Hot Christmas Nights: Shameful Secret, Shotgun Wedding / His for Revenge / Mistletoe Not Required

‘You could stay and get another job,’ he suggested.

Cassie shook her head. He just didn’t understand. But then, why should he—when these sort of commonplace problems were completely outside his experience? ‘Three weeks before Christmas?’ she questioned. ‘I don’t think so. Most stores already have their full quota of staff to cope with the holiday rush—and I’m hardly going to be able to dazzle them with a glowing reference.’

Steak and chips were placed in front of them—but Giancarlo scarcely registered one of his favourite dishes. He looked into her eyes, resenting the renewed striking of his conscience provoked by her pale face and troubled expression.

‘You could stay anyway—without working,’ he suggested.

‘I can’t stay at the flat without paying rent—it’s not fair to the others—and if I’m not working then I can’t pay rent. What do they call it—a catch-22 situation?’

He took another mouthful of wine—only now the clarion call of his conscience began to wane as her words took them effortlessly on to more familiar territory. One of funds and finance and supply and demand. Because when he stopped to think about it—didn’t they each have something the other wanted? He had the money to cushion her fall from grace—and she had…His eyes drifted over her face.

She had plenty. Violet eyes and soft petal lips and a tight, young body which had caused him to act with such uncharacteristic impulse. He felt the familiar arrowing of desire. Because if he was being honest—he hadn’t had enough of Cassandra Summers. And she certainly hadn’t had enough of him.

He leaned across the table and took her cold and unresisting hand in his, rubbing his thumb over the pulse, which instantly began to skitter beneath the delicate skin. ‘I have a much better idea, cara,’ he murmured. ‘Something which I think could be mutually beneficial to us both.’

Cassie stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘What sort of idea?’ she whispered, her senses befuddled just by the way he was touching her.

‘Why don’t you come and live with me?’

Cassie’s heart missed a beat. ‘Live with you?’ she repeated dazedly.

‘Mmm.’ He saw the flare of hope in her eyes and hurried to make sure she didn’t read too much into his suggestion. ‘I don’t much like the holiday season—but you could provide a very welcome distraction. And in the meantime, you need somewhere to stay.’ Giancarlo’s lips curved into a sensual smile as he lifted her fingertips and warmed them with the brush of his lips. ‘So why don’t you come and stay until Christmas?’

Chapter Five

‘WHAT do you mean, you’re going to go and live with some bloke you’ve only just met?’

Gavin’s outraged voice made Cassie slowly count to ten as she pulled a dress from the small wardrobe and laid it in her open suitcase. With a smile of confidence she was far from feeling, she turned round to face him.

‘For heaven’s sake, Gavin,’ she chided gently. ‘Living in your flat was only ever a temporary stay! I’m twenty-one and this is the twenty-first century—why, in some cultures I’d have been married off at the age of fourteen!’

Gavin’s blue eyes bored into hers. ‘So he’s offering to marry you, is he? This Giancarlo whatever-his-name is?’

‘Vellutini. His name’s Vellutini,’ she said, liking the way her lover’s name tasted like velvet on her lips—a soft and sensuous caress, just like his mouth. Until the rest of Gavin’s words broke into her daydream and tainted it with the stark edge of reality. ‘No, of course he isn’t offering to marry me! We’ve only just met.’

‘You’ve only just met and yet you’re moving in with him?’

‘So I’m being impulsive!’

‘You’re being ridiculous.’

‘That’s your opinion, Gavin—and I don’t happen to agree with it.’

‘You know he’s a billionaire?’

Cassie stared at Gavin, her heart missing a beat. ‘I knew he was wealthy—of course I did—but how the hell did you find out a detail like that?’

‘Oh, come on, Cassie—don’t be so naïve! You think someone like that doesn’t have a huge profile on the Internet? I looked him up. He’s thirty-five, for heaven’s sake—and he’s an international playboy! While you’re just a sweet, ordinary girl from Cornwall who’s batting way, way out of her league.’ He glowered. ‘A man like that will just chew you up and spit you out when he’s finished with you.’

