It had been Charles who had suggested a secretarial course once she had been forced to abandon nursing, unblushingly hinting that such skills would be invaluable in the journalism in which she had begun showing an interest and to which, even then, he had probably already decided to block her entry.
‘Well, as you may have gathered, there won’t be nearly as much wardrobe work as originally anticipated,’ continued Sandro, hooking one long, denim-clad leg over an arm of the chair and drumming tanned fingers impatiently against the other.
She could almost sympathise with his irritation, she thought wretchedly, knowing how she would have felt if obliged to contend with the monosyllabic half-wit she must appear to be.
‘So, you’ll have quite a bit of time on your hands,’ he continued, the strain of the unfamiliar control he was exercising over himself grating in his tone.
‘I’d be happy to help you in whatever way I can,’ Tessa blurted out, marginally succeeding in her battle to get a grip on herself. ‘But you’ll have to bear in mind my complete ignorance of filming…and all the technical terms associated with it.’
‘I’ll keep that uppermost in my mind,’ he murmured, exasperation, relief and amusement mingling in his tone. ‘Perhaps it would help if I gave you a brief summary of the film and explained my reasons for coming here to shoot the finishing touches?’
‘Yes—I’m sure it would!’ exclaimed Tessa, a little of her customary confidence returning as relief inexplicably flooded her.
He hadn’t really got an accent, she decided some time later, when her ears had become more attuned to that attractively husky voice; it was more that he would now and then express himself in a way that wasn’t typically English, despite his flawless command of the language. As she listened she found her mind sifting back through the details she had hurriedly researched on his background. Needless to say, it was his famous mother who was most written about in connection with him. His English father, she vaguely remembered, was something to do with international law and appeared to shun publicity. Perhaps it was the fact that he had been brought up in Italy that accounted for those slight, though most appealing irregularities in his use of English.
‘We used the studios for the flashbacks to the central character’s medieval ancestor,’ he was saying. ‘We’d virtually completed shooting when I had to come over here for a couple of days in connection with my next film. I stayed in this hotel and it wasn’t until I took a walk along the beach that it hit me I’d found something I wasn’t even looking for—the exact location in which to place the flashback scenes.’
‘What do you mean by “place” them?’ asked Tessa, puzzled. ‘If you’ve already filmed it all and have no cast here—’
‘I don’t need the cast,’ he laughed. ‘Well, no more than the three Irish stage actors I’m using. What I want is to capture the brooding magnificence of a landscape virtually untouched by time and link it in with what we’ve put together in the studio.’ The unguarded look on Tessa’s face brought an almost teasing smile to his lips. ‘You didn’t think that what comes up on the screen is filmed in step by step sequence, did you?’
‘Of course not,’ she muttered, while a panic-stricken voice from within demanded to know how she expected to compile a clandestine, professionally detached appraisal of the working habits of a man whose voice brought her out in goose-bumps and whose smile had the power to turn her legs to jelly. ‘It’s a shame you won’t be able to do all you wanted to,’ she said, striving to sound relaxed.
‘What do you mean?’
‘All those costumes that Babs had sent over—you’re not using them now.’
‘There’s a wedding banquet in one of the flashback scenes. I had considered using the townspeople as extras to depict the contrasting poverty between the guests and the medieval villagers, but I’ve decided against it.’
‘You mean this ghastly flu epidemic has decided for you,’ countered Tessa, relieved to hear herself at long last beginning to sound relatively normal.
‘No—I mean that I have decided against it,’ he informed her coolly, swinging his leg from over the side of the chair and rising with a languid grace to his feet ‘Once I make up my mind I want something, I get it—that’s the way I operate.’ For all the honeyed warmth of their colour, there was a coolness to match his tone in the eyes that gazed down at her. ‘I would suggest you retire early tonight—we get started before dawn.’
Only the thought of what she stood to gain preventing her from giving vent to her fury and telling him what he could do with his wretched job, Tessa leapt to her feet.
‘Right, I’ll be there!’ she flung at him, the fact that she hadn’t the slightest idea where ‘there’ was not even occurring to her in her haste to escape.
Her eyes, now almost navy with the anger seething within her, were trained solely on the doorway through which she would soon mercifully pass, which was why she failed to spot the pile of papers he had earlier tossed on the floor and which now sent her catapulting towards him as her foot skidded across them.
His move to catch her was purely reflex, his tall body hurling itself forward at a precarious angle as his arms reached for her.
Having to force her body forward against the momentum of his to prevent them both from toppling over, Tessa clung on to him for dear life, one arm hooking round his neck while the other clutched at his shoulder.
‘Very clumsy,’ he drawled, his arms holding her against him like steel clamps while his body set about regaining its balance.
‘You’re the idiot who littered the floor so dangerously!’ she accused indignantly.
She was conscious of hearing her own gasped intake of breath as she looked up into that grimly unsmiling yet disturbingly attractive face hovering scant inches above her own. Then her only awareness was of the excitement stirring within her, numbing her mind to shocked disbelief with the stark sensuality of what was awakening in her.
‘You surely can’t be complaining—not when it presented you with this opportunity to throw yourself into my arms.’ He altered his hold on her, his fingers biting painfully into her flesh as he grasped her by her upper arms. ‘Well, now that you’re in them,’ he mocked softly, ‘do they live up to your expectations?’
‘Expectations?’ squeaked Tessa, almost speechless with fury. ‘If I were in the habit of throwing myself into the arms of complete strangers—which I’m not—I most certainly wouldn’t have picked on an ill-mannered, swollen-headed, arrogant—’
His mouth silenced the remainder of her tirade and, seconds later, shock was the only excuse her stunned mind could come up with for the ease with which his lips had managed to prise open her own and then coax them into what could only be described as enthusiastic participation in the most disturbingly arousing of kisses she had ever experienced.
The detached manner in which her mind was making no attempt whatever to monitor her actions only struck her as alarming when, with no recollection of when or how it had happened, she discovered her head to be cupped in large, deceptively gentle hands and her freed arms wrapped tenaciously around his body.
‘No!’ she howled, tearing herself free and scrubbing angrily with the back of her hand against her wildly throbbing mouth.
‘Play with fire and you’re bound to get burned,’ he intoned mockingly. ‘Though, I warn you, it will be more than your fingers you’ll get burned if you tangle with me. I could tell you I’m off women at the moment—which I am. I could also tell you that you’re far too young—which you are. And, more to the point, I could tell you that you’re not my type—which you most definitely are not’ His hand snaked out and grasped her by the wrist as she made to turn and run. ‘I hope you’re taking all this in, Tessa,’ he warned with soft menace. ‘Because, despite all those things I could tell you, I have—as I’m sure you’ve heard—an insatiable appetite for women…and I just might decide to amuse myself at your