Mediterranean Millionaires

‘You’re amazing, gioia mia.’ Angelo surveyed her with rampant appreciation and dropped a teasing kiss on her brow. So what if he had never done fidelity before? He had never spared much thought for his sexual relationships, but he was becoming powerfully aware that she had an extra-special something that brought a whole new dimension to their every encounter. He should be congratulating himself on his amazing perception. Had he not recognised her extraordinary appeal the very first moment he met her? Hamilton’s daughter she might be, but she was also a triumph worth a harem of ten. Smiling, he vaulted lithely upright and rearranged his clothing.

Like a sleepwalker, Gwenna scrambled up on unsteady legs, wrenching at her vest with one hand and going for her discarded jeans with the other. They hadn’t even got undressed, never mind made it as far as a bedroom. She was embarrassed, hopelessly unsure of how to behave. Her mind was in total turmoil. Everything she had believed she knew about herself was being turned upside down. But she fought off her misgivings and reminded herself that Angelo seemed to be making a genuine effort.

After all, hadn’t he come looking for her this evening? He had been annoyed to find her with Toby. Had he been jealous? Perhaps Angelo was not quite as cold and unfeeling as his womanising reputation. Hadn’t he told her that she should be proud of the fact that he wanted her so much? Worrying at her full lower lip, she studied the sofa and reflected that he had not been exaggerating on that score. Maybe she was ridiculously old-fashioned. Maybe she needed to loosen up a little and stop fretting about the moralities. Although it was obvious that a promise of fidelity was a major undertaking for him, he had given it to her, she reminded herself bracingly. No longer was everything on his terms.

‘We need a shower.’ With that husky, mocking assurance, Angelo closed a lean hand over hers and walked her upstairs.

Gwenna was in a daze—a happy daze, and that acknowledgement stunned her. Her fingers trembled in his and his grip tightened. She had the feeling he didn’t want to let go of her and she liked that. He was making her feel things she didn’t understand, making her think things that struck her as unwise. It was just the impact of all the physical stuff that was confusing her, she reasoned, hurriedly squashing an almost overwhelming sense of vulnerability.

Her mobile phone rang two steps inside the door of a palatial bedroom. She dug it out to answer and walked away from Angelo the minute she recognised Toby’s familiar voice. ‘Yes, of course, I’m all right,’ she muttered in some embarrassment.

Angelo froze, dark eyes flaring angrily as he worked out who had called her. Here she was in his bedroom and she was just chatting to the guy as though that was all right, acceptable, even normal. His perfect white teeth gritted when she gave him an apologetic glance and finished the conversation with the gentle assurance that she would be in touch soon. She smothered a yawn with a polite hand.

‘I don’t think you should be accepting calls from him.’

Delft-blue eyes met his in honest surprise. ‘Why not? Toby’s my oldest friend.’

‘You’re in love with him,’ Angelo spelt out with stinging cool.

‘But nothing’s going to happen. Toby doesn’t think of me that way.’ Embarrassment and uncertainty, however, were claiming her. She always tried to be fair, always endeavoured to look at opposing points of view. It occurred to her that in the light of the fuss she had made about fidelity, Angelo probably thought he had every right to object to her friendship with Toby.

‘But I don’t like it,’ Angelo countered flatly.

Absorbing the smouldering aspect of Angelo’s intent gaze, Gwenna was surprised to feel an unexpected twinge of amusement. She dipped her head to hide it. He was so possessive, so incredibly passionate. He was not at all the cold, callous and insensitive guy she had once believed. ‘I can see your point,’ she answered with determined tact.

The savage tension in Angelo’s broad shoulders eased. He took her into a vast en suite bathroom and undressed her. Each garment was removed with subtle caresses and an exquisitely skilled sensuality that made her quiver and burn. The bright lights made her feel desperately shy but not even that could suppress the helpless tingle of arousal he roused. The lush, swollen heart of her ached but it didn’t stop her wanting him, didn’t stop the hunger rising to a torturous peak of need. He took her in the shower. She shut her eyes tight, surrendering to the melting ripples of slow burning erotic pleasure and the shivering, whimpering rapture of delirious relief. Afterwards, she just wanted to sleep and could hardly stand upright. He wrapped her in a fleecy towel.

