India Grey - Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper

That was what did it—what tore through his iron selfcontrol. That shiver of sensual awareness seemed to reverberate through his own body and galvanise him into actions he couldn’t control. Suddenly he was pulling her against him as their mouths met and their lips parted, and he was running his slippery hands over her bare back beneath her hot, vanilla-scented hair, dripping cold water on her burning skin.

The kiss was hungry, devouring, urgent. She moved round so that she was leaning with her back against the sink, her fingers grasping his shoulders. Lorenzo could feel the jut of her hipbones against his, rising, pressing against his thudding body. His arousal was so sudden, so intense, it was almost painful. He fumbled for the bow at the back of her apron, stretched to breaking point as his fingers moved across her bare, satin-smooth back. He wanted to have her now, standing up against the sink…

As if she’d read his mind she shifted slightly, tearing her lips from his for a moment as she hoisted herself upwards so that she was half sitting on the edge of the worktop. The movement made a little space between them, and without the bewitching ecstasy of her mouth on his, her hot body pressed against him, Lorenzo was pierced through with sudden chilling awareness.

What the hell was he doing?

A self-confessed romance junkie, India Greywas just thirteen years old when she first sent off for the Mills & Boon® Writers’ Guidelines. She can still recall the thrill of getting the large brown envelope with its distinctive logo through the letterbox, and subsequently whiled away many a dull school day staring out of the window and dreaming of the perfect hero. She kept those guidelines with her for the next ten years, tucking them carefully inside the cover of each new diary in January, and beginning every list of New Year’s Resolutions with the words Start Novel. In the meantime she gained a degree in English Literature and Language from Manchester University, and in a stroke of genius on the part of the gods of Romance met her gorgeous future husband on the very last night of their three years there. The last fifteen years have been spent blissfully buried in domesticity and heaps of pink washing, generated by three small daughters, but she has never really stopped daydreaming about romance. She’s just profoundly grateful to have finally got an excuse to do it legitimately!

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For Debbie and Alyson,

without whose wit, wisdom and daily conferences

in the school car park

this book would have been written much more quickly

(but at further risk to my sanity).

ELIGIBLE bachelor.

Sarah came to a standstill in the middle of the car park, her fist tightening around the envelope in her hand.

She had to find an eligible bachelor . As an item in a scavenger hunt.

Since she’d conspicuously failed to find one of those in real life, her chances of success tonight seemed slim.

Beyond the rows of shiny Mercedes and BMWs parked outside Oxfordshire’s trendiest dining pub, the fields and streams and woodland coppices she had grown up amongst lay golden and peaceful in the low summer sun. She gazed out across them, the envelope still clutched in her hand as adrenaline fizzed through her bloodstream and her mind raced.

She didn’t have to go in there; didn’t have to take part in this stupid scavenger hunt for her sister’s hen weekend; didn’t have to be the butt of everyone’s jokes all the time—Sarah, nearly thirty and on the shelf. No, she knew these fields like the back of her hand, and could remember loads of good hiding places.

Thrusting a hand through her tangled curls, she sighed. Hiding up a tree might be considerably more appealing than going into a pub and having to find an eligible bachelor, but at the age of twenty-nine it was slightly less socially acceptable. And she couldn’t really spend the rest of her life hiding. Everyone said she had to get back out there and face it all again, for Lottie’s sake. Children needed two parents, didn’t they? Girls needed fathers. Sooner or later she should at least try to find someone to fill the rather sudden vacancy left by Rupert.

The prospect made her feel cold inside.

Later. Definitely later, rather than sooner. Right now she was going to—

The doors to the bar opened and a group of city types spilled out, laughing and slapping each other on the back in an excess of beery camaraderie. They barely glanced at her as they walked past, but almost as an afterthought the last one dutifully held the door open for her.

Hell. There was no way she could not go in now. They’d think she was some kind of weirdo whose idea of a good night out was hanging around in a pub car park. Stammering her thanks, she slipped into the dim interior of the bar, shoving the envelope into the back pocket of her jeans with a shaking hand.

In the years since she’d moved away from Oxfordshire The Rose and Crown had transformed itself from a tiny rural pub with swirly-patterned carpets and faded hunting prints on the nicotinestained walls to a temple of good taste, with reclaimed-oak floors, exposed brickwork and a background soundtrack of achingly trendy ‘mood music’ obviously intended to help the clientele of stockbrokers and barristers feel instantly ‘chilled out’.

It made Sarah feel instantly on edge. And about ninety years old.

She was about to turn round and walk straight out again when some latent sense of pride stopped her. It was ridiculous, she thought impatiently; she was used to doing things on her own. She put up shelves on her own. She did her income-tax form without help. She brought up her daughter completely singlehandedly. She could surely walk into a bar and get herself a drink.

Murmuring apologies, she slipped through the press of bodies into a space by the bar and glanced nervously around. The doors were open onto the terrace and she could see Angelica and her friends gathered round a big table in the centre. It would have been impossible to miss them. Even in this place, theirs was easily the noisiest, most glamorous group and was clearly attracting the attention of every single male within eyeing-up distance. They were all wearing T-shirts provided by Angelica’s chief bridesmaid, a gazelle-like girl called Fenella, who worked in PR and who was also responsible for the scavenger-hunt idea. The T-shirts had ‘Angelica’s final fling’ emblazoned across the front in pink letters, and Fenella had only had them made in a size ‘small’.

Sarah tugged at hers surreptitiously, desperately trying to make it cover the strip of bare flesh above the waistband of her too-tight jeans. Perhaps if she’d actually stuck to her New Year diet she’d be out there now, laughing, tossing back cocktails and shiny hair and collecting eligible bachelors with the best of them. Hell, if she was a stone lighter perhaps she wouldn’t even need an eligible bachelor because maybe then Rupert wouldn’t have felt the need to get engaged to a glacial blonde Systems Analyst called Julia. But too many nights spent on the sofa while Lottie was asleep, with nothing but a bottle of cheap wine and the biscuit tin for company, had meant she’d failed to lose even a couple of pounds.