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He pressed on with one thought driving him. Cassandra was alone in the dark, stranded on his estate, and whether or not that was thanks to her own stubbornness, she was a member of his staff and he had a duty of care towards her. He could only imagine her relief when he arrived to save the day.
He had never been so pleased to see the house. He was less pleased to discover that floodwater was lapping around the front step. Parking up, he waded to the front door. Inserting his key, he pushed, but the door wouldn’t open. He put his shoulder to it, but that made no difference. The house was in darkness. He glanced across the courtyard and called out. There was no sign of life. Where was she?
‘Cassandra!’
Framing his face with his hands, he peered into one of the windows, but all he could see was blackness beyond. Turning up his collar, he retraced his steps. It brought him a moment’s humour to see the ground might be flooded but Cassandra’s trench was doing its job in directing the water safely away from her seedlings. He skidded to a halt at the back door. It was wide open. His heart jumped at the thought she might have run out into the night; people had died in similar weather conditions.
‘Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to help me?’
He spun around at the sound of her voice. Moonlight framed her. She was at the far end of the kitchen soaked to the skin, with her hair hanging in straggles down her back as she dragged a sandbag across the floor.
‘Those candles have gone out again,’ she shouted as she backed into the hall. ‘Can you close the door and light them for me?’
‘Leave that!’ He swore viciously as he tore off his jacket. He was at her side in an instant. ‘You light the candles. I’ll take the sandbag.’
She shook him off. The brief contact between them was electrifying.
‘If you want to help me, grab another bag!’ she yelled. ‘The river must have burst its banks—’
‘Clearly,’ he said dryly, wrestling the sandbag from her grasp. He laid it down on top of the others. That was why he’d been unable to get in—and now she was rolling up his Persian carpets.
‘Help me,’ she insisted impatiently. ‘It will be faster if the two of us do it.’
‘Have you lit those candles yet?’ he pressed, frowning.
‘Have you got any manners?’ she fired back with a scowl twice as deep as his.
He straightened up with surprise. No one had ever talked to him this way before.
‘Thank you would be a start,’ she told him sharply.
An almighty thunder crash brought an end to their discussion. As lightning flashed repeatedly he could see the wide-eyed shock on her face.
‘You’re safe,’ he insisted, when nature paused to take a breath.
‘If it doesn’t stop raining soon, we’ll be sunk—quite literally,’ she said. ‘Here—catch this.’
She tossed him a towel to mop up the water leaking through her barricade. Far from cowering in a corner, waiting for her white knight to arrive, Signorina Rich was firmly in control. He surprised himself by liking that. But, then, he liked her. He couldn’t help himself. He admired her grit.
‘Well? Are you going to help me to roll up these rugs or not?’ she demanded, glancing back at him as she lit the candles on the hall table.
There were plenty of things he would like to help Signorina Rich with, and rolling rugs wasn’t at the top of his list.
It was all going well for her until she crossed the room in the half-light and caught her foot under a rug. As she stumbled he caught her close. It only took an instant to absorb how good she felt beneath his hands. Candlelight mapped the changes in her eyes from blue to black. She held her breath, almost as if she thought he was going to kiss her. Would she fight him? Would she yield hungrily? It was irrelevant to him. He might want to kiss her, he might even ache to kiss her, but he would never be so self-indulgent.
Delay was the servant of pleasure, he mused dryly as he steadied her.
‘Be careful you don’t trip up again.’
The look she gave him suggested that tripping up over a rug, or anything else for that matter, was the last thing on her mind.
‘Shall we carry on?’ she suggested. ‘The rugs?’ she added pointedly.
She got more brownie points for effort, and his senses got a second jolt when she brushed past him. She’d keep, he reassured his aching flesh. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Having been forced to work together, Cass was surprised to discover how well they could read each other’s intentions—to her surprise, they made a great team. It was certainly a pleasure watching Marco wielding his immense physical strength.
‘I’ll move things out of the way so you can take that rug into the dining room,’ she told him, holding her breath as Marco shouldered the weight of the wool rug as if it were a bag of feathers. Opening the door wide, she cleared a space for him, only to find him breathing down her neck. Their hands brushed. Their bodies touched. Their breath mingled as he turned around. They were just too dangerously close—
‘Great job,’ she said, stepping back. Now she realised that in her hurry to get away from him she had made it sound as if their positions in life had been reversed and Marco was her assistant. Oh, well. There was nothing she could do about that now. Ducking beneath his arm, she slipped away.
‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.
‘To my bed.’ She turned and shrugged. ‘We’ve done all we can tonight. I’m going to have a bath first—try to warm up. The power may be off but the water should still be warm in the reserve tank—and I promise I won’t use it all.’
‘A bath in the dark?’ he queried.
‘I’ll manage—I’ll take some candles.’ She glanced at his fist on the door. Was he going to try and stop her leaving? The tension between them had suddenly roared off the scale.
‘You’re in a hurry to get away.’
His murmur hit her straight between the shoulder blades in a deliciously dangerous quiver of awareness. ‘I’m cold,’ she excused herself, hugging her body and acting fragile. She doubted he was convinced, but at least he lifted his hand from the door.
