A Sicilian Seduction

by Michelle Reid

  ‘I still don’t think this is right without Edward’s agreement,’ Natalia informed him.

  ‘Your protest has been noted,’ he coolly acknowledged, and glanced at his watch before coming to his feet. ‘Time to move,’ he announced. ‘We have a lot to get through before we stop for lunch. Then we should, with a bit of luck, have some new premises to look over this afternoon.’

  ‘We?’ Natalia prompted. ‘What has your choice in new premises got to do with me?’

  ‘Since you will be relocating right along with me—’ he shrugged ‘—I automatically assumed you would like to look your new workplace over.’

  But Natalia didn’t want to relocate with him! In fact the very suggestion filled her with utter dismay! ‘But my job is here!’ she protested. ‘I am needed here! Edward—’

  ‘Your job, Miss Deyton,’ he cut in coldly, ‘is wherever or whatever I decide it is. And why do I get the impression that you suspect my every move is designed to actually harm this company?’ he added grimly.

  When he put it like that she began to feel rather stupid, because he was right and she did suspect him of—something, though she had to confess she didn’t know what that something was.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she sighed, making a climb-down she knew she really had no choice about. ‘But you’ve been here for less than twenty-four hours and already you’re planning to turn the place upside down!’

  ‘Upside down is better than the way it stands at present,’ he returned with contempt, then released a sigh of his own because her climb-down had made him realise that his confrontational stance was not helping his cause. ‘Listen,’ he said, aiming for a more conciliatory tone. ‘Allowing me to turn this business around while Edward is safely out of the way where he can’t worry is doing him a favour, believe me. And to make it work in the short time allowed, I need you to work with me, not against me. Is that too much to ask—for Edward’s sake—?’

  Her stubborn stance was faltering. He could see it happening in the frown that clouded her face. ‘Okay,’ she said heavily. ‘What is it you need me to do?’

  With a surrender like that, he didn’t hesitate in consolidating it. ‘I need someone I can trust working alongside me, and, since Edward clearly trusts you, then you have to be my obvious choice,’ he explained, watching his carefully chosen words work their expected magic.

  She was hooked. He had her…

  ‘So,’ he continued, ‘while my people come in here and turn this place around, you and I will move out so they can do their job without feeling me breathing down their necks. What I need from you is your secretarial skills and your input on any decision-making I may be required to do regarding Knight’s.’

  ‘What about my re-education?’ Natalia questioned dryly, trying to make light of what had turned out to be yet another heavy interview. But the moment she saw that gleam enter his eyes she knew she’d said the wrong thing.

  ‘You think I am not up to the task?’ he probed silkily.

  And it was back, just like that. From clever negotiator to lazy seducer in one smooth movement. His eyes feathered over her and her skin began to flutter. He paused at certain relevant locations and caused absolute mayhem.

  Stop it! she wanted to snap. But ‘stop it!’ would only encourage him into being more provocative. So she clamped her lips shut, gritted her teeth tightly together behind them and said absolutely nothing.

  Though what really made her teeth grit together was the warm, soft laugh he emitted as he walked around the desk. ‘Coming?’ he queried innocently and strode towards the door with that smile still working.

  She followed because she really had no option. But she couldn’t say that she was pleased with what had transpired in here today. As she entered her own office the telephone began to ring. Diverting towards her desk, she picked up the receiver. Ten seconds later she was gritting her teeth yet again, and holding the receiver out to him.

  ‘The lady who rang you earlier, sir,’ she announced with frosty formality.

  The mocking smile on his face warmed into pure pleasure. He took the phone and Natalia only just escaped their fingers brushing by a fine hair’s breadth. ‘Ah, buon giorno, mia bella amore…’

  The rest she shut her ears to and instead walked out of the room and into the executive washroom, where she spent a few seething moments bringing her composure back into line. By the time she entered her office again, he was busy scrawling something on her note-pad, and the telephone was back on its rest.

  Arrangements for their next date? she wondered acidly, watching him tear off the piece of paper, fold it and slide it into his jacket pocket.

  ‘Right, that tour,’ he said, and began walking straight towards her.

  She held her ground out of sheer cussedness. It was a stupid stand to make because he simply slid a hand around her waist and turned her to walk with him. Her breathing failed, her body started singing, and her mind went blank in response.

  That hand—that hand…was the only chant playing over and over in an empty chasm of dark self-awareness.

  ‘Where do we begin?’ he enquired so innocently she could have screamed because he knew exactly what the feel of his hand on her waist was doing to her!

  ‘The accounts department seems a good place.’ She was rather pleased by how smoothly her voice came out.

  ‘Before we go in—’ he said, swinging her deftly up against the wall, then coming to stand directly over her. She was suddenly faced full on with his wide chest, and it took all her control not to start breathing faster.

  ‘This is a delicate situation,’ he murmured, seeming to have no idea how appropriate she was finding the comment. ‘It is essential that you and I present a united front when we begin breaking the news to the staff here about what is about to happen. We must be relaxed, congenial and seem as one in our confidence that what we are proposing will be for their good as well as the company. This way there is a chance that they will be a help to my staff when they arrive and not a hindrance, you understand me?’

