Sharon Kendrik - The Sicilian's Passion

‘No, of course I can come back immediately,’ babbled Kate loudly. ‘I’ve just finished here, and I’m sure that I can be excused pudding and coffee!’

‘No doubt you’ll give me some kind of explanation later,’ came Lucy’s dry response.

‘Oh, definitely! Definitely!’ breathed Kate. Though how on earth would she put into words that she had fallen for a man with a cold, contemptuous face? The most beautiful man she had ever seen? And she wanted him, this blue-eyed stranger.

She shivered as she acknowledged the awful truth.

She wanted Giovanni Calverri!

‘KATE, what on earth is the matter with you?’

Kate looked at her sister with an unaccustomed blankness in her eyes.

She had spent the whole drive back from Lady St John’s house in Sussex veering between disbelief and self-disgust. In fact, the whole journey had been negotiated on some kind of auto-pilot. She had gone straight upstairs to Lucy’s flat, and it wasn’t until she was inside its elegant interior that she began shaking uncontrollably—like a person who had just come down with a fever.

‘It’s stupid. It’s nothing.’ She shook her head distractedly. ‘It would sound too far-fetched to explain—’

Lucy’s forehead creased with perplexity. ‘But Kate, you never leave your phone switched on during lunch. It’s one of your “unbreakable rules”, remember?’

Oh, yes, she remembered all right. And another of those rules was that she didn’t fall victim to grand and irrational passions. That she was ruled by her head, and not her heart. That she liked and respected herself, so that falling for a man who played the ‘treat them mean and keep them keen’ ticket was simply not on her agenda.

‘I just met a man,’ she said slowly, and ridiculously it sounded like the first line to a love song.

The frown disappeared, and Lucy relaxed. ‘Oh! And about time, too,’ she smiled, with the approval of someone who was happily established in a long-term relationship. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to fall in love for years and years!’

Kate nodded. So had she. But love was not an appropriate word, not in this case. If she was being brutally honest—and she always tried for honesty—then wouldn’t falling in lust be a more fitting description of what had happened to her some time over lunch?

She compressed her mouth into a determined line. ‘It isn’t like that,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t love him. How can I when I barely know him?’

‘But Cupid’s arrow has hit you with unfailing accuracy?’

‘A thunderbolt,’ admitted Kate in a dazed kind of voice. ‘The kind of thing you read about but think will never happen to you.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Lucy gave a wistful smile. ‘The French call it a coup de foudre .’

Kate shook her head. ‘That would imply that it was mutual.’

‘And wasn’t it?’

Kate thought about it. There had been an undeniable fizzle between them, yes, but… but… ‘He looked at me as though he didn’t really like what he saw.’

‘Or what he felt perhaps,’ said Lucy perceptively.

Kate looked at her sister. Two years older and the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, with her dark copper hair and thick-fringed green eyes.

Lucy had been born with looks to burn and a certain irresistibility to the opposite sex. But in the end she had fallen for her boss, unwilling and unable to stop the relationship even when the powers-that-be had threatened her with the sack if she did not.

Lucy had duly lost her job, and although Jack had not he had left anyway, using the opportunity to work for himself at long last. But at least they had stayed together, thought Kate, even if Jack now spent the majority of his life abroad. And Kate had been able to offer her sister a job as her assistant at just the right time. That was the pay-off for being neighbours as well as workmates, she realised. As sisters, she and Lucy looked out for one another.

She looked around Lucy’s flat, which, with Jack helping to pay for it, was much larger and more opulent than her own.

‘How’s things?’ she asked absently, still unable to get Giovanni out of her head.

Lucy stared at her. ‘Tell me about him,’ she said suddenly. ‘This man who’s making you tremble like that.’

Kate looked down with surprise at her unsteady hands. What could she say? That he had the coldest, proudest and most beautiful face she had ever seen? And eyes so startlingly blue that the summer sky would have paled in comparison? She shrugged, but her shoulders felt unusually heavy. ‘There’s nothing to tell. Like I said, I don’t know him. I’ve barely exchanged half a dozen words with him. He’s Lady St John’s godson—’

‘Mmm. So, he’s well-connected, then?’ murmured Lucy.

‘Oh, yes. And he’s Italian—or, rather, he’s Sicilian.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘That’s exactly what I said! And apparently there is. A huge difference.’ Kate thought of his quietly furious response to her innocent question. ‘His family owns the Calverri silver factory. You must have heard of them.’

Lucy’s eyes widened. ‘You are kidding?’

‘No, I’m not. He’s rich. He’s handsome.’ Kate shut her eyes and forced herself to see facts rather than fantasy. He is curiously unsmiling and there is an impenetrable barrier between him and the rest of the world, she thought with an instinct which seemed to come from nowhere.

‘He sounds perfect.’

‘I’m sure he is,’ said Kate lightly. ‘For someone who doesn’t mind a man who looks arrogantly down his beautifully patrician nose at you!’

‘Hmm! So you’ve got it bad!’

‘Not really. A passing fancy,’ answered Kate tightly. ‘And anyway—I’ll never see him again. Why should I?’

Never. It sounded so brutally final. Oh, what magic had he woven during that tense, short meeting? she wondered despairingly.

She had gathered up all her belongings and left the house in an unseemly rush, driven by some self-protective instinct which was quite alien to her. She had just known that if she didn’t get out of the St John mansion quickly she risked making a very great fool of herself.

Because for one brief, mad moment as he and his godmother had accompanied her into the hall she had actually thought about asking him out !

Oh, not in the kind of ‘would you like to go out with me?’ way which was perfectly acceptable nowadays. Some of her more liberated girlfriends wouldn’t have hesitated.

No, Kate would have been more subtle than that.

She could have said that she would be interested to see the latest Calverri silver catalogue on behalf of one of her clients. And that wouldn’t have been a lie—she could think of at least half a dozen people who would doubtless love to choose something lavish and expensive from the latest glossy Calverri brochure.

But she had recognised in him a steely intelligence—and an innate ability to see what might lie behind a request such as that. He wasn’t stupid. Women must react to him like that all the time—hence the contempt for her, which he had barely bothered trying to conceal.

So she had shaken his hand and given him a cool smile, and hoped that her body language hadn’t betrayed the shimmering thrill of pleasure she felt to have his fingers closing around her hand.

She frowned as Lucy went to make some coffee, walking over to the window where the Thames glittered by in tantalisingly close proximity.

Flats like this didn’t come cheap. Her own had been bought with the proceeds of her work after her salary had started surpassing even her wildest dreams. And everyone knew that you should put money into property.