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PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan's novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan's fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

CHAPTER ONE

LIFTING her head from her camera, through which she had been studying a model posing provocatively in matching bra and briefs, Lily recoiled instinctively from the scene in front of her.

Almost naked male and female models—the girls all fragile limbs and pouting mouths, some of them open in conversation, or drinking water through straws so as not to spoil their carefully applied make-up, and the boys with their gym-toned bodies—stood together as they submitted themselves to the attentions of hovering hair and make-up artists. Fingers tapped away on mobile phones, gleaming tanned skin contrasted with the catalogue client’s underwear all the models were wearing for the shoot. Heavy beat music boomed out into the small space despite the fact that some of the models were listening to their own iPods.

In other words it was a normal chaotic studio fashion shoot.

‘Has that last male model arrived yet?’ she asked the hairstylist, who shook her head.

‘Well, we can’t hold the shoot any longer. We’ve only got the studio for today. We’ll have to use one of the other male models twice.’

‘I can spray on some dye that will darken the blond guy’s hair, if you like?’ the stylist offered, reaching out to steady the rail containing more underwear to be modelled as it swayed dangerously when one of the models pushed past it.

Looking around, Lily felt her heart sink. She had grown up in this world—until she had turned her back on it and walked away—and now she disliked, almost hated it, and all that it represented.

Given free choice, this cramped, shabby studio with its familiar smell—a mix of male pheromones, sweat, female anxiety, cigarettes and illegal substances that seemed to hang invisibly in the air—was the last place she wanted to be.

Edging past a chattering group of models to get to the door, she put down her camera on a nearby table and went to check the pose of the pretty girl with the wary charcoal-grey-eyed gaze, wondering as she did so how many young hopefuls had entered the industry imagining that they would leave with a contract to model in a top fashion magazine only to discover a much seamier side to modelling. Too many.

This kind of shoot was the unglamorous rump end of what it meant to work in fashion, and a world away from money-no-object glossy magazine shoots.

She hadn’t wanted to do this. She was here in Milan for a very different purpose. But she had never been able to resist her younger half-brother’s pleas for help and he knew it. Rick’s mother—her father’s second wife—had been very kind to her when she had been young, and she felt that it was her duty now to repay that kindness by helping her half-brother. She couldn’t ignore her sense of duty any more than she could ignore all their late father had been.

She had tried her hardest to dissuade Rick from following in their famous and louche father’s footsteps, but to no avail. Rick had been determined to become a fashion photographer.

Satisfied with the model’s pose, she went back to the camera—only to frown in irritation as the door to the studio swung open, throwing an unwanted shadow across her shot, along with an equally unwanted suit clad male torso. The missing male model had obviously finally arrived—and ruined her shot by stepping into it.

Thoroughly exasperated, she pushed back the shiny swing of her blonde hair and told him, without removing her gaze from her camera, ‘You’re late—and you’re in my shot.’

It was the sudden silence and the stillness that had fallen over the rest of the room that alerted her to the fact that something was wrong. Her senses picked up on it and reacted by sending a quiverful of tiny darts of anxiety skimming along her spine. She stepped back from the camera and looked up—right into the coldly hostile gaze of the man who had just walked in. A tall, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, expensively suited man, whose body language reinforced the same cold hostility she could see in his eyes along with proud disdain. Against her will Lily could feel her eyes widening as she took in the reality of the man confronting her, her pulse beating unsteadily against her skin.

Whoever this man was, he was obviously no model. Even stripped he would be… He would be magnificent, Lily acknowledged, her stomach suddenly hollowing out with a sensation that took her completely off guard. If asked, she would have said—and meant it—that she was inured to male good looks, and that as far as she was concerned sexual attraction was a cruel deceit on the part of Mother Nature, designed to ensure the continuation of the species and best avoided. She had grown up in a world in which beauty and good looks were commodities to be ruthlessly traded and abused, which was why her own beauty was something she chose to downplay.

She intended to be crisp, cool and in control as she queried, ‘Yes?’ But instead of the apology for ruining her shot and the explanation of his presence she was expecting, she received an even more hostile look of silent, angry contempt that raked her from head to toe.

As yet he hadn’t so much as given a sideways look at the scantily clad girls who were now, Lily saw after a look at them herself, all gazing at him. And no wonder, she admitted.

He made the young male models look like the mere boys they were, for all their muscles, but then he was extraordinarily handsome—handsome, but cold. And Lily suspected judgemental. He exuded an air of raw male pride and sensual power, even if there was a grim harshness about his expression that warned her that whatever had brought him here it wasn’t going to be good news—for someone. But not her. He couldn’t be here for her, so why did his presence have every one of her carefully rigged inner alarm systems breaking into a cacophony of warning?

She was her parents’ daughter, Lily reminded herself. At some level that had to mean she was as vulnerable to that kind of overpowering male sensuality as her mother had been. And just as capable of using her own beauty for commercial exploitation? Lily struggled to repress the feeling that made her shudder—as though against an unwanted male touch. She would never allow herself to repeat her mother’s mistakes.

She was here to do a job, she reminded herself, not to give in to her own insecurities.

Whatever had brought him here to this shabby studio it wasn’t the prospect of modelling work. His face might be as commanding and as harshly delineated that a hundred thousand ancient Roman coins might have been struck in its patrician and imposing image. It might be the kind of face that could lead vast armies of men into war and entice any number of women into bed. But it was a face that currently bore an expression of such cutting contempt that if it was captured on camera it was more likely to send prospective buyers running for cover than rushing out to buy what he was supposed to be modelling.

Was he going to say anything to break the pool of tense silence he had created?

Lily took a deep breath, and repeated determinedly, ‘Yes?’

Another ice-cold look. The man must be close to inhuman, removed from the emotional vulnerabilities that affected the rest of the human race, not to be affected by the tension she could almost feel humming on the air.

‘You are the one responsible for this?’

His voice was quieter than she had expected, but redolent with the same power as his presence and grimly harsh.

Lily gave the studio and the models a brief concerned glance. He was obviously here on a hostile mission of complaint of some kind, and since she was standing in for her half-brother she knew that she was obliged to agree.

‘Yes.’

