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‘I hate that sarcasm of yours!’ Holly fired back at him angrily, taking herself almost as much by surprise as she took him because she usually went out of her way to avoid conflict.
An elegant black brow raised, Vito removed the boots, hung his coat and scarf and then lifted the rucksack from her bent shoulders. ‘What have you got in here? Rocks?’
‘Food.’
‘The kitchen here is packed with food.’
‘Do you always know better than everyone else about everything?’ Holly, whose besetting fault was untidiness, carefully hung her wet coat beside his to be polite.
‘I very often do know better,’ Vito answered without hesitation.
Holly spread a shaken glance over his lean, darkly handsome and wholly serious features and groaned out loud. ‘No sense of humour either.’
‘Knowing one’s own strengths is not a flaw,’ Vito informed her gently.
‘But it is if you don’t consider your faults—’
‘And what are your faults?’ Vito enquired saccharine smooth, as she headed for the fire like a homing pigeon and held her hands out to the heat.
Holly wrinkled her snub nose and thought hard. ‘I’m untidy. An incurable optimist. Too much of a people-pleaser... That comes of all those years in foster care and trying to fit in to different families and different schools.’ She angled her head to one side, brown hair lying in a silken mass against one creamy cheek as she pondered. In the red Santa get-up, she reminded him of a cheerful little robin he had once seen pacing on a fence. ‘I’m too forgiving sometimes because I always want to think the best of people or give them a second chance. I get really cross if I run out of coffee but I don’t like conflict and avoid it. I like to do things quickly but sometimes that means I don’t do them well. I fuss about my weight but I still don’t exercise...’
As Vito listened to that very frank résumé he almost laughed. There was something intensely sweet about that forthright honesty. ‘Strengths?’ he prompted, unable to resist the temptation.
‘I’m honest, loyal, hardworking, punctual... I like to make the people I care about happy,’ she confided. ‘That’s what put me on that road tonight.’
‘Would you like a drink?’ Vito enquired.
‘Red wine, if you have it...’ Moving away from the fire, Holly approached her rucksack. ‘Is it all right if I put the food in the kitchen?’
She walked through the door he indicated and her eyebrows soared along with the ceiling. Beyond that door the cottage changed again. A big extension housed an ultra-modern kitchen diner with pale sparkling granite work surfaces and a fridge large enough to answer the storage needs of a restaurant. She opened it up. It was already generously packed with goodies, mainly of the luxury version of ready meals. She arranged her offerings on an empty shelf and then walked back into the main room to open the box and extract the food that remained.
Obviously, she was stuck here in a strange house with a strange man for one night at the very least, Holly reflected anxiously. A slight frisson of unease trickled down her spine. Vito hadn’t done or said anything threatening, though, she reminded herself. Like her, he recognised practicalities. He was stuck with her because she had nowhere else to go and clearly he wasn’t overjoyed by the situation. Neither one of them had a choice but to make the best of it.
‘You brought a lot of food with you,’ Vito remarked from behind her.
Holly flinched because she hadn’t heard him approach and she whipped her head around. ‘I assumed I would be providing a Christmas lunch for two people.’
Walking back out of the kitchen when she had finished, she found him frowning down at the tree ornaments visible in the box.
‘What is all this stuff?’ he asked incredulously.
Holly explained. ‘Would it be all right if I put up my tree here? I mean, it is Christmas Eve and I won’t get another opportunity for a year,’ she pointed out. ‘Christmas is special to me.’
Vito was still frowning. ‘Not to me,’ he admitted flatly, for he had only bad memories of the many disappointing Christmases he had endured as a child.
Flushing, Holly closed the box and pushed it over to the wall out of the way. ‘That’s not a problem. You’re doing enough letting me stay here.’
Dio mio, he was relieved that she was only a passing stranger because her fondness for the sentimental trappings of the season set his teeth on edge. Of course she wanted to put up her Christmas tree! Anyone who travelled around wearing a Santa hat was likely to want a tree on display as well! He handed her a glass of wine, trying not to feel responsible for having doused her chirpy flow of chatter.
‘I’m heading upstairs for a shower,’ Vito told her, because even though he had worn the boots, his suit trousers were damp. ‘Will you be all right down here on your own?’
‘Of course... This is much better than sitting in a crashed car,’ Holly assured him before adding more awkwardly, ‘Do you have a sweater or anything I could borrow? I only have pyjamas and a dress with me. My foster mum’s house is very warm so I didn’t pack anything woolly.’