  Natalia nodded, and wished he would move back a bit.

  ‘We will not give the impression that I am here to scrutinise or criticise,’ he continued. ‘But all the same we will be doing both. You can do this, do you think?’

  ‘Play the cheerful spy?’ she said, making the fatal mistake of lifting her chin to send him a rueful smile. A smile that died on her lips when she caught his expression. She looked away again quickly, but not quickly enough to save herself from the disturbing glow she had seen burning in his eyes. ‘I can’t say it’s my favourite role,’ she added distractedly.

  ‘But for their sakes, you will do it anyway?’

  Their sakes. ‘Yes,’ she said, accepting that she was going to have to trust him to do what he had said he was going to do here, while taking into consideration the feelings of the people he would be dealing with.

  ‘Good.’ He moved back. Her relief to have no part of him touching her was so profound that she almost wilted into the carpet.

  For the next couple of hours they paced from department to department. She introduced him to everyone individually, and, in typical Italian style, he charmed them all from the junior receptionist upwards. And in the charming gleaned so much information out of each and every one of them that Natalia was rather shell-shocked, by the end of it, as to how many people working there had been willing if not desperate for the changes Giancarlo was proposing.

  ‘Right, let’s get out of here,’ he said eventually, and began striding across the reception area towards the doors, without waiting to see if she was following.

  He was angry, she acknowledged, and couldn’t really blame him for feeling that way. The long list of personal grievances, which had been aired here this morning, was enough to incense anyone with a reasonable grasp of good business practice. And whatever else she doubted about Giancarlo Cardinale, she did not doubt his business integrity.

  Poor Edward, she thought sadly as she stepped outside to find Giancarlo ha
d already hailed a cab and was opening the door ready for her to precede him into it.

  Edward had no idea how low morale was amongst his staff and would have been deeply hurt if he’d been here today to discover what Giancarlo had so slickly uncovered.

  So maybe it was right that Edward wasn’t going to be here to see the transformation of his precious company, she concluded.

  He waited until they were driving towards Kensington before making any comment. ‘Things are even worse than I envisaged,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she agreed. There was nothing to be gained from pretending otherwise.

  ‘How long have you known?’

  Her shrug conveyed her reluctance to answer. ‘Don’t ask me to criticise Edward because I will not,’ she told him and turned her head to stare bleakly out of the cab’s side window.

  ‘You admire the fact that he has run his own company into the ground?’ The snap in his tone was laced with sarcasm.

  Natalia kept her face turned away and said nothing in answer. For what could she say in Edward’s defence that would not be betraying his darkest secrets? She couldn’t. It was as simple as that. Edward’s pride was just too important to her.

  Strange, she mused, how one person could become the axis your life revolved around in such a short length of time. This time six months ago she hadn’t even known of Edward’s existence. This time six months ago she had been alone and sad, and seeing nothing bright in her future to make her feel any better, then—wham—everything had changed with one single glance across a café table.

  It could still make her heart leap just to think of him, think of his loving face and his loving eyes, and that silly expression that would come over both, which would say without words—I still can’t believe that you belong to me.

  But she did, and nothing—nothing in this big world was ever going to take that away from her.

  So her silence remained a wall she maintained between them as they travelled. Whatever Giancarlo was thinking about that silence did not really affect her. The man professed to care about Edward. And she did trust him to do what was best for his brother-in-law’s company. But she would never trust him with Edward’s heart, for it would take another man who had been hurt as deeply as Edward to understand its secrets.

  The restaurant was a small, smart, popular place serving Italian cuisine. And Giancarlo was known there. The proprietor himself escorted them to their reserved table conversing with Giancarlo in their native language as they went. But she could tell the man beside her was in no mood to share polite conversation with anyone right now.

  The proprietor helped her into her seat. Giancarlo sat down opposite. Menus were produced. A bottle of sparkling water appeared from seemingly nowhere. And the telling fact that Giancarlo must have ordered it, since no other table had the same thing, made her aware that, whatever else was going on inside his head, he could still call up the short, throw-away conversation about her drinking preferences, which they’d had yesterday.

  At last the proprietor took his effusive leave. Giancarlo heaved out a sigh that made her smile in wry understanding of its necessity. He saw the smile—and matched it with one of his own. ‘He is Sicilian; I supposed you guessed it. We come from the same village.’

  Only you lived on top of the hill while he lived at the bottom, she presumed simply because of the proprietor’s constant if metaphorical cap-doffing.

  ‘Don’t expect to use that,’ he warned, arching a mocking brow at the menu she was holding. ‘For I think we are about to be treated to the full repertoire of Sicilian cuisine.’

  ‘Good or bad?’ she asked, made curious by his rueful expression.

  ‘Edward hates it,’ he replied and instantly had her withdrawing back behind her protective wall…

  Giancarlo saw it happen, sat back in his seat with a heavy sigh and lifted a long-fingered hand up to his tie knot as if he was going to loosen it with an impatient yank, then changed his mind and dropped the hand to his lap instead. ‘Your loyalty to him becomes you, Miss Deyton. But have you tried to consider that loyalty in this case may well be misplaced?’

