Sabrina knew Luca was currently unattached courtesy of her research, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be bringing someone with him to the wedding. The only way to find out of course was to ferret that little detail out of him later. She quieted the whisper in her head that asked: Are you sure that’s the only reason you’re going after him? “What do you think?”
Chase did a little throat clearing. “You do know that seducing someone means you may have to put out, right?”
Sabrina swallowed. “Umm…I guess.”
There was a very pregnant pause. She could imagine Chase narrowing his famous blue eyes as he pondered her plan. “You said he was related to the Liguerias?”
“Uh huh.”
Chase was an avid watcher of European royals. He was subscribed to magazines dedicated to them. He had originally chosen Seirenada as their vacation destination because of the royal wedding. “But not a royal himself?”
Sabrina could hear the theme of Jeopardy playing in her head as Chase tried to figure out the identity of the mysterious man she had met. “I don’t think so.”
“He is related through the paternal side?”
“The paternal grandparents of the royals. You’re enjoying this.”
“Sssh. I can’t think,” Chase muttered distractedly. “The previous prince had sisters, and they all didn’t marry anyone from Seirenada. Is it one of the German cousins? Or the Italian ones?”
“The Italian ones.” Sabrina peered closer into the mirror, making sure her contact lenses were perfectly in place, like a soldier checking all his weapons were primed before going to war. Without them she had perfect vision, but that was not the reason why she wore them in the first place.
“Business associates of the Konstantinos? Hhmm. I got it!” Chase’s voice rose in excitement. “It’s one of those Argentis!”
“Very impressive.” She blinked to moisten her eyes.
“Is it Raphael? Luca?” He sounded like a kid trying to choose which present to open on Christmas day. "Or the one with that sex video? That violinist Adriano?”
“The second one.” She couldn’t even say his name out loud. How the hell was she going to manage being with him for hours? “And how can you even know their names?”
He ignored her question. “Oh my! Little Bree is playing with the big boys now. And rumor has it those boys have them big.”
“Could you please take your mind out of the gutter? This is serious. I’m supposed to make him interested enough in me so that he can bring me as a date to the wedding.”
“My mind wasn’t anywhere near the gutter, little prude. It was somewhere inside those big boys’ pants,” Chase chuckled.
Sabrina shook her head in exasperation. “I’m ending this conversation before it lands somewhere far worse than the gutter.”
“And just as it was getting to be really interesting,” Chase added wickedly. “Now I know why you’re so willing to be the sacrificial lamb in aid of your mission in Ligueria. I’d lie down on the altar myself if someone like Luca Argenti was going to slaughter me. ”
“It’s not like that at all,” she protested, but it sounded weak even to her ears.
“It’s a win-win situation, Bree,” Chase continued. “Even if he doesn’t take you to the wedding, you still get to have sex with that gorgeous specimen of manhood.”
She rolled her eyes even though he couldn’t see her. “’Bye Chase. Go back to whatever you were doing trying to earn an Oscar.”
“Ouch! Be sure to retract your claws when you’re around the Italian stallion.” Chase turned serious again. “He does have a reputation as a womanizer. Be careful.”
“I’m always careful around men,” she retorted.
“That’s part of the problem.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Take care, Bree.”
“You too. I mean it, Chase. Don’t go falling for your co-actor and getting your heart broken all over again.” Sabrina worried about how often Chase fell in and out of unrequited love.
“I’m a big boy now, Bree.” Chase sounded nonchalant then turned grave. “Sometimes you have to get something broken so it can be fixed.”
And then it gets broken again, so what’s the point? She shook off the morose turn of conversation. “I hope you’re not feeding me a line from your movie ‘cause I’m telling you right now, it doesn’t sound like Academy Award material.”
“You’re good for my ego, Bree,” Chase said sourly. “Seriously, you need anything from the hotel to pimp yourself up for your Italian stallion, I’ll take care of it. I mean it. Your bohemian style, and I’m using this term in the kindest way possible, might be cute, but you have to up your game if you want to compete with all those sultry Mediterranean women and catch the eye of Luca Argenti.”