Vito had not a clue what was in his luggage because he hadn’t packed his own case since he was a teenager at boarding school. ‘I’ll see what I’ve got.’
Through the glass barrier of the stairs, Holly watched his long, powerful legs disappear from view and a curious little frisson rippled through her tense body. She heaved a sigh. So, no Christmas tree. What possible objection could anyone have to a Christmas tree? Did Vito share Ebenezer Scrooge’s loathing for the festive season? Reminding herself that she was very lucky not to be shivering in Pixie’s car by the side of the road, she settled down on the shaggy rug by the hearth and simply luxuriated in the warmth emanating from the logs glowing in the fire.
Vito thought about Holly while he took a shower. It was a major mistake. Within seconds of picturing her sexy little body he went hard as a rock, his body reacting with a randy enthusiasm that astonished him. For months, of course, his libido had very much taken a back seat to the eighteen-hour days he was working. This year the bank’s revenues would, he reminded himself with pride, smash all previous records. He was doing what he had been raised to do and he was doing it extremely well, so why did he feel so empty, so joyless? Vito asked himself in exasperation.
Intellectually he understood that there was more to life than the pursuit of profit but realistically he was and always had been a workaholic. An image of Holly chattering by the fire assailed him. Holly with her wonderful curves and her weird tree in a box. She was unusual, not remotely like the sort of women Vito usually met, and her originality was a huge draw. He had no idea what she was likely to say next. She wasn’t wearing make-up. She didn’t fuss with her appearance. She said exactly what she thought and felt—she had no filter. Towelling off, he tried to stop thinking about Holly. Obviously she turned him on. Equally obviously he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
Why the hell not? The words sounded in the back of his brain. That battered old car, everything about her spelled out the message that she came from a different world. Making any kind of a move would be taking advantage, he told himself grimly. Yet the instant he had seen Holly he had wanted her, wanted her with an intensity he hadn’t felt around a woman since he was a careless teenager. It was the situation. He could relax with a woman who had neither a clue who he was nor any idea of the sleazy scandal currently clinging to his name. And why wouldn’t he want her? After all, he was very probably sex-starved, he told himself impatiently as he tossed out the contents of one of his suitcases and then opened a second before finding a sweater he deemed suitable.
Holly watched Vito walk down the stairs with the fluid, silent grace of a panther. He had looked amazing in his elegant business suit, but in black designer jeans and a long-sleeved red cotton tee he was drop-dead gorgeous and, with those high cheekbones and that full masculine mouth, very much in the male-model category. She blinked and stared, feeling the colour rise in her cheeks, her self-consciousness taking over, for she had literally never ever been in the radius of such a very handsome male and it was just a little like bumping into a movie star without warning.
‘Here... You can roll up the sleeves.’ Vito tossed the sweater into her lap. ‘If you want to freshen up, there’s a shower room just before you enter the kitchen.’
Holly scrambled upright and grabbed her rucksack to take his advice. A little alone time to get her giddy head in order struck her as a very good idea. When she saw herself in the mirror in the shower room she was affronted by the wind-tousled explosion of her hair and the amount of cleavage she was showing in the Santa outfit. Stripping off, she went for a shower, exulting in the hot water and the famous-name shower gel on offer. Whoever owned the cottage had to be pretty comfortably off, she decided with a grimace, which probably meant that Vito was as well. He wore a very sleek gold-coloured watch and the fit of his suit had been perfection. But then what did she know about such trappings or the likely cost of them? Pixie would laugh to hear such musings when the closest Holly had ever got to even dating an office worker was Ritchie, the cheating insurance salesman.
She pulled on the blue sweater, which plunged low enough at the neck to reveal her bra. She yanked it at the back to raise it to a decent level at the front and knew she would have to remember to keep her shoulders back. She rolled up the sleeves and, since the sweater covered her to her knees, left off her tights. Her hair she rescued with a little diligent primping until it fell in loose waves round her shoulders. Frowning at her bunny slippers, she crammed them back in her rucksack, deciding that bare feet were preferable. Cosmetics-wise she was pretty much stuck with the minimal make-up she had packed for Sylvia’s. Sighing, she used tinted moisturiser, subtle eyeliner and glossed her lips. Well, at short notice that was the best she could do. In any case it was only her pride that was prompting her to make the effort. After all, a male as sophisticated as Vito Sorrentino wouldn’t look at her anyway, she thought with a squirming pang of guilty disappointment. Why on earth was she thinking about him that way?
