by Diana Palmer
“No, I don’t,” he admitted. His eyes searched hers. “But I can guarantee you some unforgettably unique meals, and you won’t have to clean up the plates afterward.”
She had to muffle a laugh. “And you promised you wouldn’t blackmail me.”
“Scout’s honor,” he said, crossing his heart.
“Were you really a Scout?” she asked suspiciously.
“Sure. For one week. Until they caught me with little Mabel, trying for a merit badge of a different kind.”
She did laugh that time, helplessly. “Oh, you are a devil,” she said.
He grinned, and it softened him just a little. “Be a sport, Jolana. I’ll show you a good time, and all you have to do is hang around with me. Just temporarily.” He studied her narrowly. “Tony says there’s no boyfriend?”
She shook her head. “No. There’s no boyfriend.”
“The way you look speaks volumes, lady, did you know?” he asked. “Somebody left a few scars, huh?”
“Stop being so...inquisitive, will you?” she asked restlessly. “You’re making me nervous.”
“I did that the day you walked into me,” he reminded her. “Don’t be self-conscious. I make a lot of people nervous.”
“I know. I read your editorials, too,” she confessed.
He chuckled. “What do you say?”
She shrugged, sighing. “I ought to have my head examined. But, okay.” She looked straight at him. “But just for a little while, and only if you don’t make passes at me.”
“One kiss is a pass?” he asked, eyebrows arching.
“It hurt,” she said shortly.
“Did it? I must be losing my touch. Come here, baby, and I’ll kiss it better.”
She jumped as he reached for her, but she wasn’t fast enough. She wound up in his arms and on his lap, smelling the subtle scent of his cologne, drowning in the sudden warmth of his body. He was enormous up close, and his eyes filled the world. She stiffened, went rigid, like a cornered cat ready to claw.
His eyebrows edged together as he watched her. “All fur and claws, aren’t you?” he asked softly. “Talk about repressed women...!”
“Let me go, please,” she said unsteadily.
“Why? Will I break something if I kiss you?”
“Let me go!” She pushed at him wildly, but he only held her more firmly.
“That’s enough,” he said quietly. “I’m not into brutality. I won’t hurt you, or force you. What happened?”
“I don’t like being dominated,” she burst out, her dark eyes glittering with fear and anger. “Not by anyone!”
He lifted his head and watched her calculatingly. “Tell me why.”
“You don’t have the right to ask!”
He sighed heavily, letting his eyes slowly wander along the smooth lines of her body. “Not yet,” he agreed. His eyes went back up to catch and hold hers. “But someday I might. And someday you might like being dominated...by me.”
The thought sent a surge of panic through her slender figure, and she felt herself tremble. Would he be rough with her, or was he capable of tenderness? Her only experiences of intimacy had been fleeting and unsatisfying, and no man she’d ever dated had made her want to lose control. But this man affected her differently from anyone else, and she was afraid of him.
“Will you let me go?” she pleaded weakly.
“Of course.” He loosened his arms all at once, grinning when her skirt rode high up her thighs as she lifted her legs away. “Nice,” he sighed.
She stood up, a delightful picture with her hair flying and her eyes flashing. “I hate you!”
“Do you? How exciting.” He stood up, too, and smiled down at her from his much greater height. “But you’ll sleep with me one of these days, in spite of it. And you’ll like it.”
She could have slapped him. She wanted to. But she was afraid of what his reaction would be.
“Good night, honey. I’ll call you in a day or two. When you’re a little calmer.” He winked at her from the door. “Finished the paintings for the exhibit?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes,” she managed. “They’re at Tony’s gallery.”
“Mine and Tony’s,” he reminded her. “I’ll drop by in the morning and take a look. I have an interest in you these days.”
And she could take that any way she liked, his eyes added.
“Ciao, Jolana.” He closed the door, and the apartment seemed less colorful.
She slipped out of her clothes and took a quick shower, dousing herself with expensive bath powder before she pulled on her gown and climbed into bed.
Domenico Scarpelli bothered her. He was the kind of man she usually avoided like the plague, because that kind brought back memories she could hardly bear.
There had been another such man in her life. An uncle, who’d taken her in after the death of her mother. A bachelor, he hadn’t wanted the bother of a young girl, and he’d never shown her any affection at all. But he’d been overbearing and sometimes brutal when she disobeyed. And once, after he’d been drinking heavily, he’d beaten her. Despite the fact that he was obviously remorseful about it the next day, the incident had left deep scars. Shortly thereafter, she’d run away, to stay with a distant cousin north of Atlanta. The cousin, a feisty lady in her sixties, had threatened to go to court to keep Jolana and threatened the uncle with the police if he tried to take her back. He’d been glad to be rid of her. So the next few years had been pleasant. But Jolana had been wary of men ever since, suspicious of them, distrustful. Many men were brutal, and she wanted no more part of brutality. So she’d spent her free hours, the few she had between college art classes and her job, with men who were very different from her uncle, men who were kind and soft and made no demands on her.
