Читать книгу Modern Romance November 2016 Books 1-4 - Линн Грэхем, Cathy Williams - Страница 12

CHAPTER TWO

DANTE’S PLANE WAS halfway over northern Spain when he made the grim discovery which sent his already bad mood shooting into the stratosphere. He’d spent much of the journey with an erection he couldn’t get rid of—snapping at the stewardesses who were fussing and flirting around him in such an outrageous way that he wondered whether they’d picked up on the fact that he was sexually excited, and some hormonal instinct was making them hit on him even more than usual.

But he wasn’t interested in those women in too-tight uniforms with dollar signs flashing in their eyes when they looked at him. He kept thinking about the understated Englishwoman and wondered why he hadn’t insisted she miss her flight, so that he could have taken her on board his plane and made love to her. Most women couldn’t resist sex on a private jet, and there was no reason she would be any different.

His mouth dried as he remembered the way she had jumped up from the bar stool like a scalded cat and run off to catch her flight as if she couldn’t wait to get away from him. Had that ever happened to him before? He thought not.

She hadn’t even asked for his business card!

Pushing her stubbornly persistent image from his mind, he decided to check on his grandfather’s precious tiara, reaching for his bag and wondering why the old man wanted the valuable and mysterious piece of jewellery so much. Because time was fast running out for him? Dante felt the sudden painful twist of his heart as he tried to imagine a future without Giovanni, but he couldn’t get his head around it. It was almost impossible to envisage a life without the once strong but still powerful figure who had stepped in to look after him and his siblings after fate had dealt them all the cruellest of blows.

Distracted by the turbulent nature of his thoughts, he tugged at the zip of the bag and frowned. He couldn’t remember it being so full because he liked to travel light. He tugged again and the zip slid open. But instead of a small leather case surrounded by boxer shorts, an unread novel and some photos of a Spanish castle he really needed to look at for a client before his next meeting—it was stuffed full of what looked suspiciously like...

Dante’s brows knitted together in disbelief.

Swimwear?

He looked at the bag more closely and saw that instead of softest brown leather embossed with his initials, this carry-on was older and more battered and had clearly seen better days.

Disbelievingly, he began to burrow through the bikinis and swimsuits, throwing them aside with a growing sense of urgency, but instantly he knew he was just going through the motions and that his search was going to be fruitless. His heart gave a leap in his chest as a series of disastrous possibilities occurred to him. How ironic it would be if he’d flown halfway across the globe to purchase a piece of jewellery which had cost a king’s ransom, only to find that he’d been hoodwinked by the man who had sold it to him.

But no. He remembered packing the tiara himself, and although he was no gem expert, Dante had bought enough trinkets as pay-offs for women over the years to know when something was genuine. And the tiara had been genuine—of that he’d been certain. A complex and intricate weaving of diamonds and emeralds which had dazzled even him—a man usually far too cynical to be dazzled.

So where the hell was it now?

And suddenly Dante realised what must have happened. Willow—what the hell had been her surname?—must have picked up his bag by mistake. The blonde he’d been so busy flirting with at the airport, that he’d completely forgotten that he was carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of precious stones in his hand luggage. He’d been distracted by her misty eyes. He’d read in them a strange kind of longing and he’d fed her fantasy—and his own—by kissing her. It had been one of those instant-chemistry moments, when the combustion of sexual attraction had been impossible to ignore, until the last call for her flight had sounded over the loudspeaker and broken the spell. She’d jumped up and grabbed her bag. Only she hadn’t, had she? She’d grabbed his bag!

He drummed his fingers on the armrest as he considered his options. Should he ask his pilot to divert the plane to London? He thought about his meeting with the Italian billionaire scheduled for later that evening and knew it would be both insulting and damaging to cancel it.

He scowled as he rang for a stewardess, one of whom almost fell over herself in her eagerness to reach him first.

‘What can I get for you, sir?’ she questioned, her eyes nearly popping out of her head as she looked at the haphazard collection of swimwear piled in the centre of the table.

Dante quickly shoved all the bikinis back into the bag, but as he did so, his finger hooked on to a particularly tiny pair of bottoms. He felt his body grow hard as he felt the soft silk of the gusset and thought about Willow wearing it. His voice grew husky. ‘I want you to get hold of my assistant and ask him to track down a woman for me.’

The stewardess did her best to conceal it, but the look of disappointment on her face was almost comical.

‘Certainly, sir,’ she said gamely. ‘And the woman is?’

‘Her name is Willow Hamilton,’ Dante ground out. ‘I need her number and her address. And I need that information by the time this plane lands.’

