Sharon Kendrick - Priceless

BUT the craziest thing of all was that Salvatore couldn’t get Jessica out of his mind—and the irony of this didn’t escape him. How could one short, bogus date have resulted in him thinking almost non-stop about his damned cleaner? Unable to shake from his mind the memory of her grey eyes, that pure skin and the decadent delight of those luscious breasts.

The light glinted on his razor as he stared in the mirror, his dark jaw half shaved and his blue eyes narrowed. Intellectually he recognised that her improbable attraction was because she had turned him down. He was used to women fawning. Plotting. Enticing and scheming. Why, it was not unknown for a woman to beg him to make love to her!

Jessica intrigued him because in a world where one thing was predictable—his effect on the opposite sex—the unexpected would always have the power to tantalise him.

So had she been playing games with him? Knowing that precisely the right button to press was not to let him press any buttons at all? To let him touch a little, but not too much. To give him a taste to whet his appetite but leave him hungering for more?

He went to his club and swam for an hour, had a breakfast meeting in a chandelier-lit room overlooking Hyde Park and took a conference call from an Australian banker before most of the world was awake. Yet still he was restless.

How could some plain and mousy little cleaner know how to handle any kind of man—but especially a man like him ?

All day long he was distracted, though he was astute enough not to make any major decisions until her infernal perfume had left his senses. Some scent he was unfamiliar with—which had reminded him of springtime and softness and clung to his skin last night until he had viciously washed it off beneath the jets of a cold shower.

‘ Maledizione !’ Damn her!

Giovanni Amato—an old friend from Sicily—was flying in from New York and Salvatore had arranged to meet him for dinner. Yet he found himself strangely relieved when Giovanni’s secretary rang to say his flight had been delayed, and that he was running late.

‘Get him to call me,’ Salvatore said to her. ‘We’ll change it to another night.’

As he slowly put the phone down Salvatore felt the stealthy beat of excitement combined with the strong tang of self-contempt. Surely you aren’t hanging around the office waiting to see whether that pale little nobody will dare show her face here tonight? he asked himself furiously.

But as he cleared his desk of paperwork he recognised that maybe he was. He glanced at his watch. That was if she was going to bother to turn up.

He had signed the last of a pile of letters and was just putting his gold pen down on the blotter when he heard the door click open behind him. Salvatore felt himself tense, though he didn’t move. He didn’t dare move. He hadn’t felt this kind of hot, instant lust for a woman for a long time and he wanted to prolong it—knowing that the second he turned round, his fantasy would crumble into dust. He would no longer be looking at the woman who had made him feel so deliciously hard all night, but at some mousey little office worker.

He swivelled the chair round to face her. ‘Hello, Jessica,’ he said softly.

Clutching her bucket and her mop, Jessica froze as she stared across the huge office in horror.

He was still here!

Despite her leaving his office until the last possible moment—until she was certain that he had gone—Salvatore Cardini was still at his desk, his icy blue eyes mocking her with memories of what had almost happened in his car last night! She bit down on her lip so hard that she risked cutting it and the hand which wasn’t holding onto the mop clenched into a tight fist by the side of her pink overall. Of all the nightmare situations, this had to be the very worst.

Hadn’t she hesitated about coming in here at all, tempted to phone Top Kleen and tell them she was sick? And hadn’t there been a tiny part of her which had wondered about leaving the agency altogether—to sign on with someone new? Someone who might not have a prestigious client like Cardini, but who would guarantee a peaceful working environment where she would be untroubled by ridiculous fantasies.

But Jessica had a strong work ethic, which made her baulk at such behaviour, as well as a stubborn streak of pride which insisted that she had done nothing wrong. Nothing to be ashamed of.

So where was that strong conviction now? Staring across the vast space, she could see the sardonic glint in Salvatore’s eyes. Her mouth as dry as parchment, she drank him in. His black hair, his broad shoulders and outline of that amazing hard body. The image of that same body pressing itself close into hers in the back seat of his car drifted tantalisingly into her mind and fiercely she tried to block it.

What the hell was she going to say to him when their last meeting had ended in a frozen silence?

Just act normally. As if nothing happened. Wipe it from your memory—as he has probably wiped it from his.

She cleared her throat. ‘Good evening …’ she hesitated. ‘… sir.’

Salvatore gave a slow, mocking smile. So they were back to ‘sir’, were they?

His eyes flicked over her. She was wearing the same pink overall which she always wore and her hair was almost completely concealed by the hideous pink scarf. Her face was bare of make-up and her grey eyes were wary, watchful. She looked exactly the same as she always did and yet something had changed.

In him?

Was it because he had kissed those bare lips and tangled his fingers in the glossy hair which now lay covered from his gaze that made him so acutely aware of her presence in a way he had never been before? Was it because he now knew the luscious curves and unexpected temptations of the body which lay beneath the unflattering garment?

‘Sleep well?’ he questioned softly.

Infuriatingly, Jessica blushed. No, of course she hadn’t slept well! She’d spent the entire night tossing and turning and bashing her pillow into shape and then getting up to make herself a cup of camomile tea, unable to get Salvatore out of her mind.

It had been the memory of his kiss which had troubled her more than anything. Because wasn’t it rather shaming that in all her twenty-three years—the one kiss which had sent her heart soaring was delivered by a man for whom she’d been nothing but a convenience?

She wondered if he was astute enough to notice how awful she looked. Wouldn’t the dark circles beneath her eyes show her to be lying if she claimed to have slumbered like a baby?

‘Not really, no,’ she answered briskly.

‘Me neither. I tossed and I turned all night.’ His lips lingered on the words as he leaned back in his chair and studied her. ‘But I guess that isn’t really surprising, is it, cara ?’

She wished he wouldn’t dip his voice like that—as if he were dipping a rich, ripe strawberry into a bowl of thick, melted chocolate. And she wished he wouldn’t stare at her like that, either. As if it were his unalienable right to arrogantly appraise her, with the kind of slow scrutiny of a man performing an imaginary striptease. So just blank all his sensual allusions. Behave as you normally would and sooner or later he’ll tire of the game and leave you alone.

‘No, not surprising at all,’ she said, deliberately misunderstanding. She picked up a plastic bottle which appeared to show two lemons going into battle against an army of germs. ‘The food at dinner was very rich.’

‘But you hardly touched a thing all evening,’ he reminded her.

‘I’m amazed you noticed,’ said Jessica.

‘Oh, I noticed all right.’ His blue eyes gleamed with provocation. ‘Just as I noticed that Jeremy Kingston seemed to think you were the most fascinating thing to come into his life since his last tax break.’