And thinking about Vito that way put her back in mind of Ritchie, which was unfortunate. But it also reminded her that she hadn’t taken her pill yet and she dug into her bag to remedy that, only to discover that she had left them at home. As to why a virgin was taking contraceptive precautions, she and Pixie both did on a ‘better safe than sorry’ basis. Both of their mothers had messed up their lives with early unplanned pregnancies and neither Holly nor Pixie wanted to run the same risk.
Of course a couple of years back Holly had had different and more romantic expectations. She had fondly imagined that she would eventually meet a man who would sweep her away on a tide of passion and she had believed that she had to protect herself in the face of such temptation. Sadly, nothing any boyfriend had yet made her feel could have fallen into a category that qualified as being swept away. Since then Holly had wondered if there was a distinct possibility that she herself simply wasn’t a very passionate woman. Still, Holly reasoned wryly, there was nothing wrong with living in hope, was there?
Somehow Vito had been fully expecting Holly to reappear with a full face of make-up. Instead she appeared with her face rosy and apparently untouched, his sweater drooping round her in shapeless, bulky folds, her tiny feet bare. And Vito almost laughed out loud in appreciation and relief. What remained of his innate wariness was evaporating fast because no woman he had ever yet met could possibly have put less effort into trying to attract him than Holly. Before his engagement and even since it he had been targeted so often by predatory women that he had learned to be guarded in his behaviour around females, both inside and outside working hours. His rare smile flashed across his lean, strong face.
Holly collided involuntarily with molten gold eyes enhanced by thick black lashes and then that truly heart-stopping smile that illuminated his darkly handsome features, and her heart not only bounced in her chest but also skipped an entire beat in reaction. She came to an abrupt halt, her fingers dropping from her rucksack. ‘Do you want me to make something to eat?’ she offered shakily, struggling to catch her breath.
‘No, thanks. I ate before you arrived,’ Vito drawled lazily, watching her shrug back the sweater so that it didn’t slip too low at the front. No, she really wasn’t trying to pull him and he was captivated as he so rarely was by a woman.
‘Then you won’t mind if I eat? I brought supper with me,’ she explained, moving past him towards the kitchen.
She’s not even going to try to entertain me, Vito reflected, positively rapt in admiration in receipt of that clear demonstration of indifference.
When had he become so arrogant that he expected every young woman he came into contact with to make a fuss of him and a play for him?
It wasn’t arrogance, he reasoned squarely. He was as rich as Midas and well aware that that was the main reason for his universal appeal. He poured Holly a fresh glass of wine and carried it into the kitchen for her. She closed the oven, wool stretching to softly define her heart-shaped derrière.
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ he heard himself enquire, seemingly before his brain had formed the question, while his attention was still lodged on the sweater that both concealed and revealed her lush curves.
‘No. As of today I have an ex,’ Holly told him. ‘You?’
‘I’m single.’ Vito lounged back against the kitchen island, the fine fabric of his pants pulling taut to define long, muscular thighs and...the noticeable masculine bulge at his crotch. Heat surging into her cheeks, Holly dragged her straying attention off him and stared down at her wine. Since when had she looked at a man there? Her breath was snarled up in her throat and her entire body felt super sensitive.
‘What happened today?’ Vito probed.
‘I caught Ritchie having sex with his receptionist on his lunch break,’ Holly told him in a rush before she could think better of that humiliating admission. Unfortunately looking at Vito had wrecked her composure to such an extent that she barely knew what she was saying any more.
CHAPTER THREE (#u2c2929ad-3a55-52ad-9576-c4ed67d315f8)
IN RECEIPT OF that startling confession, Vito had the most atrocious desire to laugh, but he didn’t want to hurt Holly’s feelings. Her cheeks had gone all pink again and her eyes were evasive as if that confession had simply slipped accidentally from her lips. He breathed in deep. ‘Tough. What did you do?’
‘Told him what I thought of him in one sentence, walked out again.’ Holly tilted her chin, anger darkening her blue eyes as she remembered the scene she had interrupted. ‘I hate liars and cheats.’
‘I’m shockingly well behaved in that line. Too busy working,’ Vito countered, relieved that she had not a clue about the scandal that had persuaded him to leave Florence and even less idea of who he was. In recent days he had been forced to spend way too much time in the company of people too polite to say what they thought but not too polite to stare at him and whisper. Anonymity suddenly had huge appeal. He finally felt that he could relax.
‘So, why are you staying here all alone?’ Holly asked, sipping her wine, grateful he had glossed over her gaffe about Ritchie without further comment.
