by Lynne Graham
‘That’s enough,’ she framed unevenly, her breath rasping in her tight throat as an ache of what she knew could only be dissatisfaction spread at the heart of her. ‘Why the heck did you do that?’
‘If we intend to fool people into crediting that we are a genuine couple, we have to be able to behave like a couple...at least, occasionally,’ Cesare delivered with an audibly ragged hitch in his breathing.
‘I don’t like being touched,’ Lizzie told him in a small flat voice.
You could’ve fooled me, Cesare thought in disbelief, still tasting the sweetness of her soft, lush lips and struggling to suppress the rush of hungry excitement that had lit him up like a burning torch.
She was out of bounds, he reminded himself stubbornly. He was not planning to bed her. She didn’t want it and he didn’t want it either. Regrettably his body was out of step with his brain, though, and somehow she exuded all the allure of a juicy hamburger to a very reluctant vegetarian. But, Cesare reminded himself stubbornly, he could get sex anywhere. He had Celine for uncommitted sexual satisfaction. He wasn’t about to risk screwing up his marital arrangement with Lizzie by flirting with that kind of intimacy. It would blur the boundaries and she might start behaving like a real wife and even start thinking that she could attach strings to him.
‘So, it was just a sort of test?’ Lizzie gathered in relief, assuming that it was an approach that was unlikely to be repeated very often.
‘You won the gold medal for excellence, bella mia,’ Cesare quipped, striving to will his libido back down to a manageable level but that was a challenge while all he could think about, all he could see in his head, was Lizzie spread across a bed, stark naked and not only willing but also wild. The imagery didn’t help, nor did it help that he knew he, who prided himself on his detachment in business situations, was indulging in a deeply improbable but very male fantasy.
Two hours later, Lizzie was seated in a limousine with Cesare in silence. Her case was stowed, Archie was asleep on her knee and Cesare was working on his laptop. She was still thinking about that kiss, wondering what magic spark Cesare had that Andrew had so conspicuously lacked. Was it truly just a case of physical chemistry?
Frustration filled Lizzie to overflowing. There had been very few men in her life, very few kisses and she was still a virgin. Andrew had repulsed her, yet he was a young, attractive man and she had loved him. Naturally, she had assumed that she simply wasn’t a very sexual woman. But within seconds of Cesare kissing her, fireworks had gone off inside her in a rush of excitement unlike anything she had ever felt. And now, for the very first time in her life, she was studying a powerful masculine thigh and the distinctive bulge at the crotch and wondering what a man looked like naked. Colour washed in a veil to her hairline and she studied Archie instead, fondling a shaggy ear as the dog slept.
It was sexual curiosity, that was all. Silly, immature, she labelled with growing embarrassment, but nothing to really worry about. After all, nothing was going to happen with Cesare. And as for that moment of panic in his arms? One kiss and she imagined she was about to tumble into an adolescent infatuation as easily as her mother had once done? No, she was much too sensible for that, she told herself soothingly. Cesare was gorgeous and well-off and arrogant and he probably slept around as such men reputedly did. He was not her type at all...
Absolutely not his type, Cesare was reflecting with satisfaction. One dynamite kiss didn’t alter the fact that she dressed like a bag lady, had poor manners and barely a feminine bone in her body. Or that she treated him rather like a lost umbrella someone had left behind on a train seat...
CHAPTER FOUR
THE MAKEOVER, ALONG WITH the shopping and the ultra-grooming at a very fancy beauty salon, shook Lizzie to her very depths.
She was transformed and she knew it and was surprised by how very much better it made her feel to see herself polished to glossiness, with that awful brown dye gone from the last few inches of her pale silvery hair. Every time she had seen that dye in the mirror it had reminded her of Andrew and the bad times, so it was a relief to be finally rid of it and stop wondering if he ironically had tried to change her into Esther, who had mud-brown hair of no great distinction. She regarded her long, glittery nails with positive girlish delight because she had never known such beauty tweaking could transform her work-roughened hands. The calluses were gone as well, her entire skin surface buffed and moisturised to perfection. There was no doubt about it: it made her feel like a new woman, a woman of greater assurance than she had been when she first slunk through the doors of the salon, feeling like a crime against femininity in her untouched, unpolished state.
