Kicking off the silly shoes that limited her mobility was the work of seconds and her sudden loss of height disconcerted him into lifting his arms off her in surprise. Ducking out of reach and barefoot, Jemima darted round him and pelted out of the door as though baying hounds were chasing her.
Black brows pleating, Luciano swept up the abandoned shoes and looked at them incredulously. Did she think she was Cinderella or something? In bewilderment, because a woman had never before treated him to such stop-go tactics, he poured himself another stiff drink. He didn’t get it. He really didn’t understand why she was running away. Why would she do that? What possible benefit could she hope to attain by infuriating him?
And then the proverbial penny dropped and he wondered why he had not immediately grasped her strategy. After all, it was an exceedingly basic strategy: she wanted more. In fact Jemima or Julie or whatever she and her late twin had chosen to call themselves had been born wanting more. And she knew he was rich enough to deliver a lot more. Only he wouldn’t, Luciano thought angrily, stoking up his resentment and his hostility. He was determined not to further reward a woman who had lied and schemed to make a profit out of his infant son as though he were a product on sale to the highest bidder.
BREATHLESS, JEMIMA LEANT back against the door she had slammed behind her in her haste to reach her bedroom. Well, so much for turning down the gift of the clothes with charm and diplomacy! Hadn’t that gone well? She grimaced and groaned out loud. Why did she make such a mess of everything with Luciano? What happened to her brain? What happened to tact? Why had she kissed him back as though her life depended on it? Resisting him, acting repulsed would have kept him at bay, but instead she had encouraged him.
The trouble was, she thought ruefully, nobody had ever made her feel as Luciano Vitale did. When she was at college before she’d begun seeing Steven, plenty of men had tried to get her into bed. In fact being constantly badgered for sex had put her off dating. Ironically, though, she had not set out to still be virtually untouched at the age of almost twenty-four. Her parents might believe that she should remain a virgin until she married but Jemima had focused on a more attainable goal. She had believed that she would retain her virginity until she met someone she loved and she had believed she loved Steven, but Steven had seemed to prize her virginal state even more than her parents and had insisted that they should respect church teaching and wait until they were man and wife. Yet how quickly he had abandoned that conviction when true temptation had come along in the guise of her much sexier sister, she reflected wryly.
‘You can’t turn your back on true love,’ Steven had told her self-righteously before he had gone off with her twin. ‘Julie’s the perfect woman for me.’
But Jemima couldn’t tell herself the same thing about Luciano, not least because she didn’t believe that he was perfect. He was arrogant and domineering and too rich and powerful for his own good. Yet she was madly, wildly and irrationally attracted to him. In addition she respected his sincere affection for Nicky. She also liked Luciano on a level she couldn’t quite explain even to herself, for she did not know where that liking had come from or on what she based it. In the same way, when Luciano was angry and exasperated as he had been earlier she automatically wanted to make everything better for him and improve his mood. Why she felt like that she didn’t know because common sense warned her that Luciano was wrong for her in every possible way. They were too different as people.
Sex was a pursuit in itself for Luciano, an amusement and not necessarily part of a meaningful relationship. Yet he had done commitment in the past. He had been married and a father before she’d even met him and at a relatively young age, Jemima reminded herself, and that suggested that while Luciano might have the reputation of being a womaniser he had always had a deeper and more caring side to his nature.
Across the room, a door opened and she glanced up. Luciano, his jacket and tie discarded, strolled towards her in his shirtsleeves.
‘What on earth are you doing in here?’ Jemima exclaimed in consternation.
‘Finding you. You ran away,’ Luciano condemned. ‘Have you any idea how irritating that is?’
‘You were being too pushy.’
‘I’m naturally pushy.’
‘That’s not an acceptable excuse.’
‘You were trying to pretend you don’t want me,’ Luciano reminded her with a sudden edge of accusation. ‘That was an outright lie!’
‘It’s arrogant to be so full of yourself.’
Luciano shrugged a broad shoulder sheathed in smooth cotton. ‘I’m not the modest type and I know when I’m wanted.’
And he would have had plenty of practice in that line, Jemima reckoned, scanning his lean, dark, flawless features and the intoxicating whole of his fallen angel beauty, which knocked her for six every time she looked at him. That was so superficial of her, she scolded herself, but when she was gazing at Luciano her brain could not concentrate on anything else. In any case her body hummed like an engine raring to go in his radius, making it difficult for her to breathe or move, never mind think.
‘Perhaps you’re waiting for me to offer you a villa or an apartment in Palermo or Rome or Paris...a less temporary and more rewarding position in my life?’ Luciano suggested smooth as glass.
‘Why would I want you to offer me a villa or an apartment?’ Jemima asked him in genuine bewilderment.
‘A mistress has some security. A casual lover has none,’ Luciano pointed out.
‘I really don’t know what we’re talking about here. I thought mistresses died out with corsets,’ she confided jerkily, unnerved by the dialogue because he could not possibly be asking someone like her to be his mistress, his kept woman. That idea struck her as so ridiculous that a nervous giggle bubbled in the back of her throat.
‘I don’t want to talk,’ Luciano breathed with sudden lancing impatience as he met her pale aquamarine gaze. He ran his hands through the thick tangle of hair tumbling round her shoulders. ‘I like your hair. It’s so long. Are you wearing extensions?’
‘No, it’s all me,’ Jemima muttered breathlessly, because he was standing so close now that she could feel the heat of his body striking hers.
And right there, he knew he had her because he knew for a fact that only a few months earlier his son’s mother had had short hair. But he had already accepted that she was a lying fake, hadn’t he? Charles Bennett didn’t make mistakes. Yet, trailing his fingertips through that lustrous skein of golden silk, Luciano couldn’t have cared less about who Jemima was or what she was. He only wanted to see that marvellous hair spread across his pillows and without hesitation he bent and lifted her up.
‘Put me down, Luciano!’ she gasped.
‘No,’ he said simply. ‘I want you.’
‘That’s not enough!’
Luciano shouldered open the door between their bedrooms. ‘It’s enough for me, piccolo mia.’
And she was on the brink of telling him why it wasn’t enough for her when he kissed her, kissed her long and hard and hungrily until the blood drummed in her head and her toes curled and her mind went blank. Her fingers reached up and delved into his black curls, shaping his proud head, roaming down the back of his neck. The need to touch him was so powerful it overwhelmed every other prompting, even the cautious vibes trying to tug her back to sanity.
Luciano settled her down on his bed and studied her with immense satisfaction. He knew what she was. He knew what she was capable of. But he could not be damaged by a known threat. Her greed was a weakness he would use to control her, he reflected with satisfaction while only dimly questioning what had happened to his belief that one night would be sufficient for him. He knew he wasn’t fully in control and it made him feel outrageously free of his rigid rules to do as he liked. She would be his for as long