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‘Er, yes…’
‘You must be very well organised if you can carry out those duties and still have time to accompany clients to their events.’
‘I don’t normally. That is, I stand in for the others sometimes.’
She was making it sound as though she had to be coerced into doing so, Ricardo thought cynically. Of course he knew better.
‘Carly, your mother’s telephoned. She wants you to ring her—Oh, I’m sorry.’ The young girl who had burst into the office came to an abrupt halt, her face pink, as she realised that Carly wasn’t on her own.
‘It’s all right, Izzie, I’ll ring her later. Thank you.’ But as she thanked the younger girl Carly’s heart was sinking beneath her professional smile. She already knew what her adoptive mother would want. More money.
Carly did her best, but the truth was that the woman had no real understanding of how to manage money. The fortune her adoptive father had once had was gone, swallowed up in lavish living and unwise investments. A stroke had made it impossible for him to do any kind of work, and so Carly found herself in the position of having to support them as best she could. But it wasn’t easy. Her adoptive mother ran up bills and then wept because she couldn’t pay them—like a small child rather than an adult. Their anguished unhappiness and despair made her feel so guilty—especially when…
She was so lucky to have friends like Lucy and Jules, Carly reflected emotionally. She might get on reasonably well with her adopted parents now, but that had not always been the case. Without Lucy and Jules what might she have done to escape from the misery and the wretchedness that had been her own childhood? Taken her own life? She had certainly thought about it.
Where had she gone? Ricardo wondered curiously, watching anxiety momentarily shadow her eyes before she blinked it away. He cleared his throat.
‘Right. Here are the events I wish to attend.’
Pushing back her private thoughts, Carly leaned over the desk to study the list he had tossed towards her.
He had selected three events: a private party in St Tropez on board a newly acquired private yacht, to celebrate its acquisition; a media event in the Hamptons to launch a new glossy magazine, to which old money, new names and anyone who was anyone in the fashion world had been invited and a world-famous senior rock star’s birthday bash at his French château.
Carly started to frown.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘The St Tropez yacht party is next weekend, and only four days before the Hamptons do. It might be difficult co-ordinating flights and all the other travel arrangements.’
She kept a tight rein on expenses—or at least she had done until Nick had started to interfere. They always booked cheap, no frills flights to overseas events if they weren’t being flown out by the clients.
Ricardo raised an eyebrow.
‘That won’t be a problem. We’ll be using my private jet.’ He gave a dismissive shrug of those powerful shoulders. ‘One of my PAs can sort out all the details. Oh, and they’ll need your passport, ASAP. I understand from Nick that your normal practice is to be in situ a day ahead of the actual event. That suits me, because that way I shall be able to see how things are organised.’
Too right he would, Ricardo decided.
He was standing up, and Carly followed suit. He was so tall—so big! She was suddenly aware of her reluctance to go through the doorway, because it would bring her too close to him. Too close to him? Get a grip, she mentally advised herself unsympathetically.
‘My PA will be in touch with you regarding flight times.’
She walked determinedly towards the door. She was almost level with him now. In another few seconds she would be through the door and safe. Safe? From what? Him pouncing on her? No way would he do that, she told herself scornfully.
And then she made the mistake of looking up at him.
It was like stepping through a door into a previously unknown world.
Her heart whipped round inside her chest like a spinning barrel. Against her will her head turned, her lips parting as her gaze fastened on his mouth. His top lip was well shaped and firmly cut, his teeth white and just slightly uneven, and his bottom lip…
His bottom lip. A smoky sensuality darkened her normally crystal-clear grey eyes as she fed visually on the promise of its fullness. How would it feel to catch that fullness between her own lips? To nibble at it with small biting kisses, to…
‘A word of warning—’ Ricardo began.
She could feel guilty colour staining her skin as her mind grappled with inexplicable thoughts.
‘It is imperative that full confidentiality as to the purpose of my attendance at these occasions is maintained at all times.’
He was cautioning her about the events—that was all! Carly exhaled in shaky relief.
‘Yes—yes, of course,’ she agreed quickly, as she finally made it through the doorway on legs that had developed a very suspicious weakness.
But she was unnervingly aware of him behind her.
‘And one more thing.’
‘Yes?’ she offered politely, automatically turning round to face him.
‘The next time you look at my mouth like that…’ he said softly, with a mocking smile.
‘Like what? I didn’t look at it like anything!’ Carly knew that her face was burning with guilt, but she had to defend herself.
‘Liar. You looked at it, at me, as though you couldn’t wait to feel it against your own. As though there was nothing you wanted more than for me to push you up against that doorframe and take you right here and now. As though you could already feel my hands on your skin, touching you intimately, and you were loving it. As though—’
‘No!’ Carly denied fiercely. And her denial was the truth—she hadn’t got as far as thinking anything so intimate as that!
To her relief she could see Lucy hurrying towards them to introduce herself to him.
It was over an hour since Ricardo had gone, and Carly was still thinking about him. But a woman would surely have to be totally devoid of any kind of hormones to remain unaware of Ricardo as a fully functioning man.