How would Cesare view her now?
Her cheeks flushed at the thought. Why should that matter to her? What was his opinion worth? Presumably without the polishing he wouldn’t have wanted to be seen out with her in public and that was a lowering reflection, she acknowledged ruefully. She had been transformed and she appreciated it, best not to think too deeply beyond that, she decided wryly. And now all dressed up to the nines she felt more armoured to cope with the hen party ahead even if it was without the support of her sister.
Sadly, Chrissie had an exam the next day and there was absolutely no way she could join Lizzie and Cesare’s sisters. Lizzie was disappointed. She liked Cesare’s friendly siblings very much but they were still strangers and somewhat more uncomfortably, strangers she had to keep a front up with. They thought it was a normal wedding with a bride and groom in love and happy. Unfortunately, living up to that false expectation was a strain even on a shopping and beauty trip.
* * *
‘You mean, you really aren’t pregnant?’ Sofia, Cesare’s youngest half-sister, gasped as she watched Lizzie down a vodka cocktail with every sign of enjoyment. ‘Cesare told us you weren’t but we didn’t believe him.’
‘This conversation is not happening,’ Paola groaned in apology, the eldest of the trio of sisters, a teacher and married woman and rather more circumspect than her single, fun-loving sisters in what she chose to say. ‘I’m so sorry, Lizzie.’
Lizzie smiled, masking her loneliness and chagrin. ‘It’s all right. I’m not offended. I know you’re surprised that your brother’s getting married in such a hurry—’
‘When we never thought he’d get married at all,’ his third half-sister Maurizia slotted in frankly.
‘Obviously he’s nuts about you!’ Sofia giggled. ‘That’s the only explanation that makes sense. When I sent him that photo of you all dressed up to go out tonight, he wasted no time telling me that he wanted you to stay at home and that he saw no reason for you to have a hen night.’
Of course Cesare didn’t see any reason, Lizzie reflected ruefully, glugging her drink because she didn’t know what to say to his very accepting and loveable sisters or indeed to his pleasant stepmother, Ottavia, none of whom had a clue that the wedding wasn’t the real thing. She had guessed, however, that his father, Goffredo, was simply playing along with their pretence but she found that same pretence stressful and knew it was why she was drinking so much and living on her nerves. Luckily Cesare had not been required to put on much of an act, she conceded resentfully, as he had taken refuge in his city apartment, after marooning her in his unbelievably luxurious town house with his family, before flying off to New York on urgent business.
Apparently it was the norm for Cesare to move out of his flashy and huge town house into his exclusive city apartment when his family arrived for a visit. Lizzie had found that strange but his family did not, joking that Cesare had always liked his own space and avoided anything that might take his main focus off business, which evidently involved socialising with his family as well. Lizzie thought that was sad but had kept her opinion tactfully to herself.
He was so rich: in spite of the limo and the driver and the helicopter, she had had no idea how rich her future fake husband was. L
izzie was still in shock from travelling in a private jet and walking into a house the size of a palace with over ten en-suite bedrooms and innumerable staff. She had then done what she should have done a week earlier and had checked him out on the Internet, learning that he was the head of a business mega-empire and more in the billionaire than the multimillionaire category.
Indeed the house, followed by the experience of being literally engulfed by his gregarious family, had only been the first of the culture shocks rattling Lizzie’s security on its axis. Two solid days of clothes shopping followed by a physical head-to-toe makeover had left its mark. For that reason it was hardly surprising that she should be at last enjoying the chance to relax and have a few drinks in good company for the first time in more years than she cared to count.
* * *
Seated on his jet, furiously checking his watch to calculate the landing time, Cesare enlarged the photograph on his tablet and scrutinised it with lingering disbelief.
Don’t you dare take Lizzie out dressed like that to a club! he had texted his half-sister Maurizia, with a confusing mix of anger, frustration and concern assailing him in a dark flood of reactions that made him uncomfortable to the extreme.
