by Penny Jordan
‘I’ll take that,’ Luke announced, ignoring the clerk’s uncertain look.
‘Ms Roberts will be checking out as of now,’ he informed him. ‘Where’s your passport?’ he asked Suzy, turning to look at her.
If the clerk had thought originally that she was taking Luke back to her room so that they could make love, and Suzy suspected he must have done, he obviously did not think so now. Suzy saw his manner towards Luke change from uncertainty to respect.
But then there was quite definitely something about Luke that set him apart from other men, Suzy acknowledged grudgingly, angrily aware of his presence behind her as she walked to her room.
Her room—the room originally to have been provided for her friends—was elegant and extremely luxurious, with French doors which led out onto a private balcony large enough for her to have had a tea party on, had she so wished.
‘Expensive,’ was Luke’s cynical comment as he followed her inside, and then locked the door and leaned against it, pocketing the old-fashioned key. If there had been an ounce of truth in her story that she was unemployed she could never have afforded to stay in a place like this, he acknowledged.
‘But then I’m sure your boss has his own way of making sure he gets value for money.’
Angry heat burned Suzy’s face as she started to open the wardrobe doors. Her whole body trembled in reaction to his taunt that she would have sex with a man she loathed! Unable to stop herself, she turned to confront Luke, pride and anger burning red flags in her small face.
‘I know what you’re trying to insinuate, but you couldn’t be more wrong. You know nothing about me, and yet you think—’
‘On the contrary. I know a good deal about you.’ Luke stopped her smoothly. ‘Everyone who attended the Prince’s reception was vetted, including you.’
Vetted, yes, but he did not have an in-depth report on her, Luke acknowledged, and made a mental note to inform his staff in London that he required one—if only for formality’s sake.
The intensity of her own emotions was exhausting her, and she just did not have the energy to argue with him any more, Suzy decided wearily.
‘How long do you intend to keep me here in Italy?’ she demanded as she opened her case and started to fold her clothes neatly.
‘For as long as it takes,’ Luke answered her laconically, his eyes narrowing as he focused on the clothes she was packing.
Neat round-necked tee shirts, modest pairs of walking shorts, a couple of long dresses—simple, anonymous clothes of a type he would have expected a conventional, rather cautions young woman to favour, hardly in keeping with the woman he knew her to be.
She had planned for her current role quite well, he acknowledged reluctantly as he watched the way she folded every garment before packing it.
Warily Suzy gave a glance in Luke’s direction. He was still leaning against the bedroom door, arms folded, eyelids dropping over his eyes so that she couldn’t be sure whether he was watching her or not.
She had packed virtually everything now, except her underwear, and for some ridiculous reason she discovered that she was reluctant to do so with him watching her.
She stole another glance at Luke.
‘Finished?’
‘Er, no…’
‘Perhaps I’d better help you, then.’
Suzy’s mouth opened and closed again as he levered his shoulders off the door and came towards her. Automatically she fell back, putting a protective hand on the drawer which contained her underwear.
She was trying to hide something from him, Luke recognised, his gaze narrowing on the betraying movement of her hand. What was it she had in the drawer that she didn’t want him to see? He intended to find out.
‘Have you got anything in the bathroom?’ he asked casually. ‘Toilet bag? Make-up?’
Unwittingly Suzy took the bait he had offered her. ‘Yes…’
‘You’d better go and get them, then, hadn’t you?’ Luke told her impatiently, glancing at his watch and informing her, ‘You’ve got two minutes. After that, anything you haven’t packed will have to be left behind.’
Automatically Suzy hurried to the bathroom.
The minute she was out of sight, Luke pulled open the drawer she had been guarding.
Neat piles of clean white underwear greeted his searching gaze.
Quickly and expertly he searched through it, frowning as his senses unwantedly relayed to him the cool, soft feel of the white fabric and its innocent virginal message.
Innocent? Virginal? Suzy Roberts?
She had researched her role well, he reflected, his frown deepening as he recognised that a part of him was reacting to the intimacy of what he was doing in a way that was both unprofessional and totally unfamiliar.
In his hand he held the semi-sheer white lace-trimmed bra he had just removed to check that the underwiring was just that.
He remembered with what ease and lack of any kind of sexual interest or arousal he had removed the TV news reporter’s openly sexual underwear from the ‘washing line’ she had managed to delude one of the raw recruits into erecting for her. It seemed incomprehensible to him that he should be feeling such a fierce surge of sexual reaction now!
The sensation of his body beginning to strain against the constriction of his clothes had him ceasing his search to question what on earth his body thought it was doing.
Suzy, her toiletries packed, emerged from the bathroom and froze at the sight of Luke standing in front of the chest, one of her bras in his hand.
‘What are you doing? How dare you touch my…my clothes?’
Like a small whirlwind, Suzy dropped her toiletries bag on the bed and snatched her bra from Luke’s grasp, bundling it and as much of the other contents of the drawer as she could manage into her open case.
He had sent her into the bathroom deliberately so that he could go through her things! What in hell’s name was happening to him? Luke wondered in disbelief as her angry, almost anguished movements caused an unexpected and fierce resurgence of the erection he thought he had tamed.
