Bedding His Virgin Mistress. Penny Jordan

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      Ricardo studied the newspapers the most senior of his quartet of male PAs had left on his desk for him. He read them as he drank the second of his ritual two cups of thick, strong black coffee. Some tastes could be acquired, but others could never totally be destroyed or denied. He frowned, a look that was a formidable blend of anger and pride forking like lightning in the almost basalt darkness of his eyes.

      He was not a prettily handsome man, but he was a man who commanded and indeed demanded the visual attention of others—especially women, who were aware immediately of the aura of raw, challenging male sexuality he exuded.

      He reached for the first newspaper, flicking dismissively and contemptuously through its pages until he found what he wanted. A smile, in reality no more than cynically bared white teeth against the warmth of the skin tone that proclaimed his Italian heritage, curled his mouth without reaching his eyes as he glanced swiftly down the newspaper’s much trumpeted, newly revised ‘Rich List’.

      He didn’t have to look very far to find his own name. Indeed he could count on the fingers of one hand the names that came above his.

      Ricardo Salvatore, billionaire. Estimated fortune…Ricardo gave a short, grim laugh as he looked at a figure that fell well short of his actual wealth.

      Beneath his name there were also a couple of lines describing him truthfully as single and thirty-two years old, and untruthfully as having founded his fortune on an inheritance from his uncle. A further line offered the information that, in recognition of his charitable donations to a variety of good causes, it was rumoured that Ricardo Salvatore was to be given a knighthood.

      Now Ricardo did smile.

      A knighthood! Not a bad achievement for someone who had been orphaned by the deaths of his young Italian mother and British father in a rail accident, and who, because of that, had ended up growing up virtually alone in the worst of Naples’ slums. It had been a tough and sometimes brutal way to grow up, but occasionally Ricardo felt that he had more respect and admiration for the companions of his youth than he did for the people he now mixed with.

      Family ties and close friendships were not things that had ever formed a part of the fabric of his life, but he did not feel their absence. In fact, he actively liked his solitariness, and his corresponding freedom from other people’s demands. He had learned young how to survive—by listening and observing—and how to make his own rules for the way he lived his life. He drew his strength from what existed within him rather than what other people thought of him. He had been just eighteen, fiercely competitive and ambitious, when he had gambled for and won the money that had enabled him to buy his first container ship.

      He dropped the newspaper onto his desk, picked up the file adjacent to it marked ‘Potential Acquisitions’ and started to speed-read through its contents. Ricardo was always on the look out for promising new acquisitions to add to his portfolio, and Prêt a Party would fit into it very neatly.

      The first time he had heard of the organisation had been when a business acquaintance had mentioned it in passing, commenting that he was a family friend of its young owner. In fact, knowing Marcus Canning as he did, he was rather surprised that a man as financially astute as Marcus hadn’t seen the potential of the business for himself.

      He gave a small shrug. Marcus’s reasons for not acting on the potential of Prêt a Party were of relatively little interest to him. By nature Ricardo was a hunter, and, like all hunters, he enjoyed the adrenalin-boosting thrill of the chase almost as much as he enjoyed the ultimate and inevitable kill at the end of it.

      Prêt a Party might only represent a small ‘kill,’ but Ricardo’s preparations for the chase would still be carefully planned.

      The normal avenue of obtaining detailed industry reports was not one he favoured; for one thing it tended to alert every other hunter to his interest, and for another he preferred his own methods and his own instincts.

      The first thing he wanted to do was find out a good deal more about how the business worked—how efficient it was, how profitable it was, and how vulnerable to a takeover that would be profitable to him. The best person to tell him that was, of course, the owner, Lucy Blayne, but she was hardly likely to equip a potential and predatory buyer with such information. Which was why he had decided to pose as a potential client. The kind of fussy client who wanted to know every single in and out of how things worked and how his commission would be handled before he gave it. The kind of client who insisted on seeing Prêt a Party’s organisa-tional capabilities at first hand.

      Of course in order to have these ‘eccentricities’ catered for, he in turn would have to dangle a very large and very juicy carrot in front of Lucy Blayne.

      And that was exactly what he was going to do.