Mistress Material

It had certainly not been her intention to let him know that his presence still had the power to disturb her. Profoundly. And wasn’t that exactly what she was doing now?

Taking a deep breath, she switched into superficial hostess mode. Giving him the bright smile she normally reserved for the lens of a camera, she waved her hand invitingly.

‘Forgive me,’ she said, sounding deliberately insincere, and saw from the cold twist of his mouth that her insincerity had been noted. ‘I’ve been under a lot of strain recently—working too hard—you know how it is.’ She glanced down at the waterproof watch on her wrist and gave him a cool, self-possessed smile. ‘I can give you—ten minutes. Is that time enough?’

‘Plenty,’ he said abrasively, and followed her into the room.

He walked over to the window, where the balcony overlooked the poolside, and there was silence for a moment as he stared down at people tearing apart the glistening red lobsters which the waiters had now produced, at women delicately devouring the sweet pink flesh as they tried not to smear their lipstick. Suki felt a shiver of unknown origin tingle its way up her spine.

‘How’s Francesca?’ she asked suddenly.

He tensed immediately and his face was like granite when he turned around to capture her in a cold, dark stare.

‘Do you care?’

‘Of course I care! She was my best friend—before you pulled her out of school and forbade me ever to see her again!’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘That was a decision I have never regretted. I did not approve of the company she was keeping.’

Suki lifted her chin. ‘By that I suppose you mean me?’

He gave her a steady look. ‘Yes, Suki—I mean you.’

‘The bad influence,’ she observed acidly.

He gave a low laugh. ‘Precisely. I had no intention of letting my sister start copying the kind of behaviour you were indulging in. Young girls are notoriously affected by what their peers do. And whilst you might have considered it perfectly normal to sleep around I had no intention of letting Francesca do the same.’

Sick at heart, Suki turned away from those dark, intent, judgemental eyes. He still thought of her as nothing more than a tramp—so why bother defending herself? Indeed, how could she possibly defend herself when he spoke nothing more than the truth?

‘Is that what you’ve come here for?’ she asked bitterly. ‘To go over the past? You’ve made it clear what you think of me—not that I care what you think any more—’

‘Did you ever?’ he interrupted softly. ‘Or was I just one more virile male for you to wrap those beautiful legs around?’

Suki hesitated painfully, the cruel censure behind his words making the erotic image they created disintegrate immediately. Her amber eyes glittered as she found herself speaking without bothering to analyse her words. ‘Of course I cared! You were the older brother of my dearest friend—I was a guest in your house, and you threw me out! Hustled me away like some criminal—flown away at high speed, my holiday cut short. Having to explain to my mother...’

A look almost of pain crossed his face. ‘What,’ he said, very softly, ‘did you tell your mother?’

Her eyes were amber ice. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she told him scornfully. ‘Your telephone call to her managed to allay any worries she might have had. I don’t know how you managed it, but you certainly sweet-talked her into thinking that everything was just fine and dandy. I certainly wasn’t going to enlighten her with the truth—that you kicked me out of your bed and out of your house within a few hours!’

‘Dio!’ he swore raggedly. ‘Must you put it quite so—crudely?’

‘I’m sorry if it’s crude,’ she said deliberately. ‘But it’s the truth. It’s horrible, it’s something I’d rather forget—and I will tell you for the last time that I’m simply not interested in rehashing the past—if that’s why you’ve come.’

He stared at her for a long moment of consideration before shaking his head. ‘That isn’t why I’ve come,’ he told her.

‘What, then?’ she asked him in bewilderment.

‘I’ve come to ask you to do something for me,’ he said simply, but as she was caught up in his direct stare the substance of his words drifted away like gossamer on a breeze because the soft, dark blaze of his eyes had the power to confuse her, to merge the years and send her mind racing back to a time almost eight years ago—the first time she had ever set eyes on Pasquale Caliandro...

CHAPTER TWO

‘ARE you sure they won’t mind?’ asked Suzanna hesitantly as, with a flick of charcoal, she completed the small portrait she’d been doing of her friend, just as the plane began to make its final descent towards Rome airport.

‘Who?’ Francesca was too busy batting her eyelashes outrageously at the uniformed male flight attendant to pay much attention to her schoolfriend.