And that was her sole excuse, was it? She pushed back her keyboard and stood up. She was shaking slightly. Her face was burning and her body ached. She felt shocked. Guilty. Horrified, in fact, by the door she had unwittingly opened in her own head, and—even worse—was uncomfortably aware that she was physically aroused. Physically, but of course not emotionally—that was impossible. After all, she had sworn never to fall in love, hadn’t she? Never to fall in love; never to give herself emotionally to anyone; never to risk the emotional security she had given to herself.
She started to pace the small office. Her childhood had taught her all there was to know about the pain that came with being emotionally rejected. She had fought hard to give herself the protective air of calm self-confidence she projected to others, and for the right to claim their respect. The pathetic, needy child she had once been, desperate for approval and love, had been totally banished, and that was the way Carly intended it to stay.
So why was she thinking like this? No one was threatening her self-reliance, after all—least of all Ricardo Salvatore, who probably had the same loathing of emotional bondage as she did herself, if for very different reasons.
CHAPTER THREE
CARLY checked her watch—Lucy had given both Carly and Jules smart Cartier Tank Francaise watches for Christmas in the first year the business had made a profit—and then bent down and grabbed the handle of her case.
The car Ricardo Salvatore was sending to pick her up was due to arrive in exactly two minutes’ time. It was time for her to leave.
She heaved her suitcase off the floor, grimacing a little ruefully as she did so, remembering how Lucy had burst into the office the previous Thursday morning announcing, ‘Oh, my God, Carly—I’ve just realised! There won’t be anything in the Wardrobe that will fit you!’
The ‘Wardrobe’ was a standing joke between them all, and was in actual fact a small room in Lucy’s parents’ London home which housed the glamorous outfits Lucy and Jules, who were very much the same height and build, wore when they were ‘on duty’ at events.
The clothes—all designer models—were second hand, surreptitiously trawled from a variety of sources, and the subject of amused speculation between them.
‘Just look at this!’ Lucy had marvelled after their last expedition, as she held up what looked like a sequin-covered handkerchief with halter neck straps. ‘Who on earth would buy this?’
‘You did,’ Carly had pointed out, laughing.
‘Yes, but I only paid fifty pounds for it—it cost over a thousand brand-new.’
‘It’s very sexy,’ Jules had pronounced.
‘It’s repulsive,’ Carly had criticised. ‘Vulgar and tarty.’
‘Mmm…Well, Nick spotted it.’
But the Wardrobe contained nothing that would fit Carly, and so, that Thursday, Lucy had announced firmly, ‘Come on, Carly. We’ve got to go out on a trawl!’
Carly had tried to protest and resist, but Jules and Lucy had been insistent.
The result of their foray into the second-hand shops and market stalls of Lucy’s favourite haunts—which had emptied the clothes budget Carly had so carefully worked out—had been collected from the dry cleaners this morning and were now packed in Carly’s case, along with her own clothes.
Mentally Carly reviewed them—a white silk trouser suit which Lucy had cooed over, enraptured, pronouncing, ‘Oh, this is so retro—Seventies rock wife! And you’ve got the boobs for it, Carly.’
Maybe she had, but she certainly wouldn’t be wearing the jacket over bare skin and half open! There were also a couple of evening dresses, both of which were potentially so revealing that Carly had already decided she would be wearing a silk jacket over them.
She hadn’t been very keen on the designer swimsuit Lucy had found either. It was cut away in so many places that Carly feared it threatened to reveal more of her than the skimpiest of bikinis, but at least it had matching culotte pants and a jacket.
Her own classic casuals—the simple linen separates she favoured for summer and some up-to-the-minute accessories they had found in the likes of Zara—had all passed Lucy’s inspection and been declared perfect for the events she would be attending.
Dragging her suitcase behind her, Carly pushed open the door onto the street and stepped out into the late-morning sunshine.
Ricardo watched her from his vantage point in the back seat of the limo, as the driver moved the car out of the parking bay he had found further up the street.
Oh, yes, she was a typical example of her upmarket, ‘no expense spared but someone else pays’ lifestyle, Ricardo decided cynically as he watched her. Immaculate white tee shirt, perfectly fitting blue jeans, long shiny hair, minimal make-up, sunglasses, discreetly ‘good’ watch, penny loafers. The too-thin girl in designer clutter who was tottering past her on spindly heels, clutching a weird-looking handbag, couldn’t hold a candle to her. Because Carly had class.
What would she be like in bed?
He didn’t intend to let too much time elapse before he found out.
He thought of another society woman from his youth, one whom he had met when he was growing cynical but not yet completely hardened. Initially he had thought her pretty, but she hadn’t looked very pretty at all when he had flatly refused to meet her escalating demands—especially when he’d discovered they included a wedding ring in exchange for the supposed benefit of marrying into a higher social bracket. He’d told her that he preferred an honest whore.
Women like her, like Carly, might not openly demand money in return for sex, but what they were looking for was the richest and highest status man they could find—their bodies in exchange for his name.