Cassie bit back the indignant retort which flew to her lips, telling herself that Gavin only had her best interests at heart. He’d known her since they’d been at school together and she knew he had feelings for her himself. She’d never encouraged those feelings—but in a way that had only inflamed his protective interest in her. Good-looking himself, in a blond and even-featured kind of way, he had no trouble attracting women—but it was the one who eluded him who held the most allure. Maybe that was the case with all men, thought Cassie with a sudden dejection—remembering the almost indecent haste with which she had accepted Giancarlo’s offer to be his mistress. In which case, it didn’t hold out much hope for the future.

But she wasn’t holding out any hope for the future. She wasn’t completely stupid. She was simply being a modern woman and taking the relationship for what it was, like lots of women did. Surely that was enough.

‘He’s my lover,’ she told Gavin boldly, because it still sounded like a foreign word. ‘Women do have lovers, you know. And I’m going to live with him for a few weeks.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then nothing.’ Cassie shrugged with what she hoped was just the right amount of nonchalance. ‘I’ll be going back to Cornwall to carry on with my life while he carries on with his.’

‘You think it’ll be that easy, do you?’

‘Yes, Gavin,’ she said firmly—because deep down Cassie knew that she wanted this far too much to risk listening to the frightened little voice which made her wonder if he was right. ‘Actually I do.’

He scowled. ‘Well, you know where I am when you need all the pieces picking up.’

It wasn’t the blessing she would have chosen but Cassie was determined not to let anything dent her excitement. How could it, when Giancarlo’s unbelievable request over lunch had sent her senses into overdrive? And how could she possibly have resisted when he had made the arrangement sound like the perfect solution—and the only sensible option to take? He had leaned across the restaurant table and his ebony gaze had washed over hers, making her feel weak and warm inside and overwhelmed by an irresistible urge to have him kiss her again.

‘I am feeling a little guilty, mia bella,’ he had murmured. ‘As if I had sat you down for a sumptuous banquet and then whisked you away after the first course. If I’d known that you were inexperienced, I would have—’

He had paused at this point, leaving Cassie to peer at him anxiously. ‘Would have what?’

‘I made an assumption that there had been other lovers before me,’ he said, quickly skating over the question. ‘Why wouldn’t I have done? A woman of your age is usually experienced. And a man makes love differently if a woman is innocent. The pace is different—and so are his expectations. Your introduction to sex is not what I would have wished—despite the fact that I gave you much pleasure.’ Dark eyes had glittered with a message which had made her heart race. ‘So come and stay with me and I will show you even more. How does that sound?’

Cassie had blushed. It had sounded like heaven, even when he had said something else—something which would have had any sensible woman running for the hills.

‘You know that this—arrangement—is of a purely temporary nature, bella? That it ends when it ends—and that means it’s over. I need to be honest with you about that.’

Was that honesty or was it cruelty? Cassie didn’t care. She could handle it because she wanted him far too much to listen to the voice of reason. As she hugged Gavin goodbye and ran outside her Greenford flat to find Giancarlo’s car sitting purring at the kerbside she couldn’t quell a great surge of exhilaration. Because this was the most exciting thing to have ever happened to her and she was going to enjoy every second of it.

Ignoring the nagging little voice which questioned whether this was going to be a romantic high-point from which she would never recover, Cassie settled back in the car as she was driven to Giancarlo’s house.

The door was opened by Gina, a careful smile on her face—her expression impossible to read behind the trendy, black-framed spectacles.

‘Hello, Cassandra,’ she said. ‘I understand that I am to welcome you. Giancarlo won’t be back from the office until six—but he said you were to settle yourself in. Shall I show you to your dressing room—so that you can unpack—or would you prefer me to do that for you?’

Cassie hesitated. Gina didn’t sound at all fazed by the fact that a stranger was moving into her well-ordered house. Did she have to cope with this scenario on a regular basis? she wondered. And the last thing she wanted was the elegant housekeeper giving her rather humble clothes the once-over. But she hid all her misgivings behind an equally careful smile. ‘Thanks—but I can unpack myself.’

She followed Gina upstairs to a previously unseen room which led directly off the master bedroom—one containing shelves, cupboards, floor-length mirrors and another swish en-suite bathroom. It was ridiculously large for her meagre amount of belongings but, once Gina had gone, she unpacked. And once she’d put away her few bits and pieces and placed a framed photo of her parents on the window sill it felt a lot more like home.