‘Your family, of course.’ Suzanna flicked her pale auburn plait back over her shoulder. ‘It’s very kind of them to invite me to stay with them.’

Francesca shrugged. ‘They don’t care who I invite—they’re never around. Papà’s always working and is away a lot on business, and my stepmother’s away in Paris, apparently. She’ll probably be trawling the streets looking for gigolos—’

‘Francesca!’ exclaimed Suzanna in shocked horror. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘Aren’t I?’ queried Francesca with unfamiliar bitterness. ‘She’s twenty years younger than my father. She spends his money like water, and she flirts with anything in a pair of trousers,’ she finished, in disgust.

‘So why does he stay with her, then?’ asked Suzanna softly.

‘Because she’s beautiful. Why else...?’ Francesca’s voice tailed off momentarily, and when she spoke again it was with her customary, rather sardonic verve. ‘Which only leaves big brother—and he’s worse than any jailer. But at least with you there you can be my alibi.’

‘Alibi?’ echoed Suzanna uncertainly.

‘Sure.’ Francesca’s dark eyes flashed. ‘He tries to stop me going out with boys, so I don’t tell him any more. And if he asks you anything, then you tell him you last saw me praying in church!’

‘Francesca!’ said Suzanna uneasily because she didn’t know sometimes whether to take her effervescent friend seriously, and her fingers began to pleat the hem of her white dress nervously. ‘You know you don’t mean that!’

‘I know that going home for the holidays is going to cramp my style,’ muttered Francesca. ‘The discos I go to during term-time are fantastic —I wish you’d come along too.’

Suzanna shook her head. ‘Discos aren’t really my thing.’ In discos she felt gangly, awkward. And when you stood at almost six feet in your stockinged feet that was inevitable.

‘That’s because you’ve never given them a chance!’ Francesca’s attention was caught by the thumbnail sketch in Suzanna’s hand. ‘Hey! That’s good—it’s me, isn’t it?’

‘Do you like it?’ smiled Suzanna.

‘Yeah. May I keep it?’

‘Sure.’

The plane was coming in to land, and there was little time for talking again until they were seated in the back of the shiny, chaffeur-driven limousine and heading towards the Caliandro mansion. Francesca spent the entire journey chattering as she freed Suzanna’s hair from her plaits and teased it into a blazing and magnificent furnace of waves, and Suzanna was so enraptured at the spectacular landscape passing them by that the subject of alibis was all but forgotten.

Suzanna and Francesca were both at finishing school in Switzerland. ‘It’s bound to finish me off sooner or later!’ Francesca always joked. It was the expensive kind of school which was intended to produce young ladies. Daughters of the rich and the noble attended, most of them from privileged but broken homes.

Suzanna’s own father had died, leaving a wife, a son and a daughter, and a car-manufacturing plant which her brother had over-ambitious plans for. Money was tight, but a savings plan taken out at her birth had ensured that at least Suzanna’s expensive education would be paid for. But she worried about her mother’s well-being, and she worried about her feckless brother, Piers, being in charge of the family business...

Francesca’s own mother had died a few years back, and her father had quickly remarried. A mistake, according to Francesca, and it seemed that there was little love lost between her and her stepmother. ‘And my brother really hates her!’ she’d added. ‘He can hardly bear to be in the same room as her.’

It didn’t sound like a very happy house, thought Suzanna suddenly.

Francesca’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘We’re here!’ she exclaimed as the car swept down a gravelled drive and came to a halt in front of an imposing white building, and then her voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. ‘And here comes Pasquale, my brother—so don’t forget—if he asks whether I date men you just tell him that I’ve shown bags of disinterest!’

Through the window of the limousine, Suzanna could see the most handsome man she had ever set eyes on, and her heart lurched painfully in her chest. She blinked several times, as if afraid that she’d simply dreamt him up.

Quite unbelievably, she hadn’t.

He was tall—quite spectacularly tall for a man of Italian origin. His shoulders were strong and wide and his hips were narrow. His nose was a proud Roman curve and his eyes were dark and glittering. For Suzanna, naive and unused to men, the experience of staring up into the face of Francesca’s brother was like something out of the romantic novels she’d read since her early teens; she looked, and was, completely smitten.

