This really wasn’t a good idea, Alessandro warned himself. She wasn’t his type—and anyway, her role in his life was only going to be temporary. But what harm could it really do? In fact it could only add authenticity to their roles.
Alessandro was going to touch her, kiss her— do something more than that, perhaps.
‘You said you didn’t want me,’ Leonora reminded him as he reached for her and drew her towards him with one lazy movement of his arm.
‘You said you didn’t want me,’ he taunted her, rubbing his nose erotically against her own in a way that sent a jolt with the power of a dozen jet engines surging through her body. His words were a whisper as soft as morning clouds against her lips as he added meaningfully, ‘And you lied.’
THE LEOPARDI BROTHERS
Sicilian by name… Scandalous, scorching and seductive by nature!
Three darkly handsome Leopardi men believe it is their duty to hunt down their missing heir— as Sicilians, as sons, as brothers!
‘We must none of us repeat our father’s mistakes. His bitterness and resentment mark him like a physical brand.’ ‘He has accepted now that Antonio did not father a child?’ ‘Reluctantly. I have looked into every relationship Antonio had, even those lasting no more than a matter of hours, and the facts prove beyond any doubt that there is no child.’
While Falcon halts the search, Alessandro has other distractions…ones more worthy of the fiery Sicilian blood running through his veins!
Look out for the final story in this
fabulous new trilogy from Penny Jordan!
THE SICILIAN’S BABY BARGAIN in August
Penny Jordan has been writing for more than twenty years and has an outstanding record: over 170 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Penny Jordan was born in Preston, Lancashire, and now lives in rural Cheshire.
Recent titles by the same author:
CAPTIVE AT THE SICILIAN BILLIONAIRE’S
COMMAND (The Leopardi Brothers)
TAKEN BY THE SHEIKH
THE SHEIKH’S BLACKMAILED MISTRESS
VIRGIN FOR THE BILLIONAIRE’S TAKING
THE SICILIAN BOSS’S MISTRESS
BY
PENNY JORDAN
CHAPTER ONE
THE bed on which they both lay naked was high, draped with richly sensuous silk fabric. But its touch against her flesh was nowhere near as sensuously erotic as his touch, nor could the whisper of the fabric’s kiss compare with the fierce passion of his kiss.
His face was in the shadows, but she knew its features by heart—from the burning intensity of his dark eyes through the arrogance of his profile to the explicit sensuality of his mouth. Excited pleasure curled and then kicked through her. Simply looking at him awoke and aroused the woman in her in a way and at a level that no other man ever could. Just as she was the only woman who was woman enough to truly complement him as a man. They were made for one another, a perfect match, and they both knew it. Only here, with him, could she truly be herself and let down her guard to share her longing and her love.
He made her ache for him in a thousand—no, a hundred thousand different ways, and the way his knowing smile lifted the corners of his mouth told her that he knew that her whole body shuddered in mute delight at the slow, deliberate stroke of his fingertips along the curve of her breast.
She sucked in her breath and closed her eyes. His stroking hand moved lower, over her quivering belly, and then lower…
Guiltily Leonora shook herself out of her daydream and warned herself that if she didn’t start getting ready and stop wasting time she was going to be late.
What a fool she was. Her brothers would certainly think so. She could just imagine the hoots of derision with which they would have greeted her fantasy—and the secret of her own deeply sensual nature.
That was the trouble with growing up a girl sandwiched in the middle of two brothers. The three of them had been born so close together that Piers was only eighteen months older than her, and Leo a year younger. The fact that they had lost their mother so early, killed by a speeding driver as she was on her way to meet them from junior school, had naturally affected them all—including their father, an ex-professional sportsman who had retired from his sport to manage and then take over a sportswear manufacturing company. Their father had believed in fostering competition between his children as a way of preparing them for the adult world. He was also very much a stiff-upper-lip kind of man. After their mother’s death Leonora had felt she had to work even harder at being ‘one of the boys’ for her father’s sake, so that she wouldn’t let the side down by crying like a girl.
Her father loved them all very much, but he was an old-fashioned man’s man, and he hadn’t been very good at showing that love to a motherless daughter. Not that Leonora blamed him for anything. In fact she was fiercely defensive of both him and her brothers, and they were even as adults a close-knit family. But not so close knit that they hadn’t welcomed their new stepmother when their father had remarried three years ago. But watching her father unbend and get in touch with his emotions under the gentle tutelage of his second wife had reinforced for Leonora how much she had lost with her mother.
It was only her pride that kept her going sometimes, as she struggled with her growing need to be the woman she instinctively knew she might have been against the often harsh reality of being the competitive tomboy girl her father had taught her to be. Sometimes she felt so helpless and lost that she was afraid that she would never find her real self. Sometimes when she was being true to her real self and one of her brothers laughed at her she felt so crushed that she retreated immediately into the combative sibling hostility of their childhood.
And sometimes, like now, she took refuge in private dreams.
The fact that she needed to fantasise about being with a man who loved and desired her, and with whom she could have wonderful sensual sex, instead of actually knowing what it felt like from first-hand experience was, of course, partly a result of the way she had grown up. Listening to her brothers discussing their own sexual experimentation had made her wary of being judged and found wanting, as they so often seemed to judge other girls.
Leonora didn’t consider herself to be the cringing, oversensitive type, but there was something about the way her brothers, as pubescent boys, had talked about girls—giving them scores for availability, looks and sexual skill—that had made her believe that she never, ever wanted to wonder if some boy was talking to his friends about her in the way that her brothers had about girls. Because of that she had fought against and denied the depth of her own passionate nature, concealing it instead with a jokey ‘one of the boys’ manner.
Whilst other girls had been learning to be confident with their sexuality on their way to becoming women, somehow she had learned to fear hers.
It was different now, of course. Her brothers had grown up and, at twenty-seven and twenty-four, were well past the teenage stage of discussing their sex lives and their girlfriends