  ‘You clearly don’t like him very much. I do, which means we have a conflict of opinion that does not encourage an exchange in confidences.’

  ‘You are mistaken,’ he corrected. ‘I am very fond of Edward. I just dislike the fact that he seems hell-bent on destroying everything he used to hold so dear.’

  ‘Grief does that to some people,’ she replied, having no idea that, in making that comment, Giancarlo was talking about more than just Edward’s crumbling business.

  ‘You said that with the conviction of experience,’ he remarked, following the shadow which crossed her face.

  ‘My mother died fourteen months ago,’ she confessed, keeping her lashes lowered so he wouldn’t see the pain in her eyes. ‘Unexpectedly, like Marco,’ she added. ‘And even you know the kind of effect that shock and grief can have on you.’

  ‘I didn’t use it as an excuse to neglect my responsibilities,’ he grimly pointed out.

  Well, I did, and Edward did—as did Giancarlo’s own sister, Alegra—though she was sure he didn’t want to hear that, Natalia mused grimly, and reached for the bottle of water, mainly for something to do to hide the sudden heaviness of heart she was feeling.

  ‘And your father—?’ he asked, wondering what he had to say about his twenty-five-year-old daughter’s affair with a man almost twice her age.

  To Giancarlo’s surprise her skin went as pale as the cloth covering the table.

  ‘My mother never married.’

  He beat her to the water bottle by a mere hair’s breadth brush of their fingers. She snatched her hand away to place it on her lap where her nails curled into a skin-piercing fist while she concentrated on the sparkling water he was pouring into two wineglasses in the taut hope that he wouldn’t ask any more probing questions.

  He didn’t. Being as astute as any red-blooded man deeply interested in the woman he meant to thoroughly seduce in the very near future, he realised her reply was her polite way of saying that she never knew her father.

  So, with her mother gone, had she begun casting her eyes around looking for someone to fill the hole that had opened up in her life, and found the perfect substitute in a never-known father-figure like Edward?

  It all seemed very plausible suddenly—forgivable even—though he had no intention whatsoever of going down that road simply because it would lead him away from what he was now wanting for too many reasons to count.

  Not quite liking what that admission was saying to him, he picked up the wineglass and took a deep swallow—forgetting what was actually in the glass!

  His expression was so comically disgusted that Natalia forgot to stay aloof and found herself laughing. ‘You didn’t have to have water just because I do,’ she gently pointed out.

  ‘I was trying to impress you with my temperance!’ he threw back accusingly. ‘And all you do is laugh!’

  ‘I don’t need impressing,’ she told him with the laughter still warming her eyes.

  His own grew still. ‘Oh, yes, you do,’ he insisted, and watched her jump straight back behind her wall as the temperature between them came back to a steady simmer.

  I’ll have you, Natalia Deyton, he vowed. By fair means or foul, I will have you…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE meal was a rather quiet affair after that, mainly because Natalia had put herself on guard against Giancarlo Cardinale’s irresistible charisma. But the food was surprisingly light and pleasant, which made her realise that he’d had more control over his Sicilian friend than he’d led her to believe.

  He also controlled the small bouts of conversation they slid into, with what she read as his deliberate intention to keep the atmosphere light between them while they ate. So he talked, she listened, offered up a reply when it was absolutely necessary and in general tried very hard not to let herself become more fascinated with him than she was already.

  But
it was difficult when the man himself was a fascination even without his smooth, quiet, deeply sensual voice washing over her like a hypnotist’s drone aimed to keep her trance-like.

  Her eyes rarely left him so they missed very little: the way he lounged in his seat, the way he ate sparingly, the way he sipped at the half-bottle of crisp dry white wine he had ordered to suit his palate rather than the water…

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to try some?’ he offered, tipping the bottle of wine towards her invitingly.

  Natalia shook her head. They had reached the point in the meal where she was sitting over her empty plate with her elbows resting on the table and her glass suspended close to her mouth between her fingers. Her eyes had darkened, though she wasn’t aware of it, and there was a softer look about her which to him made her seem not of this world again.

  Young, lovely, most definitely sexy, yet she gave off a conflicting aura of innocence. That aura bothered him, because it only helped to prove how good she was at projecting herself as something she wasn’t.

  Like most seasoned liars, he grimly concluded.

  ‘A sip of white wine isn’t going to compromise your ability to function efficiently, you know,’ he heard himself snap in irritation.

  Irritation at whom? he then asked himself. Her for being what she was or himself for wanting what she was?

  ‘I’ll fall asleep,’ she said, offering a light shrug of her narrow shoulders when he flicked a sceptical glance at her. ‘It happens,’ she insisted. ‘So I’ve learned to be careful.’

  ‘You were drinking champagne at lunch yesterday,’ he reminded her. ‘And I don’t recall you falling asleep afterwards.’ In fact she was too feisty if anything, he added silently.

  ‘Sipping sparingly at it,’ she corrected. ‘As I suspect everyone else was doing.’

  ‘Apart from the rather impassioned young man you were with, who seemed to be downing it rather—feverishly.’