The De Santis Marriage. Michelle Reid

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      Whereas Lizzy, well, she had been sent to the same school after her mother had caused a terrible scandal by having an affair with their local, very married MP. She had been so mercilessly teased and bullied at her old school about the affair that her father had decided to remove her from the situation by placing her in a school hundreds of miles away from the fuss.

      Did it stop the teasing? No, it didn’t. Did she tell her father that? No, she did not, because he’d already been too cast down by the scandal and the fact that their mother had walked out and left them taking with her what funds she could grab. So Bianca had become her close friend and confidante. They looked out for each other. Bianca was the black-haired black- eyed spitfire with a solid grounding in good Australian spunk and Lizzy the much quieter one with her natural spirit squashed by the bullies and a mother who’d never bothered to get in touch again after she’d walked out.

      From the age of twelve to their present twenty-two, she and Bianca had rarely done anything without the other one knowing about it. Now her friend was about to marry into one of Italy’s finest families and, despite not wanting to be here, Lizzy was ready to shelve her own worries and do whatever it was going to take to help make Bianca’s wedding day next week absolutely perfect. It was Bianca’s family who’d paid to bring her over here. They had provided her with everything from room and board to clothes to suit every glittering occasion, even if they were Bianca’s cast-offs.

      And she was grateful to them—she was, because she could not have afforded to come otherwise, no matter what her father had said. So here she was, one week into a two-week sabbatical from family troubles, joining in the partying runup to Bianca’s glossy marriage to her super-rich, supersophisticated beau.

      Luciano Genovese Marcelo De Santis, the thirty-four- year-old supreme head of the great and vast De Santis banking empire—Luc to his very close friends.

      A tense little quiver made a sudden strike down Lizzy’s front and in pure self-defence she snatched up a silvery silk crocheted snug from the bed and hurriedly tied it across her front while wishing to goodness that she didn’t experience that same crazy tense quiver every time she let herself think about him.

      He was strange—a truly intimidating mix of smoothly polished cool sophistication and lean, dark, sexy good looks. Bianca purred around him like a sleek kitten, which seemed to amuse him, but then Bianca was Italian and as a race of people they were like that, open and warm and more touchy-feely than the British—her, Lizzy thought, making the rueful distinction.

      She’d never purred around any man and couldn’t envisage ever wanting to—which made the way she quivered around Luc De Santis all the more disturbing to her peace of mind. He wasn’t her type. He was too much of everything. Too big and tall, too lean and dark, too sexy and handsome—too crushingly cool and terrifyingly enigmatic, she decided as she hooked up her little silver beaded evening bag and headed for the door.

      They’d met only once before she’s come to Milan, in London several months ago at the private dinner Bianca’s parents had held to introduce their future son-in-law to their English friends. Luc had come as such a shock to Lizzy that she had not been able to stop her eyes from constantly drifting in his direction because he was so far away from her idea of the kind of man her friend liked.

      ‘What do you think?’ Bianca asked her.

      ‘Intimidating,’ she said, because that evening was the first time the tense quiver had struck. ‘He scares me to death.’

      Bianca just laughed, but then she’d been laughing at everything. Happy—in love again—high as a kite. ‘You’ll get used to him, Lizzy,’ she promised. ‘He isn’t nearly as awesome once you get to know him.’

      Want to bet?

      The next time she’d met him had been just a week ago, she recalled as she pushed the button to call the lift. He’d arrived here at the hotel looking for Bianca and found Lizzy standing in Reception having just arrived in Milan. He’d come over to her—of course, he would do with impeccable manners like his, she reasoned. Yet she still had not been able to stop the next quiver from making its strike.

      He’d been angry that Bianca had not been at the airport to meet her—she’d seen the anger snap at his handsome dark features just before he’d blanked it out. When she’d said quickly that she hadn’t been expecting to be met, his wide, sensual mouth had tugged into a telling flat line of disapproval.

      Cool, calm and used to ordering people about, he’d then taken it upon himself to organise her arrival by making sure she had a nice suite of rooms and had even gone as far as to escort her up here to check the suite out for himself.

      It had been the moment when his hand arrived at the base of her spine to politely usher her out of the lift that the next quiver had struck, shooting down her front like a flaming arrow and making her jerk away from him like a scalded cat, only to feel really foolish for doing it. Other than to send her one of his cool, steady looks, he’d let his hand fall to his side and thankfully made no comment.

      Now here she was waiting to ride the same lift down to the mezzanine floor of the hotel where they were all gathering for drinks before they left. And if she’d avoided Luc De Santis like the absolute plague for the rest of this week Lizzy had a horrible suspicion she was not going to be able to do that tonight. The party was too small, the reserved boxes at La Scala too intimate. Her only hope was to manage to wangle it so she sat in a different box from him.

      There was a mirror hanging on the wall by the lift and she diverted her attention to it to push the stray curl off her brow. It flopped back down again like a renegade. She should not have decided to pin it all up because it just wasn’t going to behave, she predicted. But giving in and letting her hair hang down around her shoulders in a tumble of loose glossy corkscrews had only made her face look paler and her grey-green eyes look too big.

      Like a frightened rabbit, she likened, wrinkling her nose as she gave the errant curl a teasing tug and watched it spring back into place again. certed to keep the dismay

      It had to be that precise moment that the lift doors slid open to reveal none other than the great man himself. Their eyes clashed for a startled second. Knowing he’d caught her pulling silly faces at her own reflection was enough to flood colour into Lizzy’s cheeks.

      ‘Oh,’ she said, just too disconcerted to keep the dismay from sounding in her voice. ‘Are you staying here too? I didn’t know.’

      Brief amusement lit the unusual gold colour of his eyes. ‘Good evening, Elizabeth.’ He always called her Elizabeth in that dark, deep, slightly lilting Italian accent of his. ‘Are you coming in?’

      Coming in—heck, she thought, letting her eyes run over him. He was wearing a conventional black silk dinner suit and was leaning casually against the rear wall of the lift, which should have helped to diminish his daunting height a little and that overwhelming sense of presence he always carried around everywhere with him—but didn’t.

      And the idea of stepping into a lift with him again did strange things to the nerves in her legs as she made them move. Finding a tense smile to flick his way, she then turned her back on him to watch as the doors closed them in.

      Silence hummed as they waited. She could feel his eyes on her. Tension made her bite into the soft tissue of her inner lip.

      ‘You look very beautiful tonight,’ he murmured softly.

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