‘I don’t think they’d agree with you, somehow.’ They both looked across the room to where Kirsty’s head rested on Drew’s shoulder.
‘No second thoughts?’ Drew asked.
‘Just one.’
Kirsty felt him stiffen and relented immediately, delighting in the power she had over him.
‘Mmm. I’m wondering if I made the right decision allowing you to bring me here. Oh, Drew,’ she told him, her eyes suddenly darkening, ‘just think—if we’d stayed at the farmhouse, by now…’
‘We’d have been lovers,’ Drew finished for her. ‘A special licence and soon we can be. I want it as much as you, Kirsty—more, perhaps,’ he added wryly, ‘but I want you as my wife; tied to me so firmly that you can’t change your mind.’
‘I won’t,’ she promised against his lips, joy flooding her heart and mind. He loved her. Really loved her!
He started to laugh.
‘What’s the matter?’ Kirsty demanded half fearfully.
‘Nothing. I’m just thinking that Shakespeare, were he to have witnessed our behaviour these last few weeks, would probably have called it Much Ado About Nothing—don’t you agree?’
She was still laughing when he silenced the sound with his mouth.
ISBN: 978-1-408-99932-5
A SUDDEN ENGAGEMENT
© 1983 Penny Jordan
Published in Great Britain 2015
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited
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The Suave Sicilian: Married for Revenge
Stefan Bianco is a man with one thing on his mind. Revenge. And the last person he expects to see hanging on the arm of his nemesis? The stunning Clio Norwood—the only woman to ever resist his near-lethal brand of seduction.
Clio’s life has become a mere shadow of what it once was. But Stefan’s searing gaze returns her to the fiery, passionate woman he once knew. Clio has the key to his revenge, and Stefan has the key to her freedom…but only if he agrees to her shocking proposal!
The world’s sexiest billionaires finally say “I do”!
The Sicilian’s Surprise Wife
Tara Pammi
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
SHE FELT LIKE GLASS, stretched so tightly that a gentle tap could shatter her forever.
Clutching her wrap tight in her fingers, Clio Norwood looked around for her fiancé, Jackson.
Ashley, his secretary, who had arrived unannounced and interrupted their meeting with a client Jackson was determined to add to his cap, was nowhere to be seen either. Something distasteful hovered in the back of Clio’s mind, as if waiting to strike.
With the small get-together of the ultrarich in full swing atop the Empire State Building, Manhattan glittered around them.
Usually, the vibrant, unrelenting pulse of the city that had become home to Clio over the past decade filled her with unending spirit for life. It had kept her going even when she had been struggling after graduation from Columbia University. And had helped her swallow her failures and her naive, broken expectations of making it by herself in the city that never slept.
But tonight, even New York couldn’t puncture the bubble of dread that had begun to pervade her of late.
Jackson had returned last night after three weeks from an overseas trip and had been in a stinker of a mood as he liked to call it, because he had missed out on some real estate deal.
They had barely exchanged a word all day today as she had been at work. When she had returned to the posh flat they had been living in for the past year, he had commanded her to get ready for this party tonight.
Commanded and not asked, much less requested. A pattern that was becoming more and more obvious to Clio. Still, she knew the stress of his business, understood the driving need to make one’s mark in the world, so she had given in.
Even if she was still bone tired from the out-of-season flu she had had a week ago.
Tonight, Jackson needed her help to convince Mrs. Alcott, an old friend of her parents’, to hire him as her personal investment banker. With her estates in Britain and substantial family business, Jane Alcott would be a coup for Jackson’s already flourishing career.
But they hadn’t even greeted Jane properly before Ashley had approached Jackson with a desperate glint in her eye.
Loath to create a scene, Clio had clenched her teeth and smiled serenely even as she saw the curious looks and stifled whispers among Jackson’s clients’ wives and girlfriends. Even the utter kindness of Jane’s question if everything was all right between Jackson and her had been unbearable.
What was going on with him? What was going on between them?
Because Clio knew with a nauseating clarity that Ashley was just the tip of the iceberg for what was going on between her and Jackson.
Suddenly, it felt blatantly scandalous of Ashley to drag him away with a barely disguised proprietary claim on him.
Squaring her shoulders, Clio let her long stride eat up the space. She hated creating a scene, hated the pitying and speculative glances that had been coming her way far too frequently the past few months, but she had endured it all silently.
Tonight, she had had enough. She stilled as a tall, commanding figure came into her focus.
Clio blinked, the impact of those jade green eyes and generous but scornful mouth instantaneous.
Stefan Bianco.
Her first instinct was to head for the elevator before he could see her, leave the party. Even her parents, with their disapprovingly stifling silence, would have been welcome. She didn’t want the man she had known a long time ago, one of her oldest friends, to see her tonight.
Stefan, Christian, Rocco and Zayed made up the Columbia Four—the four young men she had known when they had all been at university together, who had turned into supersuccessful, ultrawealthy, sought-after bachelors for whom the world was a playground and its most beautiful women were playthings.
But before they had all become successful in their own right, she had known them, had seen them every day for four years, and had shared her deepest fears and hopes with them.
And the fact that she wanted to run away from one of the few people who had genuinely known her, had understood her, left a bitter taste in her mouth.
Was she that much of a failure, then? Was she running away from Stefan or was she running away from what she had become?
Stefan Bianco looked around at the glittering cityscape of Manhattan and gritted his jaw tight.
The vibrant pulse of it, the memories from almost a decade ago everywhere he looked, his own sheer naïveté when he had studied at Columbia with his other three friends—the memories rose up around him like a specter that wouldn’t let him breathe easy even for a few minutes.
And yet, as the head of a multimillion luxury real estate company, New York was unavoidable even though he tried to reduce the number of times he came here.
But this time, he had a reason for being at this exact party, on top of the Empire State Building.
It was high time he found a way to stop Jackson Smith.
The memory of his executive assistant Marco’s whitened face as he lay against the hospital bed after his suicide attempt, Marco’s five-year-old daughter’s chubby face wreathed in confusion as she asked Stefan about what had happened to her papa…
The powerlessness he had felt was like acid in his stomach.
Jackson had swindled Marco out of his savings, pushed him to bankruptcy, until his assistant had lost everything, had seen no way out…
The eviscerating self-doubt, the sense of being an utter failure, of letting down everyone that had counted on him—looking into Marco’s eyes had been like looking at his own reflection of a few years ago.