Furious with himself for his physical response to her, he told her sharply, ‘Forget the shocked virgin act—it doesn’t work. It stopped working for any woman over eighteen years ago, and when it comes to a woman like you…’
What would he do if she turned round now and told him just how wrong he was? Suzy wondered bitterly as her hands trembled over her final packing. But of course she already knew, didn’t she? He simply would not believe her. He would not accept that her experience was limited to one fumbling incident whilst at university, in which she and her partner had both lost their virginity. Their relationship had ended with no regrets on either part when she had decided to give up her studies to nurse her mother…
‘Time’s up,’ Luke announced tersely.
Another minute in this room, with its huge bed and her scent lying on the warm afternoon air, and he was not sure…
He was not sure what? Luke questioned himself brutally.
His body gave him an answer his professionalism wanted to deny.
He wasn’t sure he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from spreading her on that bed and…
Ignoring the savage ache in his groin, Luke searched the room silently, checking every drawer and cupboard and even looking under the bed and on top of the wardrobe before reaching for Suzy’s suitcase.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘COME on—and remember I shall be watching your every step and your every word. One move out of line and you’ll be in an Italian prison faster than you can take another breath,’ Luke warned Suzy as they stood in the late-afternoon sunshine of the villa’s impressive forecourt, with the villa itself behind them and Suzy’s case at Luke’s feet. Any chance she might have had of escaping disappeared, as their taxi drove away.
‘You will never be able to get away with this,’ Suzy warned him angrily. ‘Someone is bound to suspect…’
‘If by “someone” you mean Sir Peter Verey, then I’m a
fraid you’re going to be disappointed. He’s far too busy trying to cope with his children,’ Luke told her grimly.
‘What do you mean “cope with his children”?’ Suzy demanded.
Luke’s comment had all the hallmarks of the kind of old-fashioned attitude towards parenting which she personally deplored.
‘Why shouldn’t he look after them? If his wife—’
Luke looked at her, well aware of her antagonism.
‘Their mother is actually his ex-wife. She left him for someone much richer! And as for looking after his children…They are probably more capable of looking after him than the other way around,’ Luke announced dryly. ‘Peter is the product of a typical upper-class upbringing and totally incapable of any kind of hands-on parenting.’
Luke’s grim words evoked Suzy’s immediate sympathy on behalf of the two children. She too had had a parent—her mother, in her case—who had not been able to provide her with strong and loving parenting.
Suzy’s eyes darkened as she became lost in her thoughts. Her mother had never really got over being widowed, and even before her health had begun to fail Suzy had found herself as a very young girl taking on the role of ‘mothering’ her own mother.
Her sympathies aroused on behalf of the children, she demanded, ‘Why are they here, then? Or can I guess?’ she asked angrily. ‘I suppose you organised it for some machiavellian reason of your own. Have you no feelings? Don’t you realise how much harm it could do them, to be here under such circumstances? Doesn’t their mother—’
Luke listened to her passionate outburst in silence. What would she say if he were to tell her that he himself had been orphaned at a young age? Would that fiercely passionate championship he could see in her eyes for Peter Verey’s children be there for the child he had been?
‘Children are so vulnerable,’ Suzy railed furiously.
‘Surely their mother…’
Children are so vulnerable. Luke looked away from her, momentarily forgetting who she was. There was a bitter taste in his mouth and his gaze was clouded by painful memories.
Some children—as he had good cause to know—were more vulnerable than others. Abruptly inside his head images he didn’t want to relive were starting to form. He banished them. They belonged to the past, and right now he needed to concentrate on the present.
‘Their mother is more interested in scoring points against their father than concerning herself about the children they created together. She has a new partner now, who has no intention of playing happy families with them, so the children have become both a means of remaining a thorn in her ex-husband’s side, and a punishment, because she now sees them as a burden she is forced to bear. She’s put them both into boarding school, and it seems that the summer holidays and the departure of the girl she employed to take charge of them means their presence is a nuisance. Hence her decision to send them to their father. Conveniently, the day she informed Sir Peter he had to take charge of them was also the day she left on an extended holiday with her second husband.’
As she saw the anger in Luke’s eyes Suzy immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion. It was obvious that he too considered the poor children to be an unwanted nuisance, she decided angrily—an inconvenience to mar his plans, just like her!
‘Of course you don’t want them here any more than their father,’ she accused him.
‘I don’t want them here,’ Luke agreed grimly.
He didn’t want any child ever again to be anywhere it might be in danger, no matter how small that risk might be.
If he closed his eyes now Luke knew he would see the most terrible images of carnage and destruction etched in fire and blood. Images he would never be able to forget.
The situation here was dangerously volatile. The African President had a reputation for seeing threats round every corner and reacting punishingly to them. Violence was a way of life to him, and to his followers.
A simple mission, MI5 had called it. But how could it possibly be simple with a woman like Suzy Roberts and two innocent children involved?
‘Come on,’ Luke commanded, picking up Suzy’s case. ‘And remember, take one step just one centimetre over the line and you’ll be locked up in jail before you can take another.’