He still couldn’t take his eyes off the photograph: Lizzie smiling as he had never seen her and sheathed in an emerald-green, ‘barely there’, strappy short dress with perilous high heels on her shapely legs. It was an amazing transformation. A magic wand had been waved over the bag lady. She looked fantastic and would outshine every woman around her now that her natural beauty had been polished up and brought to the fore. Her glorious mane of hair had been restored as he’d instructed, not cut. It gleamed in a silken tumble of silver strands round her delicately pointed face, green eyes huge, pouty mouth lush and pink. Cesare swore under his breath, outraged by his sisters’ interference and the hen-party nonsense. Lizzie was no more fit to be let loose in a London nightclub than a toddler and now he would have to go and retrieve her!
* * *
‘You’re not supposed to be here... This is her night!’ one of his sisters carolled accusingly as soon as he arrived at the women’s table.
‘Where is she?’ Cesare ground out, unamused, while he scanned the dance floor.
Looking daggers at her big brother, Sofia shifted a reluctant hand to show him. ‘Don’t spoil her night. She’s having a whale of a time!’
Cesare centred his incredulous dark gaze on the sight of his bride-to-be, a pink hen-night sash diagonally dissecting her slender, shapely body as she danced, arms raised, silvery hair flying, feet moving in time to the fast beat. What infuriated him was the sight of the two men trying to attract her attention because she appeared to be dancing in a world of her own. Suddenly Lizzie teetered to a stop, clearly dizzy as she swayed on her very high heels. With a suppressed snarl of annoyance, Cesare, ignoring his siblings’ wide-eyed disbelief at his behaviour, stalked across the floor to hastily settle steadying hands on Lizzie’s slim shoulders.
‘Cesare...’ Lizzie proclaimed with a wide, sunny smile because it only took one lingering glance to remind her how tall, dark and sleekly gorgeous he was. He towered over her, lean bronzed face shadowed and hollowed by the flickering lights that enhanced his spectacular bone structure, stunning dark golden eyes intent on her. She was really, really pleased to see him, a familiar reassuring image in a new world that was unnervingly different and unsettling. In fact for a split second she almost succumbed to a deeply embarrassing urge to hug him. Then, luckily remembering that hugging wasn’t part of their deal, she restrained herself.
‘You’re drunk,’ his perfectly shaped mouth framed, destroying the effect of his reassuring presence.
‘Of course I’m not drunk!’ Lizzie slurred, throwing up her hands in emphasis only to brace them on his broad chest while she wondered why her legs wanted to splay like a newborn calf’s trying to walk for the first time.
‘You are,’ Cesare repeated flatly.
‘I’m not,’ Lizzie insisted, holding onto his forearms to stay upright, her shoe soles still displaying a worrying urge to slide across the floor of their own volition.
‘I’m taking you home,’ Cesare mouthed as the deafening music crashed all around them.
‘I’m not ready to go home yet!’ she shouted at him.
Lizzie couldn’t work out what Cesare said in answer to that declaration. His deep-set eyes glittered like banked-down fires in his lean, strong face and he had bent down and lifted her up into his arms before she could even begin to guess his intention.
‘Think we’re going home,’ Lizzie informed his sisters forlornly from the vantage point of his arms as he paused by their table.
‘You didn’t look after her!’ Cesare growled at one of his sisters, in answer to whatever comment had been made.
‘What am I? A dog or a child?’ Lizzie demanded, staring up at him, noticing that he needed a shave because a heavy five o’clock shadow outlined his lower jawline, making it seem even harder and more aggressive than usual. It framed his wide, sensual mouth though, drawing attention to the perfectly sculpted line of his lips. He kissed like a dream, she recalled abstractedly, wondering when he’d do it again.
‘Think we should kiss so that your sisters believe we’re a real couple?’ Lizzie asked him winningly.
‘If we were real, I’d strangle you, cara,’ Cesare countered without hesitation. ‘I leave you alone for three days and I come back and you’re going crazy on the dance floor and getting blind drunk.’
