Christmas in Da Conti's Bed

He didn’t answer for a moment, but instead leaned back against one of the giant sofas and looked at her, his arms folded across his broad chest. Yet for all his supposedly casual stance, Alannah felt a chill of foreboding as his eyes met hers. There was a patina of power surrounding him which she hadn’t noticed in that long-ago nightclub. There was a hardness about him which you didn’t find in your average man. Suddenly he looked formidable—as if he was determined to remind her just who she was dealing with.

‘I think we both know a simple way to resolve this,’ he said softly. ‘All you have to do is step out of the spotlight right now. Do that and there will be no problem. Michela is about to marry a very powerful man. She is about to take on an important role as a new wife. In time, she hopes to have children and her friends will be role models to them. And…’

‘And?’ she questioned, but she knew what was coming. It was crystal clear from the look on his face.

‘You are not an appropriate role model,’ he said. ‘You’re not the kind of woman I want fraternising with my nephews and nieces.’

Her heart was beating very fast. ‘Don’t you dare judge me,’ she said, but her voice wasn’t quite steady.

‘Then why not make it easy for yourself? Tell Michela you’ve changed your mind about acting as her bridesmaid.’

‘Too late!’ Forcing herself to stay strong, she held up her palms in front of her, like a policeman stepping into the road to stop the traffic. ‘I’ve made my own dress, which is currently swathed in plastic in my room, waiting for me to put it on just before noon tomorrow. I’m wearing scarlet silk to emphasise the wedding’s winter theme,’ she added chattily.

‘But it’s not going to happen,’ he said repressively. ‘Do you really think I would let it?’

For a moment Alannah felt another shimmer of doubt flicker into the equation. The quiet resolution of his voice scared her and so did the forthright expression in his eyes. Somehow he was making her feel…vulnerable. And she wasn’t going to let that happen. Because she didn’t do vulnerable. Not any more. Vulnerable got you nowhere. It made you fall down when life landed one of its killer punches and think you’d never be able to get back up again. It made you easy prey to powerful predators like Niccolò da Conti. ‘How wicked you make me sound,’ she said.

‘Not wicked,’ he corrected silkily. ‘Just misguided, out-of-control and sexually precocious. And I don’t want any publicity generated by the presence of Stacked magazine’s most popular pin-up.’

‘But nobody—’

‘Michela has already mistakenly tried to tell me that nobody will know,’ he interrupted impatiently. ‘But they will. The magazines you stripped for have become collectors’ items and back issues now change hands for thousands of dollars. And I’ve just been informed that a film of you has made its way onto YouTube, raising your public profile even further. It doesn’t matter what you wear or what you don’t wear—you still have the kind of body which occupies a fertile part of the male imagination. Men still look at you and find themselves thinking of one thing—and only one thing.’

Alannah tried not to cringe, but unfortunately his words struck home. Clever, cruel Niccolò had— unwittingly or not—tapped into her biggest insecurity. He made her feel like an object. Like a thing. Not a woman at all, but some two-dimensional image in a magazine—put there simply for men to lust over.

The person she was now wouldn’t dream of letting her nipples peek out from behind her splayed fingers, while she pouted at the camera. These days she would rather die than hook her thumbs in her panties and thrust her pelvis in the direction of the lens. But she’d needed to do it, for all kinds of reasons. Reasons the uptight Niccolò da Conti wouldn’t understand in a million years.

‘You were notorious, Alannah,’ he continued. ‘And that kind of notoriety doesn’t just go away. It sticks like mud.’

She looked at him in despair. He was telling her that? Didn’t he realise that she’d been living with the consequences of that job ever since? No, of course he didn’t. He saw what he wanted to see and no more—he didn’t have the imagination to put himself in someone else’s shoes and think what their life might be like. He was protected by his wealth and position and his arrogance.

She wanted to go up and shake him and tell him to think outside the box. To wipe that judgemental look from his face and to start seeing her as a person, instead of someone who’d once behaved rashly. She could see exactly why Michela had been so scared of him when they’d been at school together. Was it any wonder that the Italian girl had rebelled from the moment he’d dropped her off at the exclusive Swiss finishing school where Alannah’s mother had worked as school matron?

