Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper. India Grey

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СКАЧАТЬ through which she’d had to fight a passage fell away for him, like the Red Sea before Moses. Unthinkingly she found herself following him, and couldn’t help her gaze from lingering on the breadth of his shoulders beneath the faded blue shirt he wore. He seemed to dwarf every other man in the packed room.

      He stopped in the doorway to the terrace and held out the drink to her. It was white and frothy, like a milkshake. A very expensive milkshake.

      ‘Your first Screaming Orgasm. I hope you enjoy it.’

      His face was expressionless, his tone dutifully courteous, but as she took the glass from him their fingers touched and Sarah felt electricity crackle up her arm.

      She snatched her hand away so sharply that some of the cocktail splashed onto her wrist. ‘I doubt it,’ she snapped.

      The stranger’s dark eyebrows rose in sardonic enquiry.

      ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry,’ Sarah said, horrified by her own crassness. ‘That sounds so ungrateful after you paid for it. It’s just that it’s not a drink I’d usually choose, but I’m sure it’ll be delicious.’ And account for about three days’ calorie allowance, she thought, taking a large gulp and forcing herself to look appreciative. ‘Mmm…lovely.’

      His eyes held her, dark and steady. ‘Why did you ask for it if it’s not your kind of thing?’

      Sarah gave a half-hearted smile. ‘I have nothing against screaming orgasms in theory, but,’ she held up the envelope, ‘it’s a scavenger hunt. You have to collect different items on a list. It’s my sister’s hen weekend, you see…’

       Half-sister. She probably should have explained. Right now he was no doubt wondering which one of the beautiful thoroughbred babes out there she could possibly share a full set of genes with.

      ‘So I gathered.’ He glanced down at her T-shirt and then out into the warm evening, where Angelica and Fenella and their friends had collected a veritable crowd of eligible bachelors and were cavorting conspicuously with them. ‘You don’t seem to be enjoying it quite as much as the others.’

      ‘Oh, no, I’m having a great time.’ Sarah made a big effort to sound convincing. One of Angelica’s friends was a holistic counsellor and had told her at lunchtime that she had a ‘negative aura’. She took another mouthful of the disgusting cocktail and tried not to gag.

      Gently he took the glass from her and put it on the table behind them. ‘You are one of the worst actresses that I’ve come across in a long time.’

      ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled. ‘There goes my promising career as a Hollywood screen goddess.’

      ‘Believe me, it was a compliment.’

      She looked up quickly, wondering if he was teasing her, but his expression was utterly serious. For a moment their eyes locked. The bolt of pure, stinging desire that shot through her took her completely by surprise and she felt the blood surge up to her face.

      ‘So what else is on your list of things to find?’ he asked.

      ‘I don’t know yet.’ She tore her gaze away from his and looked down at the envelope in her hand. ‘It’s all in here. As you get each item you open up the next envelope.’

      ‘How many have you got so far?’

      ‘One.’

      His long, downturned mouth quirked into half a smile, but Sarah noticed that it didn’t chase the shadows from his eyes. ‘The drink was the first?’

      ‘Actually it was the second. But I gave up on the first.’

      ‘Which was?’

      She shook her head, deliberately letting her hair fall over her face. ‘It’s not important.’

      His fingers closed around the envelope in her hand and gently he took it from her. For a second she tried to snatch it back but he was too strong for her and she looked away in embarrassment as he unfolded the paper and read what was written there.

      She looked past him into the blue summer evening. Out on the terrace, Fenella was watching her, and Sarah saw her nudge Angelica and smirk as she nodded in Sarah’s direction.

      ‘Dio mio,’ said the man beside her, his husky Italian voice tinged with distaste. ‘You have to “collect” an eligible bachelor?’

      ‘Yes. Not exactly my forte.’ Angrily Sarah turned away from the curious glances from the terrace and gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘I don’t suppose you’re one, are you?’

      The moment she’d spoken she felt her face freeze with embarrassment as she realised how it had sounded. As if she was desperate. And as if she was coming on to him. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘Let’s just pretend that I never asked that—’

      ‘No,’ he said tersely.

      ‘Please…‘ she ducked her head, staring down at the fashionably worn wooden floorboards ‘…forget it. You don’t have to answer.’

      ‘I just did. The answer’s no. I am neither a bachelor nor remotely eligible,’ he said gravely, reaching out and lifting her chin with his finger, so that she was left with no choice but to look up into his face. His eyes were black and impossible to read. ‘But they don’t know that,’ he murmured as he moved his lips to hers.

      As ideas went, it probably wasn’t his most sensible, Lorenzo thought as he tilted her face up. He saw her dark eyes widen in shock as he brought his mouth down to hers.

      But he was bored. Bored and disillusioned and frustrated, and this was as good a way as any of escaping those feelings for a while. Her lips were as soft and sweet as he’d imagined they would be, and as he kissed her with deliberate gentleness he breathed in the clean, artless smell of soap and washing powder.

      She was shaking. Her body was rigid with tension, her mouth stayed tightly closed beneath his. Anger at the women on the terrace, who had obviously given her a hard time, churned inside him, adding to the sour disappointment of the day. Instinctively he raised one hand to cradle her face while the other slid beneath the warm tumble of her silken hair and cupped the back of her head.

      Patience was one of the things that made him good at his job. The ability to make women relax and release their inhibitions was another. He held her with infinite care, close enough to make her feel cherished, but not so tightly she felt threatened. Gently his fingers caressed the nape of her neck, the secret dip at the base of her skull as his mouth very languidly explored hers.

      Triumph shot through him as a soft moan escaped her and felt the stiffness leave her body. Her plump lips parted, her spine arched towards him and then she was kissing him back, with a tentative passion that was surprisingly exciting.

      Lorenzo found he was smiling. For the first time in days…Dio, months, he was actually smiling, smiling against her mouth at the sheer unexpected sweetness of kissing this woman with the glorious auburn curls and the spectacular breasts and the sad, sad eyes.

      He had come to Oxfordshire on a sort of desperate pilgrimage; a search for places that had long existed in his head thanks to a tattered paperback by a little-known author, picked up by chance years ago. The landscape described so lucidly in Francis Tate’s beautiful, СКАЧАТЬ