‘I wish you would stay awake, passione mia, ‘Angelo complained.

‘Can’t…hardly slept last night,’ she mumbled, all the stresses of the past forty-eight hours finally taking their toll. Her eyelids felt as though weights were attached to them.

He eased her between cool sheets and she waited for him to join her. Instead she heard a door open and she peered sleepily across the room at him, noting that his sleek bronzed length was clad only in boxers. ‘Where are you going?’

‘My room is through here.’He was poised on the threshold of the room next door.

Her pale brow indented. ‘But—’

The smooth brown breadth of his muscular shoulders shifted in a casual shrug. ‘I always sleep alone. I’ll see you in the morning.’

The door closed. I always sleep alone. She had spent a lifetime sleeping alone too and could not comprehend why she should now feel rejected by his withdrawal. Exhaustion soon kicked in, however, to blur her troubled thoughts and sink her into a deep slumber.

She woke with a start, unsure of her surroundings and of what might have wakened her. In a rush she remembered that she was in Angelo’s house and she fumbled for the light switch by the bed. She was sitting up when she heard a disturbing sound from his room. A cry? Without further thought she slid out of bed and snatched up the shirt he had left in a careless heap. Hastily donning it, she opened the communicating door between their rooms.

In the dawn light filtering through the shutters she could see Angelo tossing and turning in the big bed. He was moaning something in his own language. The sheer terror in his voice grabbed her by the throat, shook her up and sent her flying straight to his side. She scrambled up on the mattress to get within reach of him and rested a soothing hand on his shoulder. His skin was as hot as fire.

‘Angelo…wake up!’ she whispered urgently, shaking him slightly.

Angelo wrenched himself up in a sudden movement that startled her. He was trembling, muttering in Italian. With a gruff exclamation, he raked rough fingers through his dishevelled black hair and he turned to study her with a frown that drew his sleek ebony brows together. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You were having a bad dream—’

‘I don’t get them—’

‘You cried out and woke me up!’

‘I couldn’t have,’ Angelo growled, dark eyes defensive, the fierce tension in his big powerful frame communicating itself to her.

Gwenna loosed a rueful sigh. Evidently, macho men didn’t have bad dreams. In the dim light he was a dazzling bronzed vision of raw masculine appeal. With his hair ruffled and blue-black stubble outlining the aggressive set of his jaw line he looked startlingly handsome, but it was the grim cast of his lustrous eyes that made Gwenna shimmy closer on her bottom and wrap her arms round him. ‘I get nightmares sometimes…’

‘Really?’ Angelo said very drily, but she noticed he didn’t push her away.

Gwenna rested her chin on his shoulder, absently drinking in the warm and already familiar scent of his skin. ‘I wasn’t there when it happened but I used to dream I saw my mother’s car crash. Then when I was at boarding-school—’

Angelo tensed. ‘When was that?’

‘I was ten when Dad first set up home with Eva and her daughters. Unfortunately, Penelope and Wanda didn’t take to me and, for the sake of peace, I was sent off to school. I hated it.’

‘Why…were you bullied?’

‘For waking the other girls up with my nightmares and being a terrible cry-baby.’ Gwenna winced in remembered shame over her past weakness. ‘I was horribly homesick—’

Angelo reached behind him with a long arm and tipped her round and deftly forward into his lap. ‘I was too, but I didn’t have a home to go to any more.’

‘You boarded too?’

‘My mother was dead and her generous employer paid for my education at an exclusive school. I didn’t fit in. Sardinian mothers spoil their sons. I spoke lousy English, and I was a science geek and very small—’

Gwenna squinted up at his shadowy profile. ‘Small?’ she interrupted in disbelief.

Angelo nodded. ‘Tiny…I didn’t shoot up until I was well into my teens.’

‘Were you bullied too?’

‘Of course not.’

But Gwenna caught a certain intonation in his dark-timbred drawl and sighed. ‘Yes, you were. I can tell.’

‘How? With your crystal ball, bella mia?’ Long, taunting fingers explored beneath the shirt she wore and she shivered, her breath catching in her throat. He cupped a pouting breast and in coaxing its tender pink nipple to straining prominence he provoked a gasp from between her lips.

‘Stop trying to distract me…’ she muttered breathlessly.