‘The most important thing for me,’ she said slowly, ‘is that Michela wants me there. It’s her day and she’s the bride. So, short of tying me up and kidnapping me—I intend to be there tomorrow.’

‘Unless we come to some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ She tilted her head. ‘Tell me more.’

‘Oh, come on, Alannah.’ He smiled. ‘You’re a streetwise woman. You’ve been around. There must be something in your life that you’d…like.’

‘Something in my life that I’d like?’ she repeated. ‘You mean like a cure for the common cold, or an alarm that doesn’t make you want to smash the phone every time you hear it?’

‘Very amusing. No, nothing like that.’ He paused, and his black eyes glittered. ‘I am a very wealthy man—and I’m willing to make it worth your while to tell Michela that you’ve changed your mind.’

She stared at him in disbelief.

‘Let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You’re offering me money to stay away from your sister and not be her bridesmaid?’

‘Why not?’ He gave a cold smile. ‘In my experience, if you want something badly enough you can usually get it. The tricky thing is negotiating the right price—but that is something I should imagine you’re very good at.’

‘But that’s…bribery.’

‘Try thinking of it as common sense,’ he suggested softly.

She was shaking her head. ‘You know, Michela used to tell me how unbelievably controlling you were,’ she said. ‘And part of me thought she might have been exaggerating. But now I can see that every word was true.’

‘I am not seeking your approval of my character,’ he clipped out. ‘Just think why I’m making you this offer.’

‘Because you’re a control freak?’

‘Because Michela means everything to me,’ he said, and suddenly his voice grew harsh as he remembered how he’d fought to protect his sister from the sins of their father. And their mother. He thought of their flight from Sicily—his mother pregnant with Michela and not knowing what lay ahead. Niccolò had been only ten, but he had been the one everyone had relied on. He had been the man around the house. And it was hard to relinquish that kind of role or those kinds of expectations…

‘Michela is the only family I have left in the world and I would do anything for her,’ he ground out.

‘Except give her the freedom which a woman of her age has the right to expect?’ she retorted. ‘Well, I’m glad she’s had the courage to stand up to you. To maybe make you realise that you can’t keep snapping your fingers and expecting everyone else to just leap to attention. I’m not going anywhere until after the wedding. Better deal with it, Niccolò.’

Their gazes clashed and Niccolò felt the flicker of something unknown as he returned her stare. Oh, but she was a one-off. She took defiance to a whole new level and made it seem erotic. She made him want to take her in his arms and dominate her—to show her that he could not and would not be thwarted. He took a step towards her and a primitive surge of pleasure rippled over him as he watched her eyes darken. Because she still wanted him, he realised. Maybe not quite as much as he wanted her—but the desire he could read in her eyes was unmistakable.

And couldn’t desire be the most powerful weapon of all? Didn’t sex give a man power over a woman who wanted it?

‘Why don’t you think about what I’ve said?’ he suggested. ‘So that by the time I see you at the pre-wedding dinner later, you’ll have had the sense to change your mind about my offer.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘But…’

He raised his eyebrows. Suddenly, she didn’t look quite so defiant. Suddenly she looked almost unsure of herself. ‘But?’

‘I…’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s just that…well, Michela said you were probably going to skip the dinner and that we wouldn’t see you until tomorrow. Something to do with a business deal. Some new apartment block you’ve recently built in London.’

‘Is that what she said?’ He smiled. ‘Well, not any more. I’ve decided business can wait, because something much more important has come up.’ There was a pause as he looked at her and suddenly it was easy to forget the pressing needs of his billionaire clients and friends. ‘What is it they say? Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. And I want you very close for all kinds of reasons, Alannah. You’d better believe that.’

CHAPTER TWO

ALANNAH PULLED UP the zip of her cocktail dress and stared at her pale-faced reflection in the mirror. She’d tried deep breathing and she’d done a quick bout of yoga, but her hands were still trembling and she knew why. Slipping on a pair of high-heeled shoes, she felt a wave of self-recrimination washing over her.