‘There’s something I want to say to you—in private.’

A rustle of reaction ran through the room. Lily wanted to tell him that there was nothing he could possibly have to say to her, and certainly not in private, but there was a nagging suspicion at the back of her mind that her half-brother might have done something to provoke this man’s anger.

‘Very well,’ she conceded. ‘But you will have to make whatever you want to say brief. As you can see, I’m in the middle of a shoot.’

The look of blistering contempt he gave her made Lily take a step back from him, before reluctantly moving forward through the door he was holding open for her. Out of old-fashioned good manners, or more in the manner of a guard determined not to allow his prisoner to escape?

The studio was in an old building, its door sturdy enough to block out the speculative questions Lily knew would be being asked by all the models and stylists inside it. She stood on the small landing at the top of the stairs that led to the studio, keeping as close to the door as she could.

At such close quarters to him there was nowhere to escape to—he was blocking her exit via the stairs by standing next to them.

‘Call me old-fashioned and sexist,’ he told her, ‘but somehow finding that it is a woman who is procuring young flesh for others and profiting financially by doing so is even more abhorrent and repellent than a man doing the same thing. And you are such a woman, aren’t you? You are a woman who lives off the vanity and foolishness of others, feeding them with false hope and empty dreams.’

Lily stared at him in disbelief. Revulsion filled her at the accusation he had made, accompanied by shock that he should have made it. The thought crossed her mind that he might be some kind of deranged madman—only to be squashed by the message from her senses that this was a man who was perfectly sane.

She pushed her hand into her hair a habitual gesture of insecurity and told him shakily, ‘I don’t know what all this is about, but I think you must have made a mistake.’

‘You’re a photographer who seeks out vulnerable young idiots with the promise of a glamorous modelling career that you know is all too likely to destroy them.’

‘That’s not true,’ Lily defended herself, but her voice wobbled slightly as she made the denial. After all, wasn’t what he was saying really very much in line with the way she herself felt about the modelling industry?

She took a deep breath, intending to tell him that, but before she could do so he continued grimly. ‘Have you no sense of shame? No compunction or guilt about what you do?’

Guilt. Ah, that was the word above all others that could trigger off an avalanche of dark memories inside her—a word like a poisoned dart aimed at her unprotected emotions. She had to get away from him, but she couldn’t. She was trapped here with him on the tiny landing. In her mind’s eye she saw the panic he was causing in her manifesting itself into a wild flight to escape from him, a desire to curl herself up into a ball of flesh so small that it could not be seen—or touched. But that was just in her imagination. The reality was that she could not escape.

‘This world into which you are attempting to drag Pietro—my nephew—is one of cruelty and corruption in which young flesh is used and abused by those who crave its beauty for their own debauched purposes.’

His nephew? Lily’s heart was thumping wildly. Every word he said carved a fresh wound into her own emotions, lacerating the too thin layer of fragility that was all she had to protect them.

‘I have no idea how many young people have fallen victim to your promises of fame and fortune, but I can tell you this. My nephew will not be one of them. Thank goodness he had the good sense to tell his family how he had been approached with promises of modelling work and money.’

Lily’s mouth had gone dry. She had always particularly disliked this aspect of her father’s work, knowing what painful fires of experience young models could be drawn into by the unscrupulous. To be accused as she was being accused now was such a shock that it robbed her of the ability to defend herself.

‘Here’s your money back.’ The man was slamming down a wad of euros. ‘Blood money—flesh money… How many of the vilest sort of predators were you planning to introduce him to at this party you invited him to attend with you after the shoot? Don’t bother to answer. Let me guess. As many of them as you could. Because that is what this business is about, isn’t it?’

Rick had invited the young man to accompany him to a party? Lily’s heart sank even further. Rick was a sociable guy. It was normal for him to go out after shoots and have a drink. Besides, it was fashion week, and Milan was full of important people from the top of the fashion tree. It was also full of those at the bottom of that world, though. The kind who…

She could feel a shudder of revulsion gripping her as her skin turned clammy with remembered fear and her heart pounded. She wanted to breathe fresh air. She wanted to escape from the past this man and their surroundings had brought back to her.

‘People like you disgust me. Outwardly you may possess the kind of beauty that stops men in the street, but all that beauty does is cloak your inner corruption.’

She had to get some fresh air. If she didn’t she was going to pass out. Think of something else, Lily told herself. Think of the present, not the past. Focus on something else.

The effort of trying to refocus her thoughts caused her to sway slightly on her feet. Immediately he came towards her, taking hold of her to steady her. Her brain knew the truth, but her body was reacting to a very different message that had her demanding with fierce anguish, ‘Don’t touch me.’ Her reaction to being imprisoned was instinctive and immediate, ripped from deep within her as she panicked and used her free hand to try and prise his fingers away from her wrist. But all he did was drag her further into his imprisoning hold.

Crushed against his body, Lily waited for the familiar feelings of nausea and terror to flood through her, but instead—unbelievably, and surely impossibly—her senses were sending her messages of an awareness of her captor so unfamiliar to her that they stunned her into a bewildered stillness.

Could it really be happening that, instead of filling her with repugnance, the cool cologne-over-male-warmth smell of him was actually arousing her desire to move closer to its source? How was it that the solid strength of his male body against her own felt somehow right? As though it was something her flesh approved of instead of feared. It was as though she had opened a door and walked into a world that was topsy-turvy—an Alice in Wonderland world in which what she’d expected to feel had been replaced by the unexpected. The totally unexpected, she acknowledged as she looked with bewilderment at the way her free hand was splayed out against his chest, her skin pale next to the dark fabric of his suit.

Only seconds had passed—seconds in time but an aeon in terms of her emotions. Now, alongside the confusion of what she was feeling, she had a growing sense of urgency. A desire—no, a need to be free from the intimacy of his hold. And not because she feared him, but because she feared her own awareness of him.

There was an odd look in his eyes, a sort of shocked and furious disbelief, as though he couldn’t fully comprehend something.

‘Let me go.’

