by Penny Jordan
No photographs or ornaments broke up the flat matt surfaces of the dark furniture. The wooden floors were free of rugs, the leather sofa unadorned by throws or cushions. The bedrooms reflected the same Spartan decor. The entire flat was as immaculate as though no one actually lived in it—but then she didn’t really live anywhere, did she? Giselle challenged herself as she let herself into the narrow hall, its small space opened up by the large mirrors on the walls, and took all the glossy carrier bags into her bedroom. She didn’t really ‘live’ at all, as other people understood the word.
When she wasn’t working or driving north to visit her great-aunt she spent as much time as she could visiting London’s museums, walking in the city’s parks or just simply sitting in a café watching the world go by. A world of couples and families and happiness from which she was excluded and always would be.
The master bedroom of the flat had the luxury of a walk-in wardrobe. For the first time since its previous occupants had left it would now have something hanging in it that suited its expensive designer space, Giselle reflected as she started to unpack her new clothes. Clothes she knew she would have to force herself to wear.
They were only clothes, she tried to tell herself. She had not chosen them and they were not a gift—rather, they were her own form of personal hair shirt, and that was what she must focus on when she wore them. Not how elegant and smart they made her look, but how painful it was for her to wear them. She must think of them as a penance she was forced to make. A penance forced on her by Saul to punish her.
Giselle’s chin lifted. Well, she would make sure that he never knew from her that he had succeeded in humiliating her—again. She would not allow him to know so much as by a look how she really felt. Instead she would make herself act as though she was ‘grateful’ for his ‘kindness’, and thus deprive him of any satisfaction he might get from knowing he had got under her skin.
Chapter Six
FROM the glass-sided gallery that ran the full width of his office, Saul could look down into the atrium of the reception area and its busy comings and goings. It was one person his gaze was focused on as she crossed the foyer—Giselle, looking far more smartly dressed than she had done the last time he had seen her.
So she had obeyed his instructions. Good. That of course was the only reason he was watching her—to make sure that she had. So why did the sight of two men from his senior management team turning to watch her walk past with discreet but quite definite male appreciation have his hackles rising like those of a possessive guard dog? Because he did not want flirtations between his staff members distracting them from their work, Saul told himself grimly. That was why.
It was just over twelve hours since he had returned from New York—earlier than he had planned. It was just as well that his business meetings in New York had gone well, Saul reflected, because the situation in another area of his life was going far from well.
He’d received a bewildered telephone call from his cousin whilst he was in New York, from which he had deduced that his cousin Aldo had become the victim of a Ponzi scheme and had probably lost the entire twenty million that Saul had given him when he had realised how hard-pressed financially his cousin was.
Being Grand Duke of one’s own country might seem an exalted position, but neither the ducal exchequer nor the country itself was wealthy, and for all his promises of helping out his new son-in-law the Russian oligarch whose daughter Aldo had fallen so deeply in love with and married had so far failed to deliver. Not that Saul wanted to see his cousin financially tied to the Russian. It was bad enough that he was already emotionally tied to his daughter.
Saul grimaced with distaste and dislike. There was some history and hostility between Natasha, his cousin’s wife, and himself—mainly because he had refused Natasha’s advances.
Women! Natasha was a jealous shrew, with no compunction whatsoever about using his cousin for her own ends, and Saul avoided her company as much as he could. Normally he would have tried to sort out the mess in Aldo’s affairs without having to visit Arezzio, but on this occasion that would be impossible—which meant that he would have to fly out there. It was a pity he wasn’t currently involved with anyone. Another woman clinging determinedly to his side and sharing his bed would help to keep Natasha at bay.
Almost as though it possessed the instincts of a homing pigeon, his attention returned to Giselle and stayed there.
Without him encouraging it to do so his gaze slid over the curve of her hips before travelling upwards, over the white shirt that modestly hinted at rather than revealed the curve of her breasts. What had begun as a mental exercise had turned into something far more personal and intimate with such speed that his body was reacting to his visual scrutiny of her before he could stop it. What the hell was going on? She wasn’t his type, her attitude irritated him like that of no other woman he had ever met, rubbing against him like sandpaper, and yet every time he moved to put her in her place something she said or did, something she inadvertently revealed about herself, had him experiencing a pang of sympathy and fellow feeling for her. She was like a thorn under his skin, a pebble in his shoe—an irritant he couldn’t escape. Like his growing need to know more about her.
She wasn’t just the first but the only woman he had ever met who had told him that she wanted to remain single and child-free and meant it. Had she made that decision because, like him, she had been orphaned?
She had stopped still in the middle of the atrium, and was looking round as though she suspected that someone was following her—or watching her? Saul stepped back from the glass. It wasn’t like him to allow anyone to get into his head when she had no right to be there. It was because it was well over six months since he had ended his last relationship that he was feeling the increasingly inescapable pulsing ache every time he saw her. Nor could he forget how it had felt to kiss Giselle, to touch her and feel her responding to him as though she too was driven by the same fierce compulsive need that had driven him.
