Seated on his jet, furiously checking his watch to calculate the landing time, Cesare enlarged the photograph on his tablet and scrutinised it with lingering disbelief.
Don’t you dare take Lizzie out dressed like that to a club! he had texted his half-sister Maurizia, with a confusing mix of anger, frustration and concern assailing him in a dark flood of reactions that made him uncomfortable to the extreme.
He still couldn’t take his eyes off the photograph: Lizzie smiling as he had never seen her and sheathed in an emerald-green, ‘barely there’, strappy short dress with perilous high heels on her shapely legs. It was an amazing transformation. A magic wand had been waved over the bag lady. She looked fantastic and would outshine every woman around her now that her natural beauty had been polished up and brought to the fore. Her glorious mane of hair had been restored as he’d instructed, not cut. It gleamed in a silken tumble of silver strands round her delicately pointed face, green eyes huge, pouty mouth lush and pink. Cesare swore under his breath, outraged by his sisters’ interference and the hen-party nonsense. Lizzie was no more fit to be let loose in a London nightclub than a toddler and now he would have to go and retrieve her!
‘You’re not supposed to be here... This is her night!’ one of his sisters carolled accusingly as soon as he arrived at the women’s table.
‘Where is she?’ Cesare ground out, unamused, while he scanned the dance floor.
Looking daggers at her big brother, Sofia shifted a reluctant hand to show him. ‘Don’t spoil her night. She’s having a whale of a time!’
Cesare centred his incredulous dark gaze on the sight of his bride-to-be, a pink hen-night sash diagonally dissecting her slender, shapely body as she danced, arms raised, silvery hair flying, feet moving in time to the fast beat. What infuriated him was the sight of the two men trying to attract her attention because she appeared to be dancing in a world of her own. Suddenly Lizzie teetered to a stop, clearly dizzy as she swayed on her very high heels. With a suppressed snarl of annoyance, Cesare, ignoring his siblings’ wide-eyed disbelief at his behaviour, stalked across the floor to hastily settle steadying hands on Lizzie’s slim shoulders.
‘Cesare...’ Lizzie proclaimed with a wide, sunny smile because it only took one lingering glance to remind her how tall, dark and sleekly gorgeous he was. He towered over her, lean bronzed face shadowed and hollowed by the flickering lights that enhanced his spectacular bone structure, stunning dark golden eyes intent on her. She was really, really pleased to see him, a familiar reassuring image in a new world that was unnervingly different and unsettling. In fact for a split second she almost succumbed to a deeply embarrassing urge to hug him. Then, luckily remembering that hugging wasn’t part of their deal, she restrained herself.
‘You’re drunk,’ his perfectly shaped mouth framed, destroying the effect of his reassuring presence.
‘Of course I’m not drunk!’ Lizzie slurred, throwing up her hands in emphasis only to brace them on his broad chest while she wondered why her legs wanted to splay like a newborn calf’s trying to walk for the first time.
‘You are,’ Cesare repeated flatly.
‘I’m not,’ Lizzie insisted, holding onto his forearms to stay upright, her shoe soles still displaying a worrying urge to slide across the floor of their own volition.
‘I’m taking you home,’ Cesare mouthed as the deafening music crashed all around them.
‘I’m not ready to go home yet!’ she shouted at him.
Lizzie couldn’t work out what Cesare said in answer to that declaration. His deep-set eyes glittered like banked-down fires in his lean, strong face and he had bent down and lifted her up into his arms before she could even begin to guess his intention.
‘Think we’re going home,’ Lizzie informed his sisters forlornly from the vantage point of his arms as he paused by their table.
‘You didn’t look after her!’ Cesare growled at one of his sisters, in answer to whatever comment had been made.
‘What am I? A dog or a child?’ Lizzie demanded, staring up at him, noticing that he needed a shave because a heavy five o’clock shadow outlined his lower jawline, making it seem even harder and more aggressive than usual. It framed his wide, sensual mouth though, drawing attention to the perfectly sculpted line of his lips. He kissed like a dream, she recalled abstractedly, wondering when he’d do it again.
‘Think we should kiss so that your sisters believe we’re a real couple?’ Lizzie asked him winningly.