The words, echoing from her past, had a galvanising effect on her captor, banishing that look immediately and replacing it with the anger she could now see in his eyes. Anger was better—anger meant that they were enemies and on opposite sides, even though it was obvious to Lily that, whoever and whatever he was, he wasn’t used to women rejecting him. His gaze was a dangerous volcano of molten gold, fixing on hers, pinning her beneath it. She could feel herself starting to tremble, weakness filling her. Tiny betraying shivers of sensation rayed out all over her body from its point of contact with his hand. Sexual awareness? Sexual desire? From her? For this man who was a stranger to her—a stranger who had already shown his bitter contempt for her? How could he have such an intense impact on her, sidetracking her away from telling him just how wrong he was about her?

Abruptly he released her, thrusting her from him, turning away from her towards the stairs and taking them two at a time, whilst she gasped for air and tried to turn the handle of the door to the studio with trembling fingers.

She was back—safe in the studio. Only Lily knew that she could never be completely safe with herself ever again. In a handful of seconds and with one automatic and instinctive male movement the protective bubble in which she had wrapped herself to defend herself against his sex had been torn from her. In his hold she had experienced an awareness of him as a man that had struck right at the core of everything she believed about herself, revealing to her a vulnerability she had promised herself she would never know. How could it have happened so quickly and so unexpectedly? So unacceptably? Like lightning striking out of nowhere? She didn’t know, and she didn’t want to know. She just wanted to ignore it and forget about it.

Numbly, she forced herself to go through the motions of getting back to work.

‘What was all that about?’ the stylist asked her curiously.

‘Nothing. Just a bit of a mistake, that’s all.’

A mistake it certainly had been—and the real mistake had been hers.

Her hands trembled as she adjusted the camera. Her very first memories included the feeling of being able to make herself feel safe behind a camera as she played with the equipment in her father’s studio, where she had been left so often as a young child, by parents too involved in their own lives to care about hers. Her camera represented security in so many different ways. It was the magic cloak behind which she could conceal and protect herself. But not today. Not now. When she looked through her camera, instead of seeing a model posing, ready for her to photograph, all she could see was an image of the man who had just ripped the security of her self protection from her.

She closed her eyes and then opened them again. Nothing had really happened to alter her life in any way. She might feel as though she had been dragged through the eye of a storm, but that storm had gone now and she was safe.

Was she? Was she really? Or was that just what she wanted—no, needed to believe?

Her mobile beeped to warn her of an incoming text. Automatically she pressed to read it, scrolling down its length with a jerky uncoordinated touch that betrayed the effect he had had on her nervous system.

It was from Rick, telling her that he’d got wind of a terrific opportunity and was flying out to New York to follow up on it.

PS, he’d texted, bkd studio in yr name. Can u pay the bill for me?

Lily straightened her body, pushing her hair back off her face. This was reality—the reality of her life and her relationships. What had just happened was nothing—and meant nothing. It should be forgotten—treated as though it had never happened.

It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. For some reason a gap had opened up in the protection she had woven around herself and she had slipped into it. Slipped into it—that was all. Not fallen through it, not become lost for ever in it, spellbound by the dark magic of an unknown man’s touch.

She had work to do, she reminded herself. Proper work—not stepping in to do Rick’s work for him. Her real purpose in being here in Milan had nothing to do with models, or fashion, or anything that belonged to the world that had been her father’s. She had her own world and her own place in it. Her world. Her safe, protected and protective world—and that world would never admit into it a man who could bewilder her senses to the point where he might take them prisoner.

Marco nodded to his PA, handing over to him the documents he had just signed, his mind on the rather trying and over-emotional phone call he’d just had from his sister. She was hoping, he knew, that he would take her son Pietro onto his personal staff once he had completed his university education, with a view to Pietro eventually being appointed to the board of the family business, which comprised a vast empire of various interests built up by successive generations of Lombardy nobles and merchants.

Marco’s own contribution to those assets had been the acquisition of a merchant bank which had turned him into a billionaire by the time he was thirty.

Now, at thirty-three, he had turned his attention and his razor-sharp intellect away from the future to focus it instead on the past, and in particular on the artistic legacy originally created by members of his own family and those like it in financing and sponsoring artists as their protégés.

Marco had never been able to understand quite where his older sister got her emotional intensity from. Their now dead parents had after all been rather distant figures to them, aristocratic and stiffly formal in the way they’d lived their lives. The upbringing of their two children had been left in the hands of nannies and then good schools. Their mother hadn’t been the type to fuss over her children in any way, but especially not physically. She had been the opposite of the normal conception of Italian mothers—proud of them both, Marco knew, but never one to hug or kiss them. Not that Marco looked back on his childhood with any sense of deprivation. His personal space, his personal distance from other people, was important to him.

However, he could and did understand the concern his sister had about Pietro—even if his keenly logical brain was not able to accept her defence of her son’s reasons for accepting money in return for a so-called ‘modelling’ assignment. Her poor son needed a more generous allowance, she had told him, adding that it was Marco’s fault that Pietro had felt the need to take such a risk, because Marco insisted on Pietro managing on a ridiculously small amount of money. Of course his sister has been quick to assure him that she was grateful to Marco for intervening and going to see the wicked person who had approached her precious son. After all, they both knew what could happen to young innocents who found themselves caught up in the sordid side of modelling.

Marco’s gaze fell on the silver-framed photograph on his desk. Olivia, the girl in it, looked very young. The photograph had been taken just after her sixteenth birthday. Her pretty face was wreathed in a shy smile, her dark hair curling down onto her shoulders. She looked innocent and malleable, incapable of deceiving or betraying anyone. Her beauty was the beauty of a still unopened rose—there to be seen, but not yet fully mature. Olivia had never reached that maturity. Anger burned inside him—an anger that grew in intensity as out of nowhere he felt an unwanted echo of the electrical jolt of sexual awareness that had shocked through him earlier in the day, for a woman who should have been the last kind of woman on earth who could affect him like that. It had been a momentary failing, that was all, he assured himself. A consequence, no doubt, of the fact that his bed had been empty for the best part of a year, following his refusal to give in to his mistress’s pleas for commitment.

He stood up and walked over to the window. He didn’t particularly care for city living—or Milan. But for business reasons it made sense to keep an apartment and an office here. It was only one of several properties in his portfolio—some bought by him and some family properties inherited by him.