She thought about the things Niccolò had said to her earlier. The way he’d insulted her and looked down his proud, patrician nose. He’d been judging her in the most negative way possible, but that hadn’t stopped her wanting him. She shuddered. Where was the self-respect she’d worked so hard to get back? She wondered what had happened to the cool, calm Alannah who wasn’t going to let him get under her skin. How had he managed to puncture her self-possession with nothing more than a heated ebony gaze, which reminded her of things she’d rather forget?

Because memory was a funny thing, that was why—and sometimes you had no control over it. It flipped and jerked and jumped around like a flapping fish on the end of a hook. It took you to places you didn’t want to visit. It could make ten years seem like a minute, or a minute seem like an hour. It could put you back inside the skin of the person you’d once been.

And suddenly she was a teenager again. Seventeen years old and about to break the rules. Off to a party wearing the make-up which her Swiss finishing school strictly forbade, when really she should have been tucked up in bed in the dormitory. Wearing a tiny little micro-mini because she had been young and carefree—because back then she hadn’t realised that a woman’s body could become her enemy, instead of her friend…

By rights, someone like her shouldn’t have been a pupil at the exclusive all-girls academy, tucked high in the beautiful mountains of Switzerland. She wasn’t rich. She wasn’t well-connected. She was just the illegitimate daughter of a single-parent mother who happened to be Matron at the fancy boarding school. And while this meant that Alannah got herself a great education, her ‘charityʼ status meant that most of the girls simply tolerated her.

Michela da Conti was different. She was the only one who had held out the hand of genuine friendship—maybe because they had something in common, despite their rich-girl/poor-girl pairing. Alannah had spent her life rebelling against her super-strict mother while Michela had known real tragedy in her short life, plus she wanted to escape the strictures of her controlling brother, Niccolò.

Their youthful rebellion usually stretched no further than going out for illicit under-age drinks in one of the nearby bars after lights-out, or hanging out of the dormitory window, trying to inhale cigarettes without being sick.

But one night they heard about a party. A glitzy twenty-first birthday celebration for one of Niccolò’s godsons—which was being held in one of the neighbouring mountain valleys.

‘And we’re going!’ declared Michela excitedly.

Alannah remembered frowning. ‘But what about your brother? Won’t he be there?’

‘You’re kidding.’ Michela had given a smile of satisfaction. ‘Apparently, he’s miles away in some obscenely expensive resort in Barbados, with his latest ghastly supermodel girlfriend. So we’re safe.’

Alannah remembered walking into the crowded room, where coloured lights were flashing and music was blaring out loudly. Her borrowed silver minidress was clinging to her body like honey and she was getting lots of requests to dance, but she turned down every one because all the boys seemed too loud and too brash to be interesting.

She did her best to enjoy herself. She sipped a soft drink and admired the snowy view. Found a sleeping kitten on her way back from the loo and spent an enjoyable ten minutes stroking its furry tummy and wishing she could go home. When eventually she went back into the main room to find Michela to suggest they got a cab back to school, she couldn’t find her anywhere. So she went and stood in a quiet corner of the room, losing herself in the shadows while everyone else partied—and that was when she saw him.

Him.

She had never forgotten that moment. It was like being struck by something with no sense of warning that it was coming. As if a velvet sledgehammer had hit her very hard. She was aware that he was tall and his hair was as black as the night sky. His eyes were black too—even from this distance she could see that. He was dressed in a dark suit, which made him look outwardly sophisticated, but she could sense something primitive about him. There was something predatory in the gleam of his eyes, which should have scared her as he began to walk towards her, with a sense of purpose in his step.

But she wasn’t scared.

It was the most illogical thought she’d ever had, but at that moment she felt as if she’d been waiting all her life for him to arrive, and here he was.

Here he was.

He looked her up and down—as if it was his right to study a strange woman as he might study a car he was thinking of buying. But surely no car would make him smile like that—a smile which seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, one that pierced her heart and made her knees feel as if they might have difficulty supporting her.

‘I think you need to dance,’ he said.