* * *

There were four missed calls on her phone by the time Willow left the Tube station in central London, blinking as she emerged into the bright July sunshine. She stepped into the shadow of a doorway and looked at the screen. All from the same unknown number and whoever it was hadn’t bothered to leave a voicemail. But she knew who the caller must be. The sexy stranger. The man she’d kissed. The blue-eyed man whose carry-on she had picked up by mistake.

She felt the race of her heart. She would go home first and then she would ring him. She wasn’t going to have a complicated conversation on a busy pavement on a hot day when she was tired and jet-lagged.

She had already made a tentative foray inside, but the bag contained no contact number, just some photos of an amazing Spanish castle, a book which had won a big literary prize last year and—rather distractingly—several pairs of silk boxer shorts which were wrapped around a leather box. She’d found her fingertips sliding over the slippery black material of the shorts and had imagined them clinging to Dante Di Sione’s flesh and that’s when her cheeks had started doing that Scarlet Pimpernel thing again, and she’d hastily stuffed them back before anyone on the Heathrow Express started wondering why she was ogling a pair of men’s underpants.

She let herself into her apartment, which felt blessedly cool and quiet after the heat of the busy London day. She rented the basement from a friend of her father’s—a diplomat in some far-flung region whose return visits to the UK were brief and infrequent. Unfortunately one of the conditions of Willow being there was that she wasn’t allowed to change the decor, which meant she was stuck with lots of very masculine colour. The walls were painted bottle-green and dark red and there was lots of heavy-looking furniture dotted around the place. But it was affordable, close to work and—more importantly—it got her away from the cloying grip of her family.

She picked up some mail from the mat and went straight over to the computer where she tapped in Dante Di Sione’s name, reeling a little to discover that her search had yielded over two hundred thousand entries.

She squinted at the screen, her heart beginning to pound as she stared into an image which showed his haunting blue eyes to perfection. It seemed he was some sort of mega entrepreneur, heading up a company which catered exclusively for the super-rich. She looked at the company’s website.

We don’t believe in the word impossible.

Whatever it is you want—we can deliver.

Quite a big promise to make, she thought as she stared dreamily at photos of a circus tent set up in somebody’s huge garden, and some flower-decked gondolas which had been provided to celebrate a tenth wedding anniversary party in Venice.

She scrolled down. There was quite a lot of stuff about his family. Lots of siblings. Snap, she thought. And there was money. Lots of that. A big estate somewhere in America. Property in Manhattan. Although according to this, Dante Di Sione lived in Paris—which might explain why his accent was an intriguing mix of transatlantic and Mediterranean. And yet some of the detail about his life was vague—though she couldn’t quite put her finger on why. She hadn’t realised precisely what she’d been looking for until the word single flashed up on the screen and a feeling of satisfaction washed over her.

She sat back and stared out at the pavement, where from this basement-level window she could see the bottom halves of people’s legs as they walked by. A pair of stilettos tapped into view, followed by some bare feet in a pair of flip-flops. Was she really imagining that she was in with a chance with a sexy billionaire like Dante Di Sione, just because he’d briefly kissed her in a foreign airport terminal? Surely she couldn’t be that naive?

She was startled from her daydream by the sound of her mobile phone and her heart started beating out a primitive tattoo as she saw it was the same number as before. She picked it up with fingers which were shaking so much that she almost declined the call instead of accepting it.

Stay calm, she told herself. This is the new you. The person who kisses strangers at airports and is about to start embracing life, instead of letting it pass her by.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that you, Willow?’

Her heart raced and her skin felt clammy. On the phone, his transatlantic/Mediterranean twang sounded even more sexy, if such a thing was possible. ‘Yes,’ she said, a little breathlessly. ‘It’s me.’

‘You’ve got my bag,’ he clipped out.

‘I know.’

The tone of his voice seemed to change. ‘So how the hell did that happen?’

‘How do you think it happened?’ Stung into defence by the note of irritation in his voice, Willow gripped the phone tightly. ‘I picked it up by mistake...obviously.’

There was a split-second pause. ‘So it wasn’t deliberate?’

‘Deliberate?’ Willow frowned. ‘Are you serious? Do you think I’m some sort of thief who hangs around airports targeting rich men?’

There was another pause and this time when he spoke the irritation had completely vanished and his voice sounded almost unnaturally composed. ‘Have you opened it?’

A little uncomfortably, Willow rubbed her espadrille toe over the ancient Persian rug beneath the desk. ‘Obviously I had to open it, to see if there was any address or phone number inside.’

His voice sounded strained now. ‘And you found, what?’

Years of sparring with her sisters made Willow’s response automatic. ‘Don’t you even remember what you were carrying in your own bag?’

‘You found, what?’ he repeated dangerously.

‘A book. Some glossy photos of a Spanish castle. And some underpants,’ she added on a mumble.

‘But nothing else?’

‘There’s a leather case. But it’s locked.’