If he ever had to choose only one property from that portfolio it would be a magnificent castle built for one of his ancestors who himself had been a collector of the finest works of art.

Marco had been wary at first when he had been approached by Britain’s Historical Preservation Trust, with a view to his helping with an exhibition being mounted in an Italian inspired English stately home that would chart the history of the British love of Italian paintings, sculpture and architecture via various loaned artefacts, including plans, drawings and artworks. But the assurances he had received from them about the way in which the whole project would be set up and handled had persuaded him to become involved. Indeed he had become involved with it to such an extent that he had volunteered to escort the archivist the trust were sending to Italy on a preliminary tour of the Italian properties it had been decided would best fit with what the exhibition wanted to achieve.

Dr Wrightington, who had been appointed by the Historical Preservation Trust, would be touring a selection of properties selected by Marco and the trust, and Marco would be accompanying her. Her tour was to begin with a reception in Milan, after which they would visit the first properties on Marco’s list—several villas on the banks of Lake Como to the North of Milan. He knew very little about Dr Wrightington other than the fact that the thesis for her doctorate had been based on the long-running historical connection between the world of Italian art and its artists, and the British patrons who had travelled to the great art studios of Rome and Florence to buy their work, returning home not just with what they had bought but also with a desire to recreate Italian architecture and design in their own homes. The tour would end at one of his own homes, the Castello di Lucchesi in Lombardy.

Marco looked at his watch, plain and without any discernible logo to proclaim its origins. Its elegance was all that was needed to declare its design status—for those rich enough to recognise it.

He had an hour before he needed to welcome Dr Wrightington to Milan at the reception he had organised for her in a castle that had originally been the home of the Sforza family—the Dukes of Milan—and what was now a public building, housing a series of art galleries. His own family had been allies of the Sforzas in earlier centuries—a relationship which had benefited both families.

CHAPTER TWO

LILY looked round her small anonymous hotel bedroom. Her bag was packed and she was ready to leave, even though it would be half an hour before the taxi would arrive.

The label on her laptop case caught her eye: Dr Lillian Wrightington. She had changed her surname just after her eighteenth birthday, to avoid association with her famous parents, taking on her maternal grandmother’s maiden name.

Even now, over a year after she had been awarded her PhD, it still gave her a small thrill to see that title in front of her name.

Rick couldn’t understand why she had chosen the life she had—but then how could he? His memories of their father were so different from hers.

She had had the dream again last night, for the first time in ages, knowing that she was dreaming but powerless to wake herself up from it. It always followed the same course. Her father called her into the studio, telling her that she must stand in for a model who had not turned up. The thought of being photographed brought on her familiar fear. She looked for her own camera, wanting to hold it and hide behind it. Then the door to the studio opened and a man came in. His features were obscured, but Lily still knew him—and feared him. As he came towards her she tried to escape from him, calling out to her father as she did so, but he was too busy to pay her any attention. The man reached for her…

That part of the dream had been completely familiar to her. She had dreamed it a thousand times and more, after all. But then something odd had happened—something new and unfamiliar. As the horror and revulsion had risen up inside her, accompanied by anguish that her father couldn’t see she needed help, the door to the studio had opened again, admitting someone else, and when she’d seen the newcomer she had been filled with relief, running to him, welcoming the feel of his fingers on her arms, knowing that despite the anger she could feel burning in him his presence would protect her and save her.

Why had she turned the man who had come to the studio Rick had hired and berated her so furiously into her rescuer? It must be because he himself felt contempt for the seedier side of modelling, and therefore at some deep level of her subconscious she had assessed him as a safe haven from those that she herself had learned so very young to fear. And was that the only reason? Lily gave a small mental shrug. What other reason could there be? What other reason did there need to be. Sometimes it was a mistake to dwell on things too deeply and to over-analyse them.

What mattered more was why she had had the dream again, after nearly three years without having it. She suspected she knew the answer to that particular question. The whole ambience of that studio had aroused too many painful unwanted memories. Memories that belonged in her past, she reminded herself determinedly. She was another person now—a person of her own creation and in her own right. Dr Lillian Wrightington, with a doctorate in the influence of Italian art and architecture on the British grand house.

Reception finally called to say her taxi was outside, and she went down to the lobby, wheeling her suitcase behind her. She was, she admitted, slightly apprehensive about meeting the Prince di Lucchesi—but only slightly. Her job as a freelancer archivist connected to the Historical Preservation Trust meant that she had attended enough fundraising events not to feel intimidated at the thought of mingling with the rich and titled. Besides in many cases, thanks to the research for her doctorate, she knew as much about the centuries of skeletons in their family cupboards as they did themselves, she reminded herself wryly.

Other academics might focus on the life of an artist responsible for certain works. She had focused instead on the patrons. Initially that had simply been so she could establish which patrons had been drawn to and bought which artist’s work, but then she had found herself becoming increasingly curious about why a certain person had been drawn to a certain piece of art—or a certain artist. Human relationships were at the same time both very simple and very complicated because of the emotions that drove them—because of the mazes and minefields of problems people themselves created to control the lives of others.

She could have researched the Prince online, of course, but Lily was far more interested in men and women who inhabited the past rather than those who lived in the present. The Prince was merely someone she had to deal with in order to achieve the goal she shared with the Trust.

She had still dressed appropriately for the reception, though. First impressions mattered—especially in the world of art and money. Whilst Lily had no interest in fashion per se, it would have been impossible for her to have grown up the way she had without absorbing a certain sense of style. Modestly she considered that she was helped in that by her height and her slenderness. At five nine she wasn’t particularly tall, but she was tall enough to carry her clothes well. Although normally when she was working she preferred to wear a tee shirt and jeans—a polo neck and jeans if it was cold, along with a fine wool long-line cardigan—for more formal public occasions such as this one she kept a wardrobe of simple good-quality outfits.

For today’s reception she was wearing a caramel-coloured dress. Sleeveless, with a high slashed neckline, it skimmed the curves of her body rather than clung to them. Round her neck she was wearing the rope of pearls that been handed down to her from her great-grandmother on her mother’s side. The only other jewellery she was wearing was the Cartier watch that had been her mother’s, and a pair of diamond ear-studs which she had had made from the two diamonds in her mother’s engagement ring.

