Penny Jordan - The Italian Duke's Virgin Mistress

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I am not being ridiculous. You have as good as kidnapped me, and my boss is expecting me to be back in England tomorrow.’

‘Not any more,’ Raphael informed her. ‘When I spoke to him earlier he was most anxious that you should remain here—in fact he begged me to keep you and use you for whatever purpose I wished.’

Charley opened her mouth to object to the offensive connotations of his choice of words, and then closed it again when she saw the gleam in his eyes. He wanted to upset and humiliate her. Well, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him think that he had done so.

Instead she said firmly, ‘You said that you have taken over the project?’

‘Yes. I have decided to fund the restoration myself rather than allow my family’s name to be connected with the kind of cheap, tawdry restoration you had in mind.’

‘So you’ll be cancelling our contract, then?’

‘I would certainly like to do so,’ Raphael agreed. ‘But unfortunately it won’t be possible for me to do that and find someone else to complete the work in time for next year’s formal re-opening of the garden. However, I do have some concerns about your suitability to manage the project.’

She was going to be sacked.

‘It seems to me that someone who gave up her Fine Arts degree halfway through to study accountancy instead is not the person to manage this project in the way I wish to have it managed.’

‘My career choices have nothing to do with you,’ Charley defended herself. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him that after the deaths of their parents and the financial problems that had followed she had felt morally obliged to train for something that would enable her to earn enough to help her elder sister provide a home for them all.

‘On the contrary, since I am now in effect employing you they have a very great deal to do with me. From now on you will work directly under my control and you will be answerable directly to me. Should I find that you are not able to satisfy me and meet the standards I set, then you will be dismissed. Your employer has already assured me that he has someone in mind to replace you, should that prove necessary.’

‘His daughter,’ Charley was unable to stop herself from saying furiously, ‘who can’t speak a word of Italian.’

Ignoring her outburst, Raphael continued, ‘It is my intention that the garden will be restored as exactly as possible to its original design.’

Charley stared at him in the darkness of the car, the light from the moon revealing the harsh pride of his profile, etching it with silver instead of charcoal.

‘But that will cost a fortune,’ she protested, ‘and that’s just for starters. Finding craftsmen to undertake the work—’

‘You can leave that to me. I have connections with a committee in Florence that is responsible for much of the work on its heritage buildings; it owes me favours.’

And she could just bet that calling in ‘favours’ was something he was very, very good at doing, Charley recognised.

‘Your work begins tomorrow, when we will visit the site together. I have in my possession the original plans.’

‘Tomorrow? But I was only supposed to be here for the day. I haven’t got anywhere to stay, or…’

‘That will not be a problem. You will stay at the palazzo, so that I can monitor your work and ensure that the garden is restored exactly as I wish. That is where we are going now—unless, of course, it is your wish that I ask your employer to send someone else to take over from you?’

Was that secretly what he was hoping? Well, he was going to be disappointed, Charley decided proudly. She was as equally capable of managing a high-budget project as she was of managing a lowbudget one, and in truth there was nothing she would have enjoyed more than seeing the garden come to life as it had once been, if only he was not involved. More important than any of that, though, was her need to keep on earning the money they all so desperately needed right now. She could not afford the luxury of pride, no matter how much it irked her.

The road began to climb up ahead of them, and on the hilltop, caught in the full beam of the rising moon, Charley could see the vast bulk of an imposing building dominating the landscape.

‘That is the Palazzo Raverno up ahead,’ Raphael informed her.

The façade of the building was illuminated by floodlights, and when they had finally came to a halt outside it Charley could see it was Baroque in style, with curved pediments and intricate mouldings displaying the deliberate interplay between curvaceous forms and straight lines that was so much a part of the Baroque style of architecture.

Despite her determination not to betray what she was feeling, when Raphael got out of the car and then came round to the passenger door to open it for her she was totally unable to stop herself from saying in disbelief, as she followed him up the marble steps, ‘You live here? In this?’

Her awed gaze took in the magnificence of the building in front of her. It looked like something that should have belonged to the National Trust, or whatever the Italian equivalent of that organisation was.

‘Since it is the main residence of the Duke of Raverno, and has been since it was first remodelled and designated as such in the seventeenth century, yes, I do live here—although sometimes I find it more convenient to stay in my apartments in Rome or Florence, depending on what business I am conducting.’ He shrugged dismissively, making Charley even more aware of the vast gulf that lay between their ways of life.

‘My nephews would envy you having somewhere so large to play in,’ was all she could manage to say. ‘They complain that there isn’t enough room in the house we all share for them to play properly with their toys.’

‘You all share? Does that mean that you live with your sister and her husband?’

Raphael didn’t know why he was bothering to ask her such a question, nor why the thought that she might share her day-to-day life with a man, even if he was her own sister’s husband, should fill him with such immediate and illogical hostility. What did it matter to him who she lived with?

‘Ruby isn’t married. The three of us—my eldest sister Lizzie, Ruby and I and the twins—all live together. It was Lizzie’s idea. She wanted to keep the family together after our parents died, so she gave up her career in London to come back to Cheshire.’

‘And what did you give up?’

The question had Charley looking at him in shock. She hadn’t expected it, and had no defences against it.

‘Nothing,’ she lied, and quickly changed the subject to ask uncertainly, ‘Will your wife not mind you bringing me here into her home like this?’

‘My wife?’

Raphael had been moving up the marble steps ahead of her, but now he stopped and turned to look at her.

‘I do not have a wife,’ he informed her, ‘and nor do I ever intend to have one.’

Charley was too surprised to stop herself from saying, ‘But you’re a duke—you must want to have a son, an heir…I mean that’s what being someone like a duke is all about, isn’t it?’

Something—not merely anger, nor even pride, but something that went beyond both of those things and was darker and scarred with bitterness—was fleetingly visible in his expression before he controlled it. She had seen it, though, and it aroused Charley’s curiosity, making her wonder what had been responsible for it.

‘You think my whole purpose, the whole focus of my life, my very existence, is to ensure the continuation of my genes?’ The grey eyes were burning as hot as molten mercury now. ‘Well, I dare say there are plenty of others who share your view, but I certainly do not. I have no intention of marrying—ever—and even less of producing a son or any child, for that matter.’