India Grey - The Italian's Defiant Mistress

His eyes were gritty and his whole body ached with fatigue. After the ordeal of the press conference he had planned to return to his apartment for a few hours of much-needed sleep, but the encounter with Eve Middlemiss had put paid to that.

How much did she know?

His first thought when he’d seen her at the press conference was that she was a scheming, unscrupulous journalist who’d got the little-girl-lost act down to award-winning standard. Now he wasn’t so sure. Her naïvety…her total bloody cluelessness…was way too realistic to be put on. And yet somehow she knew enough to blow an international drugs investigation sky-high.

He sighed and passed his hands briefly over his face. The situation with Luca was volatile enough without having an airhead blonde journalist set on writing some half-witted exposé charging around like a bull in a china shop.

No, that was all wrong. Not a bull…Something far more dangerously delicate than that. A fawn, perhaps. She was like a fawn careering through a minefield. The memory of her wide, frightened eyes as she’d stepped in front of the taxi came back to him, followed swiftly by the feel of the soft swell of her breast beneath her T-shirt as he’d pulled her back.

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair as a flicker of desire licked though him, and turned his attention abruptly back to the CCTV monitor. It didn’t really matter what metaphor you chose. The fact remained that Eve Middlemiss was a problem. A complication he could well do without.

His mouth set in a grim line of contempt as he studied the screen. The scene it showed was like a nightmarish cross between a third-rate porn movie and a big-budget blockbuster. A very high-profile footballer’s wife and an Oscar-tipped Hollywood starlet were cavorting in the champagne fountain as a crowd of onlookers clapped and cheered. Raphael’s gaze skimmed dismissively over them, coming to rest instead on the knot of people around the fountain.

Only the tension in his broad shoulders betrayed the strength of his ruthlessly controlled emotion as he located Luca.

Raphael didn’t flinch, but the light from the screen showed the sudden shuttered stillness of his face as he watched his brother pick a strand of hair from the slickly glossed lips of Eve Middlemiss. She was looking up at Luca trustingly, her lips pouting and slightly parted, and once he had moved the stray hair, with much careful concern, she tentatively pressed them together. It was a movement that was curiously childlike, but at the same time piercingly erotic.

Gripping the remote control, Raphael saw his knuckles show bone-white through the suntanned skin of his hands. Dimly, as if from a great distance, he was aware of the pounding blood in his ears. He was a man who lived on his instincts, whose survival in the volatile Columbian underworld of drugs gangs and hired killers had depended on his ability to make split-second decisions. Every nerve and fibre of his being was telling him to go down and drag Eve Middlemiss away from Luca.

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