After her mother’s suicide her father had given her all her mother’s jewellery. She had sold it all, apart from the watch and the engagement ring, giving the money to a charity that helped the homeless. Somehow it had seemed fitting. After all her mother’s heart had become homeless, thanks to her father’s affairs.

She had toned her dress with plain black accessories: good leather shoes and an equally good leather bag. Good quality, but not designer. In her case she had one of her favourite black cashmere long-line cardigans to wear later in the day for the journey from Milan to the world-famous luxurious Villa d’Este Hotel on Lake Como, where the Prince was going to escort her on a tour of some of the wonderful privately owned villas of the region at the invitation of their owners.

It was entirely due to the Prince that she was being given such a rare opportunity to see the interiors of those villas, her employer at the trust had told her, adding that it had been at the Prince’s suggestion and his own expense that she was to stay at the exclusive Ville d’Este, which itself had originally been privately owned.

There was no sunshine quite like the sunshine of late September and early October, Lily thought as the taxi negotiated the streets of Milan. Fashion week was almost over, but she still looked over when they passed the Quadrilatero d’Oro—the area that housed some of the world’s most famous designer shops—before heading for the Castello Sforzesco palace.

The reception she was attending was being held within the castle, which now housed several galleries containing works of art by Italy’s most famous artists. Lily was familiar with the layout of the building, having visited it whilst she had been studying for her doctorate and writing her thesis, and was a great admirer of its collections. However, after the taxi had dropped her off and she had made her way to her destination, it wasn’t either the Sforza family’s history or its art collections that brought her to a stunned halt in front of the double doors behind which the reception was to be held.

It was the man waiting for her there that brought a shocked, ‘You!’ to her lips.

She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t want to believe it but it was true. He, the man from the studio who had already harangued and insulted her once, was regarding her with an expression that said just how unwelcome to him her presence was as he announced grimly, ‘I don’t know what you think you are doing here.’

Was he daring to suggest that he thought she was pursuing him? Fortunately, before she could give vent to her feelings, Lily realised that he was staring at the suitcase in front of her, where her name was written plainly on the address label.

Focusing on it, Marco read the label in growing disbelief. Dr Lillian Wrightington.

Removing his gaze from the label, he looked up at Lily, demanding, ‘You are Dr Wrightington?’

Lily supposed that by rights she should feel a certain sense of satisfaction at his obvious disbelief, but the reality was that it was hard for her to feel anything other than a stomach churning, knee-knocking despair. Not that she was going to let him see that. Not for one minute.

Instead she drew herself up to her full height, tilting her chin firmly as she responded, ‘Yes. And you are?’

He didn’t like that, she could see. He didn’t like it one tiny little bit. Anger blazed like an inquisition fire in the depths of the tawny gold eyes.

‘Marco di Lucchesi,’ he answered her stiffly.

The Prince? He was the Prince? Her escort for the next two weeks?’

Her leaden feeling of despair threatened to become a bubble of wild, panicked hysteria. Maybe he was just a member of the royal family. Someone sent on the Prince’s behalf? Lily sent up a small prayer to fate. Please, please let that be so.

The doors behind them opened and an official came bustling out, saying when he saw Lily’s case, ‘Permit me to arrange for your luggage to be stored somewhere safe for you until you are ready to leave, Dr Wrightington.’

‘Yes. Yes, thank you,’ Lily said with a smile, before turning back to Marco to ask, dry-mouthed, ‘Marco di Lucchesi? Prince di Lucchesi?’

‘I do not use the title.’ His curt response blew away her fragile hopes like a tornado attacking soap bubbles. ‘If you are ready I will escort you inside and make some introductions for you. Several of the families whose homes you will be seeing are represented amongst those attending the reception.’

Lily inclined her head.

‘The Historical Preservation Trust supplied me with a copy of the guest list.’

‘Some of the family trees are rather complex. It is not always easy to know who owns what.’

Not for the ordinary English tourist, perhaps, but Italian genealogy where it related to grand houses and villas were her field of expertise. It was a sign of how much seeing him had shaken her that she did not feel like pointing that out to him, Lily acknowledged. Nevertheless she knew that it was war between them, with gauntlets thrown down and challenges made. Language could be every bit as filled with subtle textures that held concealed messages as art.

Her suitcase had been wheeled away. Marco was standing to one side of her, and the doors—her escape route—were directly in front of her. Refusing to look at him, Lily headed determinedly for them.

She almost made it—would have made it, in fact, if at the last minute he hadn’t beaten her to the doors, with Machiavellian timing and a male stride that easily outpaced her high-heeled gait. He barred her escape by the simple expedient of placing his arm across the closed doors.

There was nowhere for her to go—nothing for her to do other than either stand where she was, a safe couple of feet away from him, or walk into him.

Walk into him? In a series of images inside her head she could see the physical contact there had already been between them. She could feel again her own inexplicable reaction to it. The ante-room was empty, the air in it cool, but she could feel perspiration breaking out along her hair-line. Why had this had to happen? Why had he had to come into her life?

Wasn’t there an even more important question she should be asking herself? her inner critic taunted her. Shouldn’t she really be asking why he disturbed her so much? Why his mere presence was enough to cause a scarily powerful undertow of emotions and sensations within her?

He’d touched her first. And, like her, he had recoiled at that first contact as though he had suffered the same shock of sensation and awareness that had electrified her. That should surely have put them on a level battleground. But somehow it had not. Somehow he remained in possession of the higher ground.

It didn’t matter what he had or had not experienced, Lily told herself protectively. What mattered was what had always mattered to her, and that was maintaining her own security—emotionally, mentally and physically.

Marco frowned. What was that scent she was wearing? It was so delicate and alluring that it made him want to move closer to her to catch its true essence. Which no doubt was exactly why she was wearing it so sparingly, he thought cynically, reminding himself that he had far more substantial and important questions he wanted answers to than the name of her scent.

‘Does the trust know about the kind of work you do in your spare time?’

