Marco's Convenient Wife. PENNY JORDAN

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      The one thing about Alice that had caught his attention when he’d read through her application and the letters of recommendation that had accompanied it was the emotional input she put into caring for her charges. It was that degree of involvement that he wanted for Angelina! He had expected her to be an emotional woman, and one with a deeply protective instinct, but what he had not anticipated and what he most certainly did not want was her totally unexpected aura of sensuality! She wore it as lightly and easily as though she herself was totally unaware of it, which made it even more of a danger than if she had wantonly flaunted it, Marco recognised.

      Grimly he turned to Louise. ‘And you,’ he questioned her. ‘You are?’

      ‘Louise is in my charge,’ Alice answered for her, assuming a firmness and authority she was far from feeling. She had bumped her head on the impact of the crash and it was aching horridly still and making her feel very poorly, but she had Louise to protect and that had to come before her own discomfort.

      ‘She is only young and, as you can see, very upset. Her parents are expecting her return on this afternoon’s flight and…it is my duty…my responsibility to see that she is on that flight.’

      ‘Your duty…and your responsibility,’ Marco emphasised. ‘Where were those undoubtedly admirable virtues, I wonder, when you stole my car, risking not only your own lives, but those of other people as well? Have you any idea what a car smash can do, what carnage, what…destruction it can cause?’ Marco demanded harshly as the nightmare images of the crash scene he had been called upon to witness when Aldo had driven away from the palazzo in the temper that had killed both him and his wife resurfaced.

      With no way of knowing what he was thinking, Alice could feel her face starting to burn.

      ‘I…It…I couldn’t help myself,’ she started to fib desperately. ‘I have always loved…’ Helplessly she looked at the car for inspiration, unable to remember in her panic just what kind of car it actually was…

      Against his will Marco found himself being both intrigued and impossibly almost even amused as he witnessed her confusion as she hunted wildly for a rational explanation to cover both her behaviour and her protective fib. Anyone with any remote pretence to being a car lover would not have had to look wildly at the bonnet to realise what make of car they’d been driving.

      ‘Maseratis,’ he supplied dryly for her, his voice drowning out Louise’s frantically whispered, ‘Ferrari!’

      ‘Yes. Maseratis,’ Alice agreed, gratefully seizing on the name he had given her. ‘Well, I’ve always loved them and when I saw yours, just couldn’t resist. It was so tempting. And you had left the keys in the ignition,’ she told him reprovingly.

      ‘So in effect it was my fault that you stole the car,’ Marco suggested dryly.

      She had the most revealing eyes, he decided, their colour a clear blue-green that was almost turquoise.

      ‘Have you any idea just what his car means to an Italian man?’ he asked her, speaking swiftly in Italian.

      Without the slightest pause, she responded in the same language, telling him simply, ‘I shouldn’t have done it, I know.’

      So she hadn’t lied about her ability to speak his language, Marco recognised, and despite all reasons he knew he should summon the police and set about finding himself another nanny for Angelina, he knew that he was going to do no such thing.

      A woman who for whatever reason was prepared to implicate herself in a crime to protect a younger person in her charge must have a protective instinct that would keep any child entrusted to her care safe and loved. And, so far as Marco was concerned, what Angelina needed more than anything else was just that very kind of security, even if it came wrapped up in a tantalising package with ‘danger’ written all over it!

      ‘By rights I should summon the police and hand you both over to them,’ he told Alice sternly, waiting for a few seconds as the colour drained from her face and she made a small, instinctive sound of protest and distress.

      ‘However…you say that you are both booked on an afternoon flight back to England…but you,’ he told her smoothly, ‘or so I thought, were supposed to be being interviewed for a post here in Italy…’

      Alice gaped at him. ‘How do you know that?’ she began, and then stopped as the unwanted, impossible, appalling truth began to seep hideously into her shocked brain.

      ‘No!’ she whispered, her eyes huge with despair.

      ‘No. You can’t be!’

      ‘I can’t be who?’ Marco challenged her grimly.

      Nervously Alice flicked her tongue-tip over her suddenly nervously dry lips, a gesture which Marco’s eyes monitored whilst his body registered her action in a way that made him glad of the strength of will-power! Glad that it was strong enough to prevent him from covering the softness of her full lips with his own mouth. Richly pink, free of make-up, they reminded him unwantedly of the taut thrust of her nipples against her top.

      Angrily he pushed his wanton thoughts away. He had neither the time to waste on self-indulgent analysis of them, nor the inclination to do so. Some things were best left undisturbed, unexamined…Her skin would be delicately pale, her breasts crowned with rose-red nipples and when he touched them with his lips she would…

      As Alice heard him curse beneath his breath she jumped nervously. The heat beating down on her uncovered head was beginning to affect her. She felt confused and muzzy, and she wanted badly to be able to lie down somewhere cool—somewhere cool that did not include this formidable, sexy, downright disturbing man, she corrected herself shakily.

      ‘I…My interview was with…I was supposed to be seeing…’ she began to protest.

      ‘Me,’ Marco supplied for her with a softness that belied the steel-hard look he was giving her. ‘Only you did not keep our appointment, which makes you unreliable as well as untrustworthy—and yet according to your agency…’

      ‘I-I’m sorry I was late,’ Alice began to stammer with what she knew to be ludicrous consternation. He thought she had stolen his car, after all, and here she was apologising for being late.

      ‘To be late is an offence against the laws of good manners, and thus punishable by one’s own conscience,’ he agreed urbanely. ‘But theft is an offence against the laws of the land and as such it is punishable by a term in prison…’

      The way he was looking at her, his eyes now almost the colour of obsidian and just as empty of any kind of humane emotion as a piece of unfeeling stone, made her blood quite literally run icily cold in her veins. Shock and then fear crept over her in a painful tide. Prison! She knew that her fear showed in her face, and only her pride stopped her from protesting out loud.

      Out of the corner of her eye she could see Louise, silent now, her shock as obvious as Alice’s own in her suddenly very youthful, drawn white face.

      As she struggled to find something to say a mobile phone started to ring imperiously. Almost as though she were observing the whole scene at a distance, Alice saw the man she now realised must be her once-prospective employer, the aristocratically named Conte di Vincenti, reaching to his pocket and removing his phone, swiftly responding to the call.

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