‘Not drunk,’ Lizzie proclaimed stubbornly.
Cesare rolled his eyes and with scant ceremony stuffed her in the back of the waiting limousine. ‘Lie down before you fall over.’
‘You’re so smug,’ Lizzie condemned and closed her eyes because the interior of the limousine was telescoping around her in the most peculiar way.
Cesare consoled himself with the hope that such behaviour was not a warning sign of things to come. How could he blame her for wanting some fun? He had a very good idea of what life must have been like for her on that farm with her misery of a father, always there at her elbow, keen to remind her of every mistake and failure. For the very first time in his life he realised just how lucky he had been with Goffredo, who saw everything through rose-tinted, forgiving spectacles. In comparison, Brian Whitaker’s view of life was seriously depressing.
Lizzie opened her eyes. ‘Do you want to kiss me?’ she enquired.
Cesare skimmed his disconcerted gaze to her animated features, taking in the playful grin she wore. ‘Do you want me to kiss you?’
Lizzie flushed and shifted on the seat. ‘You’re not supposed to ask that.’
‘You expect me to act like a caveman?’
Lizzie thought about that. She had rather enjoyed being carried out of the club. Was that weird? She scolded herself for that enjoyment while mustering up a dim memory of her mother giggling and tossing her hair, eyes sparkling at the latest man in her life. Inwardly she cringed a little from the comparison she saw.
‘Only when you’re sober and you know what you’re doing,’ Cesare extended infuriatingly.
‘You believe I could only want to kiss you when I’m drunk?’
Cesare suppressed a groan and studied her. If truth be told, it would take very little encouragement for him to flatten her along the back seat and take inexcusable advantage of her delightfully feminine body. ‘We have a business arrangement,’ he reminded her doggedly, cursing the hot swell of the erection disturbing his poise because just the thought of doing anything to her turned him on hard and fast.
Her honey-brown lashes flickered. ‘I’m open to negotiation.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Cesare informed her grimly, lean bronzed face set in forbidding lines, mobile mouth compressed. ‘There will be absolutely no negotiation on that score tonight.’
Was it so w
rong, Lizzie asked herself, that she should want to experience just once what other women commonly experienced? She had always wanted to be normal, to feel normal. Was that wrong? Indecent? Her cheeks burned. Naturally she had picked him. That kiss... Somehow he had become her forbidden object of desire. How had that happened? Treacherous heat curling in her pelvis, Lizzie breathed in slow and deep.
Cesare watched her feathery lashes dip and the sound of her breathing slow as she slid into a doze. Well, he wouldn’t be letting her loose around alcohol again. Sex, drink and business arrangements did not make for a rational or successful combination. And he was a very rational guy, wasn’t he? Here he was being a saint and protecting her from doing something she would regret. Or would she? he wondered with inbred cynicism. She was a gold-digger, after all, and sure to be on a high after the orgy of spending that had centred on her in recent days.
He was acting against his own nature, he acknowledged grudgingly. In reality, he wanted to fall on her like a sex-starved sailor on shore leave and keep her awake all night. Instead he was likely to spend half the night in a cold shower. He should have made more of an effort to see Celine. Clearly, it was the lack of regular sex that was playing merry hell with his hormones.
Lizzie awakened as Cesare half walked, half carried her into the town house only to stop dead as Goffredo and his stepmother, Ottavia, appeared in the doorway of the drawing room.
‘Your daughters are still partying,’ Cesare announced. ‘Lizzie was falling asleep, so I brought her home early.’
‘Cesare is a party pooper,’ Lizzie framed with difficulty.
Goffredo grinned and Ottavia chuckled and the older couple vanished back into the drawing room.
At the foot of the stairs, Cesare abandoned the pretence that Lizzie could walk unaided and swept her up into his arms.
‘I like it when you do this,’ Lizzie told him. ‘It’s so...so...masculine.’
‘We are lucky you don’t weigh more,’ Cesare quipped, barely out of breath as they reached the top of the stairs.