Afterwards, she was to tell herself that she had been ripe to fall for someone—anyone. It was just unfortunate that it had happened to be Pasquale...

He greeted his sister with a kiss on both cheeks and then held his hand out formally to Suzanna.

The sun was behind her and seemed to create a halo of golden-red around her hair—or so Francesca whispered to her later that night when Suzanna’s heart was still pounding in that strange, unfamiliar way which hadn’t left her since she’d first set eyes on Pasquale.

The short white cheesecloth dress she wore merely hinted at the outline of the smooth young flesh which lay beneath, but when he looked at her a stillness and a watchfulness came over Pasquale Caliandro. He caught her small hand in his firm, warm and masculine grip and as she gave him a look of helpless fascination his eyes narrowed, his mouth hardening as he stared down at her.

‘I think my brother fancies you,’ Francesca said that night as they got ready for bed. ‘He gave you a real mean, hungry look!’

‘Rubbish!’ said Suzanna, blushing furiously. Of course it was rubbish, she convinced herself as she dived into the pool one morning, a few days after she’d arrived. Men who fancied you didn’t virtually ignore you in a way which she thought bordered on downright rudeness. And they certainly didn’t speak to you in that awful, brusque way he had of addressing her. One day he’d actually had the nerve to tell her to stop hanging her head and to be proud of her height!

Sometimes, she thought as she ploughed up and down the swimming pool in an effort to get rid of the heat in her veins which just wouldn’t go away—sometimes she thought that Pasquale almost disliked her—his manner towards her was so abrupt.

And yet at others...

She shivered. Other times she would turn around to find him watching her. Just watching her with a dark and brooding intensity which frightened the life out of her, yet thrilled her at the same time.

Just about the only nice thing he’d said to her had been when he’d found her sketching quietly in the garden one day.

He had stood silently looking over her shoulder for at least a minute, and had given a little nod as he’d watched her long fingers cleverly recreating the glass summer house, which was overhung with vines.

‘That’s good,’ he observed. ‘Good enough to make it your career, I think.’ And Suzanna had blushed furiously at the unexpected praise.

She turned on her back and lazily kicked her legs around in the cool water. It was indeed a strange household she was staying with, she reflected. Francesca seemed to spend her whole time concocting schemes to get to one of the discotheques in the city, but so far she hadn’t succeeded, since Pasquale vehemently blocked every suggestion. ‘You’re far too young,’ he’d told her emphatically, and then his eyes had narrowed and he had given Suzanna one of his rare looks. ‘Do you girls go to many discos?’ he’d queried, his dark eyes suspicious.

‘Never!’ Suzanna and Francesca had replied in unison, but Suzanna hadn’t been able to stop herself from blushing at Francesca’s easy lie, and she was certain that Pasquale’s sharp eyes had noticed, for he’d frowned severely.

Francesca and Pasquale’s father she hardly saw at all. A still handsome man of sixty, with streaks of silver in his dark hair, he seemed to spend most of the time working—as Francesca had prophesied—making it home only in time for the evening meal. Usually at dinner it was just the three of them, as Pasquale always seemed to be out on a date with one of the many glamorous-sounding women who telephoned him, and their stepmother was still in Paris.

But today Suzanna was alone in the house. Pasquale was working and Signor Caliandro had flown to Naples for the day. Francesca had gone to visit her godmother on the other side of the city. She’d invited Suzanna to go along, but Suzanna knew that the elderly lady spoke little English and had decided that it would be fairer to let Francesca go alone. Besides, she rather liked having this luxurious house to herself.

The swimming pool was vast and deliciously cool and Suzanna dived to the depths of the turquoise water and swam around. She’d almost used up all her air, when the devastatingly sharp pain of cramp stabbed ruthlessly at her calf.

Perhaps if she’d had a lungful of air and hadn’t been near the bottom of the pool she wouldn’t have panicked, but panic she did, doing the worst thing she could possibly have done—she gulped water down, her arms and legs flailing wildly in all directions.

Her head and chest felt as though they might actually burst, but suddenly she felt a pair of hands tightly grasping her waist. She tried instinctively to wriggle free, but whoever was holding her had an indomitable strength and would not let her go.