Six o’ clock seemed like ages away and she took a long bath and washed her hair, luxuriating in the scent-filled steam from the bathroom, and was just sitting wrapped in a towel in front of the dressing table when the door opened—and in walked Giancarlo.

It was the first time she’d seen him since lunch yesterday—and her heart began to pound with a trembling kind of excitement as she turned round to find his gaze raking over her. For a moment he didn’t say anything—just studied her from between narrowed eyes—and Cassie sat frozen like a statue. What if he was now regretting his decision—if the reality of coming home and finding her in situ was threatening his bachelor independence?

She swallowed. Say something. Don’t just sit there. ‘H-hello.’

Once more he allowed his eyes to rake over her—at the soft white towel covering her pink-flushed skin and her hair trailing in damp tendrils all the way down her back. He had been distracted all day—wondering if he had taken leave of his senses in giving her access to his house—before reminding himself that she had nowhere else to go. But now that he had seen her again, his reservations dissolved. God, she was beautiful.

The swift and heady rush of desire heated his veins as he walked towards her and repeated her trembled little greeting, and yet something in her big violet eyes made his voice gentle as he leaned over her. ‘Hello,’ he said as he bent his head to whisper a kiss on her bare shoulder. ‘Is this the way you’re always going to greet me when I get home from work?’

‘Do you like it?’ she whispered, closing her eyes as she felt the soft, seductive graze of lips.

‘Yes, I think we can safely say that I like it, cara. I like it very much. Though I think we could improve on it even more.’ His hand moved round to give a little tug of the knot which constrained the towel so that it fell away—revealing her rosy-tipped breasts, the slender dip of her waist and the rounded curve of her pale hips. She looked like a still-life painting come to glorious life, he thought as he let his fingers drift downwards to cup one breast.

Cassie’s eyes opened wide as she saw the image reflected back from the mirror—his olive fingers contrasted against the paleness of her own skin. She could feel the insistent peaking of her nipple against his palm and the warm heat in the pit of her stomach as his lips grazed over her damp hair. Restlessly, she wriggled—tried to turn to have him kiss her properly—but he wouldn’t let her. ‘Giancarlo,’ she breathed.

‘Stay,’ he commanded as his fingers continued to stroke her.

‘But it’s—’

‘Stay!’

Despite her erotic imprisonment, she felt a hot, fierce heat shoring up inside her—building and building as he reached further down, his fingers tangling in the soft fuzz of hair at the juncture of her thighs and the honeyed moistness it concealed. She squirmed as he moved against her heated flesh and gasped his name as she felt the heat now spiralling upwards—like a great, strong tidal wave which was carrying her in its rush. It had happened to her when he had taken her to bed—but he had been there with her, not fully dressed like this, as if she were some kind of erotic puppet and he were pulling the strings. As if he were not part of what was happening to her. But then those new and extraordinary sensations began to engulf everything else—so that the world seemed to be composed of nothing other than sheer delight.

‘Giancarlo,’ she gasped, closing her eyes as she felt it about to happen.

‘No, watch,’ he urged. ‘Watch yourself in the mirror, mia bella. Watch how beautiful you look when you experience pleasure.’

Obediently, Cassie’s lids fluttered open to see that her eyes were dark with desire. Glancing upwards, she met his mocking reflection in the mirror—felt control slipping away as his fingers continued their insistent dance. And then desire dissolved within her—leaving her helpless to do anything but watch herself orgasm. She saw the involuntary jerk of her body and the way that the high colour in her cheeks seemed to spread all over her breasts—as if someone had washed them in rose-pink paint.

Weakly, she clutched onto his arm until the spasms had died away—feeling as if she might float away if she let go of him—but now Giancarlo had moved forward and he lifted her up into his arms. And she thought how decadent it seemed that he was still in his work suit while she was completely naked.

‘Wasn’t that the most erotic thing imaginable?’ he murmured, pressing his lips over hers and feeling her warm sensuality rising up to meet him.

Still dazed, Cassie nodded—because she couldn’t deny his words. It was. But as he took her through into the bedroom she thought that it had been…been…

What?

