The Secret His Mistress Carried

Gio’s nostrils flared at that declaration, exasperation roughening the edges of an anger he knew he had no right to express. If she had another man, she would naturally get rid of him because he refused to credit that any other man could set her on fire the way he did. But nothing could assuage his bone-deep ferocious reaction to being forced to imagine Billie in bed with someone else. Billie had always been his alone, indisputably his.

As they crossed the foyer of the opulent hotel a familiar voice hailed Billie and she stopped dead and flipped round with a smile as a tall blond man in expensive country casuals moved towards her eagerly to greet her.

‘Simon, how are you?’ she said warmly.

‘I’ve got an address for you.’ Simon dug into his wallet to produce a piece of paper. ‘Got a pen?’

Billie realised her bag had been left behind at the shop and looked expectantly at Gio. ‘Pen?’ she pressed.

Totally unaccustomed to being ignored while others went about their business around him, Gio withdrew a gold pen from his pocket with pronounced reluctance, his beautiful obstinate mouth sardonic.

Simon borrowed the pen and wrote the address on the back of a business card. ‘There’s a heap of stuff there you’ll like and it won’t cost you much either. The seller just wants the house cleared.’

Impervious to the reality that Gio was standing by her side like a towering and forbidding pillar of black ice, Billie beamed at the taller man. ‘Thanks, Simon. I really appreciate this.’

Simon studied her with the same appreciation Gio had often seen on male faces around Billie and his perfect white teeth gritted. ‘Maybe you’ll let me treat you to lunch here some day soon?’

Gio shot an arm like a statement round Billie’s slender spine. ‘Regrettably she’s already taken.’

Ignoring that intercession, Billie reddened but kept on valiantly smiling. ‘I’d like that, Simon. Call me,’ she suggested while knowing that she was only encouraging the other man to make a point for Gio’s benefit and feeling guilty about that because Gio was making her behave badly as well.

‘What was that all about?’ Gio demanded grittily as he urged her into the lift.

‘Simon’s an antique dealer. He tips me off about house clearances. I know a lot of dealers. That’s how I built up my business,’ Billie advanced with pride.

‘You can open a shop in London. I’ll pay for it,’ Gio told her grimly.

Unimpressed, Billie glanced wryly at him. ‘Well, in a roundabout way you paid for this one and my house, so I don’t think it would be right for you to pay anything more.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I sold a piece of jewellery for cash. It was something you gave me.’

Gio frowned. ‘You left everything I ever gave you behind.’

‘No, I took one piece. Your very first gift,’ Billie extended. ‘I had no idea how much it was worth. That was a surprise, I can tell you.’

‘Was it?’ Gio couldn’t even remember his first gift to her and he would have been prepared to swear, having checked the jewellery she left behind, that she had taken nothing with her when she walked out.

‘Yes, you’re so extravagant it’s a wonder you’re not broke. You hardly knew me and yet you spent an absolute fortune on that diamond pendant,’ Billie told him critically. ‘It paid for my house and setting up the shop. I couldn’t believe how valuable it was!’

Gio thrust open the door of his suite. And just like that, the memory of the gift returned to him. He had bought the pendant after their first night together and he was furious that she had just sold it as if it meant nothing to her. ‘I don’t believe that there’s another man in your life.’

‘I’m not coming back to you,’ Billie told him in the most ludicrously apologetic tone. ‘Why would I want a shop in London? Why would I want to move? I’m happy here. And believe it or not there are men out there who would take me out with them into a public restaurant instead of hiding me inside their suite!’

Billie had served a direct hit. Gio paled beneath his Mediterranean tan. ‘We’re in my suite only because we need a private setting in which to talk.’

Billie gave him a wry smile. ‘Maybe that’s true this one time, Gio, but when it went on for almost two years, even I got the message. You might as well have been married from the moment I met you. I was like a guilty, dirty secret in your life.’

‘That is not true.’

‘No point arguing about the past now,’ Billie parried with determination. ‘It’s not worth it.’

‘Of course it is...I want you back.’ A spasm of open exasperation crossed Gio’s lean dark face when a knock sounded on the door, announcing the arrival of two waiters pushing a rattling trolley: lunch had arrived.

Billie folded her arms, thinking of her grandpa’s favourite winning racehorse, Canaletto, and the reality that just four years ago she had never heard of the artist called Canaletto before. Recalling that blunder still made Billie cringe and die inside herself, for the moment she had entered the conversation she had known her mistake but it had been far too late to cover it up. Unhappily for her, the one and only time Gio had taken her out to mix with his friends she had made an outsize fool of herself...and him.

Although he had reacted with neither anger nor criticism, he had dismissed her attempts to talk about the incident and explain that she had grown up more at home in betting shops than museums. But she had known that she had seriously embarrassed him in public in a way that would not be forgotten and, even worse, in a manner that had literally signposted the reality that she and Gio came from worlds and educational backgrounds that were light years apart.

That was why she had never complained about being excluded from his social life and why she had happily settled for dinners out alone in discreet locations where he was unlikely to meet anyone he knew. She had guessed that he was worried she would let him down again and without his awareness she had swiftly set about a self-improvement course in the hope that eventually he would notice and give her another chance. Sadness filled Billie when she recalled that naivety born in the early months of their relationship before she had reached the daunting moment of discovery and slow, painful acceptance that she was not Gio’s girlfriend but instead his mistress, there to dispense sexual entertainment and not much else and never ever to be taken seriously.