The last woman he had been seeing had started to make assumptions, and with those assumptions demands, which had led to him making it plain to her that he had no intention of making her or any other woman a permanent fixture in his life.
He had thought his parents were permanent fixtures, but they had left him, and their deaths had taught him that nothing and no one could be relied on to always be there. Was that how Giselle felt? Would she understand as no one else had or could that it was impossible for him to risk that level of pain again and survive? If he told her, would she…?
Cursing beneath his breath, Saul reined in his thoughts. He had never discussed his feelings about losing his parents with anyone, and he never intended to do so. It was safer to keep those thoughts to himself. That way it wasn’t possible to be hurt, or to feel betrayed when the inevitable happened.
He knew Natasha would undoubtedly hurt and betray Aldo, and probably sooner rather than later. His thoughts returned to his cousin. Yes, Natasha would hurt Aldo—but not through him. Taking another woman with him would definitely help to keep Natasha at bay. His glance returned to Giselle and stayed there whilst he assessed and considered the situation, working with the speed and the focused clarity of a man used to making swift decisions.
‘Moira,’ he told his PA five minutes later, going into her office, ‘I’m going to have to fly out to Arezzio. Fix up a flight with the usual private jet people, will you?’
‘When for?’
‘ASAP.’
‘You’ve got that lunch appointment with Lord Richards in half an hour,’ Moira reminded him.
‘Yes. I know,’ Saul agreed, and then told her, ‘I’ll be taking Giselle with me. I’ve decided I might as well kill two birds with one stone and visit Kovoca as well. I’ve got some issues with the plans that can best be settled by a site visit.’
After nodding her head, Moira queried, ‘Will you be staying on the island? If so, I’ll let the caretaker at the villa know.’
‘Yes,�
� Saul confirmed.
It was too late to change his mind now, or to listen to the inner voice that was questioning the reasoning behind what he was doing. Or the reason why she was occupying his thoughts so much. So what if she was? It meant nothing.
Within fifteen minutes Moira was reporting to him that a private executive jet would be waiting on the tarmac at Luton Airport at six o’clock.
Saul looked at his watch.
‘I’d better go. I don’t want to keep Lord Richards waiting. Tell Giselle she can take the rest of the day off and that I’ll pick her up at her home address at three-thirty. That should leave us plenty of time to reach Luton.’
‘How long do you expect the trip to last?’ Moira asked.
‘No more than five days at most—possibly less. I’ll be able to be more definite once I’ve spoken with Aldo and checked properly what’s going on.’
Giselle’s heart was thudding heavily into her ribs. She was still in shock from learning that she was going to have to accompany Saul on a field trip to Kovoca—a trip she couldn’t refuse to go on, since it was quite obviously part and parcel of her work and objecting was out of the question. It would make her look unprofessional and, worse, might lead to Saul guessing that…Guessing what? That she was afraid of being on her own with him because of the way he’d made her feel when he’d kissed her? She couldn’t put herself in that position. And she wasn’t going to.
Instead she was going to focus on being completely professional. She looked down at her bed and the clothes she had laid out on it. Field trips in her experience usually called for outdoor clothes, which meant jeans, and since she knew from the surveyors’ reports that the island’s terrain was rugged in places she’d need a pair of sensible shoes.
Moira had warned her, though, that Saul was combining the trip to the island with a visit to his cousin the Grand Duke of Arezzio on what Moira had described vaguely as ‘family business’. Giselle looked at her watch. Nearly three o’clock. Moira had said that Saul would pick her up at three-thirty, prior to driving them both to Luton for their flight.
She looked down at the bed again, checking to make sure she’d laid out everything she’d need. Jeans, her two new white tee shirts, undies, sensible shoes—and socks for them—and she would travel in her Joseph work suit and one of her white shirts.
She’d taken the precaution of checking online once she’d got home just to see what the weather would be like in both Kovoca and Arezzio at this time of the year, guessing correctly that it would be warmer than London.
Ten past three. She’d better hurry. The only case she had was the small one she used when she went north for a few days to see her great-aunt.
She had almost finished packing when the doorbell rang. The undies she was holding slipped from her grasp as her heartbeat accelerated. What was she so nervous for? Or was it excitement she was feeling and not nervousness?
Of course it wasn’t excitement. Why should it be? The doorbell pealed again, forcing her to hurry to the door.
Saul was standing on her doorstep and a long, dark, polished expensive limousine was parked at the kerb.
‘Ready?’ he asked her.
‘Not quite. Moira said half past three,’ she told him defensively, stepping back into her hall and then wishing she hadn’t when he followed her inside.
‘I won’t be long, though, if you want to wait in your car.’
‘I never trust a woman when she says she won’t be long. Women have a very elastic idea of time, in my experience.’
‘That might have more to do with your taste in women than with hard truth about the female sex in general,’ Giselle couldn’t resist pointing out as she hurried down the corridor, pausing only to turn back towards him and wave her hand in the direction of her living room, inviting him to go in, before assuring him, ‘I will only be five minutes.’
Saul nodded his head.
