Michelle Reid - Italian Deception

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RevengeWhen a tragic family accident reunites Shannon Gilbraith with Luca Salvatore, she isn’t prepared for the searing attraction that still flames between them. Luca is motivated by more than the custody of their orphaned baby niece when he proposes – he’s looking for revenge…PassionGiancarlo Cardinale thought Natalia Deyton had slept with his sister’s husband. His passionate Sicilian nature demanded revenge – a vengeful seduction – and total surrender. But Giancarlo wasn’t prepared for the innocence of Natalia…SeductionCarlo Carlucci passionately pursues heiress Francesca Bernard, who stirs him with her beauty and innocence, but she’s already engaged. There’s only one way he can have Francesca – satisfy his desire – and that’s to claim her as his wife!

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He was angry with himself for making that comment about her personal life. It had placed him in the position of sounding hard and nasty, and could have given the impression that he cared when he didn’t. She could have as many Alexes as she liked lining up to take their turn in her bed. Joshua Soames was a different matter. Luca knew all about her close friend and business partner because Keira never ceased to talk about how their graphic design venture had taken off like a rocket from the moment the two of them had begun to trade. The two partners had been friends throughout university, both excelling in computer design. Luca had listened to Keira spouting proud things about her sister even that far back. Only his mood had been more indulgent then—his mind remembering a rather cute, if self-conscious, freckle-faced teenager with a head of gorgeous hair in a pale blue taffeta bridesmaid’s dress that managed to wear her rather than the other way around. She’d simply amused him then. He’d liked her because despite all her teenage awkwardness she’d had a tongue like a whip, which had entertained him all the way through Keira and Angelo’s long wedding breakfast.

Needless to say it was the image he’d used to conjure up of Shannon whenever Keira had mentioned her younger sister. So when, four years later, she’d arrived on her first visit to Florence and he’d found himself confronted by the grown-up version, he had been completely blown away.

Beautiful, he thought, and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. Astoundingly, fascinatingly beautiful. The freckles had gone; her body had filled out to take on a shape that was truly spectacular. And instead of teenage awkwardness he’d been faced with a supremely self-confident graduate with a hunger for life and lethal gift for flirtation. She’d plied him with coquettish looks and her plans to start up her own design company with Joshua Soames and take the world by storm. Older, wiser, and as cynical as hell about people with ideals so grand, he’d listened patiently, answered all her eager questions about financial management, and found it was he who was taken by storm.

The first time they’d kissed it had been meant as a brotherly salutation to finish off the evening they’d just spent together listening to Puccini. She had been eager to go to the opera and he had been happy to take her. They’d shared a candlelit dinner at his favourite restaurant afterwards and, even though he had known by then that he was getting in too deep, he had held onto the arrogant belief that he still had control of the situation—until that kiss.

Grimly driving them out of the city now in weather so foul a duck would find shelter, he felt his lips heat at the memory. He had not intended it to be a meaningful kiss, just one of those light exchanges you shared with someone you’d spent a pleasant evening with. But Shannon had fallen into that kiss with the same all-out enthusiasm she threw at life. It had shaken him, sent his libido soaring to a place it had never known was there.

Bringing the car to a halt at a junction, he checked the road either way and used the opportunity to cast a brief glance at her. She was sitting there with her head turned away and that silly little hat pulled down over her ears. Something hot shot from his heart to his loins, then stayed burning there. Only Shannon had ever made that connection, only she had ever been able to turn him into a mass of raging hormones without needing to try.

Ten years his junior, yet divided by almost a millennium’s difference in life experience, she’d caught him, trussed him up and packaged him in a box marked ‘taken’—by the woman with the amazing hair, the stunning face, a fantastic body and an insatiable set of desires that had him balancing on the edge of fear that she might decide to find satisfaction elsewhere.

Well, he’d got his wish, if that was what he had been looking for. And he should have been relieved he’d found out before he’d placed the wedding ring on her finger. Yet oddly he hadn’t been—not once the first flush of anger had worn off, that was. All he’d felt then was regret because at least a wedding ring would have given him a reason to go after her—haul her back by her lovely hair and make her pay for daring to betray him.

Instead he’d enjoyed two years of long, hard, festering about what should have been. And in that time bitterness had turned his view of women so sour he hadn’t been able to touch one since.

A great legacy for her to chew on, if she ever found out she’d rendered him impotent, he grimaced as they drove through rain like sheets of ice.

If he throws me one more nasty look I think I might turn round and hit him, Shannon decided as she sat watching his profile via the side-window reflection. Up to now she had watched him slice her one look of utter blinding derision, several of disgust and two of seething sexual denunciation. The roads were bad enough without him distracting himself from his driving by thinking lewd and hateful thoughts.

A slave to his ever-raging libido, she thought. Sex was all that Luca knew. Not Love but Sex —give me, I need, I want, I have to have. Physical, insatiable, inventive and so good at it that it was no wonder his reputation went before him. Variety—he used to say while grinning unrepentantly when she used to face him with grapevine chatter—is most definitely the spice of life. She should have realised then that she was nothing but a brand new and exciting variety he simply had to try out.

Love? Not this man. He had no idea of the concept if it didn’t attach itself to some physical act. The word? Oh, he’d known how to use the necessary words to gain the required responses. I love you. Ti amo mio per sempre l’innamorato . Whispered words in sensual Italian that could seduce a woman to mush.

Then suddenly she was a slut and a harlot, a woman beneath his dignity to know. One mistake—not even her mistake—and she had been put out in the cold so fast, she was still dealing with the shock of it two years later.

Over him? she asked. No, she wasn’t over him. She was still too angry, bitter and hungry to draw blood to be anywhere near getting over what Luca had done to her.

‘We will never take off in this weather,’ he gritted.

Tears pricked her eyes at the sudden realisation that she had allowed herself to concentrate on Luca instead of on Keira yet again. Oh, may God forgive me, she thought and had to rummage in her bag for a tissue.

‘You OK?’ Luca had heard her telling little snuffle.

‘Fine,’ she said, hating him—hating him with every fiber she was made of.

‘Not far to the airport,’ he said more levelly.

He knew she was crying. But then, he knew her so well. Inside, outside, every which way a man could know a woman he had lived and slept with for half a year before he’d chucked her out. Gritting his teeth together, Luca withdrew inside himself, dark eyes fierce as they pierced the driving rain in his quest to get to the airport and out of close contact with the hate of his life. He had never been more relieved as he was when he saw the lights of the private airport where his plane was waiting for them. He needed some space—air to breathe that wasn’t tainted with the scent of this woman.

The hire-car parking bay was under cover. Getting out, he directed Shannon to the departure lounge, then headed off in the other direction to officially hand back the car keys. By the time he went looking for her, she had removed her hat and coat and was standing in front of the departure lounge viewing window watching the rain pelting down from the sky.

Five feet eight was fairly tall for a woman, but next to him Shannon felt small, frail, delicate. Tonight as he paused to study her slender legs encased in denim and the pale sweater she was wearing he could detect a new fragility in the slender lines of her figure. It was a frailty caused by vulnerability and fear, and realising it made him feel the worst kind of lout for letting his feelings towards her get the better of him.

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