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‘Mmm?’
His lips were at the base of her neck now, drifting in a tantalising path down towards her breasts. And she held her breath, not wanting to break the moment nor the feeling even as some stubborn resistance reared again its unwanted head. Go away, she told her doubts fiercely—but somehow those doubts refused to die. ‘I mustn’t—’
‘Sì, you must.’ He smiled against her skin as the tip of his tongue flicked against her skin. ‘You want to. You know you do.’
Jessica felt herself slipping under—as if sensual dark waters were lapping over her. Her eyelids fluttered open and all she could see was the ceiling of the luxury car. The car! He was seducing her in the back seat of his car! ‘You … you … oh, oh!’
But, ironically, it was as his hand began to slide its way up her thigh that reality hit her like a sudden spray of ice-water and Jessica tore herself out of his arms, wriggling over to the corner where she surveyed him as if she had found herself alone with an unknown and deadly predator.
Her fingers reached for her neck and she could feel the rapid rise and fall of her breast as she struggled to cope with her ragged breathing.
‘What … what on earth do you think you’re doing?’ she breathed.
‘You know exactly what I’m doing—I’m going to make love to you.’
Jessica swallowed. ‘You are not!’
‘But you want me to.’
Oh, the arrogance and the assurance which was printed all over that gorgeous face—but even worse was the glaring truth which underpinned his words. She did want him—more than she could ever remember wanting anyone, but, oh, at what price? Her dignity? Her job? She tugged at the black silk dress which had ridden up round her thighs. ‘Maybe for a moment I did—but this certainly wasn’t supposed to be part of the plan tonight!’
‘No?’ he drawled, infuriated now by the sudden, abrupt ending and by the growing feeling of disbelief that a woman should be turning him down. And such a woman as this! ‘I wasn’t aware that we had drawn up some kind of itinerary for the evening.’
‘That’s not what I meant and you know it!’ she flared.
‘No?’
‘No!’ And suddenly Jessica was angry—not just with herself but with him, too. ‘Did you think that I’d jump into bed with you at the drop of a hat?’ she demanded.
He wanted to say that it was far more likely to be a drop of her panties, which—unbelievably and infuriatingly—he had yet to see. ‘I think you were pretty close to it, Jessica. Sì.’
‘You think that all you have to do is to whisk me off to a fancy dinner in a chauffeur driven car and I’ll be so … so … grateful that I’ll capitulate to you!’
Salvatore was beginning to grow bored now. ‘I hadn’t actually given it that much thought,’ he told her damningly. ‘It wasn’t a situation I’d anticipated.’
Stupidly enough, this only added to her anger. So now he was saying that he hadn’t even considered he might find her attractive enough to make a pass at her! Was that why he had chosen her—because she was too plain to provide any temptation? Well, thank heavens she had seen sense before it was too late.
Imagine if she’d gone back with him—let him make love to her, and then what? Would he have sent her on her way in the middle of the night—to be taken home by his driver, like a toy he had grown bored with playing with? Or, even worse, being given money for a taxi to conveniently disappear from his bed?
‘We are just a man and a woman,’ he mused, when still she said nothing. ‘And sometimes passion comes along when you are least expecting it. It is the way of these things.’
As he spoke he reached out to brush a stray strand of the thick, shiny hair which had fallen over her face and that one innocent, almost tender gesture was almost Jessica’s undoing. Because that was the kind of thing that a real lover might do—especially if he was trying hard to seduce you. Not that Jessica was the world’s biggest expert on lovers, but she knew what was considered acceptable by most women with a degree of self-respect and what was not.
If she allowed Salvatore to make love to her now, then it would be tantamount to telling him to treat her like a disposable cloth—to be thrown away when he’d finished with her!
And by tomorrow, his desire would have died. Why, he might even thank her for having been level-headed enough to put a stop to things before they got out of hand. True, facing him again in the workplace wasn’t going to be the most comfortable option, but there were ways of dealing with that.
She pulled her head back from the enticement of that touch. ‘Maybe it’s the way of things in the world you live in,’ she said pointedly. ‘But not in mine.’
He searched her face for a teasing look, the telltale expression on her face which would indicate that this was merely female playfulness, but to Salvatore’s disbelief there was none. Just the kind of jutting-chinned certainty which women often assumed when they meant something, and which made his heart sink.
