Kitabı oku: «The Italian's One-Night Consequence»

CHAPTER ONE

FROM THE BACK seat of his chauffeur-driven car, which was parked a discreet distance away, Leo Conti took a few minutes to savour the edifice that dominated this tree-lined Dublin road. Prime location, perfect size, and with all the discernible signs of wear and tear that indicated a department store clinging to life by the skin of its teeth.

Frankly, things couldn’t have been better.

This was the store his grandfather had spent a lifetime trying to acquire. It was the store that had eluded the old man’s grasp for over fifty years, always just out of reach. Despite the vast property portfolio Benito Conti had built up over the decades, and the grand shopping complexes he had opened across the globe, this one department store had continued to hold sway over him.

Leo, raised by his grandparents from the age of eight, had never been able to understand why his grandfather couldn’t just let it go—but then, being outmanoeuvred by someone you’d once considered your closest friend would leave a sour taste in anybody’s mouth.

Which said something about the nature of trust.

Over the years Leo had witnessed his grandfather’s frustrated attempts to purchase the department store from Tommaso Gallo to no avail.

‘He would rather it crumble to the ground,’ Benito had grumbled, ‘than sell it to me. Too damn proud! Well, if it does crumble—and crumble it will, because Tommaso has been drinking and gambling his money away for decades—I will be the first in line to laugh! The man has no honour.’

Honour, Leo thought now, as his sharp eyes continued to take in the outward signs of decay, was an irrational emotion that always led to unnecessary complications.

‘Find yourself something to do, James,’ Leo said to his chauffeur, leaning forward, eyes still on the building. ‘Buy yourself a decent meal somewhere. Take a break from that fast food junk you insist on eating. I’ll call you when it’s time for you to swing by and collect me.’

‘You plan on buying the place today, boss?’

A shadow of a smile crossed Leo’s face. He caught his driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. James Cure—driver, dogsbody and rehabilitated petty thief—was one of the few people Leo would actually trust with his life.

‘I plan,’ Leo drawled, opening the passenger door and letting in a blast of summer heat, ‘on having a little incognito tour to find out just how low I can go when it comes to putting money on the table. From what I see, the old man has died leaving a nice, healthy liability behind, and from what I understand, the new owner—whoever he is—will want to sell before the dreaded words fire sale start circulating in the business community.’

Leo had no idea who the new owner was. In fact he wouldn’t have known that Tommaso Gallo had gone to meet his maker a mere month previously if his grandfather hadn’t summoned him back from Hong Kong to buy the store before it went to someone else.

‘Now,’ Leo said, briskly winding up the conversation, ‘off you go, James—and while you’re finding yourself a nice, healthy salad for lunch, try and locate the nearest pawn shop, so that you can offload that array of jewellery you insist on wearing.’ Leo grinned. ‘Hasn’t anyone told you that medallions, signet rings and thick gold chains are things of the past?’

James smiled and rolled his eyes before driving off.

Still grinning from the familiar exchange, Leo strolled towards the bank of revolving glass doors, joining the very small number of shoppers coming and going—which, on what should have been a busy Saturday morning in the height of summer, pretty much said it all about the state of the department store.

Four storeys of glass and concrete, heading for the knacker’s yard. Mentally he dropped the price he’d had in his head by a couple of hundred thousand.

His grandfather, he thought wryly, would be pleased as Punch. He would have found it galling to have paid top whack for a place he privately thought should have belonged to him fifty years ago, had Tommaso Gallo been prepared to honour the deal he had promised.

Strolling away from the revolving doors towards the store guide by the escalator, Leo gave some thought to the tales about the now legendary feud that had been part and parcel of life as he had grown up.

Two friends—both from Italy, both talented, both seeking to make their fortunes in Ireland. One small, dilapidated shop, up for sale at a knockdown price. But sitting on a slice of street that both Tommaso and Benito had fast recognised would be worth a lot in years to come. The drift of business hadn’t quite reached that part of the city then, but it would.