‘You’ve done well tonight,’ he said as he stood back.
‘And now I’m freezing,’ she reminded him in a stronger voice. That wasn’t so far from the truth. She was soaking wet. ‘If you could get the power back on...’ she suggested hopefully.
Marco narrowed his eyes and looked at her. ‘You’d better take that bath,’ he said, to her relief. ‘And don’t forget to reassure your godmother that you’re safe. A storm like this will have made the international news. And anyone else, of course, who might be interested,’ he added as an apparent afterthought.
He didn’t fool her. ‘There is no one else.’ She guessed that was his real question. ‘And I will speak to my godmother as soon as the phone line comes back.’
‘You obviously think a lot of her.’
Passion and gratitude swept over her. ‘My godmother is the most wonderful woman on earth. She took me in—’
‘When your parents were killed,’ Marco supplied thoughtfully.
‘Yes.’ She firmed her lips, reluctant to say anything more. How much did he know?
‘Why did you leave her to come here to work in Tuscany?’
‘It’s a great job,’ she said frankly. ‘And I can’t just live off her. She found this opportunity for me when I left my last job. She found it through one of her friends, another keen gardener. It would have been churlish of me to turn it down.’
Though maybe she should have done, Cass reflected as Marco continued to stare at her. He was beginning to make her nervous. She decided to give him a little more. ‘I can easily get a job at another supermarket when I go home, and in the meantime this job is perfect for me.’
‘Perfect,’ Marco echoed without comment or expression.
He might want to know more, but she wasn’t going to discuss her personal life with someone who was practically a stranger.
‘Don’t catch cold,’ he reminded her.
She didn’t need another prompt. She left him and ran across the courtyard without a backward glance. Racing up the steps to her room, she felt as if the devil was on her back.
* * *
He stood in silence when Cassandra left him. She had handled the crisis with impressive calm and now she intrigued him more than ever. Apparently uncomplicated and open, she was, in fact, as much a closed book as he was. He would like to find out more about her. She was hopeless at taking orders, but she was a breath of fresh air. Having worked closely with her, he now felt the lack of her, like a caged lion, penned in with a woman he wanted in his bed. He would be ill-advised to seduce her, he reminded himself firmly. He never slept with his employees.
He eased the physical ache with practicalities, starting up the generator and checking the garden to assess the damage. He huffed dryly to see her seedlings had survived when trees that had stood for centuries were lying broken on the ground. He should give her a long-term contract just to build drainage channels for him.
Having checked the sandbags were doing their job, he marvelled that she could lift them at all. He was trying to exhaust himself, he realised, in an attempt to put Cassandra out of his mind. That didn’t stop his body craving her, or his mind from examining every tiny detail he knew about her. Cassandra Rich was the most unsettling woman he’d ever met. She was everything he would usually avoid. She was too young, too naïve, and she had no inkling of their relative positions in life—which was something else he liked about her, he now discovered. There were far too many toadies in his world. Cassandra Rich was real, he concluded with a shrug. If he were stranded in another storm, would he want Cassandra at his side or one of those fragrant types he usually went for? He’d choose Cassandra every time.
He laughed as he jogged up the stairs. There were so few surprises left in life, he almost welcomed her arrival into his remote, complex world.
So few surprises?
He was about to get the surprise of his life. He stopped dead on the threshold of his room. His window was closed, but his shutters were open and Cassandra’s light was on.
* * *
She would never know what made her do it, other than to say she had seen pictures in magazines and films, as well as images in her head, of the type of sophisticated temptress a man like Marco would most likely be attracted to. That woman would be a minx, a siren, a temptress—all the things that capable Cass, as they had called her at the supermarket, most certainly wasn’t. But there was nothing to stop her playing out her fantasy.
Perhaps it was the warmth of the evening and having a man like Marco close by and yet at a safe distance that had made exploring her own sexuality not just irresistible but an imperative. She’d missed having fun, but Tuscany seemed to have released something in her.
Working side by side with Marco had certainly released something in her, Cass reflected mischievously—and that was her excuse for dancing around the room while she waited for her bath to fill. In her dreams, she was dancing for him—and Marco was drooling, of course.
In reality, he wouldn’t want his gardener, but what fun were bare facts? Her job here would end soon and he would be out of her life, but for now...let the dream continue!
Taking a breather, she went to peer out of the window. Marco’s lights were safely off and his room was empty. Thank goodness! For a moment she had felt a rush of concern, wondering if he was watching her from the shadows. But no. It was just her and the moonlight, and she was safe to continue with part two of the show, dancing on her imaginary stage, beneath the moon, her imaginary spotlight...
* * *
He stood transfixed as Cassandra started to undress. She had her back to him, and was performing a slow and rather skilful striptease. When the top came over her head and he caught a glimpse of the ripe swell of her breasts, he was disappointed that the angle at which she was standing prevented him from seeing more. His imagination lost no time supplying the detail, and he groaned at the prospect of another night without sleep.