This was worse than being back in Sicily! Did she really imagine that he was going to start courting her? That she would allow him certain privileges each night? One night the kiss, the next the breasts—until she breathlessly allowed him to take her whole body, as she would have been hungering for from the very beginning?
Did she really think he had the time or the inclination to waste on a leisurely pursuit of a woman for whom his desire was already waning—someone who should have been thanking her lucky stars to be here with him in the first place? His mouth twisted. What a little fool she was—to have called time on what would have been the best experience of her life!
‘If you think that such resistance will elevate you to a truly irresistible status in my eyes, then I am afraid you are sadly mistaken, cara. Do you not think that I have been privy to every devious game played by women? I know them all—and it won’t work, for I am immune to them all.’
Jessica sat bolt upright. She hadn’t been so angry since … well, actually, she couldn’t ever remember being as angry as this!
‘Oh, don’t worry, Signor Cardini,’ she retorted, trying to match his withering tone with one of her own and in that hot moment of fury not caring that she might be jeopardising her job. ‘I really hadn’t given any thought to game-playing—why would I? I thought I was coming out to act as some kind of decoy—not to be leapt on in the back of your car! And now, if you don’t mind—I’d like to be taken home.’
There was a moment of brief, stunned silence as the impact of her words sank in, until in the shadowed gloom Salvatore’s mouth curved into a cruel and mocking smile. ‘I think you forget yourself, cara mia,’ he drawled damningly. ‘You will certainly be dropped off—but only after the car has taken me home.’
He pressed a button by his seat, tersely issued the instruction to his driver and drew a sheaf of documents from one of the side-pockets. And then, clicking on a reading light, he leaned back in his seat and began to flick through them, as if he had simply forgotten she was there.
CHAPTER FIVE
BUT the craziest thing of all was that Salvatore couldn’t get Jessica out of his mind—and the irony of this didn’t escape him. How could one short, bogus date have resulted in him thinking almost non-stop about his damned cleaner? Unable to shake from his mind the memory of her grey eyes, that pure skin and the decadent delight of those luscious breasts.
The light glinted on his razor as he stared in the mirror, his dark jaw half shaved and his blue eyes narrowed. Intellectually he recognised that her improbable attraction was because she had turned him down. He was used to women fawning. Plotting. Enticing and scheming. Why, it was not unknown for a woman to beg him to make love to her!
Jessica intrigued him because in a world where one thing was predictable—his effect on the opposite sex—the unexpected would always have the power to tantalise him.
So had she been playing games with him? Knowing that precisely the right button to press was not to let him press any buttons at all? To let him touch a little, but not too much. To give him a taste to whet his appetite but leave him hungering for more?
He went to his club and swam for an hour, had a breakfast meeting in a chandelier-lit room overlooking Hyde Park and took a conference call from an Australian banker before most of the world was awake. Yet still he was restless.
How could some plain and mousy little cleaner know how to handle any kind of man—but especially a man like him?
All day long he was distracted, though he was astute enough not to make any major decisions until her infernal perfume had left his senses. Some scent he was unfamiliar with—which had reminded him of springtime and softness and clung to his skin last night until he had viciously washed it off beneath the jets of a cold shower.
‘Maledizione!’ Damn her!
Giovanni Amato—an old friend from Sicily—was flying in from New York and Salvatore had arranged to meet him for dinner. Yet he found himself strangely relieved when Giovanni’s secretary rang to say his flight had been delayed, and that he was running late.
‘Get him to call me,’ Salvatore said to her. ‘We’ll change it to another night.’
As he slowly put the phone down Salvatore felt the stealthy beat of excitement combined with the strong tang of self-contempt. Surely you aren’t hanging around the office waiting to see whether that pale little nobody will dare show her face here tonight? he asked himself furiously.
But as he cleared his desk of paperwork he recognised that maybe he was. He glanced at his watch. That was if she was going to bother to turn up.
He had signed the last of a pile of letters and was just putting his gold pen down on the blotter when he heard the door click open behind him. Salvatore felt himself tense, though he didn’t move. He didn’t dare move. He hadn’t felt this kind of hot, instant lust for a woman for a long time and he wanted to prolong it—knowing that the second he turned round, his fantasy would crumble into dust. He would no longer be looking at the woman who had made him feel so deliciously hard all night, but at some mousey little office worker.
He swivelled the chair round to face her. ‘Hello, Jessica,’ he said softly.
Clutching her bucket and her mop, Jessica froze as she stared across the huge office in horror.
He was still here!