He was threatening her, or at least attempting to threaten her, Lily recognized. Even if he had not put that threat into exact words. Anger and fear burned a caustic path over her emotional nerve-endings. He was wrong about her. He was misjudging her. He probably thought he was far too important for her to risk offending him by standing up to him. She had a right to defend herself, though, and that was exactly what she was going to do—as little as she liked being put in a position where she had to explain herself to him.

‘I wasn’t working—as such. I was simply doing a favour for…for a friend, and standing in for them at the last minute.’ It was the truth, after all.

Marco felt his anger against her grow and burn even more hotly. She was playing with words, using those that suited her and discarding those that did not. Just as she played with the vulnerable young lives of silly young fools like his nephew. ‘So the trust doesn’t know?’

‘There is nothing for them to know. I did a favour for…for someone, and—’

‘A favour? Is that what you call it? I have a very different name for what you were doing.’

How could this woman, this Dr Lillian Wrightington, be the same woman he had caught trying to bribe his nephew into modelling for her?

It seemed impossible…but it wasn’t. Quite plainly Dr Wrightington was a woman who lived two very separate lives. What could possibly motivate a woman highly qualified and presumably able to command a respectable salary to involve herself in such sleaze? The anger and pain he had felt over Olivia’s death surged through him. He could taste it in his mouth, feel it burning his emotions.

They had been childhood friends, expected by their families to marry one day. Theirs would have been a platonic union, a business arrangement, and Olivia had assured him that she wanted the same thing, too. Only she’d been leading a secret life, duped into chasing fame as a model, and it cut deep to think that the girl he’d thought he knew had been deceiving him all that time.

Olivia had never found that fame. Drugs and ultimately prostitution had dragged her into the gutter and from there to her death, and her journey there had been facilitated by a woman like the one standing in front of him now. A woman who bought beautiful young flesh for those with a taste for it, and who deceived those who possessed that beautiful young flesh with promises of fame and fortune.

He had trusted both Olivia herself and that woman, but they had both lied to him about their intentions. That knowledge had left a raw wound within him that his pride could not allow to heal. They’d given him their word, their promise, they’d taken his trust and destroyed it. He’d have to be a complete fool—a weak, easily manipulated fool—to trust another woman now. His cynicism burned inside him like vitriol.

‘Why do you do it?’ he asked grimly.

Lily could feel the icy-cold blast of his contempt like a burn against her skin. It made her want to shrink into herself in anguished pain. What had she ever done to warrant his harshness towards her? Nothing. And yet the knowledge that he felt contempt for her pierced her. What was it about him that made her own emotions react so deeply to him? As though somehow she was hyper-sensitive to him—as though some kind of magnetic link existed between them, enclosing her and making her acutely vulnerable to the force-field of his personality, no matter how hard she struggled to resist the effect he was having on her.

‘Why do I do what?’

‘Don’t pretend not to understand me. You know perfectly well what I mean—that seedy studio, the manner in which you approached my nephew.’

His words brought a guilty flush of colour to her skin, even though she had nothing to feel guilty about.

‘I’ve already told you I was simply doing someone else a favour.’

Far from placating him, her explanation served only to add to his biting contempt.

‘I can imagine the kind of favour you were attempting to do,’ he told her brutally, the fury inside him spilling over. ‘Tell me something,’ he demanded. ‘Does what you’re doing never worry you? Do you ever give any thought to the damage and destruction you and your kind cause?’

Lily’s heart had started to thump heavily and uncomfortably. She was beginning to feel panicked by his attack. He was advancing into private territory within her that was filled with thinly healed sores. It was incredibly ironic that he should make the assumptions about her that he had. Incredibly ironic and almost unbearable. Only her keenly honed instinct to protect herself stopped her from protesting and from justifying her involvement. Instead, as calmly as she could, she said unsteadily, ‘As I’ve already told you—not that I need to explain or excuse my actions to you—I was asked by my…by someone to take over a photographic shoot for a clothes catalogue. Nothing more than that.’

‘So what about the young man who was approached in a student bar and offered the opportunity of doing some modelling work in this shoot? Didn’t that worry you? Didn’t you question your…friend about why he had found a model in such a way? There are, after all, model agencies who I am sure have books filled with the names of young men who already know at least some of the pitfalls of the business in which they are involved.’

Lily could feel the sting of his words against her emotions, lacerating and flaying them as effectively as though he had laid a whip to her flesh. The only difference was that the wounds he was inflicting on her she could and must keep hidden from him. In the life she had so carefully created for herself there was no place for the girl she had once been and there never would be. She had cut herself off from her past to protect herself from her own ghosts. She would never look back at them.

Because she was still afraid of them?

Why was this happening to her? She had been so happy, so safe, had felt a real pride in herself and what she had achieved, and now because of one man—this man—who was determined to misjudge her, everything she had was in jeopardy. The desire to give in to her emotions had never been stronger, but Lily knew that she had to overcome that desire. Calmness, logic and knowing the truth must be her weapons in this fight, and she must wield them well if she was to protect herself.

Lily took a deep breath,

‘Clothing catalogues don’t exactly pay top dollar. My…the person I was helping wanted to keep his costs down. That was why he approached your nephew. No other reason.’

‘Do you really expect me to believe that? It’s illogical. After all, in addition to paying my nephew your friend also suggested he accompany him to a post-shoot party with some of fashion’s big names.’

This was too much. Lily could feel her defences crumbling. She had really had enough. She wasn’t at all happy about being put in the position of having to defend her half-brother’s behaviour, but neither did she think Marco di Lucchesi’s behaviour towards her was in any way acceptable.

He had virtually accused her of acting on behalf of a pervert bent on corrupting the innocence of his nephew. Rick had his faults, but he would only have been trying to impress his potential models—nothing more.

‘You’re mistaken about Rick,’ she insisted fiercely, ‘and about me.’ When he didn’t respond she added impulsively, ‘If you want the truth, I feel exactly the same way about the sleazy side of modelling as you do.’

Wasn’t that more or less exactly what the owner of the model agency Olivia had worked for had told him when he had gone to her for help in his quest to bring Olivia safely home? When Olivia herself had refused to listen to him? Hadn’t the woman told him that she shared his opinion of Olivia’s vulnerability and that he could trust her to protect and keep her safe? Eighteen-year-old Marco had foolishly believed her, but she had been lying, and so too was the woman confronting him now. Past experience and the facts told him that.