Angelo swung her down onto the bed beside him and shifted over her in one lithe motion, angling his hips into the soft cradle between her thighs to acquaint her with his thrusting hardness. Scorching eyes scorned her reproachful scrutiny. ‘Is that what I’m doing?’

‘But I want to know…I really want to know what happened to you to make you sound so scared!’ she protested.

His fabulous bone structure clenched hard and he was pale. ‘I was burned with cigarettes, kicked where it most hurts and beaten up.’

‘Oh my word…’ She was overcome by horror and consternation, and her eyes glistened, awash with moisture. ‘Angelo…that’s awful. And you still dream about it?’

‘Sì…’ Even as he wondered why the hell he had told her, Angelo was surveying her reaction in fascination.

Gwenna struggled to fight off the tears of sympathy without much success. She gulped, swallowed, sniffed and finally linked her arms tightly round him and hugged him hard. She was thinking of that bewildered and bright little boy, suddenly deprived of a loving mother and plunged into an alien environment.

‘It made me tough…I was too soft, bellezza mia. It was good for me—’

‘Don’t talk rubbish!’ Gwenna gasped, sucking in a steadying breath of oxygen. ‘I mean, I was just teased and scolded. But you were brutalized—’

‘Do you think I deserve a sympathy shag?’ Angelo enquired in silken interruption.

Her clogged lashes lifted on troubled blue eyes. ‘Sometimes you can be really offensive.’

Almost imperceptible colour scored his superb cheekbones.

‘And the answer is no…not because I’m annoyed with you but because—and I find this very embarrassing—I think I would find it rather uncomfortable right now.’ Grinding to a mortified halt as she referred to the fact that she was rather sore, she bit her lip and turned her face away.

Angelo hadn’t thought of that possibility and guilt came out of nowhere and attacked him full force. It was less then forty-eight hours since she had been a virgin and he had been pretty demanding as well as passionate. Either he had a cold shower or he introduced her to a more creative way of satisfying his high sex drive.

‘I can be a selfish bastard,’ he remarked and waited confidently for her to argue that description.

But it did not even occur to Gwenna to contradict him for a statement she considered accurate. ‘Maybe we could…later.’

‘Later I’ll be in New York, cara mia,’ Angelo groaned in frustration, releasing her reluctantly from his weight but tugging her into his arms, fully intent on attacking her learning curve.

Gwenna squinted at the face of the clock by the bed and gasped. ‘My goodness, is that the time?’

‘It’s only half past six,’ Angelo told her gently.

‘In less than an hour it’ll be feeding time at the pet hotel and I don’t want to be late,’ she lamented, pulling free and rolling over to vacate his bed at a frantic pace. ‘The staff don’t mind me going to give Piglet breakfast because he wouldn’t eat otherwise. But they do like me to fit in with their routine and they don’t like visitors between eight and nine in the morning.’

Barely able to credit that harried explanation, Angelo sat up. ‘Give me a moment,’ he urged tautly. ‘Are you telling me that you’re running over there every single morning to feed that animal?’

‘Evenings too…he has a very tiny tummy,’ Gwenna told him defensively. ‘You should see him on the webcam in his kennel…he’s so depressed, it would break your heart. He won’t even look at the TV or play ball any more.’

Her departure from his room was hasty. Angelo cursed vehemently while he took a cold shower and strode out of the wet room determined to get a look at Piglet malingering on the webcam. And there he was, the clever little tyke, curled up on his gilded four-poster bed with his head sunk between paws, little round eyes dull and his ridiculous bat ears drooping. In no need of canine acting lessons, he was the very picture of full-blown doggy misery.

But Gwenna was devoted to her pet. Totally devoted and obsessed, Angelo reflected dourly. And why not? How much love and attention had she got from her sleazy father and a mother who had probably only had her in an effort to destroy her lover’s marriage? He lifted the phone. When Gwenna got out of his bed at dawn to trek across the city simply to feed the dog, it was time to release Piglet from captivity.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANGELO surveyed the huge crowded room with concealed dissatisfaction. He wondered why it was that when fate gave him what he believed he had always wanted he should find it so irritating. Clingy women who remained welded to him like superglue in company had always exasperated him.