It was a trade-off that nauseated him, as did those who participated in it.
He had no illusions about women or sex. He had lived too long and seen too much for that. His wealth could buy him any woman he wanted, and that included Carly. She had made that plain enough already, with the way she had looked at his mouth.
She hadn’t even tried to be subtle about it! She had stared openly and brazenly at him. If they hadn’t been in her office it would have been an open invitation to him to push her tee shirt out of the way and free her breasts to spill into his hands so that he could accept their flaunting invitation.
It had told him that he could have yanked down her jeans and explored and enjoyed her and she would not have said a single word in denial.
And then in the morning she would no doubt expect to receive her payment—a piece of jewellery, a telephone call from an exclusive shop inviting her to choose herself something expensive…
That was the way things were done in her world.
He was wasting too much time on her, he warned himself. His primary reason for what he was doing was the potential acquisition of Prêt a Party, not the inevitable sexual acquisition of Carly Carlisle who, although she did not know it yet, would be one of the first in line to lose her job.
Carly frowned as the large, elegant steel-grey car drew up alongside her.
A limo, Lucy had said, and she had pictured a huge, shiny black ostentatious vehicle, not something so supremely understated. But the rear door was opening and Ricardo was getting out.
‘Is this all your luggage?’
She gaped at him as he reached for her case, and then looked uncertainly towards the chauffeur.
‘Charles is driving. I am perfectly capable of picking up a case,’ Ricardo told her dryly, following her uncertain look.
‘The…my case is heavy,’ she told him, but he ignored her, picked it up and put it in to the boot of the car as if it was as light as a feather pillow.
He was wearing a black tee shirt and a pair of tan-coloured casual trousers, and the muscles in his arms were hardening as he lifted her case. He looked more like a man who worked outdoors than one who sat at a desk, she acknowledged, unwilling to admit to the response that the sight of him was eliciting from her own body.
After what had happened when she had given her imagination its head, she was now keeping it on a controlling diet of bread and water, and that meant no thinking about the effect Ricardo could have on her! So he had a good enough body to carry off the macho male thing—so what? she told herself dispassionately.
But the sight of his black-clad back, bent over the open boot, suddenly transformed by her rebellious thoughts into a totally naked back bent over her equally naked body, evoked such a powerful sensual image that she felt as though she were transfixed to the spot.
So it was true. You could go weak at the knees, Carly reflected several minutes later as she sat primly straight in the back seat of the powerful car, dizzily aware that her private thoughts were anything but prim. All those enforced deportment classes at school had definitely left her with an automatic ‘sit up straight’ reflex.
She was accomplished, Ricardo admitted to himself. That cool, remote pose she had adopted, that said Pursue me would certainly work with most men. Unfortunately for her, he was not most men. He opened his briefcase and extracted some papers.
As soon as they were free of the city traffic the powerful car picked up speed. Carly was pleased that Ricardo was engrossed in his work, because that left her free to think about hers, instead of having to make polite conversation with him.
Since their clients were using their own yacht as the venue for their party there was no construction work in the shape of marquees on the like for her to oversee. The client’s chef and kitchen staff were being augmented by a chef from the upmarket caterers she had sourced. They were already on the yacht. Menus had been agreed, floral arrangements decided on—she would be meeting with the florists, who had also been flown in from London.
The arrival and deployment of the hostess’s hairdresser, make-up artist, and a dresser from the couture house she favoured were also Carly’s responsibility, plus a hundred or more other small but vitally important arrangements.
She had an inch-thick pile of assorted coloured and coded lists in her briefcase, most of which she had actually memorised.
‘You’re so much better at this than me,’ Lucy had told her ruefully before she left.
Carly had smiled, but she knew that it was true.
Carly shifted her body against the leather upholstery. It was ridiculous that she should be so acutely conscious of Ricardo’s presence in the car with her—and even more ridiculous that she should be so acutely aware of the impact he was having on her physically. So much for the ‘bread and water’ regime, then!
The grand slam of his raw sensuality had sliced through her defences, leaving an alarming trail of female awareness in its wake. Her jeans, normally a comfortable easy fit, suddenly seemed to be uncomfortably tight, clinging to her flesh in a way she could only mentally describe as erotic, as though somehow she were being caressed by the lean, powerful male hands she couldn’t resist looking towards.
She could feel the heat expanding inside her, dangerous little languorous curls of it thrusting against her sensitive flesh. She crossed her legs and then uncrossed them. Her arm accidentally brushed against her own breast and immediately she was aware of the hot pulsing of her nipples.
This was crazy. It felt as though somehow or other an unfamiliar and certainly unwanted very sexual alter ego had been released inside her. And, what was more, it seemed to be attempting to take her over! Or had it always been there and it had simply taken meeting Ricardo Salvatore to make her aware of it, just as her own senses were making her aware of him?
This was definitely crazy.
She realised with relief that they had reached the airport. The car slowed down and turned into an entrance marked ‘Strictly Private’.
A uniformed customs officer stepped out of a nearby office and came over to the car.