He meant it Suzy recognised apprehensively, and she fought not to back away from him and let him know how much he was intimidating her.
‘We’re lovers, remember?’ Luke warned her, closing the gap between them.
Ignoring the lynx-eyed look he was giving her, Suzy took a deep breath. Lovers! Panic shot through her as she recognised that her instinctive response to the thought was not one of abhorrence and rejection. Why wasn’t it? She wasn’t still holding onto that idiotic thing about them being soul mates, was she?
Lovers! Inside her head images were forming. Dangerous, wanton and tormenting images that made her body ache and burn.
Beneath her thin top Suzy could feel her nipples stiffening and peaking. Her heart thudding erratically, she turned away from him to look up at the villa. It was awesomely elegant and magnificent.
‘Built by an Italian prince for his favourite mistress and the children she had by him,’ Lucas informed her. ‘The frescoes around the hall and staircase include images of both her and their sons. Come on.’
The visually gentle clasp of his hand around hers was in reality anything but, Suzy recognised and she flinched beneath his tight grip.
‘My things—’ she began, but Luke shook his head.
‘I’ll get someone to come out for them.’
The supposed butler who opened the door to them exchanged a look with Luke which made her suspect that the man was more than just a servant. One of Luke’s men? Suzy suspected so, but before she could voice her suspicions one of the doors off the hallway opened and a young boy of around six came running out, hotly pursued by a pre-teenage girl who was protesting crossly,
‘That’s mine, Charlie, give it back to me now.’
‘Children! Oh—Luke.’
This must be the children’s father, Suzy guessed, and she waited to be introduced to her unsuspecting host.
He was tall and good-looking, with crinkly blue eyes and a nice smile, but Suzy still recognised that of the two of them it was obvious that Luke was the one in charge.
‘Peter, I am delighted to tell you that you have an additional guest,’ Luke announced. ‘My partner, Suzy Roberts. Darling, this is Sir Peter Verey,’
‘Luke, I applaud your taste.’ Peter Verey smiled warmly, his words for Luke but his admiring gaze fixed very firmly on Suzy.
There was something almost endearing about Peter Verey, Suzy decided as she tried rebelliously to move away from Luke, but then tensed as his fingers closed around her wrist in steely warning.
‘I’m going to take Suzy up to my room. It’s almost dinnertime…’
Suzy opened her mouth to say something, but Luke took immediate action to forestall her by the simple expedient of silencing her protest with the pressure of his mouth on her own.
Caught like a rabbit in a car’s headlights, she stared up into his eyes and saw the warning glinting there. But the warning certainly didn’t match the soft, sensual pressure of his mouth as it moved on hers, Suzy recognised as her heart thumped painfully. He was holding her, kissing her as though…
A huge lump formed in her throat and she had to close her eyes against the sharp pain that speared her heart. As she did so she felt him lifting his mouth from hers.
They were alone in the vast hallway, Sir Peter having discreetly disappeared.
‘This way,’ Luke announced curtly.
He had released her wrist and Suzy noticed that he made no attempt to re-imprison her. In fact as she walked numbly towards the stairs he seemed to deliberately hang back a little from her. The lump in her throat turned to icy panic as she realised how bereft her body felt at its lack of contact with him.
He was a monster. She ought to hate and loathe him. She did hate and loathe him. It was
just her body that was vulnerable to him. That was all.
Stopping mid-step, she turned on the stair and looked at Luke. He was two stairs below her and their eyes were on the same level. As she looked into his her heart gave a funny little kick-beat before flinging itself at the wall of her chest.
‘Do we really have to share a room?’ she asked, anxiety thickening her voice to a husky whisper.
Something in the soft timbre of her voice was touching a nerve he didn’t want to have touched, Luke recognised angrily—arousing a reaction he didn’t want to have aroused. What the devil was the matter with him?
‘Yes, because that will ensure that I can keep a very close eye on you, and it will reinforce the necessary fiction I’ve had to create that we are lovers,’ Luke said to her prosaically, adding scathingly, ‘I should have thought you could have worked that out for yourself. I assure you there’s no other reason for it.’
Mutely Suzy looked at him, then turned away and began to climb the remaining stairs.
What was it about those eyes that made him want to take hold of her?
Infuriated by the effect Suzy was having on him, Luke followed her up the stairs.
‘This way.’ Tensing beneath Luke’s brief touch on her bare arm, Suzy willed herself not to betray how emotionally vulnerable he was making her feel.
He had come to a halt outside a door which he unlocked and pushed open.
Warily Suzy stepped inside, her eyes widening as she took in the magnificence of her surroundings.
What she was standing in wasn’t just a room but a suite. Almost an apartment, she decided, and she gazed around in awe, recognising wryly that her own small flat would have fitted easily into the elegant and spaciously proportioned sitting room in which she was now standing. Through the three tall windows she could see the grounds of the villa, but it wasn’t the view from the windows that caught and held her attention. As she stared through the double doors which opened into what was obviously the bedroom Suzy felt her throat constrict.