‘Burnout. I needed a break from work.’ Vito gave her the explanation he had already decided on in the shower. ‘Obviously I wasn’t expecting weather like this.’
He was unusually abstracted, however, ensnared by the manner in which the blue of his sweater lit up her luminous eyes. He was also wondering how she could possibly look almost irresistibly cute in an article of his clothing when the thick wool draped her tiny body like a blanket and only occasionally hinted at the treasures that lay beneath. What was the real secret of her appeal? he was asking himself in bewilderment, even though the secret was right in front of him. She had a wonderfully feminine shape, amazing eyes and a torrent of dark hair that tumbled round her shoulders in luxuriant loose curls. But what was most different about Holly was that she was genuine as so few people dared to be. She put on no show and said nothing for effect; indeed she followed a brand of candour that was blunt to the point of embarrassing.
‘Why are you staring at me?’ Holly asked baldly, straightening her spine and squaring her little shoulders for all the world as though she was bracing herself for him to say something critical.
‘Am I?’ Vito fielded, riveting dark eyes brimming with amusement as he straightened to leave the kitchen. ‘Sorry... I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.’
He was setting up a games console when Holly joined him with her plate of savoury snacks. ‘I thought I’d have a game,’ he told her, ‘but perhaps you would rather watch TV—’
‘No, what game is it?’
It was a war game Holly knew well. ‘I’ll play you,’ she told him.
Vito shot her a startled glance. ‘You play?’
‘Of course I do. Every foster family had a console and you learned to play with the other kids to fit in,’ she pointed out wryly.
‘Dio mio...how many different families did you live with?’
‘I never counted but there were a lot of them. I’d get settled somewhere and then someone somewhere would decide I should have another go at bonding with my mother, and I’d be shot back to her again for a few months.’
Vito was frowning as he set up the game. ‘Your mother was still alive?’
‘Just not a good parent. It never worked out with her,’ Holly completed wryly, keen to gloss over the facts with as little detail as possible while she watched Vito, lean hips flexing down into powerful thighs as he bent down.
From her position kneeling on the floor, she could admire the fluidity of his long-fingered brown hands as he leant over the console. His every movement was incredibly graceful, she acknowledged. And when she glanced up at him she noticed the black density of his eyelashes and the definition that dark luxuriance lent to his already stunning dark eyes. Her nipples were tight little buds inside her bra and she felt hot.
‘Your father?’ Vito queried.
‘I had no idea who my father was so he didn’t come into the picture. But my mother still being around was the reason why I moved around so much, because she refused to allow me to be put up for adoption. Every time I went back to my mother and then had to leave her again to go back into care, I ended up with a new foster family.’ Holly grimaced and shrugged. ‘It was a messy way to grow up.’
Vito had always thought he had it rough with a tyrannical grandfather, warring parents and being an only child on whom huge expectations rested. But his glimpse at what lay on Holly’s side of the fence sobered him and gave him an unsettling new perspective. He had always had security and he had always known he was loved. And although Holly had enjoyed neither advantage, she wasn’t moaning about it, he thought with grudging appreciation.
As Vito lounged back on the sofa his six-pack abs rippled below the soft cotton stretched over his broad chest and Holly’s mouth ran dry. He was amazingly beautifully built and the acknowledgement sent colour surging into her cheeks because she had never looked at a man’s body and thought that before. But she couldn’t take her eyes off him and it mortified her. It was as if she had been locked back into a teenager’s body again because there was nothing sensible or controlled about what she was experiencing.
‘We’ll set the timer for a ten-minute challenge,’ Vito told her lightly, doubting that she would last the game that long.
Fortunately, Holly didn’t even have to think while she played him. In dark times the engrossing, mindless games had been her escape from the reality of a life that hurt too much. With the weapon she had picked she made kill after kill on screen and then the challenge was over and she had won.
‘You’re very fast,’ Vito conceded with a slashing grin of appreciation, because once again he could not think of a single woman who, having chosen to play him, would not have then allowed him to win even though she was a better player. Of course that was a debatable point when he didn’t actually know any other woman who could play.
‘Lots of practice over the years,’ Holly conceded, still recovering from the raw charisma of that wolfish grin that cracked right through his essential reserve. Gaming had relaxed him, warmed him up, melted that cool façade he wore to show the real man underneath. And now he didn’t just strike her as heartbreakingly handsome, he was downright irresistible. She shifted uneasily in her seat, her body tense and so weirdly super sensitive that even her clothes seemed to chafe her tender skin.