A demonstration of his superior sexuality. A pleasure-fest, yes—but without any of the attendant romance of deep kisses and tender caresses that her foolish heart had craved. Did he sense her misgivings? Was that why he sat her down on the edge of the bed and crouched in front of her?

‘Are you going to undo my tie?’ he murmured.

With trembling fingers, she complied—realising that he meant her to carry on, so she unbuttoned the silk shirt, too. He helped her with the belt and the trousers, swiftly divesting himself of the rest of his clothes until he was as naked as she, his body all satin-sheened skin and powerful limbs.

‘Oh, Giancarlo,’ she whispered as she felt the hard length of his arousal pressing insistently against her.

‘What?’

‘I didn’t realise—’

‘That it could be so good?’ His lips curved into a smile before drifting to her neck. ‘And I didn’t realise that you would be so beautifully responsive. So quick to orgasm and so eager to learn.’

He pushed her back onto the bed and moved over her, his fingers entwining in the spill of her hair and his lips whispering over hers in tantalising little kisses. And Cassie revelled in the growing familiarity of his body. Already, she was eager to reacquaint herself with the feel of tensile muscle beneath the silken skin and the honed perfection of his torso. This time she knew exactly when he wanted her to part her legs—and although she knew now what to expect, the glorious intimacy of his first thrust still took her breath away.

Glancing up, she could see that the ebony eyes were slitted and opaque as he entered her, could see the play of muscles in his powerful shoulders as he moved inside her. His lips dipped to tease hers—brushing and biting and grazing—until she greedily raised her hands to pull his head down, hearing his soft laugh as he deepened the kiss. She revelled in the changing rhythm—the way his hands clamped around her waist so that he could draw her even closer—until she felt so full of him that there was only one way to release herself from this exquisite tension and that was to let go.

She cried out—a strange, broken little sound she scarcely recognised as her own voice—and almost immediately she heard his own ragged groan. Afterwards, she lay there for a warm age, wrapped in his arms—her head on his chest as she listened to the thundering of his heart as it grew steady and his hand stroked absently at her hair.

But Cassie felt shaken as she lay in the curve of his arms. She hadn’t realised that sex could make you feel so utterly vulnerable—even more vulnerable than she’d felt in that room with the security officers at Hudson’s. Or that it could bind you to a man—make you want to cling to him and never let him go.

He must have gone to sleep, for his hand stilled to lie on top of her head, and she risked turning slightly, her eyes drinking in the details of his face as if she was committing them to memory.

In sleep the rugged features were relaxed—his expression less stern. She studied the dark sweep of his lashes and the way his hard mouth had softened into a sensual pout. It suddenly occurred to her that the man he really was lay concealed behind the rather formidable mask he always wore. Would he ever let her see what lay beneath?

She was unprepared for his sudden awakening—the way those lashes parted to reveal the ebony gleam beneath.

Giancarlo stretched and gave a lazy yawn. ‘Eri persa nei tuoi pensieri,’ he murmured.

She pleated her brows in response. ‘What does that mean?’

‘That your thoughts were elsewhere.’

Cassie pushed the hair back off her face. ‘They were.’

‘Usually a danger sign where a woman is concerned,’ he observed drily.

‘I was thinking…’ She hesitated, because despite the intimacies they’d just shared there was something still a little intimidating about him. ‘That I don’t really know anything about you,’ she finished softly.

His index finger stroked from neck to nipple, his mouth curving as he registered her answering shiver. ‘Yes, you do,’ he contradicted silkily. ‘You know how to turn me on with your big violet eyes and your petal lips and your soft, firm curves. You’re learning a little more every time we make love. By the time you go home to Cornwall, you will have become a sleek and seasoned lover who will be able to captivate any man you choose.’

Cassie supposed that was a kind of compliment—the kind of thing a man would say to his temporary mistress—but it made her feel like nothing more than a body. Somebody without a mind of her own. ‘But I don’t know anything about your life, Giancarlo.’

Giancarlo let his hand drift down to her breast. Why did women always want to interrogate you—and at the most inappropriate times? Hadn’t he hoped that his little shop-girl would be docile when he wanted her to be? He sighed. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tell me how you ended up living in London.’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘Those are the best ones.’