Sabrina glanced down at her dress and grimaced. “I doubt he’d be interested in what I’m wearing once, you know,” she swallowed, “once we have them off.”
“True, but like presents, you have to make the packaging pretty so someone would actually want to open them.” Chase had often wondered aloud how an accessories designer like her couldn’t care more about the way she dressed.
This time it was Sabrina’s turn to say “Ouch.” She had no time to change and if the way she dressed didn’t pass his standards…then it didn’t.
Sabrina stuffed her mobile inside her bag. It was time to bring herself one step further in her plan and hopefully, a whole lot closer to Luca Argenti.
Chapter 4
Luca witnessed the whole thing as he was coming out of the lobby elevator. The old man dropped the folded newspaper on the floor. Sabrina, standing a few feet away, rushed over and picked it up. She handed the paper to the owner, who was wheelchair bound. Luca waited for the awestruck reaction on the man’s face at the first glimpse of her face. There was none. Only anticipation.
Luc swore quietly. He recognized the man and knowing how the old stronzo operated, there was nothing accidental about the situation. The old man mumbled something he couldn’t make out and Sabrina smiled in response. This time the old man appeared dumbstruck for a few seconds.
Her smile. It was heart-stopping. Another peculiar English word he understood now. Sabrina Connelly was very bad for his vital organs. Except for one which strained against his pants at the mere sight of her.
He watched her for several minutes, enthralled against his will. The light from the massive chandelier overhead bounced off her hair. Her face had an unguarded expression, so different from this morning at the beach. How could she look so naïve and yet be so…calculating?
A passing hotel staff greeted him and interrupted his study. He nodded in acknowledgement and strode to break up Sabrina’s tête-à-tête with the tycoon. It was time to stake his claim.
She must have sensed his approach because she looked up and turned around slightly. Her smile froze.
“Here is your date now,” the old man said in heavily accented English. His dark eyes were twinkling beneath bushy gray eyebrows. Luca had a feeling the crafty old man knew he had been observing them for quite some time.
Her cheeks turned pink, and Luca was again amazed at her ability to blush. If it weren’t for the fact that she was flirting with another man while waiting for him, he would be convinced she was some shy miss.
“Thanks for keeping her company, Mr. Theodorou,” Luca addressed the man politely. The wily old man noted the coolness in his tone and smirked. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted Sabrina’s slight start of surprise that he knew the man. “I was a bit delayed due to a business call.”
“Never keep a beautiful woman waiting,” Mr. Theodorou admonished lightly with a wag of his knobby finger, “or someone else might snatch her up.”
“I think it’s the other way around. She might snatch someone else up¸” he said, his eyes slanting to Sabrina, who was attracting all male eyes in the vicinity.
Her brow furrowed at his statement.
“As I can’t run,” Theodorou gestured to hi
s wheelchair and flashed Sabrina a besotted smile, “you’ll find I’m very easy to catch, my dear.”
“Only if you want to be caught, I’m sure,” Sabrina replied charmingly, turning her attention back to her new admirer.
The Greek tycoon’s booming laugh resounded in the lobby, at odds with his frail-looking body. “Not only beautiful but witty, too.”
“Are you trying to steal my date under my nose, sir?” Luca said with just the right tone of amusement.
The old man grinned widely. “Do you want to be stolen, Miss Connelly?”
She appeared to give the question some consideration. Was she really going to ditch him in favor of Theodorou, who was as rich as the proverbial Croesius? Luca felt his stomach turning at the thought.
“Can I let you know after our first date?”
Witch! She hadn’t looked at him once since that first moment he had arrived, but here she was flirting brazenly with another man.