None of them had appealed to her physically, oddly enough, but at least she wasn’t afraid of them. She was afraid of Domenico Scarpelli. And not solely because he was such a mountain of a man, and so strong. When he had pulled her body against his she had felt the oddest, most terrifying sensations. And the threat he’d made, about taking her to bed, had excited even as it frightened. Men dominated in bed, as so many of them did in everyday life. She was afraid of any kind of domination, and she knew that was the real reason she had never gotten serious about any man. Jolana was full of secret terrors, and she dreaded sharing them with anyone.
Tony called her the next morning, just as she was getting ready to run out to do some shopping.
“Nick loved the paintings,” he said without preamble, and sounded smug and cheerful.
“Did he?” she asked.
“Especially the landscapes. He said they reminded him of the place he grew up,” he added.
She was pleased about the praise, but she couldn’t manage to express it. “How strange,” she said instead, “I don’t remember painting hell.”
“Shame on you! Nick’s going to be your biggest booster,” Tony chided.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” she laughed. “Uh, where did he grow up?” she asked, because the landscapes were Caribbean ones, inspired by a trip to the Bahamas.
“Nassau,” he said. “His father had business interests there. They spent his childhood commuting between Nassau and New York.”
“I thought he grew up poor,” she said.
“He did. His father died when he was ten, and his mother married a, let’s face it, a gigolo. The guy went through everything she had in a year and left her on the street. Nick had to go to work to keep them from starving. His mama waited tables and he was a busboy. But, honey, it was a hard life. She got sick... Hey, this is something Nick should tell you. He’s a private kind of guy, doesn’t like being gossiped about.”
“I’d never tell him,” she said, oddly touched. She could picture the proud Domenico Scarpelli as a busboy, and it hurt. Why, she wouldn’t even contemplate. “Bu
t it explains a lot.”
“Yeah, doesn’t it? But don’t waste time feeling sorry for him. He does okay.”
“So I’ve noticed. He’s like a steamroller, all right.”
“Try working for him,” he chuckled. “Once a month, one of his editors gets me drunk and cries all over me.”
“I can believe that,” she said. “Well, I need to eat lunch. I’m starved.”
“Go! I’ll talk to you later.”
“Thanks for calling, Tony. ’Bye.”
She hung up and had started for the door when the intercom buzzed. Frowning, she answered it and found that Nick was downstairs.
Puzzled and vaguely apprehensive, she told the doorman to send him up. A few minutes later she opened her door to find Nick grinning at her. “I’m hungry, are you? How about a nice, big steak somewhere ritzy?”
She couldn’t keep from smiling. He looked big and very European in the expensive dark slacks and suede jacket he was wearing with a white turtleneck sweater. She shouldn’t have been glad to see him after last night. But she was.
His eyes swept down her body in its gray flannel slacks and purple-patterned silk shirt. “You look nice,” he murmured. “But you’ll need a jacket.”
She had a corduroy one, and it took only a minute to put it on, grab her purse and follow him out the door.
“Does it have to be somewhere ritzy?” she asked. “I feel more like a McDonald’s hamburger, in this getup.”
“You don’t think McDonald’s is ritzy? Shame on you,” he said.
She laughed in spite of herself. “I guess it depends on your definition, doesn’t it? I thought you were going to stay away for a while.”
“Oh, that.” He dismissed it with a gesture as they left the elevator. “I was afraid you’d cry. Missing me, you know.”
She shook her head. This was a totally different man from the taciturn, arrogant one she’d met on the busy city street. And she found she liked this one very much.
CHAPTER FOUR
EVEN HAVING LUNCH at a fast-food restaurant with Nick was an experience, Jolana learned quickly. He told her wildly amusing stories that kept her in stitches as they ate.
“You’re nothing like the man I bumped into on the street a few days ago,” she said after a few minutes.
“I was completely wrong about you, too.” He studied her over his coffee cup with appreciative dark eyes. “Are you as innocent as you seem?”
She shrugged and shook her head, “I’m not sure. I had a bad experience right off the bat. I was eighteen and in love for the first time.” She sighed, remembering, her eyes wistful and sad. “He was thirty-two, a salesman, of all things. He used to come into the restaurant where I worked. He fed me a line and I was swept right off my feet. He talked me into his bed and that was when I found out why he wasn’t married and how he really felt about women.” She shifted restlessly in her seat; the memories were painful. “Can we talk about something else?”
“He hurt you?”
“Oh, yes,” she laughed bitterly. “The next day, I moved to another apartment, where he couldn’t find me. I literally hid out. It broke my heart, too, because I really loved him. But he was one of those men who just aren’t capable of loving, I suppose, and I was too stupid to know it. Love hurts at that age.”
“It hurts at any age, honey,” he said with a bitter smile. He took a long sip of his coffee. “So what then? Did you give up on men entirely?”
“Except for the occasional friendly date, yes. I couldn’t trust my own instincts anymore, you see,” she explained, wondering even as she spoke how it was that she trusted him with things she’d told no one else.
“How old are you?” he persisted.
“Twenty-seven.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “If you wait many more years to make a commitment, it’s going to be too late. Don’t you want a husband, a family?”
“No,” she said. “I prefer my life as it is.”
“A vacuum?” he asked.