She found herself being propelled to the surface, where her mouth broke open and greedily sucked in air, and she fell back against the chest of her rescuer, a solid, hard wall of muscle, but she knew without turning to look at him that it was Pasquale.

His arms were still around her waist, and his head dropped briefly to rest on hers.

‘Dio!’ he exclaimed savagely, and kicked off and swam towards the pool steps. He climbed out first, then picked her up easily and carried her to lay her down on the soft, sun-warmed grass.

She realised that he had dived in fully dressed—that he had not even bothered to kick off his beautiful, soft, handmade shoes, which were now sodden. His silk shirt clung to him like a second skin and his sopping trousers now etched every hard sinew of the strong shafts of his powerful thighs.

His eyes were blazing. ‘You fool! You crazy little idiot!’ he cried out, and he ran his hands thoroughly but dispassionately over her body, like a doctor examining for broken bones.

‘I—I’m sorry.’ She trembled as her body felt his warm, sure touch.

‘And so you should be!’ he told her furiously. ‘Don’t you realise that you could have drowned?’ His eyes narrowed as he took in her white, frightened face. ‘Do you hurt anywhere?’ he demanded.

Humiliatingly, her teeth stared to chatter so that she couldn’t speak.

‘Do you?’ he demanded again, still in that same grim tone. ‘Hurt anywhere? Tell me!’

She couldn’t cope with his harshness, not when she was feeling so vulnerable, and she did what she hadn’t done since her father had died the previous year—she burst into tears.

Instantly, his attitude altered. He looked appalled with himself as he gathered her into his arms and laid his strong hand protectively against the back of her head.

‘Don’t cry, bella mia,’ he whispered. ‘There is no need for tears. You are safe now.’

But the shock of realising what might have happened if he had not been there made her sob all the harder, and he made a little sound, a small, rough assertion beneath his breath, as he picked her up and carried her towards the house. She was too weak to do anything other than rest her head against his chest, and gradually the sobs receded. It was just like visiting heaven, being in his arms like this, she realised, her body all wet and clingy and close. She could have stayed like that all day.

‘Wh-where are you taking me?’ she wondered aloud as he mounted the stairs.

‘To get you dry,’ he answered. His gentleness had vanished, and he spoke again in that grim, terse tone which left her wondering why he still seemed so angry with her.

He carried her to her own room and set her down on the thick carpet, glancing quickly around, his eyes narrowing as they alighted on a tiny pair of knickers which were lying in an open drawer, together with a matching bra.

Suzanna blushed.

‘Do you have a towelling robe?’ he asked.

She shook her head. A towelling robe wasn’t the kind of thing you brought to Italy in the middle of summer. She only had a silk wrap.

‘You’d better wait here!’ he told her, and left the bedroom.

He returned minutes later with what was obviously his own robe—a luxurious, almost velvety towelling garment in a deep, midnight-blue colour—and threw it down on the bed. ‘Now strip off,’ he told her. ‘Completely. Put the robe on and I will run you a bath.’

If any other man had issued such a curt and intimate order, Suzanna would have screamed for the police, but because it was Pasquale she simply nodded obediently. He set off for the en suite without a backward glance, his shoulders curiously stiff and set, and Suzanna began to do as he had told her.

Easier said than done. She’d never thought that it would be so difficult to remove two tiny scraps of bikini, but the wet material was clinging to her cold, damp skin and her fingers were stiff and trembling with the cold.

So when, minutes later, the bathroom door opened and Pasquale came back in, accompanied by clouds of delicious-looking, scented steam, it was to find her almost sobbing with frustration as she attempted to slide her hands round to her back to unclip the clasp of her bikini-top.

There was a moment when he froze, as though he’d never seen a woman almost naked before—but that was nonsense. Francesca had already regaled her with stories of Pasquale smuggling girls out of his room when he was still at boardingschool. And you only had to look at that brooding, almost dangerous physique to know that Pasquale would have tasted most of the pleasures of lovemaking...

A strange look crossed those tight features. A look of anger, but of something else too—something which even the totally innocent Suzanna recognised as desire—and then he said something very softly and very eloquently in Italian, before moving quickly to her side.

‘I... I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I can’t... My fingers are all...’

