Sharon Kendrik - A Tainted Beauty

‘Like a cat burglar?’ he interjected silkily.

Digging her nails into the palms of her hands, Lily met the gleam of his eyes, his words reminding her of that brief intimacy they’d shared. When she’d flirted with the idea of him wearing black Lycra and he had flirted right back. When she’d felt light-headed with the sensation of being with an attractive man and her body had felt like a flower in the full heat of the sun. ‘Like a thief,’ she said fervently.

‘Lily!’ Suzy had now taken up a central position, as if she were the referee in a boxing ring. ‘You really mustn’t be so rude to Mr D’Angelo. He has made me an extremely generous offer for the Grange… an offer I couldn’t possibly refuse.’

‘I can be anything I please!’ said Lily. ‘ I haven’t been conducting secret deals with him!’

‘I’m so sorry about this.’ Suzy turned to Ciro, curving her shiny lips into an exasperated smile. ‘But I’m afraid that because we’re so close in age, I’ve always had difficulty disciplining her—even when my late husband was alive.’

‘Cl-close in age?’ Lily spluttered indignantly.

Ciro saw that Lily’s face was ashen and, overcome by a mixture of protectiveness and fury, he turned to the older woman. ‘Mrs Scott, I wonder if you’d mind providing some refreshment? I’ve flown straight from New York and—’

‘Of course. You must be exhausted—jet lag always completely lays me out, too!’ gushed Suzy. ‘Would you like coffee?’

‘Coffee would be perfect,’ he said coolly.

Suzy looked across the room at Lily and for a split second she thought her stepmother was about to ask her to make it, as she normally would have done if she’d had friends round. But something in her expression must have made her change her mind because she merely gave her a quizzical smile. ‘Lily?’

‘No, thanks. I think I need a real drink,’ said Lily, walking over to the drinks cabinet and yanking open the door, afraid that if she didn’t occupy herself with something then she might just crumple to the carpet. She was aware of Ciro’s eyes burning into her as she pulled out a crystal brandy glass the size of a small goldfish bowl and recklessly splashed in a large measure of the most expensive brandy she could find. Taking a large mouthful, she felt her eyes water and she almost choked as the fiery spirit burned her throat. But somehow she managed to swallow it down and quickly took another gulp to take the taste away.

‘Easy,’ warned Ciro.

She turned on him and the fear and insecurity she’d been suppressing now came bubbling out in a bitter stream. ‘Don’t you dare tell me to go “easy”,’ she breathed, because surely defiance and anger were preferable to the hot tears which were stinging at the backs of her eyes. ‘I can’t believe that you sat down in my kitchen—sorry, your kitchen—and gave me all that wistful stuff about soup, when all the time…’ She drew in a shuddering breath and felt the brandy fumes scorching through her nostrils. ‘All the time, you must have been laughing at me, knowing that you were now the owner of this house while I had no idea.’

‘I was not laughing at you,’ he ground out.

‘No? Then why didn’t you do the decent thing and tell me you were the new owner?’

‘I thought about it.’ He paused and he could feel the tension in his body. A tension which had been there every time he’d thought about her. ‘But it wasn’t really my place to do so.’

‘Why not?’ She met his eyes—the brandy now burning in her stomach, giving her the courage to level an accusation she might normally have bitten back. ‘Because you were too busy flirting with me?’

He shrugged. ‘There was an element of that,’ he conceded.

‘So, what? You thought you’d see how far you could get before you came out and told me?’

‘Lily!’ he protested, taken aback by her burning sense of outrage. And wasn’t her response turning him on? For a man unused to any kind of resistance from a woman, wasn’t it turning him on like crazy? ‘I wasn’t expecting to find anyone home—that much is true. And when I stumbled across you, well…’

His words tailed off because he was reluctant to explain himself. Admitting his feelings to women wasn’t in his make-up—hadn’t that been a complaint which was always being levelled against him? Eugenia had said it all the time, especially in those early days—when she had been trying to make herself into the kind of woman she thought he wanted.

Yet Ciro could never remember feeling quite so entranced by anyone as much as Lily Scott. She seemed to embody all the old-fashioned qualities he’d never found in a woman before—and hadn’t her blue-eyed face and sexy body haunted him ever since?

‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘You can’t come up with a reasonable explanation, can you?’

Impatiently, he shook his head. ‘If anyone should have told you, it was your stepmother.’

As if on cue, Suzy came back into the room carrying a tray with coffee and a plate of Lily’s home-made ginger biscuits. Clearly she had overheard his last words because she put the tray down and gave him a reproachful look. ‘That’s not really fair, Ciro—since one of the conditions of your purchase was that I keep your identity secret.’

‘My identity, yes,’ he agreed, irritated by her over-familiarity, because he certainly couldn’t remember telling her to call him by his Christian name. Or to keep batting her damned eyelashes at him like that. ‘But I certainly didn’t ask you to keep quiet about the actual sale. No wonder Lily is hurt and upset if she’s just been told that in a few weeks’ time she has nowhere to live.’

Suzy pouted. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! This isn’t some Charles Dickens novel! She’s not some homeless urchin, you know. I offered her space at my London place, but she turned her nose up at it.’

Lily had had enough. Feeling slightly nauseous now, she put the half-drunk glass of brandy down on a table. ‘I’m not some kind of object you can just move around!’ she declared.

‘I don’t like the thought of you being thrown out of your home,’ he said roughly, thinking that she was now looking quite alarmingly fragile . ‘And I’m willing to help in any way I can.’

She met his eyes, hating the way her body prickled in response to their dark and seeking gleam. ‘Well, I neither want nor need your help, Mr D’Angelo,’ she said, with as much dignity as was possible when her head was spinning from the hastily gulped brandy. With difficulty, she only just stopped herself from swaying, but the movement was enough to make Ciro move.

He stepped towards her, his hand instinctively reaching out to catch her wrist and for a brief moment the rest of the world seemed to fade away. Her skin seemed to spark like a bonfire where he touched her and all she was conscious of was him. Him . Staring into the fathomless depths of his dark eyes, her mouth as dry as flour as she imagined him kissing her. Imagined him pulling her into the powerful and protective strength of his body and, to her horror, her breasts began to tighten in response to her fantasy. ‘Get… off me,’ she croaked, wondering if he could feel the rapid thunder of her pulse and if he realised what was causing it. ‘Just let me go.’

Reluctantly, he let her hand fall—his brow furrowing into a deep frown. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

Lily glared at him. ‘Not that it’s any of your business,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to work.’

‘You can’t—’

‘Can’t? Oh, yes, I can! I can do anything I please,’ she said, cutting across his words with fierce determination. ‘I believe your sale is completing on the third of the month, is that right? So I’ll make sure all my belongings will be out of here by then. Goodbye, Mr D’Angelo—and it really is goodbye this time.’