Kate Walker - The Sicilian's Wife

At last!

Cesare gave a deep sigh of relief as he pushed both his hands through his jet-black hair. It was almost as if the housekeeper had sensed his intent, the reason why he was here tonight, and had set herself up as the moral guardian of the daughter of the house, the defender of Megan’s honour, against the dark intrusive force of a sexually mature male.

His beautifully curved mouth twisted slightly cynically as he shut the door quietly. He didn’t want to alert Megan to his presence. Wanted to come up on her unawares. And it wasn’t her honour he wanted to steal. It was her heart.

Megan had heard the doorbell some time earlier but had decided to ignore it. If it was important then Mrs Moore would come and fetch her. If it wasn’t, then the housekeeper could deal with it. The older woman knew much more about her father’s daily life than she did since she had been away at university. And besides, she wasn’t in the mood for company.

‘What am I going to do?’

Sighing, she pushed aside the sleek fall of her auburn hair and propped her chin on her hands, elbows resting on the table at which she sat. A book lay open in front of her, one she had been making a pretence at reading. But it had been simply for something to do, and her mossy-green eyes had been left so unfocused by tears that the words on the pages danced in front of her vision in a totally incomprehensible blur.

‘What am I going to do?’

She had asked the question of herself again and again more times than she cared to remember, but there had never been a hope of an answer in her mind. She didn’t know what to do, or where to turn next.

‘Megan?’

The sound of the door opening jolted her head up, but it was the figure who appeared in the doorway, tall, dark and devastating that had her blinking in stunned disbelief, unable to believe that she was seeing correctly.

‘Cesare?’

Her heart gave one violent, breath-snatching thud against her ribcage, leaving her gasping in shock. Cesare Santorino was the last person she had expected to see here tonight. The last person she wanted to see as well.

But that didn’t stop her foolish emotions going into overdrive simply to see him.

She had once adored every inch of this man’s tall, rangy body, dreamed of losing herself in his arms, of drowning in the deep, molten bronze of his eyes. The image of his forcefully carved features had etched itself into her memory, so that for many nights the last thought in her mind as she drifted asleep had been of the slash of high, slanting cheekbones, the shockingly sensual curve of his wide mouth, the hard strength of his jaw and chin.

‘What are you doing here?’

To her annoyance, her voice came and went like a badly tuned radio and she had to fight to get it under control. It was just the way she was feeling, she told herself angrily. Just the low mood that had already affected her so badly. Nothing more.

She was over Cesare, had been over him for months; ever since that disastrous party at New Year when he had humiliated her so badly. Before then she had worshipped the ground he walked on, but that night he had taken her devotion, her pride, and trampled it underneath his beautifully polished, handmade leather shoes.

‘If you want to see my dad, then he’s not here…’

‘I know,’ Cesare cut in sharply, a faint frown drawing his dark straight brows together. ‘It was you I came to see.’

‘Me?’

That frown, and something in the intonation of his lyrically accented voice set her nerves on edge, raising the tiny hairs on the back of her neck in wary apprehension. She was suddenly painfully aware of the blurred marks of tears on her cheeks, only roughly scrubbed away with the back of her hand.

‘What did you want me for?’

She got to her feet as she spoke, moving away from the direct light of the window, into a more shadowy part of the room.

‘I didn’t think you ever wanted to speak to me again.’

‘Why ever not?’ Infuriatingly it was touched with a thread of amusement that scraped over her skin.

‘You made it plain that you didn’t want to waste your time with me.’

His slow, sexy smile did terrible things to what little composure she had left, making her feel as if a powerful cord was tightening around her heart and tugging hard.

‘Oh, Megan, cara, you weren’t in any fit state to spend time with anyone—waste or not.’

‘I’d had a glass or two of champagne!’

But what she was never going to admit was that it had not been the sparkling wine that had intoxicated her, but the sheer impact of his presence, lethally elegant and stunning in the stark black and white of traditional evening wear.

‘Or three, or four…’ Cesare returned drily. ‘And the problem was that you were hellishly enticing in your tiddly state. Do you have any idea just how sweetly seductive you looked in that slip of a dress?’

‘Sweetly…’ Megan echoed, totally bemused.

Had he really said what she thought he had said? Had he really used the words enticing and seductive to describe her? Even through the haze of misery that clouded her thoughts, the words touched something in her. Something that she had believed was long since dead. Something that still lingered in the heart she was sure she had armoured against him after that last, humiliating, public rejection of her.

‘You’re kidding!’

‘Not at all.’

Cesare shook his dark head, moving at last, strolling into the room with the lithe ease of a hunting cat, letting the door swing to silently behind him.

‘It was all that I could do to keep my hands off you.’

The only response that Megan could manage was a loud, unladylike snort, vividly expressing her cynical opinion of that comment.

‘Oh sure! You had such a struggle that you put me aside as if just touching me might contaminate you. And then you…then you ignored me for the rest of the night. No?’

She blinked in confusion as Cesare shook his dark head.

‘No,’ he stated flatly. ‘There was no way I could ignore you, no matter how I tried. I’ve never been able to ignore you. Not from the moment you bounced into my life as a pretty thirteen-year-old, the first time I ever visited this house. I couldn’t take my eyes off you then, and I’ve never been able to since.’

He still couldn’t. If she was in a room, there was only one direction in which his eyes would be drawn. She was like some vivid, bright spark, burning so brilliantly that it almost blinded him. And the hardest thing had been that he could never admit to it; never reveal the way he felt.

Until now.

And she was so much more lovely now; the beauty that had promised as an adolescent becoming reality in the young woman who stood before him. She had hair like the burnished leaves of a copper beech tree, eyes like the deepest, mossy pools above the finest cheekbones he had ever seen. Tall and slender, she was curved in all the right places that declared her femininity, and her skin had the smooth softness of a peach so that his fingers itched to touch it.

But he had given his promise to her father, and had sworn to abide by it until the date of her twenty-second birthday set him free.

‘You’re kidding!’

‘I would never joke about something like this.’

‘Cesare…’

Megan shook her head in bemusement. This couldn’t be happening! Nothing he was saying seemed as if it could possibly be true. And the worst, the bitterest irony, was that these words were the ones she had always dreamed of hearing him say. Dreamed, but known that those dreams would never become reality.

She had had the world’s greatest crush on this man since she had been in her teens. But he was eight years older than her, a sophisticated, cosmopolitan businessman, the owner of the huge corporation of which her father’s firm was just one microscopic, unimportant component. Men like Cesare Santorino didn’t take any notice of girls like her.