Lynne Graham: The Italian's Inherited Mistress

With admirable tact, Isla compressed her lips on the temptation to remark that she wasn’t surprised. Alissandru Rossetti had a very powerful personality and she imagined he rarely listened to the advice of others when it ran contrary to his wishes. Evidently, he had wanted to see her today and no other day and waiting for better flying conditions hadn’t been an option he was prepared to contemplate. Now his impatience had rebounded on him.

‘You can stay here,’ Isla announced wryly. ‘And I’m sure we’re both absolutely thrilled by the prospect.’

An unexpected glimmer of amusement flared in his eyes, lighting them up with pure gold enticement. Isla wondered why nature had bothered to bless him with such beautiful eyes when most of the time they were hard and cold with sharpness and suspicion. She shook away that bizarre thought and instead tried to concentrate on what she could defrost from the freezer to feed him.

Alissandru sat back down and manfully lifted the mug of tea, his mother’s training in good manners finally kicking in. But even as he did so he was wondering if he should simply have asked for coffee because he had never before been in a situation, aside of his brother’s marital problems, where he was forced to make the best of things that were bad. He supposed he was very spoilt when it came to the luxury of choice because the Rossetti family had always been rich. It was true that Alissandru’s business acumen had made his nearest and dearest considerably wealthier, but he still had to look back several generations to find an ancestor who had not been able to afford the indulgent extras of life. The tea proved not to be as horrible as he had expected and at least it warmed him up a little.

‘Where will I sleep?’ Alissandru enquired politely.

Isla rose in haste. ‘Come on, I’ll show you,’ she said uncomfortably, leading the way up the small twisting staircase.

Alissandru’s gaze flickered over the three doors opening off a landing the size of a postage stamp. ‘That’s the bathroom,’ she told him, opening up one of the doors. ‘And this is where you’ll have to sleep,’ she added tautly, opening up a room that was rather larger than he had expected and furnished with a double bed, old-fashioned furniture and a fireplace.

‘Where do you sleep?’ he asked.

‘This is the only bedroom,’ Isla admitted, sidestepping the question. ‘There used to be two but my uncle knocked them into one after he found out that they couldn’t have children. He felt the empty bedroom next door was a constant reminder they didn’t need.’

The arctic chill in the air cooled Alissandru’s face. ‘There’s no heating up here,’ he remarked abstractedly, wondering how on earth anyone could live with such a privation in the depth of winter.

‘No,’ she conceded. ‘But I can light the fire for you,’ she offered, biting her lip when she saw him struggle to kill a shiver and recalling the heat of the Sicilian climate, as foreign to her as extreme cold appeared to be to him.

‘I would be very grateful if you did,’ Alissandru said with unusual humility.

Isla thought ruefully of all the to-ing and fro-ing up the stairs carting logs and coal and stiffened her flagging resolve. He was a guest and she had been brought up to believe that, if it was possible, guests should be pampered.

‘I’ll go for a shower...if there’s hot water?’ Alissandru studied her enquiringly, recognising that there was nothing he could take for granted in such a poor household.

‘Lots of hot water,’ Isla assured him more cheerfully. ‘But you have no luggage so let me see if there’s something of my uncle’s that you could borrow,’ she added, heading for the chest of drawers by the window.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Alissandru asserted, his nostrils flaring with distaste at the thought of wearing another man’s clothing.

‘My uncle wouldn’t mind and he’s tall like you,’ Isla argued, misinterpreting his response and assuming that he had sufficient manners not to want to be a nuisance. She rifled through several drawers and produced a pair of worn jeans and a husky sweater that looked as though it had seen better days before the last world war, settling both items on the bed. ‘You’ll be more comfortable in these than in that suit. I’ll go downstairs and sort out something for dinner.’

‘Thank you...’ Alissandru forced out the words. ‘Considering what I said when I arrived, you’ve been surprisingly kind.’

A delicate coppery brow raised as she spun back to look at him. ‘I don’t think you consider what you say very often,’ she admitted with a sudden spontaneous smile of amusement that lit up her heart-shaped face like a glorious sunrise. ‘And you’re completely out of your depth in this environment, which makes me more forgiving. I was just as ill at ease in your home in Sicily.’

‘ Dio mio ... I thought we made you welcome.’

A tide of colour rose up beneath her fair skin, making Alissandru study her in fascination and move several steps closer to stare down at her.

‘Oh, my goodness, of course you did. I stayed in a wonderful bedroom and the food and everything was incredible,’ Isla babbled, belatedly conscious that she might have sounded rude and unappreciative of his hospitality and alarmingly aware of his proximity because he was so very tall and powerfully built. ‘But it wasn’t my world and I was a fish out of water there. I’d never even been abroad before, never seen a house like yours except on television...you know, everything in your home was unfamiliar...and rather unnerving, to be honest.’

Alissandru scanned the tiny pulse flickering wildly just above her delicate collarbone and he wanted to put his mouth there. He was convinced that her heart was hammering out the same fast nervous beat because naturally she recognised the heightened sexual awareness that laced the atmosphere between them. Of course , she did, he told himself cynically. She was twenty-two, no longer a teenager, precocious or otherwise, and an adult woman in every sense of the word. With that thought driving him, he lifted a hand to tilt up her chin, gazing down into startled dark blue eyes and the surge of pink suddenly brightening her cheeks. She blushed. When had he last met a woman who blushed? It was simply that fair skin of hers, doubtless telegraphing the existence of the same erotic thoughts that were currently controlling him.

Would she, wouldn’t she? Alissandru asked himself but he rather thought the answer to the suggestion of sex would be yes. He always got the answer yes from women, couldn’t remember when he had last been rejected, and the chemistry between him and Isla Stewart was indisputable. He didn’t like it, indeed he despised it, but the same powerful drive that had hardened him to steel with arousal was what kept the human race alive and it was appallingly hard to resist for a man unaccustomed to having to deny such a normal urge. He pictured her spread across the bed with its ugly patchwork duvet set...pale and lush and pink and freckled ? Sex would be one useful way of keeping warm and it would provide entertainment into the bargain, Alissandru rationalised with ease.

Alissandru slowly lowered his handsome dark head, giving her time to retreat. But Isla was frozen into immobility, disturbingly preoccupied by the tightening of her nipples and the low pulse of heat thrumming at the centre of her body. Once or twice before she had experienced such glimmerings of awareness with other men but the attraction had always vanished the moment they actually touched her, convincing her that the fertile scope of a woman’s imagination had to explain a lot of encounters that were later regretted. Yet now, when her every cautious instinct with his sex urged her to back away from Alissandru, sheer curiosity kept her where she stood because she wanted, inexplicably needed , to know if it would be the same with him.