Michelle Smart - Taming the Notorious Sicilian

That moment when she’d been lying on the cold concrete and opened her eyes, she had looked at him and felt such warmth.... Someone who could evoke that in her couldn’t be all bad. He just couldn’t.

‘Come on, Han,’ said Melanie, tugging at her hand. ‘Come and dance with me.’

‘I can’t dance.’ What she really wanted to do was search every nook and cranny of Calvetti’s until she found him. Because he was there. She just knew it.

Melanie pointed at the dance floor, where a group of twenty-something men with more money than taste were strutting their stuff. ‘Nor can they.’

* * *

Francesco watched the images from the security cameras on a range of monitors on his office wall. Through them, he could see everything taking place in his club. The same feeds were piped into the office where his security guys sat holed up, watching the same live images—but the only eyes Francesco trusted were his own. Tomorrow he would head back to Palermo to spot-check his nightclub and casino there, and then he would fly on to Madrid for the same.

A couple of men he suspected of being drug dealers had been invited by a group of city money men into the VIP area. He watched them closely, debating whether to have them dealt with now or wait until he had actual proof of their nefarious dealings.

A sweep of thick blonde hair with pink bunny ears caught his attention in one of the central feeds. He watched Hannah get dragged onto the dance floor by another pink-tutued blonde he assumed was the hen of said hen party, Melanie.

Not for the first time, he asked himself what the hell Hannah was doing there.

She looked more than a little awkward. His lips curved upwards as he watched her try valiantly to move her body in time to the beat of the music. He’d seen more rhythm from the stray cats that congregated round the vast veranda of his Sicilian villa.

The half smile faded and compressed into a tight line when he read the slogan on her back: Horny Hannah.

That all the hen party had similar personalised slogans did nothing to break the compression of his lips.

It bothered him. Hannah was too...classy to have something so cheap written about her, even if it was in jest.

He downed his coffee and absently wiped away the residue on the corner of his lips with his thumb.

What was she doing here? And why did she keep craning her neck as if she was on the lookout for someone?

Since he’d dismissed her three days ago, he’d been unnerved to find her taking residence in his mind. Now was not the time for distractions of any sort, not when the casino in Mayfair was on the agenda. This particular casino was reputed to be one of the oldest—if not the oldest—in the whole of Europe. It had everything Francesco desired in a casino. Old-school glamour. Wealth. And credibility. This was a casino built by gentlemen for gentlemen, and while the old ‘no women’ rule had been relaxed in modern times, it retained its old-fashioned gentility. More than anything else, though, it was the one business his father had wanted and failed to get. This failure had been a thorn in Salvatore’s side until his dying day, when a life of overindulgence had finally caught up with him.

After almost forty years under the sole ownership of Sir Godfrey Renfrew, a member of the British aristocracy, the casino had been put up for sale.

Francesco wanted it. He coveted it, had spent two months charming Godfrey Renfrew into agreeing the sale of it to him. Such was Godfrey’s hatred of Francesco’s dead father, it had taken a month to even persuade him to meet.

What was more, if Francesco’s spies were correct, Luca Mastrangelo was sniffing around the casino, too.

This news meant he absolutely could not afford to lose focus on the deal, yet still he’d found himself, an hour before opening for the night, giving orders to his hospitality manager to reserve the best table in the club—for a hen party of all things. He’d only ever intended to have Melanie Chapman’s party on the guest list.

Under ordinary circumstances, free tables were given to the most VIP of all VIPs and only then because of the publicity it generated.

He hadn’t expected Hannah to be in attendance, but now she was here he couldn’t seem to stop his eyes from flickering to whichever monitor happened to be fixed on her.

* * *

Hannah tried heroically to get her feet moving in time with the music, aware her dancing was easily the least rhythmic of the whole club. Not that this seemed to put any of the men off. To her chagrin, a few seemed to be suffering from what her sister termed Wandering Hand Syndrome. One in particular kept ‘accidentally’ rubbing against her. When his hand brushed over her bottom the first time she’d been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, and had stepped away from him. The second time, when he’d been bolder and tried to cup her buttocks, she’d flashed him a smile and said in her politest voice, ‘Please don’t do that,’ he’d removed his hand. Which had worked for all of ten seconds. The third time he groped her, she’d ‘accidentally’ trod on his foot. And now the sleaze had ‘accidentally’ palmed her breast and was grinding into her back as if she were some kind of plaything.

Did people actually like this kind of behaviour? Did women really find it attractive?

Just as she was wishing she had worn a pair of stilettoes like all the other women there so she could bruise him properly, a figure emerged on the dance floor.

Such was Francesco’s presence that the crowd parted like the Red Sea to admit him.

Her sister stopped dancing and gazed up at him with a dropped jaw. The other hens also stared, agog, their feet seeming to move in a manner completely detached from their bodies.

And no wonder. A head taller than anyone else on the dance floor, he would have commanded attention even if he’d looked like the back end of a bus. Wearing an immaculately pressed open-necked black shirt and charcoal trousers, his gorgeous face set in a grim mask, he oozed menace.

Even if Hannah had wanted to hide her delight, she would have been unable to, her face breaking into an enormous grin at the sight of him, an outward display of the fizzing that had erupted in her veins.

She’d hoped with a hope bordering on desperation that he would spot her and seek her out, had prepared herself for the worst, but hoped for the best. She’d also promised herself that if he failed to materialise that evening then she would do everything in her power to forget about him. But if he were to appear...

To her disquiet, other than nodding at her without making proper eye contact, his attention was very much focused on the man who’d been harassing her who, despite trying to retain a nonchalant stance, had beads of sweat popping out on his forehead.

Francesco leaned into his face, his nostrils flaring. ‘If you touch this woman again, you will answer to me personally. Capisce?’

Not waiting for a response, he turned back into the crowd.

Hannah watched his retreating figure, her heart in her mouth.

Melanie shouted over the music to her, her face animated, yet Hannah didn’t hear a single syllable.

It was now or never.

Unlike the regularity of her life, where the only minor change to her schedule came in the form of the monthly weekend-night shift, Francesco’s life was full of movement and change, hopping from country to country, always seeing different sunsets. Her life was exactly where she had planned it to be and she didn’t want to change the fundamentals of it, but there was something so intoxicating about both Francesco and the freedom of his life. The freedom to wake up in the morning and just go.

He could go anywhere right now.

Hurrying to catch him, she followed in his wake, weaving through the sweaty bodies and then past the VIP tables.