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‘Naturally feels the need to protect his wife and his son.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’ Rachel flashed.
He raised a black satin eyebrow. ‘Are you working in defence of Mr Savakis here or his poor neglected wife?’
‘Both,’ Rachel declared loyally. ‘I like Leo …’
But she wouldn’t want him as a husband, she added silently. He was too overwhelmingly unreadable and dauntingly self-controlled. He adored Elise though, she was certain of it. It was just that …
‘He’s been virtually living in Chicago for the last twelve months, working on a high-profile case that only allows him back home for the occasional flying visit.’
‘Hence poor Elise feeling lonely and neglected—’
‘If you don’t stop being nasty about her, I’m going to leave!’
He shifted his shoulders against the black leather, then moved his legs, bending them out of their lazy sprawl so he could rest one ankle on the other knee. Rachel’s eyes were drawn to the lean bowl between his hipbones where the expensive black fabric of his trousers sat easily against—
Oh, please, someone help me! she thought despairingly and wanted to run away again.
He moved a hand next, lifting it up so he could stroke a long finger across the flat line of his lips. Above the stroking finger, his grey-green eyes feathered a ponderous look over her in a way that further fanned the sexual charge.
Did all Italian men have an ability to seduce just by using body language, or was it just her misfortune that they affected her like this?
Disturbed by the whole hectic physical war going on here, Rachel put some distance between them by walking across the room to stand staring out of one of the huge plate glass windows. London—the River Thames, Westminster and Tower Bridge—lay spanned out before her in a familiar night scene.
Behind her his silent study pin-pricked her spine.
He had not even bothered to challenge her threat to leave. It was as if he knew she was becoming more and more trapped here by the sexual pull and he was enjoying feeding it.
One of the friends she’d made during her stay in Naples had once claimed that Italian men could seduce you and make you feel wonderful about falling in love with them without so much as considering falling in love themselves. It was the Italian way. Apparently you were supposed to feel blessed that they’d bothered to notice you at all.
Because they were conceited and arrogant by nature, so confident in their prowess as mighty lovers, that the sugGesùon that they might not assuage your every sexual fantasy never entered their minds or their beds. Such an uncrushable self-belief was seductive in itself. Rachel had fallen for it with Alonso. Now here she was, feeling the pull again and with a much more dangerous beast than Alonso ever had been.
It was time to put it to death, she told herself.
Turning from the window, she looked back at him. ‘Leo knows about your affair with Elise,’ she announced.
And saw death happen to sexual promise as he flicked those eyes into sharp focus on her face.
‘He was sent photographs of the two of you together in a restaurant here in London, then later being very intimate on a dance floor,’ she pushed on.
His tight curse brought him to his feet.
‘Elise got upset—’
‘Naturally,’ he gritted.
Rachel bit down hard on her lower lip. ‘She denied everything, which was a bit stupid when Leo was standing there with the photographic evidence,’ she allowed. ‘F-fortunately the photos were dark and very grainy and she insisted that the blonde in them could be anyone.’
‘She lied, in other words.’
‘Wouldn’t you have done in her place?’
His dark head went back. ‘If I was so miserable in my marriage that I needed to look elsewhere for—company, I would be man enough to say so before the event!’
‘Well, good for you, Mr Villani,’ Rachel commended. ‘It must be really great to be so sure of yourself that you know what you would do in any given situation! Well, Elise lied,’ she stressed. ‘And, right off the top of her head, she suggested that the woman in the photos could even be me. Leo wasn’t impressed—I don’t normally look or dress like this, you see—’
He flicked her a cynical look. Another liar in the family, then.’
‘Yes,’ Rachel sighed, seeing no use in denying it. ‘I had been staying with Elise in London for a while to—to keep her company while Leo was away. She was so low and depressed I encouraged her to go out with an old f-friend from her modelling days and—and enjoy life a bit instead of moping around the house waiting for …’ She stopped, shutting the rest of that away where it belonged.
By his expression she knew he knew what she meant.
‘Anyway,’ she went on after a moment. ‘She took me up on the offer and really started to cheer up and be her old self! But I had no idea she was out there enjoying herself with another man … ‘
‘Oh, call it as it is, cara, we had the hots for each other.’
‘You don’t need to be so crude about it!’ she said heatedly.
‘What happened next?’ He was striding across the room towards the brandy bottle to replenish his empty glass and there was nothing languid in his movements now.
‘Elise told Leo that I had been seeing someone while I was staying with her …’
‘A someone who just happened to be me—?’ Brandy splashed into the glass.
Rachel watched it and mentally crossed her fingers and hoped he had the steady head for it. ‘She was fighting for her marriage.’
He swallowed the drink. ‘So did Savakis call you up to demand confirmation and you lied to him for your sister’s sake?’
‘Leo didn’t do anything.’ Ignoring his sarcasm, she kept strictly to the point. ‘Instead he chose to let the subject drop.’
‘Generous man,’ he drawled. ‘Or a sadly besotted one.’
The idea of Leo being either generous or besotted was so alien to Rachel that she had to stop and think about it and still couldn’t get either scenario to fit the Leo she knew.
‘Things have been—strained between the two of them ever since, and now …’ Rachel gathered herself in before she revealed the next bit. ‘Elise has just found out that she’s pregnant.’
Raffaelle responded to this with an abrupt stiffening of his long body. The glass clenched between his fingers, he turned a narrowed look on her face.
‘Do go on,’ he invited softly.
Rachel wished she didn’t have to go on but she knew that she did. ‘W-with the timing and—everything, there’s a big chance that Leo might not believe the baby is his.’
‘You mean he does not know about it yet?’
‘Not yet,’ Rachel murmured.