“Anytime, my dear, anytime.” The tycoon swiveled his head and looked up at him. “It was nice talking to you, Argenti. I hope to see you around. And you Miss Connelly, be sure to let me know how it turns out.” Theodorou nodded to the silent man in a suit standing a polite distance away. The bodyguard approached the old man and started pushing his wheelchair towards the lobby exit.
“You sure know how to spot them,” Luca murmured after the old man was safely out of earshot.
She frowned, looking puzzled. His lips curled in sardonic amusement.
Luca had done more research on Sabrina Connelly. There had been a photo of her leaving the back exit of the house of the longtime married Hollywood producer while his actress wife was away on a film shoot. The man was twice her age. The next day, the wife filed for divorce and cited ‘a gold-digging third party bitch’ as the reason for the separation.
It galled him to the core that he was attracted to her still, even after knowing she was the kind of woman he despised. It was the same kind of social climbing puttana who had destroyed his parents’ “ideal” marriage a year ago and rocked his faith in the institution. Luca’s dislike for gold diggers was personal. However, for Sabrina Connelly, he was making an exception.
She had him hooked. He’d let her reel him in, made sure she enjoyed her catch for a few days, then he’d jump back into the sea, free as the day before he’d met her. He was disgusted with himself for making fish analogies.
“Excuse me?”
She was pretending she didn’t know whom she had been talking to? Very well. Luca would play along. Just as long as he never forgot what kind of woman she really was, he saw no harm in participating in this harmless charade.
“That was shipping tycoon Hector Theodorou you were just chatting with.”
“Oh.” She received this news with equanimity. “He seems like a sweet old man, like how I’d imagine a grandfather would be.”
Was that a fleeting pang of longing on her face? Luca refused to care. She would just be a casual lay, and emotions were fucking out of the equation.
He eyed her outfit critically. Surely a gold digger could afford better clothes? Her dress had sunflowers bursting all over the cheap-looking fabric. She kept her hair off her face with a plain white headband. And she had light make-up on. Luca preferred her without, the way she was earlier at the beach, sun-kissed and rosy-cheeked. She appeared more innocent.
“That sweet old man is on the lookout for wife number five,” he bit out. “Wife number four was young enough to be his granddaughter.” Between her breasts hung the same sea glass pendant. Luca wanted to yank it off and hurl it so it wouldn’t draw attention to her breasts, which Theodorou had been ogling awhile back.
She probably knew this already, but Luca had to give her credit for looking like she was surprised by the information.
“I’ve reserved a table at the Calypso.” He referred to the restaurant helmed by a famous French chef. “It will be too hot to dine al fresco at this time.”
She nodded. He offered his arm. She paused before hooking hers into his. Luca felt the heat of her skin boring through the fabric of his linen jacket. He wanted to pull it off and be pressed against her bare skin. He felt her stiffen by his side. Was it possible his desire was being transmitted to her?
“Is everything alright?” he asked, to hide how a tad disconcerted he was by the thought of this physical affinity.
Her big brown eyes glanced up at him, her pupils dilated. “Y-yes.” She pulled her arm away, creating some space between them.
Luca’s lips curled at her heightened awareness. She might be after Markos, but she couldn’t control her body’s response to him. Why else would she be with him? Unless she was aiming to make him her next victim, he thought grimly.
They ascended the grand marble staircase to reach the restaurant. When they reached the landing, a man who was talking on his mobile paused and gaped at Sabrina. Luca shot him a malevolent glare. The man gulped and turned away, cowed.
Get a grip, Luca thought irritably. She is nothing. Once he’d tasted her body, he would lose his attraction to her. He’d been celibate too long. He was too keyed up. That was the problem.
A charged silence hung between them as the waiter left after taking their orders.
She broke it first. “Your company renovated the hotel?”
She was trying to make small talk, but her gaze was latched on to the bread basket on the table, avoiding him. Luca fished out a wheat roll.
“Only the interiors and the furnishings. It’s my sister’s project.” He broke a piece of bread off, popped it into his mouth, and chewed slowly.
