several weeks at least—to acknowledge the reason he hadn’t. The reason she’d known all along—that he was way out of her league and had just been playing games with her.
Still flustered, she bent down to grab her carry-on and straightened up to drink in his stunning features and hard blue eyes one last time. She tried her best to keep her voice steady. To not give him any sense of the regret which was already sitting on the horizon, waiting to greet her. ‘Goodbye, Dante. It was lovely meeting you. Not a very original thing to say, I know—but it’s true. Safe journey—wherever you’re going. I’d better dash.’
She nearly extended her hand to shake his before realising how stupid that would look and she turned away before she could make even more of a fool of herself. She ended up running for the plane but told herself that was a good thing, because it distracted her from her teeming thoughts. Her heart was pounding as she strapped herself into her seat, but she was determined not to allow her mind to start meandering down all those pointless what if paths. She knew that in life you had to concentrate on what you had, and not what you really wanted.
So every time she thought about those sensual features and amazing eyes, she forced herself to concentrate on the family wedding which was getting closer and the horrible bridesmaid dress she was being made to wear.
She read the in-flight magazines and slept soundly for most of the journey back to England, and it wasn’t until she touched down at Heathrow and reached into the overhead locker that she realised the carry-on bag she’d placed in the overhead locker wasn’t actually her bag at all. Yes, it was brown, and yes, it was made of leather—but there all similarities ended. Her hands began to tremble. Because this was of the softest leather imaginable and there were three glowing gold initials discreetly embossed against the expensive skin. She stared at it with a growing sense of disbelief as she matched the initials in her head to the only name they could stand for, and her heart began to pound with a mixture of excitement and fear.
D.D.S.
Dante Di Sione.
DANTE’S PLANE WAS halfway over northern Spain when he made the grim discovery which sent his already bad mood shooting into the stratosphere. He’d spent much of the journey with an erection he couldn’t get rid of—snapping at the stewardesses who were fussing and flirting around him in such an outrageous way that he wondered whether they’d picked up on the fact that he was sexually excited, and some hormonal instinct was making them hit on him even more than usual.
But he wasn’t interested in those women in too-tight uniforms with dollar signs flashing in their eyes when they looked at him. He kept thinking about the understated Englishwoman and wondered why he hadn’t insisted she miss her flight, so that he could have taken her on board his plane and made love to her. Most women couldn’t resist sex on a private jet, and there was no reason she would be any different.
His mouth dried as he remembered the way she had jumped up from the bar stool like a scalded cat and run off to catch her flight as if she couldn’t wait to get away from him. Had that ever happened to him before? He thought not.
She hadn’t even asked for his business card!
Pushing her stubbornly persistent image from his mind, he decided to check on his grandfather’s precious tiara, reaching for his bag and wondering why the old man wanted the valuable and mysterious piece of jewellery so much. Because time was fast running out for him? Dante felt the sudden painful twist of his heart as he tried to imagine a future without Giovanni, but he couldn’t get his head around it. It was almost impossible to envisage a life without the once strong but still powerful figure who had stepped in to look after him and his siblings after fate had dealt them all the cruellest of blows.
Distracted by the turbulent nature of his thoughts, he tugged at the zip of the bag and frowned. He couldn’t remember it being so full because he liked to travel light. He tugged again and the zip slid open. But instead of a small leather case surrounded by boxer shorts, an unread novel and some photos of a Spanish castle he really needed to look at for a client before his next meeting—it was stuffed full of what looked suspiciously like...
Dante’s brows knitted together in disbelief.
Swimwear?
He looked at the bag more closely and saw that instead of softest brown leather embossed with his initials, this carry-on was older and more battered and had clearly seen better days.
Disbelievingly, he began to burrow through the bikinis and swimsuits, throwing them aside with a growing sense of urgency, but instantly he knew he was just going through the motions and that his search was going to be fruitless. His heart gave a leap in his chest as a series of disastrous possibilities occurred to him. How ironic it would be if he’d flown halfway across the globe to purchase a piece of jewellery which had cost a king’s ransom, only to find that he’d been hoodwinked by the man who had sold it to him.
But no. He remembered packing the tiara himself, and although he was no gem expert, Dante had bought enough trinkets as pay-offs for women over the years to know when something was genuine. And the tiara had been genuine—of that he’d been certain. A complex and intricate weaving of diamonds and emeralds which had dazzled even him—a man usually far too cynical to be dazzled.
So where the hell was it now?
And suddenly Dante realised what must have happened. Willow—what the hell had been her surname?—must have picked up his bag by mistake. The blonde he’d been so busy flirting with at the airport, that he’d completely forgotten that he was carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of precious stones in his hand luggage. He’d been distracted by her misty eyes. He’d read in them a strange kind of longing and he’d fed her fantasy—and his own—by kissing her. It had been one of those instant-chemistry moments, when the combustion of sexual attraction had been impossible to ignore, until the last call for her flight had sounded over the loudspeaker and broken the spell. She’d jumped up and grabbed her bag. Only she hadn’t, had she? She’d grabbed his bag!
He drummed his fingers on the armrest as he considered his options. Should he ask his pilot to divert the plane to London? He thought about his meeting with the Italian billionaire scheduled for later that evening and knew it would be both insulting and damaging to cancel it.
He scowled as he rang for a stewardess, one of whom almost fell over herself in her eagerness to reach him first.
‘What can I get for you, sir?’ she questioned, her eyes nearly popping out of her head as she looked at the haphazard collection of swimwear piled in the centre of the table.
Dante quickly shoved all the bikinis back into the bag, but as he did so, his finger hooked on to a particularly tiny pair of bottoms. He felt his body grow hard as he felt the soft silk of the gusset and thought about Willow wearing it. His voice grew husky. ‘I want you to get hold of my assistant and ask him to track down a woman for me.’
The stewardess did her best to conceal it, but the look of disappointment on her face was almost comical.
‘Certainly, sir,’ she said gamely. ‘And the woman is?’
‘Her name is Willow Hamilton,’ Dante ground out. ‘I need her number and her address. And I need that information by the time this plane lands.’
* * *
There were four missed calls on her phone by the time Willow left the Tube station in central London, blinking as she emerged into the bright July sunshine. She stepped into the shadow of a doorway and looked at the screen. All from the same unknown number and whoever it was hadn’t bothered to leave a voicemail. But she knew who the caller must be. The sexy stranger. The man she’d kissed. The blue-eyed man whose carry-on she had picked up by mistake.
She felt the race of her heart. She would go home first and then she would ring him. She wasn’t going to have a complicated conversation on a busy pavement on a hot day when she was tired and jet-lagged.
She