Why, then, when it should have been the simplest of matters to continue to denounce her, without any compunction and without any kind of emotional reaction himself, was he now discovering that it wasn’t? What was stopping him? For some inexplicable reason, and completely illogically, he was actually experiencing an unwanted but undeniable emotional reaction to her deceit. Why? Why should he care that she was a liar who couldn’t be trusted? He didn’t, Marco assured himself, and told her curtly, ‘What you’re saying does not add up, therefore it cannot possibly be true.’

Lily stared at him in stunned disbelief. Everything about his body language and the look on his face told her that nothing she could say would change his mind. He was calling her a liar, and he was making it plain that he wasn’t going to change his mind—no matter what she tried to say. It was as though he wanted to dislike and distrust her. Very well, she would defend herself by using the same ‘logic’ on him that he had used against her.

‘No one forced your nephew to accept the photo shoot, the money, or the party invitation,’ she pointed out, somehow managing to adopt a cool, clear, emotionless voice. ‘Instead of harassing me you might do better using your bullying questioning tactics on him. After all, a young man so well connected and coming from such a wealthy family shouldn’t need to accept work that pays so little—unless, of course, he had other reasons for accepting it.’

She had hit a nerve now, Lily recognised. He might not have betrayed it in any visible way, but she knew as surely as if the reaction had been hers that inwardly he had recoiled from her challenge.

‘What reasons?

His voice was harsh, almost raw with an emotion that was more than anger—as though something had been dredged up from deep within him against his will. Lily could feel herself weakening. Only he was not a man for whom she should feel compassion, she warned herself. In his way he was every bit as dangerous as those he was castigating, if not more so.

Taking a deep breath, she challenged him silkily. ‘An uncle who keeps him on too short a rope, perhaps?’

He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one little bit. And yet to her surprise, instead of retreating into an angry and arrogant princely silence, no doubt meant to indicate to her that he did not have to explain himself or his actions to someone as plebeian as she, he told her, ‘Pietro is a young man with a tendency to behave impulsively and the belief that he is immortal. Traits which in my opinion are the result of a little too much maternal indulgence. If I believe he should be able to manage within his not ungenerous allowance then I do so in the knowledge that one day he will be responsible for managing a far greater sum of money. You may think that to be keeping him on a short rope. I consider it to be encouraging him to respect the benefits of living within his means.’

‘Perhaps that is something you should be telling him, not me?’ Lily suggested. ‘I accept that your nephew is important to you, but what is important to me right now is doing what the Trust sent me here to do.’ She looked pointedly at the closed doors he had barred.

‘And you can be trusted to carry out that duty, can you? Without disappearing to undertake some very different work on the side for a “friend”?’

‘You have neither the right nor any reason to question my commitment to my work.’

‘On the contrary, I have both the right—since I am responsible for persuading people to admit you into their homes—and the reason you have already supplied to me.’

‘We are keeping people waiting,’ Lily reminded him, anxious to bring their conversation to a close and to escape from him. She looked at the door, but he was standing closer to it than she was and he was watching her.

CHAPTER THREE

THE way Marco was looking at her was making Lily’s heart thump raggedly with tension. If only someone would come and interrupt them, bring her torment to an end. But no one did, and she was left with no alternative other than to listen to him.

‘I don’t accept for one minute that the motives of you or your friend were as altruistic as you would have me believe,’ he told her.

‘I’m telling you the truth. If you can’t accept that then that’s your problem.’

‘No,’ he told her harshly. ‘You are not telling me the truth.’

His presence encircled her now. She could neither step forward nor back. He had bent his head to speak quietly into her ear, and now a thousand delicate nerve-endings were being tortured by the warmth of his breath. She felt hot and dizzy, with a torrent of sensations cascading through her caused by the fact that he had breached the polite barrier of personal space that should have existed between them.

She had to say something. She had to stand her ground. But she could hardly breathe, never mind that her flesh was almost screaming out a feral cry of panicked fear. She tried to step past him, but he moved even more swiftly, causing her to cannon into him.

Her small gasp grazed the bare skin of Marco’s neck, causing an explosion of sensual pleasure to bomb his nerve-endings and race from them along his veins like liquid fire. His response to it was so instinctive and automatic that he was reaching for her before his brain knew what was happening. Frantically it searched for an explanation for what he was feeling. How could he, a man who could quite easily remain impervious to the most blatant of erotic sensual persuasion from the women who had shared his bed, have succumbed so easily to the mere touch of her breath against his skin? What was it about this woman that ripped aside his self-control and induced in him such a primitive male response?

Of course he would release her; there was, after all no purpose in him holding her. No purpose and certainly no desire, he assured himself—and he would have released her too, if she hadn’t started to struggle against him, igniting a feeling inside him that came like a thunderbolt out of nowhere to challenge his male pride.

‘No!’ Panic had filled Lily at the way her body was reacting to the proximity of his body, as though it actually wanted that proximity, and she desperately needed to bring it to an end before he realised the effect he was having on her. But now, as she saw the look in his eyes, Lily realised that he had misinterpreted her anxiety as defiance—and she could see too that he intended to punish her for it.

That punishment was swift and shocking. His mouth taking hers in a kiss of blistering male revenge that seared her senses. It had been years since she had last been kissed—and never, ever like this. Never, ever in a way that imprinted everything about the male lips possessing hers on her senses and her psyche, from the texture of his skin to its taste. In a thousand rapid-fire shutter actions his maleness was being matched by her femaleness. Why? What was happening to her?

Lily lifted her free hand in protest, her eyes opening and widening when her fingertips grazed the flesh of his face. She could feel the contrast between the skin of his jaw where he’d shaved and the skin above it. The photographer in her, the artist, wanted to explore the lines of his face, so dramatically perfect. She wanted to. Her lips softened and parted. So that she could protest. It had to be for that. It couldn’t be for anything else. And that small mewing sound locked in the back of her throat? That was a complaint, she assured herself.

His own eyes were open now, his gaze a dangerous volcano of molten gold fixing on hers. She could feel herself starting to tremble, weakness filling her, so that she was forced to lean into him. Into him and onto him.

