Lynne Graham: The Disobedient Mistress

‘Don’t we all?’ Leone quipped with husky suggestiveness and bit into a tiny custard tart that melted in his mouth, while she hovered like a submissive handmaiden to one side of him. A faint sardonic smile curved his masculine lips. He liked her stance. He was an old-fashioned guy and the pastry was delicious. Maybe in her spare time she would be able to occupy herself in his kitchen. Eager to please, she certainly was. Though someone ought to have warned her that even a hint of nervous desperation was likely to alert clients to an unsound business.

‘It’s good,’ Leone told her softly.

The big silver-grey eyes lit up with a surge of relief and pride. He had an erotic image of her spread across his bed in the drowsing heat of a Sicilian afternoon, glorious red hair cascading in a tangle, lush pink mouth begging for his while she writhed and moaned with pleasure beneath his expert hands. Sadly, it was not to be, he reminded himself, exasperated by the predictable effects of his own powerful libido.

She poured his coffee with her own hands. He wondered if her rock-star lover had appreciated those little touches of essential femininity calculated to make even the wimpiest male feel as though he could go out and club a lion to death before dragging it back to the connubial cave to impress her in turn. She was no fragile little flower, though. The file on her had turned up quite a few surprises for she might be only twenty-two, but she had led a chequered life and one that might have inspired his compassion had she not, it seemed, been guilty of fleecing a little old lady out of her savings. Behind those mist-coloured eyes lurked a greedy little schemer with a heart of stone.

Blood will out, Leone thought fatalistically as he accepted the coffee already sugared to his preference. She might not have the foggiest idea of who her father was and she might never have met him but he already saw a similarity between Oliver Sargent and his natural daughter in the way that she seemed to use people and reinvent herself to turn situations to her own advantage.

Melissa Carlton had grown up in a series of foster homes and trouble seemed to follow her around. She had once been engaged to a prosperous landowner and her former fiancé’s mother was still congratulating herself on her success in seeing off a young woman whom she had deemed to be both mercenary and calculating. The rock-star lover had followed: an unwashed-looking yob with spiky bleach-blond hair given to screaming indecipherable lyrics into microphones while Misty had danced wildly on one side of the stage. That had not lasted long either.

‘May I have a word with you, Mr Andracchi?’ Misty asked tautly.

‘Not just at present,’ Leone said, watching her flinch and pale without an ounce of remorse.

She could stew a little longer. And why not? Ultimately, she was going to get the deal of the century and profit very nicely indeed from their arrangement. Saving her skin stuck in his throat but what else could he do? She was Oliver Sargent’s Achilles heel and he needed her co-operation to bring the bastard down. Not that she would know how she was helping him until it was too late. But then even the best deals came at a price and she was not a sensitive woman. Sensitive women did not rip off old ladies and leave them struggling to make ends meet while continuing to pose as a caring pseudo-daughter.

When the press identified Misty Carlton as Sargent’s illegitimate child, her father’s political career would go down the tubes for no man had been more sanctimonious about his moral principles than Oliver Sargent. His good-living childless wife might well pull the plug on him too but Leone had no interest in that possibility. He already knew what Sargent valued most: his power, his ambitious hopes of higher office in government, his adoring coterie of female supporters. And when the scandal broke, Oliver Sargent was going to be stripped bare of his pride and his power and his influence. It would be a brutal punishment for a man who revelled in his own importance and lived for admiration. Once Sargent’s cover was blown all the other dirt would eventually surface too: his financial double-dealing and questionable friendships with dishonest businessmen. He would be ruined beyond all hope of political recovery.

It wasn’t enough, though, it wasn’t nearly enough to compensate for Battista’s sweet life cut off in its prime, but when the axe fell Leone would be sure to let his victim know why he had destroyed him. Sargent was already nervous around him although the older man did not yet suspect that Leone knew that he had been in that car the night his kid sister had died. But then Battista’s sleazy seducer had covered his tracks too well and, no matter how hard Leone had tried, proof of that fact had been impossible to obtain.

He watched Misty Carlton, who was the very picture of her late mother, marshal her staff. Unless he was very much mistaken, Oliver Sargent would begin sweating and fearing exposure the very instant he saw her and heard her name…

Misty wondered if she had ever hated anyone as much as she hated Leone Andracchi.

He had dismissed her as though she were a servant speaking up out of turn but this was the last day but one of her temporary contract and she had yet to be told whether or not it was going to be renewed for the next year. If it wasn’t, she would be bankrupted. Perspiration beading her short upper lip, Misty got on with her work but, no matter where she was in the gracious room with its oppressive clubby male atmosphere, she was conscious of Leone Andracchi’s brooding presence.

A real Sicilian tycoon, fabulously wealthy and famously devious and unpredictable to deal with. He dominated the room like a big black storm cloud within which lurked the threat of a lightning strike. His own executives were nervous as cats around him, eager to defer to him, keen to impress, paling if he even began to frown. Yet he was only thirty years old, young indeed to wield such enormous power. But then he was supposed to be absolutely brilliant in business.

Shame about the personality, Misty thought bitterly. It was just her luck that she should be forced to kowtow to a sexist dinosaur, who had taken her attentions quite as his due. My goodness, he had loved it when she’d brought him those special pastries and had practically purred like a jungle cat while she’d sugared his blasted coffee for him. Her strong pride had stung with every obsequious move, for boot-licking did not come naturally to her. Perhaps the Sicilian baking had been overkill but, really, what did she have left to lose? Beggars couldn’t be choosers. She had crawled for Birdie’s sake, Birdie who was going to lose her home if Misty didn’t manage to pull her own irons out of the fire and get that contract confirmed. And when it came to Birdie, there was no limit to the efforts Misty was willing to make.

‘That Andracchi guy is so gorgeous,’ her friend and employee, Clarice, groaned in a die-away voice as she stacked cups into containers by Misty’s side. ‘Every time I look at him I feel like I’ve just died and gone to heaven.’

‘Shh.’ Misty reddened with annoyance, for a waitress casting languishing lustful glances at the big chief would hardly qualify as professional behaviour.

‘You’re always looking at him out of the corner of your eye,’ the chirpy and curvaceous brunette whispered back cheekily before she walked away.

All right, so she looked, but not because she was a mug for those serious dark good looks of his! No, she looked the way one looked to check a lion was still in a cage with the door safely locked. Leone Andracchi unnerved her. It had to be her imagination that she felt that he was always watching her for she had yet to catch those brooding dark golden eyes doing so, but in his radius she felt hideously self-conscious.