Playboy's Lesson
The silence seemed to ring with the echo of her outburst.
Lottie looked at the floor, studying her toes in their conservative shoes with studious intent. For as long as she could remember she had always been compared, measured, against her sister.
Found wanting.
It had been unbearable in her teens; every photo call had been a form of torture for her. The press comments at times were brutal, especially to a young overly sensitive girl who hadn’t yet found her social feet.
But ever since she’d come back from Switzerland she had tried to keep her head below the paparazzi parapet. She deliberately dressed down, even dowdily on occasion. It was her way of thumbing her nose up at the fashion set who thought she wasn’t pretty or stylish enough.
She wasn’t a beautiful blue-eyed blonde. She wasn’t an extroverted butterfly that could work a crowd to her advantage, to make everyone love her in a heartbeat, to be dazzled by her and follow wherever she led.
She was a quiet mouse who liked to mull over things in solitude. To slip by unnoticed, to be in the background, to quietly get on with things that mattered without all the fuss and the fanfare.
‘Must be a tough gig playing second fiddle all the time.’
Lottie looked up at him to find his expression was still ruminative. ‘I wouldn’t want to be playing first even if I had been born to it. Madeleine loves the fact that she’ll eventually be queen. She’s good at giving orders. I’m rubbish at it.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ The corner of his mouth lifted in a wry smile. ‘So far you’ve been pretty good at snapping out orders to me.’
‘That’s different.’ Lottie stabbed at the ballroom-floor button with her index finger. ‘You don’t want my orders any more than I want to be giving them.’
He leaned against the wall of the lift, crossing one ankle over the other in an I’ve-got-all-the-time-in-the-world pose. ‘I know what you’re up to, you know.’
She hitched one of her shoulders in a guileless manner. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.’
He gave one of his low deep laughs that made her insides stumble. ‘You’re going to drag me to every mind-numbing inspection or appointment you can think of until I walk off the job in boredom. But it won’t work.’
We’ll see about that, Lottie thought as she pressed the floor to the ballroom again. ‘What’s taking this lift so long?’
As if to spite her, the lift gave a shuddering jolt and then hissed to a halt.
Fear scuttled up her spine like the sticky legs of a spooked spider. She stabbed at the button again. Frantically. Manically. ‘Come on! Get moving, you stupid thing!’
‘Looks like we’re stuck.’ He didn’t sound too worried about it. In fact, his tone contained a hefty measure of amusement.
‘Stuck?’ Lottie rounded on him, her heart feeling as if it was beating inside her throat instead of her chest. ‘We can’t be stuck! I have things to do. People to see. A wedding to plan!’ I have to get out of here before I get into a claustrophobic meltdown!
He pushed himself away from the wall of the lift to inspect the computerised control panel. ‘We’ve stalled between floors.’
She glared at him crossly, trying to control her fear with anger instead of blind panic. ‘You don’t seem the least bit put out. This is your family’s hotel. Doesn’t it worry you that the lifts are faulty? That surely can’t be good for your reputation.’ She put her fingers up in quotation marks and put on a posh travel guide voice. ‘Come to the Chatsfield and get stuck in a lift for hours.’ She dropped her hands and arched a brow. ‘Not going to look too flash on the website, is it?’
‘Not all the lifts are faulty. Just this one.’ He leaned back against the wall again. ‘This is a private one to the penthouse suite. I reckon you confused it by stabbing at the button too hard. You should try a softly-softly approach next time. Trust me—’ his sleepy, half-lidded gaze slid over her like a caress ‘—you’ll get way better results.’
Lottie ground her teeth. ‘Thanks for the lesson in managing temperamental lifts, but don’t you think you should do something like call someone for help? We could be stuck in here for hours.’
‘What fun.’ His dark eyes glinted, his mouth lifting in a slant of a smile. ‘How do you propose we pass the time till help arrives?’
A tiny shiver raced over her skin. A different one this time, not of cold primal fear but hot primal attraction. The lift wasn’t small by any means, but with him looking at her with those devilishly sexy eyes, and that wickedly tempting mouth smiling in that incendiary way, it felt like the space had shrunk to the size of a cereal box.
She could smell the sharp clean citrus scent of his aftershave, a mix of lemon and lime and some other exotic spice that intoxicated her senses like a potent drug.
She couldn’t seem to drag her gaze away from his mouth. It was quite possibly the most attractive male mouth she had ever laid eyes on. The laughter lines either side of it only added to its knee-wobbling gorgeousness. Was that why women in their hundreds fell over like drunk dominoes whenever he beamed that bad-boy smile their way? He represented everything that was sinful and tempting, wicked and hedonistic.