‘If we were real, I’d strangle you, cara,’ Cesare countered without hesitation. ‘I leave you alone for three days and I come back and you’re going crazy on the dance floor and getting blind drunk.’
‘Not drunk,’ Lizzie proclaimed stubbornly.
Cesare rolled his eyes and with scant ceremony stuffed her in the back of the waiting limousine. ‘Lie down before you fall over.’
‘You’re so smug,’ Lizzie condemned and closed her eyes because the interior of the limousine was telescoping around her in the most peculiar way.
Cesare consoled himself with the hope that such behaviour was not a warning sign of things to come. How could he blame her for wanting some fun? He had a very good idea of what life must have been like for her on that farm with her misery of a father, always there at her elbow, keen to remind her of every mistake and failure. For the very first time in his life he realised just how lucky he had been with Goffredo, who saw everything through rose-tinted, forgiving spectacles. In comparison, Brian Whitaker’s view of life was seriously depressing.
Lizzie opened her eyes. ‘Do you want to kiss me?’ she enquired.
Cesare skimmed his disconcerted gaze to her animated features, taking in the playful grin she wore. ‘Do you want me to kiss you?’
Lizzie flushed and shifted on the seat. ‘You’re not supposed to ask that.’
‘You expect me to act like a caveman?’
Lizzie thought about that. She had rather enjoyed being carried out of the club. Was that weird? She scolded herself for that enjoyment while mustering up a dim memory of her mother giggling and tossing her hair, eyes sparkling at the latest man in her life. Inwardly she cringed a little from the comparison she saw.
‘Only when you’re sober and you know what you’re doing,’ Cesare extended infuriatingly.
‘You believe I could only want to kiss you when I’m drunk?’
Cesare suppressed a groan and studied her. If truth be told, it would take very little encouragement for him to flatten her along the back seat and take inexcusable advantage of her delightfully feminine body. ‘We have a business arrangement,’ he reminded her doggedly, cursing the hot swell of the erection disturbing his poise because just the thought of doing anything to her turned him on hard and fast.
Her honey-brown lashes flickered. ‘I’m open to negotiation.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Cesare informed her grimly, lean bronzed face set in forbidding lines, mobile mouth compressed. ‘There will be absolutely no negotiation on that score tonight.’
Was it so wrong, Lizzie asked herself, that she should want to experience just once what other women commonly experienced? She had always wanted to be normal, to feel normal. Was that wrong? Indecent? Her cheeks burned. Naturally she had picked him. That kiss... Somehow he had become her forbidden object of desire. How had that happened? Treacherous heat curling in her pelvis, Lizzie breathed in slow and deep.
Cesare watched her feathery lashes dip and the sound of her breathing slow as she slid into a doze. Well, he wouldn’t be letting her loose around alcohol again. Sex, drink and business arrangements did not make for a rational or successful combination. And he was a very rational guy, wasn’t he? Here he was being a saint and protecting her from doing something she would regret. Or would she? he wondered with inbred cynicism. She was a gold-digger, after all, and sure to be on a high after the orgy of spending that had centred on her in recent days.
He was acting against his own nature, he acknowledged grudgingly. In reality, he wanted to fall on her like a sex-starved sailor on shore leave and keep her awake all night. Instead he was likely to spend half the night in a cold shower. He should have made more of an effort to see Celine. Clearly, it was the lack of regular sex that was playing merry hell with his hormones.
Lizzie awakened as Cesare half walked, half carried her into the town house only to stop dead as Goffredo and his stepmother, Ottavia, appeared in the doorway of the drawing room.
‘Your daughters are still partying,’ Cesare announced. ‘Lizzie was falling asleep, so I brought her home early.’
‘Cesare is a party pooper,’ Lizzie framed with difficulty.
Goffredo grinned and Ottavia chuckled and the older couple vanished back into the drawing room.
At the foot of the stairs, Cesare abandoned the pretence that Lizzie could walk unaided and swept her up into his arms.
‘I like it when you do this,’ Lizzie told him. ‘It’s so...so...masculine.’
‘We are lucky you don’t weigh more,’ Cesare quipped, barely out of breath as they reached the top of the stairs.
A sudden lurch in the stomach region made Lizzie tense and she crammed a stricken hand to her mouth, mumbling, ‘Cesare...’