‘I’m not a very good dancer.’

‘That’s because you’ve never danced with me. So come here and let me teach you how.’

Later, she would remonstrate with herself at the eagerness with which she fell into his arms. At the way she let him slide his hands around her back as if she’d known him for years. His hand moved to her hair and he started stroking it and suddenly she wanted to purr as loudly as that kitten had done earlier.

They said very little. The party was too loud for conversation and, anyway, it didn’t seem to be conversation which was dominating Alannah’s thoughts right then. Or his. Words seemed superfluous as he pulled her closer and, although the music was fast, they danced so slowly that they barely moved. Their bodies felt as if they were glued together and Alannah almost wept with the sheer pleasure of it all. Did he sense her enjoyment? Was that why he dipped his mouth to her ear, so that she could feel the warmth of his breath fanning her skin?

‘You,’ he said, his velvety voice underpinned with an accent which she recognised as Sicilian, ‘are very beautiful.’

Wasn’t it funny how some people you just seemed to spark off? So that she—inexperienced and raw as she was—didn’t respond in a conventional way. She didn’t blush and tell him she wasn’t beautiful at all—but instead came out with something which sounded almost slick.

‘And you,’ she cooed back, looking straight into his black eyes, ‘are very handsome.’

He smiled. ‘A perfect match, then?’

She tipped her head back. ‘Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?’

‘Probably.’ He leaned forward, so that her face was bathed in the dark spotlight of his gaze. ‘Especially as we haven’t even kissed. Don’t you think that’s a shocking omission, my beauty? So shocking that I think we ought to remedy it right now.’

She remembered the way her heart had crashed loudly against her ribcage. The way her mouth had dried with anticipation and the words had just come tumbling out of her mouth. ‘Who says I’m going to kiss you?’

‘I do.’

And he did.

In that shadowy corner of some anonymous house in the Swiss mountains, while outside flakes of snow floated past the window like big, white feathers, he kissed her.

He kissed her so intensely that Alannah thought she might faint. He kissed her for so long that she wanted him never to stop. It was like that pile of bone-dry sticks she’d once built on a long-ago holiday to Ireland—she remembered the way they’d combusted into flames the moment her aunt had put a match to them. Well, it was a bit like that now.

She was on fire.

His thumb brushed over her breast and Alannah wriggled with excitement. Because surely this was what she had been made for—to stand in this man’s arms and be touched by him. To have him look at her as if she were the most beautiful woman in the world. He deepened the kiss to one of added intimacy and as he pushed his thigh between hers the atmosphere suddenly changed. It became charged. She could feel the flood of liquid heat to her groin and the sudden, almost painful hardening of her nipples as they pushed insistently against his chest. His breath was unsteady as he pulled away from her and there was a primitive emotion on his face which she didn’t recognise.

‘We’d better think about moving somewhere more comfortable,’ he said roughly. ‘Somewhere with a bed.’

Alannah never had a chance to reply because suddenly the mood was broken by some kind of commotion at the door. She felt him tense as Michela burst into the room with snow melting on her raven hair, and the guilty look on her friend’s face when she saw Niccolò told its own story.

It was unfortunate that Michela was surrounded by the miasma of sickly-sweet marijuana smoke—and even more unfortunate when Niccolò’s discreet enquiries the next day yielded up the information that both girls were already on a formal warning from the school. A small matter of the building’s elaborate fire-alarm system having been set off by the two of them hanging out of a dormitory window, smoking.

Alannah would never forget the look of passion dying on Niccolò’s face, only to see it being replaced with one of disgust as he looked at her. She remembered wanting to wither beneath it.

‘You are my sister’s friend?’ he questioned incredulously. ‘Her school friend?’

‘Y-yes.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Seventeen.’

All the colour drained from his face and he looked as if she’d hit him. ‘So Michela associates with a puttana, does she?’ he hissed. ‘A cheap little tart who puts out for strangers at parties.’

‘I d-don’t remember you objecting,’ she stammered, stung into defending herself, even if deep down she felt she had no real defence to offer.