‘And is it his baby?’
‘Yes!’ she cried out. ‘Unless you are wondering if it might be your baby?’ she then could not resist hitting back.
‘I know it isn’t.’ His mouth was as hard now as his eyes were like ice.
Rachel shivered. ‘It’s Leo’s baby,’ she repeated firmly. ‘Conceived during one of his flying visits home. He’d only been there one night when he was telling Elise over the breakfast table that he was flying back to Chicago the next day. S-so she rebelled at his arrogant assumption that he could just fly in and—’ The rest was cut off and smothered. But once again she knew that he knew what she was getting at. ‘So Elise decided to punish him by telling him she had started her period and so was off limits … ‘
Because, as Elise had said, if Leo thought he could fly in just to ease his libido, then he could go back to Chicago and to libido hell!
‘Dio,’ Raffaelle muttered. ‘The sly machinations of a selfish woman never cease to impress me.’
‘Nor am I impressed by the casual attitude of a man on the hunt for sex!’
‘Was that remark aimed at me?’ he demanded.
‘Does it fit?’ Rachel lanced back. ‘Did you or did you not hit on my sister because you fancied your chances in her bed?’
Guilty as charged. His teeth came together. ‘I did not know that she was married,’ he declared stiffly.
‘And that’s your excuse?’ Rachel denounced. ‘Why didn’t you know she was married?’ she demanded. ‘She was a famous exmodel, for goodness’ sake! Her face used to be seen everywhere. Her marriage made the front pages of every glossy there is!’
‘Does she look like the famous model any more?’ he hit back. ‘You know she does not! She carries more weight now and her face has altered. And she did not exactly go out of her way to tell me who she was!’
‘What did she do then—pretend to be Catwoman, complete with rubber mask?’
Rachel saw him make a grab at his temper. ‘She used a different name,’ he said.
A different name—? That was one small detail Elise had left out of her account of her reckless rebellion against Leo.
‘What name—?’ She frowned at him.
He looked at her, then dared to laugh, though it wasn’t a very pleasant-sounding laugh. ‘Does—Rachel Carmichael mean much to you?’
Rachel suddenly needed to sit down again. Walking on trembling legs to the nearest sofa, she sank into its soft black leather and put the glass to her equally trembling mouth.
‘I see you recognise the name,’ he drawled hatefully.
‘Shut up!’ she whipped back; she was trying to think.
The devious witch, the calculating madam! She’d gone out there on the town stuffed full of rebellion, using her name as a cover-up, while insisting that Leo’s precious security guards remained at the house to guard her son!
‘No wonder Mark dragged me back here,’ she mumbled.
‘Who the hell is Mark?’ Raffaelle Villani rapped out.
‘My half-brother—the one with the camera,’ she enlightened.
‘You mean you are related to one of the paparazzi?’
Rachel shifted uncomfortably. ‘Mark and Elise are twins.’
He didn’t bother to say anything to that, but just stood there glaring into space. The atmosphere was pretty much too thick to breathe now and Rachel was wishing she was wearing armour plating because she had a horrible feeling she was going to need it soon.
‘From where?’ he demanded suddenly.
Looking up at him, she just blinked.
‘You said that your brother dragged you back,’ he enlightened her. ‘From where—?’
‘Oh—Devon,’ Rachel responded. ‘I work there on the family farm—organic,’ she added for no reason she could think of.
His raking scan of her was downright incredulous. ‘You … are a farmer?’
Her chin shot up. ‘What’s the matter with that, Mr Villani?’ she challenged. ‘Does it bruise your precious ego to know you’re about to be intimately linked to a poor farming girl instead of some rich chick with a three-hundred-year-old pedigree—?’
Silence clattered—no, it thundered down as both of them realised at the same time what it was she had just said.
‘“Intimately linked—?”’ he fed into that rumbling thunder.
Rachel bit down hard on her bottom lip to stop it from quivering. The thickened air in the room began to curdle—or was it the vodka she wasn’t used to drinking that was beginning to make her feel slightly sick?
‘Explain that,’ he raked out.
‘I w-will in a minute,’ she whispered. ‘I just need to—get my head together to …’ say what still had not been said.
Abandoning what was left of the glass of vodka and her bag to the floor at her feet, she made herself stand up again, preferring to meet what was about to come back at her from an upright position with her hands free rather than have him loom over her like a threatening thunderclap.
Why did he have to be so intimidatingly tall and big?
She found herself sending him a plea for understanding with her eyes as she lurched back into speech. ‘Elise provided this d-dress and the invitation to the charity thing tonight,’ she explained. ‘Then she was packed off to Chicago with her son this afternoon f-for a surprise visit to Leo, while Mark and I … ‘
‘Set up the sting on me?’
Pressing her lips together, she nodded, deciding not to object to the latest label he’d hung on them because it was the truth, and there was still more to come.
‘Tomorrow morning you and I will appear together in a Sunday tabloid—’
‘Saying what—?’ he bit out.
Oh, God, she groaned silently. ‘S-something like—Raffaelle Villani goes public with his latest w-woman …’
Having to really bite down hard on her bottom lip now, Rachel searched the hard angles of his face for a small sign that he wasn’t into murder—but she didn’t see it.
‘It was important to convince Leo that the woman in the photographs he has in his possession and the one who will appear in tomorrow’s paper are the same person and cannot be Elise if she is in Chicago with him!’
And that was the bottom line.
Suddenly he was a tall dark stranger standing there. A man so cold and so very still it was as if he had pulled on the same awesome cloak of implacability that Leo always wore.
The silence gnawed. So did the heightened tension which began sapping the defences that had kept Rachel going through all of this.
