to put down even the necessities had hurt. Rio Lombardi was putting them up and he would be feeding them as well. The very last thing she wanted to do was cost him money into the bargain.
Ezio led her up the imposing staircase. The magnificent landing was adorned with gilded furniture that looked as if it belonged in a palace. But then, Rio Lombardi’s home was just like a palace, Holly conceded in a daze. She was shown into a fabulous guest room, complete with an adjoining bathroom, and then into the smaller room next door which contained a cot. The cot, which contained several very new-looking toys, surprised her. Belatedly it occurred to her that perhaps Rio Lombardi was or had been married and had children. Tensing, tummy suddenly feeling hollow, she asked Ezio right out.
‘The boss is…single,’ the older man stated after a slight hesitation. ‘But he often has relatives with kiddies to stay. The Lombardis are a big family and very close.’
As Ezio departed Holly glimpsed her reflection in a mirror and a mortified gasp left her lips. The backside of her jeans was filthy, probably from the road the night before. Fetching a couple of the toys from the cot, she took Timmie into the bathroom, set him down with them on a bathtowel and then stripped down to her skin. Everything she wore went into the bath to steep in hot water. She stepped into the separate shower cubicle but could only run the water in bursts because she couldn’t close the door properly while she watched over Timmie. Her son could not yet crawl but he could cover a surprising amount of distance by rolling.
It was such bliss, such utter bliss to feel truly scrubbed clean again. Making use of the luxury toiletries in the corner shower compartment, she shampooed her hair and then conditioned it for the first time in many months. Having pounded her clothes back to cleanliness with soap, she then realised in dismay that there were no radiators in which to dry them. At that point, a knock sounded on the bedroom door.
Wrapped in a towel, she peered round the edge of the door. It was Ezio Farretti and he had a large cotton sack in his arms.
‘Where are the radiators?’ she queried.
‘There aren’t any. The heating is under the floor.’
‘Oh…’
‘This bag is full of clothes left behind by other guests,’ Ezio continued. ‘There might be something which will fit you or Timmie.’
‘I can’t wear someone else’s things…they’d be furious—’
‘These are very rich people. They don’t miss what they overlook; they just buy more,’ the older man told her gently. ‘I’ll leave the bag outside the door.’
There was a horrid thickness in her throat. ‘Thanks, Ezio.’
‘No problem.’ He cleared his throat. ‘But, if you don’t mind a spot of advice, give the boss a wide berth. Off the record, he’s just not himself right now and you don’t want to get your feelings hurt.’
Not just himself? Her feelings hurt? What on earth was that supposed to mean? Holly’s face burned up scarlet. Oh, my goodness, had Ezio noticed her blushing and getting on like a teenybopper with a bad crush around Rio Lombardi? Was he warning her off? What else could he possibly be doing?
CHAPTER THREE
‘HOLLY’S doing…what?’ Rio ground out with rampant incredulity.
‘Almost finished cleaning the kitchen floor, boss,’ Ezio repeated with reluctance. ‘She’s been dusting and scrubbing and polishing all day and, short of physically restraining her, there was nothing I could do about it. She’s got a lot of grit but she’s on the brink of a collapse—’
‘The kitchen floor…’ Rio seethed, striding through the door that led down to the basement where all the household utilities were situated. His mood was not improved when he went through the wrong door on the lower floor and found himself in some sort of boiler room because it had been a very long time since he had visited the kitchen quarters.
When he finally located his own kitchen, the first sight that met his eyes was Timmie strapped into a high chair, slumped over fast asleep, curly dark head down on the tray, a feeding cup dangling from one tiny hand. He looked rather like a miniature drunken sailor, his little legs and feet clad in white…tights? And what was that frilly thing round his almost non-existent neck? Dio mio, Timmie was wearing a little girl’s woollen dress with a lace collar! Rio was truly appalled by that discovery.
He strode round the protruding unit to gaze down the length of a kitchen that stretched more than forty feet in depth. He settled his outraged gaze on the female behind weaving from side to side as Holly knelt on the floor with her bucket and scrubbed like a Victorian housemaid. He stilled, attention entrapped by the wholly feminine fullness of that derrière, every line defined by the fine fabric shaping its delicious curves.
Without warning, an attack of such powerful lust assailed Rio that his every muscle clenched in shaken resistance. Four weeks without sex and he was turning into an animal, ready to jump anything female, he decided in even darker fury. His lean hands clenched into fists as he willed the throb of his aching sex to dwindle to manageable proportions.
‘Get the hell up off that floor!’ Rio launched with wrathful bite.
Dredged from her concentrated efforts to deny her exhaustion until she had completed her work, Holly swivelled round on her knees in fright, collided with the bucket and tipped it noisily over. Her soft mouth opening in dismay, she gasped strickenly, ‘Now look what you’ve made me do!’
‘How dare you come here and start cleaning my floors?’ Rio demanded with savage censure.
Very slowly, Holly picked herself up, the over-large green dress with its wide neckline lurching off one bare white shoulder. But that shade was incredible against that fair skin of hers, Rio noted before he registered that she was swaying and literally grey with pallor.
Holly focused on him, butterflies breaking loose in her tummy. Snatching in a stark breath, she met his stunning golden eyes and felt the burn of reaction deep down in her pelvis, an enervating sensation that made her weld her slender thighs together in fierce embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, I thought—’
Rio strode through the grimy flood that had spilled from the bucket and lifted her off her feet before she fainted in front of him. ‘How could you be so foolish? Do you think I invited you here to slave for me?’
‘I only wanted to make myself useful…’ Holly drank in the scent of him that clung to the jacket beneath her cheekbone, her nostrils flaring with helpless eagerness on that fresh familiarity.
Holding her that close was doing nothing for Rio’s rampant arousal. He was furious with himself, furious with her. Lack of control was not a sensation he was accustomed to suffering around a woman. But he was hugely tempted to tell her that if she wanted to make herself useful he had a whole catalogue of undomestic distractions to offer, not one of which, he was ashamed to admit, would have been thwarted by a wet floor, a child within hearing distance or even a fire alarm. He had seen her susceptibility in her eyes, in the way she held her slender, shapely body and in the mood he was in, a don’t-give-a-damn-about-anything mood of intense bitterness, that awareness inflamed his libido even more.
Ezio was positioned by Timmie’s sleeping form when Rio strode for the kitchen exit. ‘Bring Timmie upstairs and get him out of that stupid dress,’ he instructed the older man.
‘I only put it on him to keep him warm until his own clothes dried. He doesn’t know it’s a dress,’ Holly protested. ‘It was all that was available—’
‘You could be damaging his sexual identity for life!’ Rio condemned fiercely.
‘Do you think so?’ she questioned, aghast, as Rio carried her into a lift that she had not known existed until that moment.
He set her down and hit the buttons, choosing not to wait for Ezio. The door buzzed shut. She slumped back against the cool wall. ‘The floor’s in a real mess now,’ she lamented. ‘I can’t leave it like