They could have done the sensible thing and gone into business together, but instead they had tossed a coin after way too many drinks. Winner to take all. A drunken handshake had sealed the bet that would prove the unravelling of their friendship—for Benito had won the toss, fair and square, only for his one-time friend to go behind his back and snap up the property before Benito had been able to get his finances together.

Bitter, Benito had retreated to London where, over time, he had made his own vast fortune—but he had never forgiven Tommaso for his treachery. Nor had he ever stopped wanting that one department store, which he really didn’t need because he had quite enough of his own.

Leo knew that he could have worked a little harder to dampen his grandfather’s desire to have something that no longer mattered, all things considered, but he loved his grandfather and, much as he didn’t believe in emotions overriding common sense, he had to admit that something in him could understand the need for some sort of retribution after such an act of betrayal.

And also, from a practical point of view, it would certainly work in Leo’s interests to have the place. Dublin would be an excellent addition to his own massive portfolio of companies. He had already agreed with his grandfather that once the store was back in Conti hands he, Leo, would do with it as he wished, with the proviso that the name Conti replaced Gallo.

Leo had argued with his grandfather, wanting him to allow him to pay for the purchase himself. Because there was no way he intended to leave it as a cumbersome department store, however iconic it had once been.

That sort of sentimentality wasn’t for him. No, Leo wanted the place because he liked the thought of finally getting his foot into Dublin—something long denied him because he had never found the perfect property to set down roots.

Along with his own start-up companies Leo had acquired a string of software and IT companies, which he had merged under one umbrella and continued to run while simultaneously overseeing Benito’s empire by proxy. He had only a handful of outlets for his highly specialised merchandise, where expert advice was on hand for the elite group of medical, architectural and engineering giants who used what he had to offer.

This site would be perfect for expanding his businesses into a new market.

His thoughts far away, he was already indulging in the pleasurable exercise of planning how he would use the space to its best advantage.

Naturally it would have to be gutted. Wood, carpet and dowdy furnishings might have worked back in the day—although to be fair Leo wasn’t sure when that day might have been—but as soon as he got his hands on the store they’d have to go. God knew, the place was probably riddled with rising damp, dry rot and termites. By the time he was through with it, and the ‘Gallo’ sign had been unceremoniously dumped, it would be unrecognisable.

He looked around, wondering which decrepit part of the store he should hit first—and there she was.

Standing behind one of the make-up counters, she looked as out of place as a fish in a bookstore. Despite the fact that she was surrounded by all manner of war paint, in expensive jars and shiny compact holders, she herself appeared to be devoid of any cosmetics. Frowning at an arrangement of dark burgundy pots on the glass counter, and needlessly repositioning them, she was the very picture of natural, stunningly beautiful freshness, and for a few seconds Leo actually held his breath as he stared at her.

His libido, which had been untested for the past three weeks, ever since he had broken up with his latest conquest after she’d started making unfortunate noises about permanence and commitment, sprang into enthusiastic life.

Leo was so surprised at his reaction that he was hardly aware that he was staring like a horny teenager. Not cool. Not him.

Especially when the leggy girl he was staring at was definitely not a Page Three girl and even more definitely not the sort of woman he was attracted to.

She was tall and willowy, from the little he could make out under the cheap store uniform, and she had the sort of wide-eyed innocence that was always accompanied in his head with the strident ringing of alarm bells. Her skin was smooth and satiny and the colour of pale caramel, as though she had been toasted in the sun. Her hair was tied back, but the bits escaping were a shade darker than her skin, toffee-coloured with strands of strawberry blonde running through it.

And her eyes...

She abruptly stopped what she was doing and looked up, gazing directly back at him.

Her eyes were green—as clear as glass washed up on a beach.

The kick of sexual attraction, a lust as raw as anything he’d ever felt before, shot through him like a bolt of adrenaline, and Leo felt himself harden in immediate response. It was fierce enough to take his mind off everything that had hitherto been occupying it.

His stiffened shaft was painful, and he had to adjust his position to release some of the pressure. As their eyes tangled he thought that if she kept looking at him like that, making him imagine what it would be like to have that succulent full mouth circling the throbbing, rigid length of him, he would soon be desperate for release.