In spite of himself, he smiled—his finger stilling on the puckering rosy flesh of her nipple. ‘You are very persistent, aren’t you?’

She bit her lip as she felt pleasure rippling from where he was touching her. Was he trying to distract her? ‘J-just interested.’

He looked into her flushed face. ‘I told you that I was Tuscan by birth?’

‘Mmm.’ Cassie nodded, snuggling a little closer to him. ‘What’s it like in Tuscany?’

The clean, fresh smell of her struck some long-hidden chord within him so that for once he allowed himself to think of the green hills and sun-washed landscape of home—even though he had ring-fenced his memories and put them out of bounds. Exiled himself from it in all the ways that he could—so that even on his rare, duty visits home he didn’t allow nostalgia or sentiment to lure him.

‘What’s it like? Well, it is very beautiful. In fact, some people say it’s the most beautiful place on earth.’

‘So why…why live here, and not there?’

‘It’s complicated.’ He wound a strand of blonde hair around his finger. ‘My brother lives there—and it’s a little too small for both of us.’

He had a brother. She felt as if she had just discovered a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. ‘What’s he like?’

‘We’re twins.’

‘Twins!’ She turned onto her tummy and looked at him. ‘Identical twins?’

‘Not really. Well, we…look the same,’ he said, and then gave a short laugh. ‘But no two men are identical, Cassandra—if you were a little more experienced, you’d know that.’

Cassie registered the darkness which underpinned his voice. ‘You had some sort of fall-out?’ she guessed softly.

Giancarlo looked into her eyes and suddenly had the strangest desire to tell her. Was it because pillow talk and secrets were the currency traditionally shared with a mistress—or because her place in his life was so temporary that telling her would have no impact on it? She didn’t mix in his circles and she never would. And hadn’t he buried the memory so deep that he was curious now to see what it would look like if he dragged it out into the cold and dispassionate light of day?

‘A fall-out? Yes, I guess you could say that.’

‘What happened?’

Giancarlo swallowed because the acid taste of betrayal could still catch him unawares. Even now. He stared at the ceiling. ‘It all started soon after the death of our parents. My mother died when I was twelve—my father five years earlier.’

‘That must have been very hard,’ said Cassie softly.

She had the kind of voice which soothed—which felt like balm on his troubled recall. ‘Yes. It was a lonely kind of childhood. Plenty of money but not much else.’

‘And who looked after you?’

‘Oh, we had a series of guardians—aristocratic and intellectual men appointed by the estate who were supposed to educate us, and who we used to take pleasure in outwitting.’ He shrugged his broad, naked shoulders. ‘We were pretty much a law unto ourselves. And of course—we were fiercely competitive. Life was a constant battle to each prove ourselves—maybe to compensate for the lack of parental guidance.’

His mouth hardened. And the lack of warmth, or softness, of course—for there had been no compensatory woman’s touch. No comfort or reassurance from the gentler sex given to two little rich boys who ran wild as gypsies.

Giancarlo felt something like pain as memories came flooding back—more vivid than he had expected them to be. ‘Both Raul and I went to university in Rome. I read law and he read business. We were due to inherit the family estate when we turned twenty-one and we were going to work it between us.’

He remembered Gabriella, too. Tiny and beautiful—with thick hair even blacker than his own and eyes like polished jet. Gabriella, the darling and beauty of the campus. The woman every man had wanted and she had wanted Giancarlo. Oh, yes. His competitive nature had been at first flattered and then seduced by her attention towards him. How he had basked in her adoration and the envy of his peers and how he had revelled in that hot, heady explosion of first love. For a while they became the golden couple—making plans for the future and the family they would make together. And then…

‘So what happened?’

Cassie’s question broke into his thoughts. ‘We both qualified.’

‘Similar degrees?’

‘Mine was better.’ He shrugged. ‘And that is not a boast, but a fact. And that rankled with my brother. On our twenty-first birthday we were summoned into our lawyer’s office and told that Raul would inherit everything. The farms. The vineyards. The olive groves and the properties in Rome and Siena. The vast estates with which the Vellutini name was synonymous would all pass to him.’ He paused. ‘While I would receive precisely nothing.’