weak shake of her head.
‘Then say it so I can hear it.’
‘I want you,’ she whispered, swaying closer to him again, wanting, needing, body contact.
His hands on her waist held her back. ‘Say my name,’ he insisted.
Say his name … Alonso was suddenly looming up between them again. She tugged in a tense breath.
‘I did not think of any other man but you last night, Raffaelle.’ She felt she owed it to him to tell him that.
His murmur of satisfaction brought his mouth back to hers again with a full-on hot, deep, sensual attack. At last he was letting her have what she craved the most—skin-to-skin contact with him. Her fingernails curled into satin-tight flesh, then followed the muscular line of his ribcage across his chest, then around to his back so she could punish him at the same time as she arched even closer.
He shuddered, deserting her mouth. ‘You ruthless witch,’ he muttered as he took a moment to grip the edge of his T-shirt and rake it right off. Hers followed suit before he would allow her any more of his mouth.
Like that they strained against each other, exploring with their hands, tongues and lips. He was perfect. No man should possess a body like his. Rachel tasted his skin, her hands moving possessively over his hair roughened contours while he stood there and let her enjoy him, encouraging her with kisses and slow strokes of his hands.
One Night In Collection Page 11