Sharon Kendrick - Di Sione's Virgin Mistress

He drummed his fingers on the armrest as he considered his options. Should he ask his pilot to divert the plane to London? He thought about his meeting with the Italian billionaire scheduled for later that evening and knew it would be both insulting and damaging to cancel it.

He scowled as he rang for a stewardess, one of whom almost fell over herself in her eagerness to reach him first.

‘What can I get for you, sir?’ she questioned, her eyes nearly popping out of her head as she looked at the haphazard collection of swimwear piled in the centre of the table.

Dante quickly shoved all the bikinis back into the bag, but as he did so, his finger hooked on to a particularly tiny pair of bottoms. He felt his body grow hard as he felt the soft silk of the gusset and thought about Willow wearing it. His voice grew husky. ‘I want you to get hold of my assistant and ask him to track down a woman for me.’

The stewardess did her best to conceal it, but the look of disappointment on her face was almost comical.

‘Certainly, sir,’ she said gamely. ‘And the woman is?’

‘Her name is Willow Hamilton,’ Dante ground out. ‘I need her number and her address. And I need that information by the time this plane lands.’

* * *

There were four missed calls on her phone by the time Willow left the Tube station in central London, blinking as she emerged into the bright July sunshine. She stepped into the shadow of a doorway and looked at the screen. All from the same unknown number and whoever it was hadn’t bothered to leave a voicemail. But she knew who the caller must be. The sexy stranger. The man she’d kissed. The blue-eyed man whose carry-on she had picked up by mistake.

She felt the race of her heart. She would go home first and then she would ring him. She wasn’t going to have a complicated conversation on a busy pavement on a hot day when she was tired and jet-lagged.

She had already made a tentative foray inside, but the bag contained no contact number, just some photos of an amazing Spanish castle, a book which had won a big literary prize last year and—rather distractingly—several pairs of silk boxer shorts which were wrapped around a leather box. She’d found her fingertips sliding over the slippery black material of the shorts and had imagined them clinging to Dante Di Sione’s flesh and that’s when her cheeks had started doing that Scarlet Pimpernel thing again, and she’d hastily stuffed them back before anyone on the Heathrow Express started wondering why she was ogling a pair of men’s underpants.

She let herself into her apartment, which felt blessedly cool and quiet after the heat of the busy London day. She rented the basement from a friend of her father’s—a diplomat in some far-flung region whose return visits to the UK were brief and infrequent. Unfortunately one of the conditions of Willow being there was that she wasn’t allowed to change the decor, which meant she was stuck with lots of very masculine colour. The walls were painted bottle-green and dark red and there was lots of heavy-looking furniture dotted around the place. But it was affordable, close to work and—more importantly—it got her away from the cloying grip of her family.

She picked up some mail from the mat and went straight over to the computer where she tapped in Dante Di Sione’s name, reeling a little to discover that her search had yielded over two hundred thousand entries.

She squinted at the screen, her heart beginning to pound as she stared into an image which showed his haunting blue eyes to perfection. It seemed he was some sort of mega entrepreneur, heading up a company which catered exclusively for the super-rich. She looked at the company’s website.

We don’t believe in the word impossible.

Whatever it is you want—we can deliver.

Quite a big promise to make, she thought as she stared dreamily at photos of a circus tent set up in somebody’s huge garden, and some flower-decked gondolas which had been provided to celebrate a tenth wedding anniversary party in Venice.

She scrolled down. There was quite a lot of stuff about his family. Lots of siblings. Snap, she thought. And there was money. Lots of that. A big estate somewhere in America. Property in Manhattan. Although according to this, Dante Di Sione lived in Paris—which might explain why his accent was an intriguing mix of transatlantic and Mediterranean. And yet some of the detail about his life was vague—though she couldn’t quite put her finger on why. She hadn’t realised precisely what she’d been looking for until the word single flashed up on the screen and a feeling of satisfaction washed over her.

She sat back and stared out at the pavement, where from this basement-level window she could see the bottom halves of people’s legs as they walked by. A pair of stilettos tapped into view, followed by some bare feet in a pair of flip-flops. Was she really imagining that she was in with a chance with a sexy billionaire like Dante Di Sione, just because he’d briefly kissed her in a foreign airport terminal? Surely she couldn’t be that naive?

She was startled from her daydream by the sound of her mobile phone and her heart started beating out a primitive tattoo as she saw it was the same number as before. She picked it up with fingers which were shaking so much that she almost declined the call instead of accepting it.

Stay calm, she told herself. This is the new you. The person who kisses strangers at airports and is about to start embracing life, instead of letting it pass her by.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that you, Willow?’

Her heart raced and her skin felt clammy. On the phone, his transatlantic/Mediterranean twang sounded even more sexy, if such a thing was possible. ‘Yes,’ she said, a little breathlessly. ‘It’s me.’

‘You’ve got my bag,’ he clipped out.

‘I know.’

The tone of his voice seemed to change. ‘So how the hell did that happen?’

‘How do you think it happened?’ Stung into defence by the note of irritation in his voice, Willow gripped the phone tightly. ‘I picked it up by mistake...obviously.’

There was a split-second pause. ‘So it wasn’t deliberate?’

‘Deliberate?’ Willow frowned. ‘Are you serious? Do you think I’m some sort of thief who hangs around airports targeting rich men?’

There was another pause and this time when he spoke the irritation had completely vanished and his voice sounded almost unnaturally composed. ‘Have you opened it?’

A little uncomfortably, Willow rubbed her espadrille toe over the ancient Persian rug beneath the desk. ‘Obviously I had to open it, to see if there was any address or phone number inside.’

His voice sounded strained now. ‘And you found, what?’

Years of sparring with her sisters made Willow’s response automatic. ‘Don’t you even remember what you were carrying in your own bag?’

‘You found, what?’ he repeated dangerously.

‘A book. Some glossy photos of a Spanish castle. And some underpants,’ she added on a mumble.

‘But nothing else?’

‘There’s a leather case. But it’s locked.’

At the other end of the phone, Dante stared at the imposing iron structure of the Eiffel Tower and breathed out a slow sigh of relief. Of course it was locked—and he doubted she would have had time to get someone to force it open for her even if she’d had the inclination, which he suspected she didn’t. There had been something almost otherworldly about her...and she seemed the kind of woman who wouldn’t be interested in possessions—even if the possession in question happened to be a stunning diadem, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He could feel the strain bunching up the muscles in his shoulders and he moved them slowly to release some of the tension, realising just how lucky he’d been. Or rather, how lucky she had been. Because he’d been travelling on a private jet with all the protection which came with owning your own plane, but Willow had not. He tried to imagine what could have happened if she’d been stopped going through customs, with an undeclared item like that in her possession.