doesn’t stop raining soon, we’ll be sunk—quite literally,’ she said. ‘Here—catch this.’
She tossed him a towel to mop up the water leaking through her barricade. Far from cowering in a corner, waiting for her white knight to arrive, Signorina Rich was firmly in control. He surprised himself by liking that. But, then, he liked her. He couldn’t help himself. He admired her grit.
‘Well? Are you going to help me to roll up these rugs or not?’ she demanded, glancing back at him as she lit the candles on the hall table.
There were plenty of things he would like to help Signorina Rich with, and rolling rugs wasn’t at the top of his list.
It was all going well for her until she crossed the room in the half-light and caught her foot under a rug. As she stumbled he caught her close. It only took an instant to absorb how good she felt beneath his hands. Candlelight mapped the changes in her eyes from blue to black. She held her breath, almost as if she thought he was going to kiss her. Would she fight him? Would she yield hungrily? It was irrelevant to him. He might want to kiss her, he might even ache to kiss her, but he would never be so self-indulgent.
Delay was the servant of pleasure, he mused dryly as he steadied her.
‘Be careful you don’t trip up again.’
The look she gave him suggested that tripping up over a rug, or anything else for that matter, was the last thing on her mind.
‘Shall we carry on?’ she suggested. ‘The rugs?’ she added pointedly.
She got more brownie points for effort, and his senses got a second jolt when she brushed past him. She’d keep, he reassured his aching flesh. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Having been forced to work together, Cass was surprised to discover how well they could read each other’s intentions—to her surprise, they made a great team. It was certainly a pleasure watching Marco wielding his immense physical strength.
‘I’ll move things out of the way so you can take that rug into the dining room,’ she told him, holding her breath as Marco shouldered the weight of the wool rug as if it were a bag of feathers. Opening the door wide, she cleared a space for him, only to find him breathing down her neck. Their hands brushed. Their bodies touched. Their breath mingled as he turned around. They were just too dangerously close—
‘Great job,’ she said, stepping back. Now she realised that in her hurry to get away from him she had made it sound as if their positions in life had been reversed and Marco was her assistant. Oh, well. There was nothing she could do about that now. Ducking beneath his arm, she slipped away.
‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.
‘To my bed.’ She turned and shrugged. ‘We’ve done all we can tonight. I’m going to have a bath first—try to warm up. The power may be off but the water should still be warm in the reserve tank—and I promise I won’t use it all.’
‘A bath in the dark?’ he queried.
‘I’ll manage—I’ll take some candles.’ She glanced at his fist on the door. Was he going to try and stop her leaving? The tension between them had suddenly roared off the scale.
‘You’re in a hurry to get away.’
His murmur hit her straight between the shoulder blades in a deliciously dangerous quiver of awareness. ‘I’m cold,’ she excused herself, hugging her body and acting fragile. She doubted he was convinced, but at least he lifted his hand from the door.
‘You’ve done well tonight,’ he said as he stood back.
‘And now I’m freezing,’ she reminded him in a stronger voice. That wasn’t so far from the truth. She was soaking wet. ‘If you could get the power back on...’ she suggested hopefully.
Marco narrowed his eyes and looked at her. ‘You’d better take that bath,’ he said, to her relief. ‘And don’t forget to reassure your godmother that you’re safe. A storm like this will have made the international news. And anyone else, of course, who might be interested,’ he added as an apparent afterthought.
He didn’t fool her. ‘There is no one else.’ She guessed that was his real question. ‘And I will speak to my godmother as soon as the phone line comes back.’
‘You obviously think a lot of her.’
Passion and gratitude swept over her. ‘My godmother is the most wonderful woman on earth. She took me in—’
‘When your parents were killed,’ Marco supplied thoughtfully.
‘Yes.’ She firmed her lips, reluctant to say anything more. How much did he know?
‘Why did you leave her to come here to work in Tuscany?’
‘It’s a great job,’ she said frankly. ‘And I can’t just live off her. She found this opportunity for me when I left my last job. She found it through one of her friends, another keen gardener. It would have been churlish of me to turn it down.’
Though maybe she should have done, Cass reflected as Marco continued to stare at her. He was beginning to make her nervous. She decided to give him a little more. ‘I can easily get a job at another supermarket when I go home, and in the meantime this job is perfect for me.’
‘Perfect,’ Marco echoed without comment or expression.
He might want to know more, but she wasn’t going to discuss her personal life with someone who was practically a stranger.
‘Don’t catch cold,’ he reminded her.
She didn’t need another prompt. She left him and ran across the courtyard without a backward glance. Racing up the steps to her room, she felt as if the devil was on her back.
* * *
He stood in silence when Cassandra left him. She had handled the crisis with impressive calm and now she intrigued him more than ever. Apparently uncomplicated and open, she was, in fact, as much a closed book as he was. He would like to find out more about her. She was hopeless at taking orders, but she was a breath of fresh air. Having worked closely with her, he now felt the lack of her, like a caged lion, penned in with a woman he wanted in his bed. He would be ill-advised to seduce her, he reminded himself firmly. He never slept with his employees.
He eased the physical ache with practicalities, starting up the generator and checking the garden to assess the damage. He huffed dryly to see her seedlings had survived when trees that had stood for centuries were lying broken on the ground. He should give her a long-term contract just to build drainage channels for him.
Having checked the sandbags were doing their job, he marvelled that she could lift them at all. He was trying to exhaust himself, he realised, in an attempt to put Cassandra out of his mind. That didn’t stop his body craving her, or his mind from examining every tiny detail he knew about her. Cassandra Rich was the most unsettling woman he’d ever met. She was everything he would usually avoid. She was too young, too naïve, and she had no inkling of their relative positions in life—which was something else he liked about her, he now discovered. There were far too many toadies in his world. Cassandra Rich was real, he concluded with a shrug. If he were stranded in another storm, would he want Cassandra at his side or one of those fragrant types he usually went for? He’d choose Cassandra every time.
He laughed as he jogged up the stairs. There were so few surprises left in life, he almost welcomed her arrival into his remote, complex world.
So few surprises?
He was about to get the surprise of his life. He stopped dead on the threshold of his room. His window was closed, but his shutters were open and Cassandra’s light was on.
* * *
She would never know what made her do it, other than to say she had seen pictures in magazines and films, as well as images in her head, of the type of sophisticated temptress a man like Marco would most likely be attracted to. That woman would be a minx, a siren,