“It beats having your heart torn out,” she said with a smile.
For a moment he appeared lost in thought, almost as though he had forgotten she was there and was remembering something unpleasant, almost painful. Abruptly coming out of his reverie, he finished his coffee in one quick gulp. “Come on. Let’s go walking.”
“What a nice way to spend the morning. Freezing to death.”
He glared at her. “It’s unseasonably warm for January,” he reminded her. “And walking is healthy.”
“Do I look sick?” she replied.
“Don’t get me onto that subject,” he said as he cleared away the debris on their table, a tiny smile on his mouth. “I could go on for ten minutes about the way you look.”
“That bad, huh?” she sighed. “Well, I’ve been working pretty hard lately, and keeping terrible hours...”
“That wasn’t what I meant.” He moved in front of her as she stood up. He was intimidating, sensuous. “You look gloriously beautiful.”
She met his eyes and froze. They were so dark, and there was a glitter in them that both attracted her and terrified her. Domenico had an intense sexuality that left her weak-kneed. Her eyes searched his in the sudden silence, and she couldn’t have moved to save her life.
“I’m beginning to thank fate for making you bump into me on the street that day, Jolana,” he said deeply. “You fascinate me.”
Her breath was coming too quickly for comfort. She didn’t like the powerful reaction he caused in her and she felt completely vulnerable. She deliberately moved past him with a nervous little laugh.
“Well, where are we going?”
“How would you like to see my offices?”
She whirled, her face glowing with excitement. “Really?”
Her enthusiasm seemed to puzzle him. “It’s only a magazine office,” he said.
“Yes, I know. I’ve never been in one before,” she confessed, smiling.
A slow smile spread across his hard face. “I’ve never seen anyone quite so enthusiastic about seeing an office before.”
“I’m that way about most things, I’m afraid,” she sighed, swinging around to rush out onto the street ahead of him, her hair flying in beautiful disarray around her flushed face. “I love seeing and doing things I’ve never done before.”
He didn’t answer. He was looking at her, watching the way the sunshine shimmered on her hair, making it seem a halo around her lovely oval face. His dark eyes dropped to her mouth and lingered there while he felt an odd sensation not unlike hunger.
She smiled at him over her shoulder. “Which way do we go?”
He blinked, coming out of his momentary trance. “This way.”
His offices were on the fourteenth floor of a building near Rockefeller Center, very modern and up-to-date and neat. There were word processors everywhere and people doing layouts and pasting up copy. He showed her through the entire process, from the writing of an article to the making up of the magazine, and from there to its printing.
“Since we publish monthly,” he explained when they were in the spacious confines of his private office, “we have to keep up-to-date with every facet of the stock market, and changes or coming changes in major corporate structure. It can get hairy,” he added with a faint smile. “Especially when a corporate executive is going to get the ax, and we know it, and he doesn’t.”
“I can imagine!”
She moved to the wall, where she found his degrees—two of them, one in business administration and one in political science. She glanced at him, perched carelessly on the edge of his desk with his arms folded, watching her.
“These must have taken a long time,” she observed.
“Mama always believed in education. She only finished grade school and was determined that her children would have more than that.”
�
��Do you have a photo of Rick?” she asked, curious.
He picked up a framed portrait on the desk and offered it. She moved to stand in front of him. It was a photograph of Nick, his two brothers and their mother, fairly recent, too. Rick looked to be about two or three years younger than his brother, slight and slender and balding.
“Not a lot of resemblance, is there?” he asked, taking back the framed photograph to give it a cursory glance before he replaced it on the desk. “Rick is like our father. Marc is like Mama. I take after my grandfather.”
“Was he a pirate?” she teased.
His hands shot out, catching her waist to draw her between his powerful thighs and hold her level with his dark, piercing eyes. “No,” he said thoughtfully, holding her gaze. “He was an amazing man, though. He sired his last child at the age of eighty. He was Greek, you know, not Italian.”
That explained the painting Tony had hired her to do for Domenico, of Mount Olympus.
“Was he...big, like you?” she asked nervously. The feel of his chest under her hands was making her uneasy, along with the masculine scent of cologne and the threat of powerful muscles surrounding her slenderness.
“No,” he said softly. “He was small. Wiry. Very tough. My father was big like me. They called him ‘Big Rome,’ and he had a small textile empire in my boyhood. He died and Mama remarried, and in less than a year there was nothing left.”
She couldn’t admit that Tony had told her that, so she searched his hard face and asked, gently, “Why?”
His hands contracted, bruising her waist. “Mama married a fast-talking little rat. He liked to spend money and he liked to play the horses.” He shrugged. “It didn’t take him long to spend her into debt, and then he ran out.”
“Lovely man,” she muttered. “What happened to him?”
“He disappeared one day and we never heard from him again. Personally, I believe he ran afoul of some gentlemen who took exception to his welching on a bet.” He drew her closer. “Don’t stiffen up like that, baby, I won’t hurt you.”
Her hands spread, pushing. “Yes, I know. But, Nick, let’s not start anything,” she pleaded, knowing her voice, like her traitorous body, lacked conviction.