At the other end of the phone, Dante stared at the imposing iron structure of the Eiffel Tower and breathed out a slow sigh of relief. Of course it was locked—and he doubted she would have had time to get someone to force it open for her even if she’d had the inclination, which he suspected she didn’t. There had been something almost otherworldly about her...and she seemed the kind of woman who wouldn’t be interested in possessions—even if the possession in question happened to be a stunning diadem, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He could feel the strain bunching up the muscles in his shoulders and he moved them slowly to release some of the tension, realising just how lucky he’d been. Or rather, how lucky she had been. Because he’d been travelling on a private jet with all the protection which came with owning your own plane, but Willow had not. He tried to imagine what could have happened if she’d been stopped going through customs, with an undeclared item like that in her possession.

Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead and for a moment he cursed this mission he’d been sent on—but it was too late to question its legitimacy now. He needed to retrieve the tiara as soon as possible and to get it to the old man, so that he could forget all about it.

‘I need that bag back,’ he said steadily.

‘I’m sure you do.’

‘And you probably want your swimwear.’ He thought about the way his finger had trailed over the gusset of that tiny scarlet bikini bottom and was rewarded with another violent jerk of lust as he thought about her blond hair and grey eyes and the faint taste of champagne on her lips. ‘So why don’t I send someone round to swap bags?’

There was a pause. ‘But you don’t know where I live,’ she said, and then, before he had a chance to reply, she started talking in the thoughtful tone of someone who had just missed a glaringly obvious fact. ‘Come to think of it—how come you’re ringing me? I didn’t give you my phone number.’

Dante thought quickly. Was she naive enough not to realise that someone like him could find out pretty much anything he wanted? He injected a reassuring note into his voice. ‘I had someone who works for me track you down,’ he said smoothly. ‘I was worried that you’d want your bag back.’

‘Actually, you seem to be the one who’s worried, Mr Di Sione.’

Her accurate tease stopped him in his tracks and Dante scowled, curling his free hand into a tight fist before slowly releasing his fingers, one by one. This wasn’t going as he had intended. ‘Am I missing something here?’ he questioned coolly. ‘Are you playing games with me, Willow, or are you prepared to do a bag-swap so that we can just forget all about it and move on?’

In the muted light of the basement apartment, Willow turned to catch a glimpse of her shadowed features in an antique oval mirror and was suddenly filled with a determination she hadn’t felt for a long time. Not since she’d battled illness and defied all the doctors’ gloomy expectations. Not since she’d fought to get herself a job, despite her family’s reluctance to let her start living an independent life in London. She thought about her sister Clover’s wedding, which was due to take place in a few days’ time, when she would be kitted out in the hideous pale peach satin which had been chosen for the bridesmaids and which managed to make her look completely washed out and colourless.

But it wasn’t just that which was bothering her. Her vanity could easily take a knock because she’d never really had the energy or the inclination to make her looks the main focus of her attention. It was all the questions which would inevitably come her way and which would get worse as the day progressed.

So when are we going to see you walking down the aisle, Willow?

And, of course, the old favourite: Still no boyfriend, Willow?

And because she would have been warned to be on her best behaviour, Willow would have to bite back the obvious logic that you couldn’t have one without the other, and that since she’d never had a proper boyfriend, it was unlikely that she would be heading down the aisle any time soon.

Unless...

She stared at her computer screen, which was dominated by the rugged features of Dante Di Sione. And although he might have been toying with her—because perhaps kissing random women turned him on—he had managed to make it feel convincing. As if he’d really wanted to kiss her. And that was all she needed, wasn’t it? A creditable performance from a man who would be perfectly capable of delivering one. Dante Di Sione didn’t have to be her real boyfriend—he just had to look as if he was.

‘Don’t I get a reward for keeping your bag safe?’ she questioned sweetly.

‘I’ll buy you a big bunch of flowers.’

‘Flowers make me sneeze.’

‘Chocolates, then.’

‘I’m allergic to cocoa.’

‘Stop playing games with me, Willow,’ he snapped. ‘And tell me what it is you’re angling for.’

Willow stared at the piercing blue eyes on the computer screen. His thick black hair looked as if he had been running his fingers through it and she remembered how it had felt to have his lips brushing over hers. It was now or never. It was all about seizing the moment and doing something you wouldn’t normally do. Because what was the point of sitting back and moaning about your fate as if it was set in stone, instead of trying to hammer out something new for yourself?

And here was a chance staring her straight in the face.

She drew in a deep breath. ‘What I want won’t cost you anything but your time. I’m being a bridesmaid at my sister’s wedding next weekend and I’m fed up with people asking me why I don’t have a boyfriend. All you have to do is pretend to be that man. For one day only, you will be my fictitious but very convincing boyfriend, Mr Di Sione. Do you think you could manage that?’