He began walking towards her, every hunting instinct inside him honing in on his prey. He’d never wanted any woman with such urgent immediacy before and Leo wasn’t about to ignore the pull. When it came to sex, he was a man who had always got what he wanted—and he wanted this woman with every fibre in his body.

The closer he got to her, the more stupendously pretty she was. Her huge eyes were almond-shaped, fringed with very dark lashes that seemed to contradict the colour of her hair. Her lips, parted, were sensuous and full, even though their startled-in-the-headlights expression was teasingly innocent. And her body...

The unappealing, clinical white dress, belted at the waist, should have been enough to dampen any man’s ardour, but instead it sent his imagination into frantic overdrive and he caught himself wondering what her breasts would look like, what they would taste like...

* * *

‘Can I help you?’ Maddie’s heart was beating like a sledgehammer, but her expression was studiously polite as she met the stranger’s openly appreciative gaze.

Man sees girl. Man is attracted to girl. Man makes beeline for girl because he has one thing on his mind and that’s getting her into bed with him.

Maddie was used to that response from the opposite sex. She hated it.

What was even more galling was the fact that this particular man had, just for a second, aroused something in her other than her usual instinct to slam down the shutters hard the minute she saw a come-on situation on the horizon.

In fact, for a second, she had felt a stirring between her thighs—a tingling, tickly melting that had horrified her.

‘Interesting question,’ the man murmured, positioning himself directly in front of her.

The look in her eyes seemed to amuse him.

‘Are you looking for make-up?’ Maddie asked bluntly. ‘Because if so you’re in the wrong department. I could always point you in the right direction.’

In response, the man randomly picked up a jar from the precarious display she had been fiddling with earlier and twirled it in his hand.

‘What’s this if not make-up?’

Maddie removed it from him and swivelled it so that the label was facing him. ‘Regenerating night cream, targeting a woman in her sixties,’ she said crisply. ‘Are you interested in buying it?’

‘Oh, I’m interested,’ he said, in a tone laced with innuendo.

‘Well, that’s all I’m selling, so if it’s not what you’re interested in you should probably keep moving.’

Maddie folded her arms. She knew she was blushing. She also knew that her body was misbehaving. Once upon a time, it had misbehaved before, and she still had the scars to show for that. A repeat performance wasn’t on the cards—especially not with some arrogant guy too good-looking for his own good.

‘Are we cutting to the chase, here?’ Leo purred, rising to the challenge and liking it. ‘Who’s to say I’m not...interested...in that very expensive pot of cream for my mother?’

‘Oh!’ Maddie flushed. She’d misread the situation.

At this rate, sampling how things worked on the shop floor was going to get her precisely nowhere—because she clearly had no idea about effective salesmanship. But then she’d never stood behind a counter selling anything in her entire life.

Yet again she wondered whether she was doing the right thing. Was she? Three and a half weeks ago she’d received the startling news that she was the sole beneficiary of a bequest that included a department store, a house, and various assorted paraphernalia—courtesy of a grandfather she had never seen, nor met, and never really known existed.

Having been struggling to make ends meet, and living the sort of disastrous life she had never imagined possible, she had already been asking herself what direction she needed to take to wipe away the past couple of years of her life, or at least to put it all in perspective, and wham—just like that, she’d received her answer.

She’d arrived in Ireland still barely able to believe her good fortune, with big plans to sell the store, the house and whatever else there was to sell, so that she could buy herself the dream that had eluded her for so many years.

An education.

With money in the bank she would be able to get to university, an ambition she had had to abandon when her mother had become ill four years previously. She would be able to throw herself into the art course she had always wanted to do without fear of finding herself begging on street corners to pay for the privilege.

She would be able to make something of herself—and that meant a lot, because she felt that she’d spent much of her life being buffeted by the winds of fate, carried this way and that with no discernible goal propelling her forward.

But she’d taken one look at the store and one look at the house she had inherited—full of charm despite the fact that it was practically falling down—and she’d dumped all her plans to sell faster than a rocket leaving earth. Art school could wait—the store needed her love and her help now.