He wasn’t prepared to admit that he had been curious to see where and how she lived. Picking her up at her home address had merely been effective in terms of the time it would save. Now that he was here, though, he was prepared to admit that it was impossible to learn anything about her life from the impersonal starkness of her decor. Where were the photographs? The cherished bits and pieces of female clutter he was familiar with seeing in the homes of the women he had dated over the years. There was nothing here in this room to tell anyone anything at all about the woman who lived here.
He looked at his watch. Five minutes Giselle had said, and she had one of those minutes left. Opening the door into the hallway, Saul walked towards what he guessed must be her bedroom. The door was open, and he could hear the sound of a suitcase being zipped closed. From the doorway he looked into the room. Like the living room, it was empty of any kind of female frippery, bare and bleak.
‘This is your bedroom?’ he asked, causing Giselle, who hadn’t been aware of his presence behind her until she heard his voice, to spin round immediately to confront him.
‘Yes,’ she confirmed crisply, almost biting off the word, as though reluctant to make even such a small admission to him.
‘It looks more like a nun’s cell than a modern woman’s bedroom,’ was Saul’s equally curtly delivered assessment.
The air hissed out of Giselle’s lungs as though she had just taken the full force of a painful blow, but she wasn’t about to let him go unanswered.
‘That’s probably because you’re contrasting it with the kind of bedrooms favoured by a very different type of woman to me.’
As she spoke both the tone of her voice and her expression made it plain that this ‘different’ type of woman was, in her opinion, an inferior type.
Reflecting on the women who had shared his bed, and the high value they put on themselves and their needs, Saul had to admit that Giselle had guts—even if she was engaging in a fight for which she was poorly equipped and which, more importantly, he had no intention of allowing her to win.
‘Not as different as you might like to think,’ he assured her softly, bending down to retrieve from the floor the pair of silk and lace knickers that must have fallen off the bed whilst she had been packing.
Held in Saul’s hand, the delicate scrap of nude and cream underwear somehow looked even more deliberately sensual than it had when the personal shopper had insisted on adding it to her purchases.
‘A taste for wearing the kind of underwear that a man both likes to see and touch on a woman must be a universal female trait.’
‘It wasn’t my choice,’ Giselle snapped at him as she reached out to take the knickers from him.
But instead of letting go Saul closed his hand round them and enquired, ‘A gift from a lover, then, were they?’
‘No!’ Giselle knew she was losing her self-control to the mix of anger and embarrassment that was storming her, which had been deliberately aroused by this man who was so obviously enjoying baiting her. She wanted to regain that control, but she couldn’t. It was like being caught in a fine net—the more she thrashed about, trying to set herself free, the more entangled she became. Like telling lies.
Lies—how they could trick you with their easy offer of security. Like the offer of money from a loan shark. Just like that loan shark, the payment lies demanded for what they had given came with compound interest, to make an intolerable burden that could never be diminished. But how could she ever tell the truth—the whole truth—without being judged and labelled by its darkness herself? She had taken and would continue to take all the steps that needed to be taken to ensure that history could never repeat itself. That was surely all she needed to do?
Saul, watching her, saw the fight drain out of her like blood draining from an open vein. The abrupt change in her from angry adversary to someone who looked too afraid even to breathe didn’t bring him any satisfaction, though. His instincts told him that it was not he who had secured a victory, but rather something or someone else.
‘You’ll need an evening dress,’ he warned her, almost abse
ntly.
Who or what had caused that almost naked fear he had seen seize her? Why should he want to know or care? He’d always been a man who refused to allow the women he took to bed to bring their emotions into their relationship with him. But he hadn’t taken Giselle to bed, and he wasn’t having a relationship with her. All the more reason not to question her emotional reactions.
‘An evening dress?’
‘Yes. Moira must have told you that we will be visiting Arezzio prior to going on to Kovoca?’
‘She said that you had some family business to attend to,’ Giselle agreed.
‘Family business, yes, but you can hardly be expected to eat alone in your room like some Victorian governess. And since my cousin’s wife enjoys the formality of being Grand Duchess and dressing for dinner you will need an appropriate outfit. Or were you imagining that I wanted you to dress for me?’ Saul taunted her unkindly.
‘Certainly not,’ Giselle flashed back.
‘Good. I wouldn’t want you getting the wrong idea just because—’
Gisele stopped him. ‘You’ve already told me that, and I haven’t.’ She didn’t want him mentioning that kiss—not here in her bedroom, where since it had happened there had hardly been a night when she hadn’t been woken from her sleep by her memories of it and how he had made her feel.
She was glad of the excuse his assertion that she would need to pack an evening dress gave her to put some distance between them. The cool privacy of her walk-in wardrobe gave her a badly needed opportunity to press her hands to her hot face and try to still her racing heartbeat. Racing because she was so furious, she assured herself, and not for any other reason—not for one minute because her bedroom was now filled with the male smell of the man who had disturbed her dreams for the last two weeks and whose touch was already imprinted on her body and her senses. She reached blindly for the two evening dresses the personal shopper had selected for her, thankful for her sensible advice that the silky jersey fabric wouldn’t crush and would be easy to pack.