Mistress Material. Sharon Kendrick

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       CHAPTER TWO

      ‘ARE you sure they won’t mind?’ asked Suzanna hesitantly as, with a flick of charcoal, she completed the small portrait she’d been doing of her friend, just as the plane began to make its final descent towards Rome airport.

      ‘Who?’ Francesca was too busy batting her eyelashes outrageously at the uniformed male flight attendant to pay much attention to her schoolfriend.

      ‘Your family, of course.’ Suzanna flicked her pale auburn plait back over her shoulder. ‘It’s very kind of them to invite me to stay with them.’

      Francesca shrugged. ‘They don’t care who I invite—they’re never around. Papà’s always working and is away a lot on business, and my stepmother’s away in Paris, apparently. She’ll probably be trawling the streets looking for gigolos—’

      ‘Francesca!’ exclaimed Suzanna in shocked horror. ‘You’re not serious?’

      ‘Aren’t I?’ queried Francesca with unfamiliar bitterness. ‘She’s twenty years younger than my father. She spends his money like water, and she flirts with anything in a pair of trousers,’ she finished, in disgust.

      ‘So why does he stay with her, then?’ asked Suzanna softly.

      ‘Because she’s beautiful. Why else...?’ Francesca’s voice tailed off momentarily, and when she spoke again it was with her customary, rather sardonic verve. ‘Which only leaves big brother—and he’s worse than any jailer. But at least with you there you can be my alibi.’

      ‘Alibi?’ echoed Suzanna uncertainly.

      ‘Sure.’ Francesca’s dark eyes flashed. ‘He tries to stop me going out with boys, so I don’t tell him any more. And if he asks you anything, then you tell him you last saw me praying in church!’

      ‘Francesca!’ said Suzanna uneasily because she didn’t know sometimes whether to take her effervescent friend seriously, and her fingers began to pleat the hem of her white dress nervously. ‘You know you don’t mean that!’

      ‘I know that going home for the holidays is going to cramp my style,’ muttered Francesca. ‘The discos I go to during term-time are fantastic —I wish you’d come along too.’

      Suzanna shook her head. ‘Discos aren’t really my thing.’ In discos she felt gangly, awkward. And when you stood at almost six feet in your stockinged feet that was inevitable.

      ‘That’s because you’ve never given them a chance!’ Francesca’s attention was caught by the thumbnail sketch in Suzanna’s hand. ‘Hey! That’s good—it’s me, isn’t it?’

      ‘Do you like it?’ smiled Suzanna.

      ‘Yeah. May I keep it?’

      ‘Sure.’

      The plane was coming in to land, and there was little time for talking again until they were seated in the back of the shiny, chaffeur-driven limousine and heading towards the Caliandro mansion. Francesca spent the entire journey chattering as she freed Suzanna’s hair from her plaits and teased it into a blazing and magnificent furnace of waves, and Suzanna was so enraptured at the spectacular landscape passing them by that the subject of alibis was all but forgotten.

      Suzanna and Francesca were both at finishing school in Switzerland. ‘It’s bound to finish me off sooner or later!’ Francesca always joked. It was the expensive kind of school which was intended to produce young ladies. Daughters of the rich and the noble attended, most of them from privileged but broken homes.

      Suzanna’s own father had died, leaving a wife, a son and a daughter, and a car-manufacturing plant which her brother had over-ambitious plans for. Money was tight, but a savings plan taken out at her birth had ensured that at least Suzanna’s expensive education would be paid for. But she worried about her mother’s well-being, and she worried about her feckless brother, Piers, being in charge of the family business...

      Francesca’s own mother had died a few years back, and her father had quickly remarried. A mistake, according to Francesca, and it seemed that there was little love lost between her and her stepmother. ‘And my brother really hates her!’ she’d added. ‘He can hardly bear to be in the same room as her.’

      It didn’t sound like a very happy house, thought Suzanna suddenly.

      Francesca’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘We’re here!’ she exclaimed as the car swept down a gravelled drive and came to a halt in front of an imposing white building, and then her voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. ‘And here comes Pasquale, my brother—so don’t forget—if he asks whether I date men you just tell him that I’ve shown bags of disinterest!’

      Through the window of the limousine, Suzanna could see the most handsome man she had ever set eyes on, and her heart lurched painfully in her chest. She blinked several times, as if afraid that she’d simply dreamt him up.

      Quite unbelievably, she hadn’t.

      He was tall—quite spectacularly tall for a man of Italian origin. His shoulders were strong and wide and his hips were narrow. His nose was a proud Roman curve and his eyes were dark and glittering. For Suzanna, naive and unused to men, the experience of staring up into the face of Francesca’s brother was like something out of the romantic novels she’d read since her early teens; she looked, and was, completely smitten.

      Afterwards, she was to tell herself that she had been ripe to fall for someone—anyone. It was just unfortunate that it had happened to be Pasquale...

      He greeted his sister with a kiss on both cheeks and then held his hand out formally to Suzanna.

      The sun was behind her and seemed to create a halo of golden-red around her hair—or so Francesca whispered to her later that night when Suzanna’s heart was still pounding in that strange, unfamiliar way which hadn’t left her since she’d first set eyes on Pasquale.

      The short white cheesecloth dress she wore merely hinted at the outline of the smooth young flesh which lay beneath, but when he looked at her a stillness and a watchfulness came over Pasquale Caliandro. He caught her small hand in his firm, warm and masculine grip and as she gave him a look of helpless fascination his eyes narrowed, his mouth hardening as he stared down at her.

      ‘I think my brother fancies you,’ Francesca said that night as they got ready for bed. ‘He gave you a real mean, hungry look!’

      ‘Rubbish!’ СКАЧАТЬ