‘And the prize is...’ Vito’s attention locked like a missile to the soft pink fullness of her mouth and her nipples pinched into tight little points. ‘You get to put your Christmas tree up.’
Holly sprang off the seat. ‘Seriously?’ she exclaimed in surprise.
‘Seriously.’ Vito focused on that sparkling smile and gritted his teeth in a conscious attempt to cool off and quell his hard-on. He didn’t know what it was about her but one look from those melting blue eyes and he was hotter than hell. ‘Go ahead...’ He pinched one of the snacks on her plate by his feet. ‘Any more of these?’
Holly laughed. ‘I’ll put more on before I get the tree sorted.’
Vito watched her rush about full of energy, and suppressed a rueful sigh. It didn’t take a lot to make her happy. ‘Why does Christmas mean so much to you?’
‘I didn’t have it when I was very small,’ she admitted.
‘How can you not have Christmas?’
‘Mum didn’t celebrate it. Well, not in the family sense. There was no tree, no present, nothing. She went out partying but I didn’t know what the day was supposed to be until I went into care for the first time.’
Vito frowned. ‘And how did that happen?’
Holly hesitated, eyes troubled as her oval face stiffened. ‘You know, this is all very personal...’
‘I’m curious... I’ve never met anyone who grew up in care before,’ Vito told her truthfully, revelling in every fleeting expression that crossed her expressive little face. She was full to the brim with emotional responses. She was his exact opposite because she felt so much and showed even more. It shook him that he could find that ingenuousness so very appealing in a woman that he was challenged to look away from her.
Holly compressed her lips, those full pink lips with that dainty little cupid’s bow that called to him on a far more primitive level. ‘When I was six years old, Mum left me alone for three days over Christmas. I went to a neighbour because I was hungry and she called the police.’
Taken aback by that admission, Vito sat up very straight, dark-as-night eyes locked to her as she finished that little speech in an emotive surge. ‘Your mother abandoned you?’
‘Yes, but eventually she probably would have come back, as she’d done it before. I was put into a short-term foster home and the family gave me Christmas even though it was already over,’ Holly told him with a fond smile of remembrance.
‘And you’ve been making up for that loss ever since,’ Vito said drily, shrugging off the pangs of sympathy assailing him, taking refuge in edgy cynicism instead. He didn’t do emotion, avoiding such displays and feelings whenever he could because the memories of his mother’s raw pain in the face of his father’s rejections still disturbed him. As far as he was concerned, if you put your feelings out on display you were asking to be kicked in the teeth and it was not a risk he was prepared to take for anyone. Yet just looking at Holly he could tell that she had taken that same risk time and time again.
‘Probably. As obsessions go, Christmas is a fairly harmless one,’ Holly fielded before she got up to hurry into the kitchen and retrieve the snacks from the oven. After handing him the plate, she returned to winding the fairy lights round the small tree.
He watched the firelight flicker over her, illuminating a rounded cheekbone, a tempting stretch of gleaming thigh as she bent down, and the provocative rise of her curvy behind. ‘How old are you, Holly?’
Holly attached an ornament to a branch and glanced over her shoulder at him. As soon as she collided with his spellbinding dark golden eyes, her heart raced, her mouth ran dry and her mind went blank. ‘I’m twenty-four...tomorrow.’
Vito’s gaze glittered in the firelight. ‘It’s both Christmas and your birthday.’
‘Now it’s your turn. Tell me about you,’ Holly urged with unconcealed eagerness because everything about Vito Sorrentino made her insanely curious.
It should not have been an unexpected question but it hit Vito like a brick and he froze on the reality that having questioned her so thoroughly he could hardly refuse to respond in kind. He breathed in deep, squaring his broad shoulders, fighting his tension. ‘I’m the only child of ill-matched parents. Holiday periods when my father was expected to play his part as a family man were always very stressful because he hated being forced to spend time with us. Christmas fell into that category.’
‘Why haven’t they separated?’ He was so on edge talking about his family situation that it touched her heart. Such a beautiful man, so sophisticated and cool in comparison to her, so seemingly together and yet he too bore the damage of a wounding childhood. Holly was fascinated.
‘My mother was raised to believe that divorce is wrong...and she loves my father. She’s incredibly loyal to the people she loves.’ Vito spoke very stiffly because he had never in his life before shared that much about his family dynamics. He had been taught to live by the same code of secretive silence and polite denial that his mother had always observed. Even if the roof was falling in, appearances still had to be conserved. Breaking that code of silence with an outsider filled him with discomfiture.