Despite her leaving his office until the last possible moment—until she was certain that he had gone—Salvatore Cardini was still at his desk, his icy blue eyes mocking her with memories of what had almost happened in his car last night! She bit down on her lip so hard that she risked cutting it and the hand which wasn’t holding onto the mop clenched into a tight fist by the side of her pink overall. Of all the nightmare situations, this had to be the very worst.
Hadn’t she hesitated about coming in here at all, tempted to phone Top Kleen and tell them she was sick? And hadn’t there been a tiny part of her which had wondered about leaving the agency altogether—to sign on with someone new? Someone who might not have a prestigious client like Cardini, but who would guarantee a peaceful working environment where she would be untroubled by ridiculous fantasies.
But Jessica had a strong work ethic, which made her baulk at such behaviour, as well as a stubborn streak of pride which insisted that she had done nothing wrong. Nothing to be ashamed of.
So where was that strong conviction now? Staring across the vast space, she could see the sardonic glint in Salvatore’s eyes. Her mouth as dry as parchment, she drank him in. His black hair, his broad shoulders and outline of that amazing hard body. The image of that same body pressing itself close into hers in the back seat of his car drifted tantalisingly into her mind and fiercely she tried to block it.
What the hell was she going to say to him when their last meeting had ended in a frozen silence?
Just act normally. As if nothing happened. Wipe it from your memory—as he has probably wiped it from his.
She cleared her throat. ‘Good evening …’ she hesitated. ‘… sir.’
Salvatore gave a slow, mocking smile. So they were back to ‘sir’, were they?
His eyes flicked over her. She was wearing the same pink overall which she always wore and her hair was almost completely concealed by the hideous pink scarf. Her face was bare of make-up and her grey eyes were wary, watchful. She looked exactly the same as she always did and yet something had changed.
In him?
Was it because he had kissed those bare lips and tangled his fingers in the glossy hair which now lay covered from his gaze that made him so acutely aware of her presence in a way he had never been before? Was it because he now knew the luscious curves and unexpected temptations of the body which lay beneath the unflattering garment?
‘Sleep well?’ he questioned softly.
Infuriatingly, Jessica blushed. No, of course she hadn’t slept well! She’d spent the entire night tossing and turning and bashing her pillow into shape and then getting up to make herself a cup of camomile tea, unable to get Salvatore out of her mind.
It had been the memory of his kiss which had troubled her more than anything. Because wasn’t it rather shaming that in all her twenty-three years—the one kiss which had sent her heart soaring was delivered by a man for whom she’d been nothing but a convenience?
She wondered if he was astute enough to notice how awful she looked. Wouldn’t the dark circles beneath her eyes show her to be lying if she claimed to have slumbered like a baby?
‘Not really, no,’ she answered briskly.
‘Me neither. I tossed and I turned all night.’ His lips lingered on the words as he leaned back in his chair and studied her. ‘But I guess that isn’t really surprising, is it, cara?’
She wished he wouldn’t dip his voice like that—as if he were dipping a rich, ripe strawberry into a bowl of thick, melted chocolate. And she wished he wouldn’t stare at her like that, either. As if it were his unalienable right to arrogantly appraise her, with the kind of slow scrutiny of a man performing an imaginary striptease. So just blank all his sensual allusions. Behave as you normally would and sooner or later he’ll tire of the game and leave you alone.
‘No, not surprising at all,’ she said, deliberately misunderstanding. She picked up a plastic bottle which appeared to show two lemons going into battle against an army of germs. ‘The food at dinner was very rich.’
‘But you hardly touched a thing all evening,’ he reminded her.
‘I’m amazed you noticed,’ said Jessica.
‘Oh, I noticed all right.’ His blue eyes gleamed with provocation. ‘Just as I noticed that Jeremy Kingston seemed to think you were the most fascinating thing to come into his life since his last tax break.’
‘Only because I asked him about fishing. He says he gets fed up with people always wanting to know which bank he’s taking over next.’
‘Are you aware that he’s one of the most powerful financiers in Europe?’ questioned Salvatore coolly.
‘No, of course I’m not,’ scoffed Jessica. ‘Finance not only doesn’t interest me—it also confuses the life out of me. Now, do you mind if I start working?’
He linked his long fingers together. ‘You don’t usually ask.’
She wasn’t usually remembering just what it felt like to have his lips all over her neck, his hands splayed over her silk-covered thighs. ‘So I don’t,’ she agreed tightly. ‘But under the circumstances, I thought I’d make an exception.’