Allowing her top to drop to the floor, she removed the band from her ponytail and let her hair flow free in a shimmering cascade down her back. Running her fingers through it, she shivered a little as it fell around her shoulders, as if the touch of her hair on her naked skin aroused her. Still moving with a tantalising lack of haste, she freed the fastening at the waistband of her jeans, and reaching her hands behind her back she slipped her fingers beneath the denim, pushing it down over the swell of her hips. When she arched her back, it was almost as if she was presenting her buttocks for his approval. He did approve.
He went still as she stepped out of the jeans. Many women had tried to seduce him, and a good few had succeeded, but no one had made him feel as hungry as this. He was transfixed by the sight of Cassandra running her fingertips lightly over her breasts, her hands lingering, as if she appreciated the pertness of her nipples as much as he did. His senses roared as she pinched them. She appeared to cry out softly at the pain. Rolling her head back, she cupped her breasts and drew them forward as if inviting him to suckle. He would go mad if this went on for much longer.
He tensed as her hands travelled down over the swell of her belly. She had reached another place he would like to take his time exploring. She traced the swell lightly with her fingertips before delving deeper, and when she withdrew her hand he sucked in a noisy breath, only to realise that for the past few seconds he hadn’t breathed at all. Cassandra had seemed so innocent, and yet these were the actions of a very sensual woman, who knew exactly how to torment a man. For all her physical strength and forthright manner, Cassandra was as lush and womanly as he could wish for. And, in the biggest surprise of the night, she had turned out to be the most erotically provocative female he’d ever met. He wondered if her pleasure was always self-administered. Her right arm was undulating lazily. Was she touching herself intimately? He had never been so aroused by the sight of a woman doing that. He was in agony.
* * *
What was she doing? Cass asked herself in shock, bringing a sudden halt to her performance.
She should be curled up safely in bed. She could only put her behaviour down to a release of tension now the storm had passed, and the old house she was coming to love had survived, because this was way over the top, and she had to stop doing it right now.
Had she lost her mind completely? She hadn’t even closed the windows—
Grabbing the towel she’d laid ready for her bath, she secured it around her body, and then turned around to check that she hadn’t been seen.
Marco’s shutters were firmly closed, thank goodness.
Closed? Had they been closed before?
She couldn’t remember. She could only remember thinking that his room had been in darkness. Maybe they had been closed. They must have been closed, she reassured herself sensibly.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_9b76d8eb-8636-500b-b81d-e096ac2df192)
HE WAS TENSE at breakfast for obvious reasons. Cassandra, on the other hand, appeared to be totally relaxed, and was her customary rosy-cheeked self. After her assertiveness during the storm, and her astonishing striptease performance afterwards, she appeared to be as cool, calm and collected as ever.
‘Sorry—didn’t you want eggs again?’ she asked him as he groaned out loud, thinking back to her dance in the moonlight.
‘Eggs are good—eggs are fine. Thank you.’ He sat back in his chair and tried to not to think about Cassandra and her night-time activities.
‘My cooking skills are pretty basic,’ she added, as she busied herself at the business end of the kitchen. ‘Maria should get back today, so tomorrow you’ll have better food.’
And then she bent down to put a pan away and her faded denim shorts clung tightly to the outline of her bottom. The urge to join her—to stand behind her and press his body into hers—to map her buttocks with one hand holding her in place, while he pleasured her with the other—
‘More bread? Eggs? Coffee?’ she called out.
‘No. Thank you.’
When she turned to face him, his thoughts were not of breakfast but of slowly sinking into her welcoming body and sheathing himself to the hilt. Her long, slender legs would wrap around his waist, and she would move with him. Her soft cries of need would urge him on, as he worked steadily to bring her release—multiple releases, he amended. He sat up as she put a hand to her forehead. ‘Something wrong?’
‘Dishwasher tablets!’
He blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘We’re out of them,’ she explained, frowning.
So much for his fatal charm! Though, far from being discouraged, her quirky ways had only fuelled his hunger for her.
* * *
Marco di Fivizzano was driving her crazy. He was about to start clearing the garden after the storm as she set out to go shopping, and he was stripped to the waist with an axe in his hand, looking like every one of her fantasies come true. But who was he, really? Her boss was so wealthy and powerful he could keep his backstory under wraps. That didn’t stop her wondering about him. He made her curious. Everyone had an interesting backstory, once she had scraped the surface, but Marco didn’t allow anyone to get close enough to tickle his back, let alone scrape his surface.
She wouldn’t mind tickling his back... She wouldn’t mind digging her fingers into those impressive shoulder muscles—
The spell broke abruptly as Maria came bustling out of the house. There had obviously been a call for Marco. Burying the axe in the tree stump, he led the way back into the house.
Sometimes life was so unfair, Cass mused wryly as Marco and his delightful body disappeared inside the house. But there was always a next time...
She spent the afternoon in the village, where it was tranquil and cool after the storm. She still had some work to do in the garden to make sure everything was straight again, so she set off back to the house as soon as she could, and was surprised to find Marco pacing the kitchen, waiting for her.
‘Leave that now,’ he said, as she started to put away the shopping.
‘What’s wrong?’ She frowned as she straightened up.
‘We need to talk.’