In the course of a month, he had learned that Gwenna did not cling, shadow him round the room or continually seek ways to attract his attention. In fact, he sometimes felt like handcuffing her to his wrist or tagging her with a satellite-navigation system he could use to locate her when he wanted her back by his side. When she got talking to his guests, she lost track of time. She was wildly popular with the garden enthusiasts and had to be regularly rescued from those who took advantage of her horticultural knowledge to request free advice and even personal visits.

‘Where is she?’ Angelo was finally forced to ask Franco.

A few minutes later, his chief of security at his heels, he strode out to the rear terrace of his impressive London abode and looked down into the garden below. Her iridescent blue evening gown trailing across the damp grass in her wake, Gwenna was showing off a flowering wall plant to a man and a woman. The man was a notoriously lecherous Swiss banker. That he should even be close to Gwenna set Angelo’s teeth on edge.

Franco cleared his throat. ‘You know, boss…Miss Hamilton doesn’t know she might be rattling your cage.’

‘Is that a fact?’ Angelo murmured without expression.

‘She’s a very friendly lady, who loves helping people,’ the older man remarked into the awkward silence.

So, that dangerous virus of niceness was subverting the loyalties of all the staff who came into regular contact with her, Angelo acknowledged sardonically. She took what Angelo considered to be an inordinate interest in other people and made no distinction between his employees and his acquaintances. Even Franco, a tough nut with a jaundiced view of the female sex, was eager to speak up on her behalf. His chauffeur, cured of a persistent cough with the gift of some magical mixture derived from honey, regarded her with positive reverence. His hard-hitting senior PA had mentioned how very pleasant and courteous Gwenna was. His chef conjured up special dishes adorned with horticultural motifs because she had planted herbs in containers for him.

Unfortunately, Angelo felt pretty much excluded from that general niceness and that awareness nagged at him like a fine stiletto knife in his side. She did not take an inordinate interest in him or question his absences. There was a barrier beyond which she did not go. But she did set him on fire in bed and wasn’t that what was most important? he asked himself impatiently. Sometimes he joined her at dawn after an all-night meeting. No woman had ever given him so much pleasure and he went to great lengths to make time to be with her. He also gave her a lot of attention. Naturally he wanted her to be content with her role in his life and he was a very generous lover. But she was not responding to his efforts to gratify her.

She wore the clothes and the jewellery he gave her with indifference, shedding them for jeans and T-shirts the first opportunity she got. Film premières and fashionable parties did not impress her. Celebrities, the very few that she actually recognised, roused an equal lack of enthusiasm. His houses were a roof over her head, but no more, and only the outside spaces were capable of engaging any real interest. Hadn’t he reunited her with her precious pet? Did he complain when that tiny psychologically disturbed mutt lay in wait to attack him? Piglet was the canine version of a piranha fish.

But what bothered Angelo most of all was the sneaking suspicion that Gwenna was not happy. She didn’t brandish that unhappiness, never mentioned it and didn’t droop in public. Yet he was continually conscious of it. Was she pining for Toby James? The very suspicion filled Angelo with a murderous tide of hostility. Infuriated by that lack of mental discipline, he used his fierce strength of will to thrust both the name and thought from his mind.

And if she was unhappy, Angelo was aware that he would soon be breaking news that would make her even unhappier. Three weeks ago, he had had a call from the lawyers he had instructed to check over every aspect of the properties that Donald Hamilton had signed over. Question marks had speedily been raised by certain anomalies in the paperwork and further extended investigation had revealed that Hamilton was guilty of yet another crime. Angelo now had the proof of an unscrupulous fraud that would destroy Gwenna’s faith in her father for ever.

Her face pink from the attention Johannes Saudan was paying her and the dagger looks of resentment emanating from his girlfriend, Gwenna answered the middle-aged banker’s query as briefly as she could. When she saw Angelo on the terrace above, it was a relief to be able to say, ‘I think Angelo wants me…’

‘What man would not? You are stunning.’ The older man’s appraisal made her feel horribly like a piece of meat on a slab.

‘Excuse me.’ Suppressing a shudder of revulsion, she headed back indoors.