There was a moment in space and time during which it seemed to Lily that their bodies moved together of their own volition—and then abruptly he was pushing her away from him.

What was happening to him? He never normally allowed emotion to control his behaviour. Never.

Someone was trying to open the door from the other side. Without looking at one another, never mind speaking to one another, they both stepped back from it. As swiftly and determinedly as he intended to step back from what he had felt holding her in his arms, her lips clinging to his, Marco told himself, acknowledging grimly as he did so that he had been right to have doubts about the wisdom of this project. He should have trusted his instincts and refused to get involved. The trouble was when he had had those doubts it had never for one minute crossed his mind just why he had been right to have them. It had been the ability of a foreign organisation in a foreign country to do justice to the history of Italy in general and his own family in particular that had made him feel wary about the project.

Now, though, he was having to deal with a far more immediate and personal cause for concern. And that was…

He snatched a brief, hard glance at Lily. On the face of it there was no immediately discernible reason why his flesh should be so aware of hers, or so responsive to it. No discernible reason why his senses should so attuned to her presence, her scent, the shadow cast by her body, the sound of her breathing, the lift of her breasts as she did so. Grinding his teeth against the way his thoughts were running free, he battled to bring them back in order, straining the muscles of his self-control just as controlling runaway horses and chariot would have strained the muscles of an experienced Roman gladiator.

She was attractive enough—quietly and discreetly beautiful, even. In a way that blended perfectly with her current persona whilst being completely at odds with the persona she had revealed in the studio—her real persona, he was sure. And was that the persona to which he was attracted? Like a schoolboy aroused by the thought of the pseudo-wantonness of a naked centrefold model? Was there deep within him a hitherto unknown part that was attracted to and aroused by such a woman? The thought revolted him, and it told him all he wanted to know about his real feelings. A part of him would have preferred that to be the truth rather than having to admit the actual truth—which was that his body was every bit as responsive to her in her present role as Dr Lillian Wrightington as it had been to the streetwise, jean-clad, predatory woman.

So physically he had responded to her? What did that mean? Nothing. Nothing at all. He would not allow it to mean anything.

Holding the door open for her, Marco told Lily in a curt voice, ‘I shall be watching you, Dr Wrightington, and if I suspect for any reason that your presence here is compromising the success of this project I shall have no hesitation in getting in touch with the trust and requesting them to replace you with someone else.’

‘You can’t do that,’ Lily protested. Her mouth had gone dry and her heart was thumping unevenly. This project meant so much to her. There’d even been talk of it being covered for a very well thought of TV arts programme. More than the career benefits that kind of exposure would bring her, though, Lily wanted to share with a wider audience the huge impact Italian art brought back to Britain had had on so many aspects of British life—from architecture to literature, from gardening to fashion, and so much more. To be dismissed from this project was the last thing she wanted.

Marco was a powerful man, and one who was already prejudiced against her. What was that sharp stab of anguish all about? She didn’t care what he thought about her. He could misjudge her as much as he wished. In fact she was glad that he had. Was she? Was she really?

Marco was still holding the door open. The buzz of conversation from the people gathered inside the room receded like an ebbing tide, until there was nothing left apart from a rustling silence as everyone looked towards them.

Whilst she felt uncomfortable, her companion seemed completely composed and in control, announcing, ‘Please accept my apologies for the fact that we are a little late. The blame is entirely mine.’

And he would be forgiven for it, Lily could tell. The smiles being directed towards him were both admiring and respectful. No one, it seemed, wished to question or query the Prince di Lucchesi.

‘I know you are all impatient to talk with our guest of honour, Dr Wrightington, so I think I shall dispense with a lengthy speech and just say instead that her scholarship in the subject of the art collected by our predecessors and the architecture of our homes should speak for itself.’

Had anyone other than her noticed that questioning ‘should’? Lily wondered, thankful of the poise she had learned from observing her mother—before heartache and prescription pills had destroyed her. It was surprisingly easy to stand tall with a smile pinned to your face once you’d learned the trick of hiding the reality of what you were feeling within yourself.

Easy, too, to make small talk as she circled the floor at Marco’s side whilst he introduced her to people with names that were woven into the very fabric of this part of Italy’s.

‘Your Grace.’ Lily responded to Marco’s introduction to an elderly duchess with a formidably upright bearing. ‘I can’t thank you enough for allowing me to see your villa and your art collection. There is a wonderful sketch in the archives at Castle Howard of one of your ancestors, drawn—’

‘By Leonardo. Yes, I have heard of it. Although sadly I have never seen it.’

Lily smiled at her. ‘I was given permission to photograph it so that I could show it to you.’

She was impressive, Marco acknowledged reluctantly. Not just in her knowledge of her subject but also in her manner—but how much of her was learned and how much the real woman? Not very much, he decided.

‘It will be interesting to compare it with the painting of my husband’s ancestor by Leonardo,’ the Duchess told Lily with a smile.

Normally Lily enjoyed this kind of occasion—the opportunity to talk with people who shared her interests and her love of Italian art—but today for some reason, after less than a couple of hours of mingling with the other guests, she developed the beginnings of a very painful pounding stress headache that made her feel slightly sick.

For some reason? She was supposed to be an intelligent woman. The reason for her tension was standing less than two yards away from her, and right now she could feel his gaze burning into her back. So the man running the project here in Italy was hostile to her and contemptuous of her—so what? She more than most people was adept at cocooning herself in her own private emotional and mental space and not allowing others to penetrate that space. Adept at it? She was an expert in it, Lily acknowledged wryly. In fact if there was a degree to be had in it she would have graduated first class with honours.

‘It will soon be time for us to leave.’

The sound of Marco’s voice from directly behind her had Lily almost choking on the sip of wine she had just taken. Not because she hadn’t heard him move—she had. She was acutely aware of every single move he made. What she hadn’t been prepared for was the warmth of his breath on the nape of her neck, where it was revealed by the soft knot of her drawn back hair. Was it just because he had caught her off-guard that she had felt the shower of tiny darts that had now brought her skin out in goosebumps? Goosebumps of delicious sensual pleasure?

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