‘No man objects when a woman offers herself to him on a plate like that,’ he snapped.

The following day he had withdrawn Michela from the school and shortly afterwards the head teacher had summoned Alannah and her mother to her office. The head had clearly been furious at the prospect of having to say goodbye to Niccolò da Conti’s generous donations to the school. She had told Alannah that her behaviour was unacceptable and her mother had pre-empted the inevitable expulsion by offering up her resignation.

‘I’m not having my girl scapegoated by some rich financier,’ she’d said fiercely. ‘If you’re going to heap all the blame on her, then this is not the kind of school for her.’

Of course, that was not an end to it—merely the beginning of a nightmare which put the whole Niccolò incident to the back of her mind.

But she’d never grassed up Michela and Michela had remained loyal to her ever since.

Her thoughts cleared and she saw her friend looking at her in the dressing-table mirror, her face still glowing from her pre-wedding facial, and Alannah sighed as she met Michela’s questioning gaze. ‘Maybe it would be better if I just bowed out, if it’s going to cause a massive row between you and your brother. I’ll just stand at the back like everyone else and throw rose petals. I can live with that.’

Michela glared as she put her hairbrush down.

‘And let Niccolò have his own way? I don’t think so. You’ve been the best of friends to me, Alannah—and I want you there. In fact, it’ll probably do Niccolò good on all kinds of levels. I’ve never heard anyone speak to him the way you do.’ She smirked. ‘Nobody else would dare.’

Alannah wondered what Michela would say if she realised how much of her reaction to her powerful brother was bravado. That her feelings for him were…complicated. Would she be shocked if she knew the truth? That she only had to look at him to want to rip the shirt from his body and feast her eyes on all that silken olive flesh? That somehow he brought out a wildness in her which frightened her. Which she knew was wrong. And not only wrong…she knew only too well that those supposedly seamless sexual fantasies were nothing but an illusion.

She forced a smile. ‘Okay, if you insist…it’ll be business as usual. In which case, we’d better get going. I know it’s traditional for the bride to keep her groom waiting on the big day, but not on the eve-of-wedding dinner!’

They took the elevator down to the iconic Midnight Room, where a large clock was set permanently at the witching hour. It was a spectacular party room designed by Emma Constantinides, the hotel owner’s wife—and had won countless industry prizes since its opening. Circular tables had been set for dinner and the dark velvet ceiling was punctured with tiny lights, so that it resembled a star-filled sky. In the silvery light from hundreds of candles, people in evening dress stood drinking champagne as the scent of dark blue hyacinths wafted through the air.

A roar of delight greeted the bride-to-be’s appearance and Alannah leaned forward to whisper in Michela’s ear as people began to surge towards them. ‘You go and sparkle,’ she said. ‘Anything you need me to check?’

Michela shook her head. She had already spotted Lucas on the opposite side of the room, talking to his mother. ‘No. You go and sparkle too,’ she said. ‘And for goodness’ sake, have a very large cocktail before we sit down to dinner. You look completely washed out, Alannah.’

But Alannah refused a drink. A drink on an empty stomach was a recipe for disaster and hers was already in knots. All she had to do was to get through the next thirty-six hours without crumbling, and surely she could do that.

And then she looked around the room and saw Niccolò—and every empowering thought flew straight from her mind as her gaze focused on him.

He was standing talking to a blonde whose sequined dress left little to the imagination and Alannah found herself thinking that he didn’t seem to have a problem with that. The woman was gazing up at him and nodding intently, as if nothing but pearls of wisdom were falling from those cruel and kissable lips. There were other women clustering nearby, too—as if he were a dark shark and they were all hungry little pilot fish, just waiting for whatever scraps he cared to leave for them.

He lifted his head as if he had sensed her watching him—glancing across the room to where she stood. And suddenly it was too late to look away. His gaze captured hers and held it and it felt as if some fierce dark light were piercing through her skin. She felt sensitive. Exposed and raw. Terrified he would see through to the dark mass of insecurities hidden beneath her cool exterior, she tried to look away, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t. He seemed to be drawing her in by the force of his formidable will.