The Platinum Collection: Claiming His Innocent. Lynne Graham

her mole concerning his reputation and she finally took pity on him and confided that her parents lived next door to his former housekeeper.

      Cesario frowned. ‘She signed a confidentiality agreement. All my staff have to. I can’t believe she’s gossiping about my private life…’

      Jess winced. ‘I should have kept quiet and I probably shouldn’t have listened either. Dot does seem to cherish a certain resentment over being put into retirement before she was ready to go.’

      ‘Because an audit revealed that she was helping herself to the household cash and selling off wine on the sly,’ Cesario chipped in drily. ‘That’s why she was put out to grass and Tommaso was brought in.’

      Jess was shocked by that explanation. ‘But you didn’t prosecute her?’

      ‘She’s quite an age and had worked for the Dunn-Montgomery family all her life. Rather than make an example of her in my role as the new owner of the Halston estate, I thought it best to just write it off to experience and replace her.’

      They walked hand in hand back to the little hotel. Three quarters of the way across the moonlit piazza he paused and kissed her with a slow, deep hunger that made her heart crash against her breastbone.

      ‘I misjudged you,’ she confided in a guilty rush. ‘I believed all the bad stuff. I thought the very worst of you from the moment we met.’

      Cesario looked down at her in the moonlight, dark eyes gleaming above classic high cheekbones. ‘But you don’t now.’

      ‘Are you a love cheat like the tabloids say?’ Jess asked abruptly, allowing her need to know free access to her deepest insecurities.

      Cesario groaned out loud in dismay at that blunt query. ‘Is my answer going to be held against me?’

      ‘Probably,’ Jess declared.

      ‘I did cheat sometimes when I was younger and sex was still a game, but even then I didn’t lie about it or make promises I couldn’t keep,’ Cesario answered. ‘Growing up with my father, who always had more than one woman on the go, I saw the cost of that kind of deception time and time again. I’ve never wanted to live my life the same way. Screaming rows, jealous scenes and bitter break-ups are better avoided.’

      ‘Deception is the one thing I couldn’t forgive,’ Jess confessed. ‘Honesty is incredibly important to me.’

      Cesario screened his gaze, his lean, strong face hollowed by unmistakeable tension. Glancing up at him in the small hotel foyer, she surmised that she had got too serious and made him feel uncomfortable. Were her standards of behaviour too high for him? It was an unsettling suspicion. Perhaps he even suspected that she was trying to get him to make her promises and the notion brought colour to her cheeks, for she wanted nothing from him that he did not choose to give her of his own accord.

      Long after Cesario went to sleep that night, Jess lay awake by his side and wondered what their future held. Or even how far that fragile future might extend in front of her.