Sharon Kendrick - Priceless

And yet despite the head-turning quality of his looks she thought his face was rather ruthless and cold when you got up close. True, the full mouth was sensual, but it rarely smiled and there was something rather forbidding about the way he could fix you with a gaze which froze you to the spot. Yet somehow, looking the way Salvatore did, he could be forgiven almost anything. And he was.

She’d seen secretaries swoon and tea-ladies get flustered in his presence. She’d observed his powerful colleagues regard him with a certain kind of deferential awe and to allow him to call all the shots. And she’d watched simply because he was a joy to watch.

He was tall and lean and his body was honed and hard, with the white silk shirt he wore hinting at the tantalising shape of the torso beneath. Raven-dark hair contrasted with glowing olive skin and completed the dramatic colour pallet of his Mediterranean allure.

But it was his eyes which were so startling. Bright blue—like the bluest sky or the sea on the most summery day of the year. Jessica had never imagined an Italian having eyes which were any other colour than black. The intensity of their hue seemed to suck all the life from his surroundings and sometimes she felt quite dizzy when they were directed on her. Like now.

And from the faintly impatient crease between his dark brows it seemed that he was expecting some kind of answer to his question.

Distracted by his presence, she struggled to remember exactly what it was he’d asked her. ‘Perhaps they think you want a wife because you’re … er, well—you’re about the right kind of age to get married, sir.’

‘You think that?’ he demanded.

Jessica felt trapped. Backed into a corner. She shook her head. If he wasn’t planning to whisk her off her feet, then she thought he should remain a lifelong bachelor!

‘Actually, no. Your marital future is not something I’ve really considered,’ she hedged. ‘But you know what people are like. Once a man passes thirty—which I assume you have—then everyone starts to expect marriage.’

‘ Sì ,’ said Salvatore and he ran a slow and thoughtful thumb over the hard line of his jaw where the shadow of new growth had already begun to rasp even though he had shaved that very morning. ‘Exactly so. And in my own country it is the same!’

He shook his dark head impatiently. Had he really believed that things would be different here in England? Yes, of course he had. That had been one of his reasons for coming to London—to enjoy a little uncomplicated fun before it came to the inevitable duty of choosing a suitable bride in Sicily. For once in his life he had wanted to escape all the expectations which inevitably accompanied his powerful name—particularly at home.

Sicily was a small island where everyone knew everyone else and the subject of when and whom the oldest Cardini would marry had preoccupied too many, and for too long. On Sicily if he was seen speaking to a woman for more than a moment then her eager parents would be costing up her trousseau and casting covetous eyes over his many properties!

This was the first time he had lived somewhere other than his homeland for any length of time, and it had taken little more than a few weeks to discover that, even within the relative anonymity of England, expectation still ran high when it concerned a single, eligible man. Times changed less than you thought they did, he thought wryly.

Women plotted. And they behaved like vultures when they saw a virile man with a seemingly bottomless bank account. When was the last time he had asked a woman for her phone number? He couldn’t remember. These days, they all seemed to whip out their cell phones to ‘key you in’ before he’d even had time to discover their surname! Salvatore had fiercely traditional values about the roles of the sexes, and he made no secret of the fact. And the fact was that men should do the chasing.

‘The question is what I do about it,’ he mused softly.

Jessica was unsure whether or not to pick up her mop again. Probably not. He was looking at her as if he expected her to say something else and it wasn’t easy to know how to respond. She knew exactly what she’d say if it was a girlfriend who was asking her, but when it was your boss, how forthright could you afford to be? ‘Well, that depends what choices you have, sir,’ she said diplomatically.

Salvatore’s long fingers drummed against the polished surface of his desk, the sound mimicking the raindrops which were pattering against the giant windows of his top-floor office suite. ‘I always could turn the dinner invitation down,’ he said.

‘Yes, you could, but you’d need to give a reason,’ she said.

‘I could claim that I had a cold—how do you say, the “man-flu”?’

Jessica’s lips curved into a reluctant smile because the very idea of Salvatore Cardini being helpless and ill was impossible to imagine. She shook her head. ‘Then they’ll only ask you another time.’

Salvatore nodded. ‘That is true,’ he conceded. ‘Well, then, I could rearrange the dinner so that it was on my territory and with my guest-list.’

‘But wouldn’t that be a little rude? To so obviously want to take control of the situation?’ she ventured cautiously.

He looked at her thoughtfully. Sometimes she seemed to forget herself—to tell him what she thought instead of what he wanted to hear! Was that because he had grown to confide in her—so that some of the normal rules of hierarchy were occasionally suspended?

He realised that he spoke to Jessica in a way he wouldn’t dream of speaking to one of his assistants, or their secretaries—for he had seen the inherent dangers in doing that before.

An assistant or secretary often misjudged a confidence—deciding that it meant he wanted to share a lifetime of confidences with them! Whereas the gulf between himself as chairman and Jessica as cleaner was much too wide for her ever to fall into the trap of thinking something as foolish as that. Yet she often quietly and unwittingly hit on the truth. Like now. He leaned back in his chair and thought about her words.

He had no desire to offend Garth Somerville—nor to appear to snub his wife or her eager friends. And what harm would it do to attend a dinner with such women present? It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened, or the last.

Yet he was in no mood for the idle sport of fending off predatory females. Like a child offered nothing but copious amounts of candy, his appetite had become jaded of late. And it didn’t seem to matter how beautiful the women in question were. Sex so freely and so openly offered carried with it none of the mystique which most excited him.

‘ Sì ,’ he agreed softly. ‘It would be rude.’

Almost without him noticing, Jessica plucked a cloth and a small plastic bottle from the pocket of her overall and began to polish his desk. ‘So it looks like you’re stuck with going after all,’ she observed, and gave the desk a squirt of lemon liquid.

Salvatore frowned. Not for the first time, he found himself wondering just how old she was—twenty-two? Twenty-three? Why on earth was she cleaning offices for a living? Was she really happy coming in here, night after night, wielding a mop and a bucket and busying herself around him as he finished off his paperwork and signed letters?

He watched her while she worked—not that there was a lot to see. She was a plain little thing and always covered her hair with a tight headscarf, which matched the rather ugly pink overall she wore. The outfit was loose and he had never looked at her as man would automatically look at a woman. Never considered that there might be a body underneath it all, but the movement of her arm rubbing vigorous circles on his desk suddenly drew attention to the fact that the material of her overall was pulling tight across her firm young breasts.