‘You’re so quiet. I’m not accustomed to you being quiet with me,’ Gio confessed in growing frustration, closing his hands over her slender, taut shoulders, massaging the tense muscles there as the door flipped shut behind the waiters. ‘Talk to me, Billie. Tell me what you want.’

Feeling the warm tingling of his touch snaking down her rigid spine and the pinching tautness of her nipples while resisting a powerfully seductive urge to lean back into the strong, sheltering heat of Gio, Billie pulled away and quickly sank down into one of the chairs by the beautifully set table. Talk to me. That was an insanely perplexing invitation to receive from a male like Gio, who didn’t like serious conversations and who smoothly sidestepped or downright ignored emotional moments and phrases.

‘We’ve got nothing to discuss,’ she pointed out, tucking into the first course with sudden appetite because while she ate she did not have to speak and had less excuse to be looking at Gio. Gio, surely one of the most beautiful men ever born? She glanced at him from below her lashes, roaming with helpless appreciation across his sculpted features to relish the spectacular slash of his high cheekbones and the tough masculine angle of his jaw. He was out of her reach. He was rich and successful, handsome and sophisticated, educated and pedigreed, everything she was not. He had always been out of her reach. If only she had had the wit to accept that obvious fact, she would never have got involved and never have got hurt.

‘Is there really another man?’ Gio asked very quietly, the rich velvety depth of his accented drawl filling her with pleasure, no matter how hard she tried not to react that way. But that was the same voice she had once lived to hear on the phone when he was away from her, and she could not break her instinctive appreciation.

Billie worked out the question and flushed as she collided with stunning tigerish golden eyes surrounded by ebony lashes. She breathed in, intending to lie, breathed out, knew that for some reason she didn’t want to lie. Perhaps it was because if she lied he would come down on her like a granite block to get further information about the supposed man in her life and would eventually cleverly trip her up and learn that she was lying, which would only make her look stupid. ‘No, there isn’t,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘But that doesn’t change anything between us.’

‘Then we’re both free,’ Gio murmured lazily, topping up her glass with the bottle of wine.

‘I have no intention of getting involved with you again,’ Billie declared, taking a hasty gulp of the mellow red, wondering if he would laugh if she told him what the flavour reminded her of. After all, she had once attended a wine course as well as an art-appreciation course and had never had the opportunity to show off what she had learned there.

‘But we work well together.’

Billie shook her head in vehement rejection of that statement and concentrated on her food again.

Sipping his wine, Gio watched her. He suspected she was wearing vintage clothes and the pale green linen dress she wore teamed with a light blouse-like jacket embroidered with flowers didn’t bear any resemblance to what he deemed to be current fashion, but the colours and plain styling had an understated elegance. The minute she sat down, however, the fabric of the dress pulled taut across the swell of her ample bosom. Gio tensed, hunger stabbing through him while he wondered how he was supposed to tempt a woman so utterly lacking in greed. She didn’t want his money, had never wanted his money, had once told him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t need a yacht because he would never take the time off to use it. His yacht, sitting idle and costing a fortune to maintain, was currently moored at Southampton.

The waiters came back to serve the main course. She saw their sidewise glances and recognised their curiosity about her. By now the hotel staff would have established who Gio was—Giorgios Letsos, the oil billionaire was a legend the world over. The press loved him because he lived a rich man’s life and looked great in print. Calisto had looked brilliant in print too with her sleek straight blonde hair, her perfect features and her terrifyingly tiny size-zero body. Beside her, Billie would have appeared plump, short and ungainly and, from seeing that first photo, Billie had accepted that no comparison could ever be made between them. After all, she and Calisto weren’t even on the same page in the looks department.

Gio wound down the tension by talking about his recent travels round the world. She asked small, safe, impersonal questions about some of his staff, a couple of whom she had met and some she had only got to know by speaking to them often on the phone.

While eating her dessert, a glorious concoction of fresh berries and meringue, she enquired whether or not he still had the apartment.

‘No...like you, it’s long gone,’ he stated.

Billie took that to mean that he had not installed a more malleable woman in her place and when a sense of relief filtered through her she gulped more of her wine and tried hard to direct her thoughts to safer topics. It was no longer her business to wonder who he slept with. Once he had married Calisto the question had become academic. Billie had been replaced in every way. Calisto had been chosen to sit at the other end of the dining table in his probably very beautiful Greek home, which Billie had naturally never visited. Gio would have socialised with Calisto because they were a real couple and obviously he had planned to make Calisto the mother of his children...

CHAPTER THREE

AS THE PAIN of that never-to-be-forgotten reality pierced Billie, she suddenly reached the limits of her tolerance. Her attempt to be civilised for the sake of appearances was shattered and, forced cruelly out of her comfort zone, she thrust her hands down on the edge of the table and suddenly stood up. ‘I can’t do this!’ she told Gio with ragged abruptness. ‘I want to go home right now!’

Taken aback, Gio sprang upright, a frown line drawing his ebony brows together, his lustrous dark eyes locked to her flushed and unhappy face with wary, searching curiosity. ‘What’s wrong?’

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