Lottie swung around and stabbed wildly at the button again. ‘I need to get out.’ Right now.
He stepped up close behind her and covered her hand with the broad span of his. Her heart did a crazy somersault as those long strong fingers touched hers, sending a current of high-voltage electricity through her entire body. ‘Don’t stab at it so savagely.’ His breath teased the hair around her ears in a warm minty-and-martini-scented caress as he took her fingertip between his index finger and thumb and guided it to the button pad. ‘Press softly. There, just like that.’
Lottie could feel the tall lean frame of him behind her from her cheeks of her bottom to her wings of her shoulder blades. She hadn’t been so close to a man since … since for ever.
Her boyfriend in Switzerland had been a boy.
Lucca Chatsfield was unmistakably A Man.
Her senses were not just intoxicated—they were sloshed, smashed, stoned. His hand felt so strong around hers, it made hers feel small and dainty and feminine. His body was so male. She could feel its latent strength in his light hold and in the way his hard and leanly muscled thighs brushed hers from behind.
She could not get her brain to work. It was a swirling mess of jumbled thoughts. Wanton thoughts. Wicked thoughts. Tempting thoughts.
Was he going to turn her around and kiss her? Her heart banged against her breastbone at the thought of that sensual mouth touching hers.
Should she stop him or should she just go with it to see what happened? What would it hurt to have one little kiss? She hadn’t been kissed in years. She had practically forgotten what a man’s mouth felt like. Would his kiss be hard or soft? Rough or smooth? Would it be passionate or beguilingly slow and tempting? Would he taste sweet or salty? Warm or cool?
Yikes! He hadn’t even turned her around and she could already feel the earth moving beneath her feet….
But then she realised it was the lift.
Lucca stepped back with a lazy smile as the lift doors glided open on the ballroom floor. ‘What did I tell you, little princess? Softly-softly works like a charm every single time.’
CHAPTER THREE
LOTTIE MARCHED INTO the ballroom with her cheeks still glowing hot enough to cook a couple of eggs on. He was playing with her like a mean-spirited cat does with a hapless little mouse. Teasing her, toying with her, making sport of her to pass the time. He was mocking her for her gaucheness, laughing at her. He wasn’t interested in her. He was playing a game. He was here under sufferance so what better way to amuse himself than to have a little flirtation just for the heck of it?
Softly-softly indeed! Nothing about him was subtle. He was blatant. Flagrant. Shameless.
And oh-so-tempting.
She knew what he was up to. She was a challenge he hadn’t encountered before, but she would show him that there was at least one woman in the world that wasn’t taken in by sexy chocolate-dark eyes, a silver tongue and a body built for sin.
She had to get him out of her hair before he tempted her to let it down … and she knew just the way to do it.
The grand ballroom was as wide as it was long, and decorated in a Venetian palazzo style with a high ceiling painted a soft shade of grey with ornate crown mouldings of white and inlaid with gold. A series of archways lined three of the walls with plush crimson velvet curtains, and crystal chandeliers hung like giant handfuls of glittering diamonds, sending prisms of light over the highly polished parquetry floor. It was a perfect setting for a wedding reception. It had the signature Chatsfield style, glamour and sophistication about it that would make any gathering a memorable occasion.
‘Not bad, huh?’ Lucca said.
‘It needs flowers.’ Lottie walked across the floor, turning in circles as she checked out the corbels where she envisaged vases of flowers festooning like floral fountains. ‘Lots and lots of flowers.’
He took out his phone and started scrolling through his messages, presumably from all of his female followers on Twitter. ‘Flowers aren’t my thing. I’ll leave that to your expertise.’
Lottie didn’t tell him she had already discussed at length with the royal florist every placement of every bloom and petal. Instead she gave him a pert look. ‘No, you won’t. I need male input. I might make it too girlie or something. We can’t have all the male guests feeling intimidated, can we?’
His eyes gave a little roll. ‘God forbid.’
‘Come on.’ She turned sharply on her heel. ‘We have work to do.’
‘Where are you taking me?’ To her delight his voice sounded a little pained as he put his phone away.
‘To the palace gardens. I want to pick a selection to see what would work best.’ She gave him a sugar-sweet smile over her shoulder. ‘You can fetch and carry for me. Won’t that be fun?’