Her eyes drifted to his mouth.
“She’s done a very good job. Everything’s beautiful.”
He waited for her gaze to drift back up to his. “Si. Very beautiful,” he said emphatically before he could stop himself.
She blushed again, playing with a strand of her hair. She was really good at playing the innocent miss. “Are you renovating the rest of the hotel chain?”
“Only this one at the moment.”
“You’ve worked with the Konstantinos family before?”
She was fishing for information. Luca decided to let her. It amused him to think she would get a shot at Markos now that he was on to her.
“Our families go a long way back.” He was pretty sure she knew this already, but he played along. “Our parents were friends. It was convenient to spend summers here. Seirenada is in the middle of Italy and Greece. My cousins are from here.”
“I know. The royal family. I looked you up.” He couldn’t contain his surprise at her little admission. He expected her to be more covert, given how subtle she was compared to what his info led him to expect. She gave a delicate lift of her shoulders. “I’m not going to have lunch with someone I barely know.”
It’s going to be more than lunch, strega, he thought with dead certainty. It was inevitable. “That’s very wise of you. But as I said, the staff of the hotel can vouch for my identity. Some of them have known me and my siblings since we were little.” Where was this constant need to reassure her coming from? Before he could stop himself he said, “I ran wild with my brothers around the island.”
Her brown eyes turned wistful. “I didn’t have a lot of playmates when I was growing up.”
The waiter laid out steaming dishes of seafood and pasta. A bottle of white wine was poured into crystal glasses.
He didn’t want to know more. So why did he have to open his mouth and ask, “You’re an only child?”
She shook her head and cast her eyes down on the tablecloth, but not before he saw them cloud over. “No.”
He knew there was a Pandora’s box of emotions in that simple word and refused to open it. He remained silent.
After several beats, she glanced up. “I bet you terrorized the local villages.”
Her smile was teasing, yet hesitant. There was a lopsided dimple on the corner of her mouth. Luca felt a strange disappointment that she deflected the topic of conversation back to
him.
Luca’s lips quirked with the memory. “Oh, we did. My brothers and I were rivals with the Konstantinos boys. We tried to top each other’s pranks.”
“Tell me about them.” It was a perfectly natural question, but Luca sensed her unusual interest in the way she leaned slightly towards him.
“One time, in the middle of the afternoon when most of the locals were napping, Markos, the eldest Konstantinos boy, snuck to the village and stole all the washings that were hanging out to dry.”
Her fork arrested midway to her mouth, strands of pasta coiled tight around the tines. “Markos did?” There was something in the way she said his friend’s name that brought a surge of jealousy through him.
Merda! Was the little gold digger in love with his friend after all?
“I was following him, keeping really quiet until he reached the last house.” Luca sipped his wine, deliberately stretching the story so that he could study her reaction. “I recognized that little brick house. It was where Lucia, not her real name,” he quipped, “lived. She was the village beauty. Markos and I were madly in love with her. I was letting him do his naughty little deed until we both saw it at the same time.”
“Saw what?” She hadn’t touched her food. She appeared thoroughly absorbed by the story.
He paused, keeping her in suspense. “Her bra.”
“Bra?” She appeared perplexed.
He didn’t know why he was telling her all this. The other option, of Sabrina telling him all about herself...he didn’t want any of that. “There was no way in hell I was going to let Markos touch her underwear. Just as he was reaching out to pull her bra down,” he said, “I sprung out of nowhere and knocked his hand off. I was wearing a bracelet, and it got caught in a button in one of those shirts hanging out to dry, I think. Markos took a swipe at me and I tried to avoid it. It snapped the laundry line from one of its posts.”
“Oh no!” Sabrina cried, equally distressed and entertained.
Luca was gratified by her reaction and continued. “We were so busy fighting with each other we did not notice the family had come out. Lucia caught us tugging on both ends of her underwear.”
When She Fell for the Billionaire Page 4