Sharon Kendrik - The Unlikely Mistress

On her own. Something she was still having to come to term with. Once again, guilt stabbed at her with piercing accuracy.

But still she watched him…

By the edge of the water, Guy felt his body tense with a sense of the unexpected, aware of the unmistakable sensation of being watched. He narrowed hard slate-grey eyes as they scanned the horizon, and his gaze was suddenly arrested by the sight of the woman who drifted in the gondola towards him. Madonna, he thought suddenly. Madonna.

The pale March sun caught a sheen of bright red-gold hair, drifting like a banner around her shoulders. He could see long, slender limbs and skin so pale it looked almost translucent. She’s English, he thought suddenly as their eyes clashed across the glittering water. And for one mad, reckless moment he thought about…what? Following her? Buying her a cup of coffee? His mouth hardened into a brief, cynical smile.

It was reckless to want to pick up a total stranger and he, more than most people, knew the folly of being reckless. Hadn’t his whole life been spent making amends for his father’s one careless act of desperation? The knock-on effect of impulsive behaviour was something to guard against. Resolutely he turned away from her distractions.

Sabrina felt something approaching pain. Look at me, she urged him silently, but her gondolier chose that moment to give an expert twist of his wrist to glide the craft into shore and he was lost to her eyes.

She pushed her guidebook back into her handbag and stood up, allowing the gondolier to steady her elbow, nodding her head vigorously, as if she understood every word of his murmured Italian. But she had paid him before the journey and didn’t have a clue what he could be saying to her.

And then there was a shout behind her, a deep, alarming shout, and instinctively she knew that the voice belonged to the man with the dark hair. She automatically turned in response, just in time to feel a great whooshing spray of icy cold water as it splashed over her.

It jetted towards her eyes and the shock made her handbag slip from her fingers. She was aware of her gondolier shouting something furiously, and when she opened her eyes again she could see the zigzag of foam left in the wake of a small speedboat.

And the man with the dark hair.

He was standing on the shore right next to her, holding his hand out, and despite the look of icy anger on his face some instinct made her take it, losing herself immediately in the warmth of his firm grasp.

‘Why the hell can’t people control the machines they’re supposed to be in charge of?’ he said, in a voice as coolly beautiful as his face. He gave a brief, hard stare at the retreating spray of the boat, then narrowed his eyes as he looked down at the shivering woman whose fingernails were gripping painfully into the palm of his hand. Her face was so white that it looked almost translucent, and he felt a strange kick to his heart. ‘You are English?’

Up close, he was even more devastating. Breathtakingly so. Awareness shimmered over her skin like fingertips. ‘Y-y-yes, I am,’ she replied, from between chattering teeth. ‘How c-c-could you tell?’

He carried on holding her hand until he was certain that she was grounded. ‘Because pale women with freckles and strawberry-blonde hair look quintessentially English, that’s why,’ he answered slowly as he allowed his eyes to drift irresistibly over her. ‘And you’re soaking.’

Sabrina looked down at herself, and saw that he wasn’t exaggerating. She was wet right through—her T-shirt stained with dirty lagoon water, the pinpoint thrust of her nipples emphasising her plummeting body temperature as much as the chattering of her teeth.

‘Not to mention freezing.’ He swallowed as he followed the direction of her eyes, tempted to make a flippant joke about wet T-shirt competitions, then deciding against it. Not his scene to make remarks like that to a complete stranger.

Sabrina suddenly realised what was missing. ‘Oh, my goodness—I’ve dropped my handbag!’ she wailed.

‘Where?’

‘In the w-water. And it’s got my purse in it!’

He went to peer over the edge of the lagoon, but the dark waters had claimed it.

‘Don’t!’ Sabrina called, terrified that he would just disappear again, exit from her life for ever.

He turned round with a look of mystification. ‘Don’t what?’

‘D-don’t t-t-try and retrieve it!’

‘You think I’m about to dive into the canal to hunt around for your handbag?’ He smiled again. ‘Princess, I’m not that much of a hero!’ But the smile died on his lips as he saw that the edges of her mouth were turning a very pale blue. ‘You know,’ he observed slowly, unable to look away from the ice-blue dazzle of her eyes, ‘you’re really going to have to get out of those wet clothes before you catch pneumonia!’

The intimacy of his remark drove every sane response clean out of her mind. Sabrina opened her mouth, then chattered it shut again.

Guy frowned. He couldn’t believe he’d said that. Crass, or what? ‘Where are you staying?’

‘M-m-miles away.’ Naturally. Rooms this close to St Mark’s Square tended to be beyond the reach of anyone other than your average millionaire.

Guy’s mouth hardened as he read the unconscious appeal in her eyes. Pity she hadn’t mentioned that before the gondola had sped away. If the driver hadn’t been flirting with her quite so outrageously, then he might have been able to warn her about the speedboat in time. And the least he could have done to recompense would have been to give her a free ride back to her hotel.

Which left it up to him.

He had achieved what he had set out to do in Venice—had purchased a superb Italian old master for one of his more demanding clients. The price he had bartered had been better than expected and his client would be pleased.

He had planned a quiet day. Playing knight in shining armour hadn’t been top of his agenda. But responsibility was etched deep into Guy’s personality. He looked down into her heart-shaped face, and felt his heart kick-start again. She really was very beautiful…‘You can’t possibly travel home in that state, but you can clean up at my hotel if you like—it’s just around the corner.’

‘Your hotel?’ Sabrina swallowed, guiltily remembering the way she had been unable to tear her eyes away from him on the lagoon. She’d been certain that he hadn’t seen her—but what if he had? And what if he’d then imagined that she was the kind of woman who allowed herself to be picked up in the most casual manner possible and taken back for a so-called siesta? ‘I don’t even know you—and I’m not in the habit of going back to strange men’s hotel rooms!’

Guy’s eyes glittered with unconcealed irritation. He was offering to do her a favour—did she really think that he was after something else? Desperate enough to make a pass at someone he didn’t even know?

He supposed that he could have shrugged and said fine and walked away, but something about her defensive stance struck at his conscience. He forced his mouth into a smile. ‘Then how about I introduce myself so I’m no longer a stranger?’ He held his hand out. ‘Guy Masters,’ he said softly.

Something in the way he said it struck at Sabrina’s heart like a hammer blow, as though she had been waiting all her life to hear just that name spoken aloud. She felt his hand still warming her frozen fingers, his grey eyes sending their icy light across her face, and tiptoes of some unknown emotion began to tingle their way up her spine. ‘S-Sabrina Cooper,’ she stumbled.

‘Well, you’ll be quite safe with me, Sabrina Cooper,’ he assured her gravely. ‘The alternative, of course, is that you travel halfway across Venice looking like that. It’s up to you—I’m only offering to help. Take it or leave it.’