Clutching her bucket, she walked across the office to the cloakroom, horribly and yet skin-tingling, aware that he was watching every step as she passed him, like a clever cat before it leapt onto a helpless little mouse. She reached for the tap. Hadn’t he called her a mouse last night? And wasn’t that an insult?
Salvatore could hear the sound of running water and he screwed his eyes together. He had been expecting—what? That she would have prettied herself up for him this evening? Flirted a little? Undone a few buttons and flaunted a little cleavage? Or acted in that deliberately coy way that women sometimes did, and which men could rarely resist, even when they knew they were being manipulated.
Yet here she was, behaving as if nothing had happened!
But nothing did happen, his aching body reminded him, and his natural sexual arrogance made his fists clench with anger that frustration imposed on him from such an unlikely source. Noiselessly, he rose from his desk and followed her into the cloakroom. ‘You don’t usually run away from me either, do you, Jessica?’
She turned round, her face flushed, heart-thumpingly aware of his proximity and the way that he seemed to dominate the space around them. Suddenly, her bravado seemed to have deserted her. ‘No, I don’t,’ she agreed unsteadily.
‘Just like you don’t usually stare at me all wide-eyed like that, as if I’m the big, bad wolf.’
Jessica attempted to make her face look normal—but how the hell did you do something like that when all you could think of was how utterly irresistible the man was? ‘Don’t I?’
He smiled, but it was a hard edged smile. ‘You know you don’t.’
He seemed to be deliberately misinterpreting the situation. Didn’t he have any inkling how difficult she was finding this? Didn’t he realise that she had feelings for him but was sensible enough to know that such feelings were totally inappropriate? Jessica frowned, but part of her felt a sudden sadness, too.
Usually they had an easy rapport, which sometimes happened when two people of completely different social standing came together. You sometimes heard about very rich men confiding in their driver, or a billionairess divulging all her secrets to the girl who painted her toenails. But it didn’t mean anything—not in the grand scheme of things.
Because such unlikely relationships only worked on the basis that both parties knew their place. That there were strict boundaries which neither should attempt to cross.
And so it had been with her and Salvatore—until last night. Last night they had broken the rules, big time. The taking her to dinner could have been classified as nothing but a minor transgression—but what had happened afterwards could not.
She couldn’t deny what she’d done—or nearly done. And although she had called a halt to that blissful bout of passion she couldn’t deny that her body had been crying out for him.
She looked at him. If she allowed herself to sink further into stupid fantasy, then her body could very easily start crying out for him right now. His black hair was ruffled, the bright blue eyes narrowed and the hard and autocratic line of his jaw was shadowed with new growth. He looked imposing and almost magisterial and a whole universe away from her. Standing here now, it seemed almost impossible to believe that they had briefly been so intimate.
Jessica knew that she had a choice—and the only sane one which lay open to her was not to rise to his teasing remarks or the sensual light which lurked in the depths of his sapphire eyes. He’s only playing with you, she told herself, and she knew she couldn’t afford to join in—neither financially, nor emotionally. That if she wanted to keep her job and carry on as before, then she had to forget the rapport they used to share. Forget everything except doing what she was paid to do, which was to clean his office.
‘I’d better get on with the floor,’ she said awkwardly, turning the hot tap on full and then jumping back as the red-hot water splashed onto her hand, and she gave a little yelp of pain. ‘Ouch!’
‘Sollecita!’ Salvatore made a clicking noise with his tongue as he walked over to her. ‘Here.’ And he calmly turned on the cold tap and held her flaming fingers beneath it.
The water was deliciously cool and soothing but his touch was even more unsettling than the stinging pain. Jessica tried to pull away but he wouldn’t let her.
‘Leave it under the running water,’ he ordered. ‘I said, leave it, Jessica.’
She didn’t have the strength or the inclination to disobey him and yet this was just too odd. He was here, in the most inappropriate of settings, administering hasty first aid to her. She felt dizzy with shock and pleasure. Everything was all wrong and yet through all the confusion of her thoughts came the overwhelming sensation that she liked him touching her.
She swallowed. Of course she liked him touching her—who wouldn’t?
After a couple of minutes, he turned the hand over and examined it, tracing a light fingertip over the still-heated flesh. ‘I think you’ll live,’ he said softly.
The surprising gentleness of the contact was completely disarming, as was the sudden deepening of his voice.