Angelo strode in from the terrace to greet her. His brilliant gaze rested on hers and an erotic twist of instant heat shimmied through her pelvis. She stiffened, hating the weakness in her legs, the heavy feel of her breasts and the dulled hollow ache of response in a place she didn’t care to think about. He owned her body, she thought wretchedly. He looked at her, he touched her and she would be seduced by her own weakness and craving. Physically he reigned supreme over her for she had yet to find a way of resisting him.

‘I always have to look for you…even in my own house, bellezza mia,’ Angelo murmured silkily.

It was a reproof but she bent her head, lowered her long curling pale brown lashes and said nothing. After all, what could she have said? She operated a deliberate policy of being elusive and could hardly complain if it exasperated him. In the bedroom she was always where he expected to find her because to her mind that, according to their agreement, was where their relationship began and ended.

He had sex with her. He had sex an awful lot with her. She was honest enough to admit that she was equally keen to have sex with him. She supposed that, in the circumstances, this was fortunate, but her anguished pride and her shame at what he had made of her would not allow her to award him much notice outside the bedroom door. She had resolved not to make a fuss about the physical stuff and not to act like the virtuous virgin he had once called her. Regrettably that did not make it any easier to deal with an inner turmoil that was growing stronger by the day. In every way that mattered, that agreement offended her beliefs and destroyed her self-respect.

‘I would like to see a little more of you when we entertain,’ Angelo spelt out in the same even tone as he lifted her slender hand.

‘Okay.’ Gwenna reminded herself that he had said nothing when Piglet chewed up one of his shoes. Either time it had happened. For a man who didn’t like indoor animals he was being remarkably tolerant.

His thumb smoothed over the soft skin of her inner wrist and lingered. The faint aroma of her perfume flared his nostrils. Her pulse was going crazy. A slight tremor ran through her and the increased rapidity of her breathing stirred her breasts.

Madly conscious of the warmth of his skin against hers and of the electric sparks of awareness in the atmosphere, Gwenna glanced up at him. The dark pupils of her blue eyes were dilated. Sensual tension sizzled through her, holding her still. She was on a high and although she tried she could not pull back from that intoxicating sense of energy and power while his smouldering tawny eyes burned over her with masculine appreciation.

Angelo bent his arrogant dark head to murmur thickly, ‘How do you do this to me?’

Taunting heat pulsed at the heart of her. She felt so wicked she closed her eyes tight, fighting his electrifyingly sexual magnetism. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—’

‘Di niente. Let me show you.’ Snapping both hands over her wrists, Angelo backed into the room behind him and drew her with him.

The instant she registered his intention, Gwenna went rigid. She knew that hot, intent look on his lean, darkly handsome face. It filled her with an excitement she loathed. All too often Angelo had proved to her how weak she was by choosing unconventional times and places to slake his passion and always she surrendered, too caught up in excitement to resist. But, for a split second, she had an image of how she would look emerging from the room with tousled hair and smudged make-up and she recoiled in shame from that prospect.

‘No…not now. Your guests will notice we’re missing.’

‘So what?’ Angelo curved lean, determined hands to her hips to jerk her into more intimate contact with his hard thighs.

‘They’ll guess what we’ve been doing—’

Angelo vented a low-pitched laugh of amusement. ‘Why should they?’

But Gwenna had often seen herself in the mirror after their encounters, the feverish pink of her cheeks and the languorous daze in her eyes that told an all-too-intimate story. ‘They will.’

‘But why should we care about such things, bellezza mia?’ Undaunted, Angelo reached up to undo the halter ties at the nape of her slender neck.

‘No!’ Angry distress gripping her, Gwenna thrust his hands away from the ties. ‘You don’t care and why should you? All the men will think you’re a real ace, but I’ll just look like a slapper!’

Angelo dealt her an incredulous appraisal. ‘What has come over you? Where is all this nonsense coming from?’

‘It’s not nonsense. We really don’t need to advertise what this relationship is about,’ Gwenna slung back at him bitterly. ‘And I won’t be humiliated in front of smarmy creeps like Johannes Saudan!’

‘What did Saudan say to you?’ Angelo demanded angrily. ‘How have I humiliated you?’

‘Relax, Saudan didn’t say anything, but I could see what he was thinking and he’s not the only one—’

Angelo spread his hands in a slashing movement. ‘Will you calm down and talk sense?’

‘You put me on parade for them all like a prize poodle. The diamonds round my neck are the equivalent of a collar—’