The palace gardens were pretty spectacular even for someone who couldn’t tell a rose from a ranunculus, Lucca thought. And early June was a fabulous time for any garden in the Mediterranean. Roses were in abundance everywhere, glorious fragrant bunches of them hanging in a sweet-scented arras over archways and trellises in a kaleidoscope of vivid colour. There were other beds of colourful blooms, old-fashioned cottage flowers such as sweet peas with a border of alyssum and lobelia, stately foxgloves and pink and blue larkspur, carnations and Canterbury bells and Queen Anne’s lace.
Princess Charlotte was moving between the garden beds, stopping every now and again to pick a bloom with a pair of secateurs she had taken from one of the gardeners. She laid each bloom carefully in the flower basket she had hanging over her arm, and every artistic cell of his wanted to capture the vision of her on a canvas.
The late-afternoon sunlight cast her alabaster skin in a golden glow. Her eyes were as mossy green as the clipped box hedges she was leaning over as she snipped a blood-red rose from a bush against a stone wall. Some strands of her hair had worked loose from her tight chignon and were bouncing in tiny cork-screws about her ears. With the abundance of flowers in the foreground and the ancient castle in the background, she looked like she had stepped out of the pages of a fairy tale.
He took out his phone and selected the camera option. Click.
She suddenly turned and glared at him. ‘Did you just take a picture of me?’
‘Yes. It was a beauty. The light was amazing.’
She put the flower basket down on the flagstones and stalked over to him with her hand outstretched. ‘Give me your phone.’
Lucca held the phone just out of her reach. ‘What’s the problem? It’s just a photo.’
Her eyes glittered and burned with resentment. ‘You had no right to photograph me without my permission.’ She made a grab for the phone by doing a series of little leaps. ‘Give it to me, damn you!’
‘Whoa there, sweetheart.’ He wrapped his fingers around her flailing arm to hold her steady on the uneven flagstones. ‘You’ll do yourself an injury bouncing about like that.’
She stamped her foot like a three-year-old child, making those cute little curls beside her ears bob up and down like springs. ‘You are an odious brute!’
‘I know, but that’s part of my endearing charm.’ He loosened his hold a fraction. ‘Now be a good girl and I’ll show you how cool the photo is.’ He brought the picture up and repositioned himself so she was standing shoulder to shoulder with him. ‘See?’
She looked at the picture for a moment and then glanced up at him with a frown puckering her brow. ‘Why did you take it?’
He slipped the phone in his pocket. ‘No special reason.’
‘I don’t like being photographed.’ She gave his fingers around her wrist a scowling look. ‘And I don’t like being manhandled either.’
He turned her wrist over and slowly raised it to his mouth so he could access the sensitive underside with his lips. He held her gaze as he brushed his lips against her delicately scented skin, watching as her eyes widened and her pupils flared like twin spills of black ink.
Lust heated his blood, set it moving, thundering, roaring to his groin as the tip of her small pink tongue darted out and swept over her lips, making them glisten invitingly. Her slim throat rose and fell as she swallowed; he even heard the tiny gulping sound in spite of the background chirruping of birds and the light whistle of the breeze moving through the cypress pines in the distance.
He lowered his head until he was barely a breath away from connecting with her lips, pausing there to give her the chance to pull back if she wanted to. He breathed in the sweet vanilla-milkshake scent of her breath as it danced over his lips as her mouth softly parted.
Come on, little princess, you know you want to….
The sound of the gravel being shifted by the tread of approaching footsteps made Lottie spring back from Lucca as if someone had fired a cannon from the battlements. She whipped around to see Madeleine coming towards them arm in arm with her fiancé, Edward Trowbridge. If the loved-up couple had seen anything untoward they were showing no sign of it; they were too engrossed in each other with their heads bent close together as they ambled along the pathway.
A tiny pang of envy twisted her insides. It would be so wonderful to have a man look at her with nothing but love and adoration in his eyes. No one would ever think she had romance running with wild hopes in her veins, but she secretly longed for a man to look at her as if his world began and ended with her. Would she ever find that sort of happiness? Or would she always be left on the sidelines, the spare part no one needed. The wallflower. The not-pretty-enough, not-smart-enough princess everyone either mocked or pitied.
Madeleine looked up and smiled. ‘Ah, Mr Chatsfield, at last I get the chance to meet you and to personally thank you for stepping in at the last minute to help Lottie with the wedding arrangements.’
‘It’s my very great pleasure, Your Royal Highness,’ Lucca said.
He was so charming, so adaptable to every situation, Lottie thought with growing annoyance. No wonder he had the reputation of being irresistible. That smile would melt through steel and leave it in a little silver puddle at his feet.
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