He shook his head, said not a word but deftly undid the clasp with a single fluid movement that sent a brief spear of jealousy through her as she found herself imagining those strong, bronzed hands undressing other women too. Her unfettered breasts bounced free and she heard him catch his breath on a muffled, almost savage note.

He almost flung the robe over her and swiftly knotted the belt around her narrow waist, and then he knelt at her feet, his hands moving inside the robe until they were on her bare hips. Suzanna held her breath with dazed and exultant shock as she felt the heat of his fingers on her cool flesh, but he kept his eyes averted as he peeled the damp bottoms off all the way down the slender length of her thighs, and her cold and discomfort vanished completely as she felt the brief slide of his hand against her inner thigh.

Something hot and potent and powerful bubbled its way into life in her veins as rapidly as bush-fire, and Suzanna was racked with an uncontrollable shudder as she became sexually aware of her body for the first time in her life.

Had he seen her automatic response to his touch? Was that why his mouth had twisted into that harsh, almost frightening line? Why the hard glittering of his dark eyes now transformed him into some unforgettable but slightly forbidding stranger?

‘Now get in the bath,’ he said roughly, and he tossed the bikini away from him as though it had been contaminated. He rose to his feet and moved towards the door, but without his customary elegance and fluidity of motion. ‘And be out of there in twenty minutes—no longer,’ he ordered, but then a wry note which bordered on amusement entered his voice and, thankfully, removed some of the awful tension from the air. ‘No falling asleep is permitted! Understand?’ he finished softly.

‘Yes, Pasquale,’ she answered meekly.

‘Good. I’ll be downstairs making you some coffee.’

She wandered into the bathroom in a heady daze, wrapped in the thickness of his robe, reluctant to remove it because the scent of it—of him—was just too heavenly for words. She hugged her arms against her breasts, then wiped away some of the steam from the mirror and stared into it, mesmerised by the heightened colour of her cheeks and the strange, almost feverish glitter in her eyes.

But what was she imagining? That he had been as affected by that brief encounter as she had? Pasquale Caliandro, the toast of Rome, bothered by a schoolgirl?

No way! she thought with honest reluctance as she pulled off the robe and stepped into the fragrant, steamy water.

The bath made her feel almost normal again. She washed her hair and left it hanging loose, dressing in a pair of white jeans and a loose white cotton sweater before going downstairs to find Pasquale, and the coffee.

She stood in the doorway watching him, enjoying the sight of such a very masculine man looking so thoroughly at ease in the domestic domain of the kitchen.

His dark eyes flicked over her impassively. ‘Feeling better?’ he enquired.

Physically, yes, certainly. But there was still that tingling awareness fizzing around her veins which his touch had brought to life. ‘Much better,’ she answered politely, and then her gratitude came out in a rush. ‘I wanted to thank you, Pasquale—for...’ it sounded a bit over the top to say it, but say it she must ‘... saving my life,’ she gulped.

He shook his head and smiled gently. ‘Let’s forget it.’

But she would never forget it, she knew that, and the burgeoning, almost schoolgirlish attraction she had felt towards Pasquale suddenly flowered and blossomed into mature life.

I’m in love with him, she thought, with a calm certainty.

‘Sit down,’ he offered, and she drew up one of the tall stools he’d indicated and sat, leaning her elbows on the counter as she struggled to say something which didn’t involve the fact that he’d seen her half-naked just minutes ago. Sitting there, with her still damp hair and her face completely bare of make-up, she suddenly felt very young and very boring.

‘You look very efficient in the kitchen!’ she remarked brightly. ‘I’m surprised!’

He raised his dark eyebrows fractionally, but didn’t comment on the sexism inherent in her remark; instead he began to pour the fragrant brew into a large porcelain cup. ‘The Italian male is renowned for many things, but not, I think, for his prowess in the kitchen,’ he said as he pushed the cup towards her.

She knew that. She knew, too, exactly what they were renowned for... For being wonderful... lovers... She gulped, and took a deep breath. ‘So you decided to break with tradition?’ she joked.

A sudden bleakness dulled the magnificent eyes as he added sugar to his own cup. ‘Unhappily, yes. One cannot have servants on hand every minute of the day, and when my mother died...’ He hesitated. ‘Well, Papà was in a state of shock for such a long time, and Francesca was too young...’