Anthony Grey, the lawyer who had arranged to see her so that he could go over every single disadvantage of hanging on to what, apparently, was a business on its last legs and a house that was being propped up only by the ivy growing around it, had talked to her for three hours. She had listened with her head tilted to one side, hands on her knees, and had then promptly informed him that she was going to try and make a go of it.

And that, first and foremost, entailed getting to know what it was she intended making a go of. Which, in turn, necessitated her working on the shop floor so that she could see where the cracks were and also hopefully pick up what was being said by the loyal staff who suspected that their jobs might be hanging in the balance.

A couple of weeks under cover and Maddie was sure she would be able to get a feel for things.

Optimism hadn’t been her companion for a very long time and she had been enjoying it.

Until now. She’d jumped to all sorts of conclusions and screwed up. She pinned a smile to her face, because the way too good-looking man staring down at her, with the most incredible navy blue eyes she had ever seen in her life, looked rich and influential, even though he was kitted out in a pair of faded black jeans and a polo shirt.

There was something about his lazy, loose-limbed stance, the way he oozed self-confidence, the latent strength of his body...

She felt it again—that treacherous quiver in the pit of her stomach and the tickling between her thighs—and she furiously stamped it down.

‘Your mother...’ She picked up the pot and squinted at it. ‘She’d love this. It’s thick, creamy, and excellent at smoothing out wrinkles.’

‘Are you just reading what’s written on the label?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve only been here a short while, so I’m just getting the hang of things.’

‘Shouldn’t you have a supervisor working with you in that case? Showing you the ropes?’

The man looked around, as though expecting said person to materialise in front of him. He was enjoying himself. It was clear this stranger was so accustomed to women fawning over him that the novel experience of a woman not caring who he was or how much he was worth was tickling him pink.

He rested flattened palms on the glass counter and Maddie shifted back just a little.

‘Dereliction of duty,’ he murmured.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You need to tell your boss that it gives the customer a poor impression if the people working on the sales floor don’t really know what they’re talking about.’

Maddie stiffened at the criticism. ‘You’ll find that everyone else on the shop floor has worked here for a very long time. If you like, I can fetch someone over here to help you in your...your quest for the perfect face cream for your mother.’

‘I’ll let you in on a little secret,’ the man said with a tinge of regret, his navy blue eyes never once leaving her face. ‘I lied about wanting the cream for my mother. My mother died when I was a boy.’ Sincere regret seeped into his voice. ‘Both my parents, in actual fact,’ he added in a roughened undertone.

‘I’m so sorry.’

Maddie still felt the loss of her own mother, but she had had her around for a great deal longer than the man standing in front of her had had his. Her father had never been in the picture. He’d done a runner before she was old enough to walk.

Maddie knew scraps of the story that had brought her mother from Italy to the other side of the world. There had been an argument between her mother and the grandfather Maddie hadn’t ever known which had never been resolved. Harsh words exchanged and then too much pride on both sides for any resolution until time took over, making reconciliation an impossibility.

Her mother had been a strong woman—someone who had planted both feet and stood her ground. Stubborn... But then she’d had to fight her way in Australia with a young baby to take care of. Maddie felt that her grandfather might have had the same traits—although she had no real idea because she’d never been told. Secretly she wondered if the grandfather she’d never met might have attempted to contact her mother, only to have his efforts spurned. Parents were often more forgiving with their children than the other way around.

Her eyes misted over and she reached out and impulsively circled the man’s wrist with her fingers—and then yanked her hand back because the charge of electricity that shot through her was downright frightening.

He raised his eyebrows, and for a second she felt that he could read every thought that had flashed through her head.

‘No need,’ he murmured. ‘Have dinner with me.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’ll pass on the face cream. Frankly, all those wild claims can’t possibly be true. But have dinner with me. Name the place, name the time...’

‘You’re not interested in buying anything in this store, are you?’

Maddie’s voice cooled by several degrees, because he was just another example of a cocky guy who wanted to get her into bed. She’d been spot-on first time round.

‘And as for a dinner date... That’ll be a no.’

Dinner with this man? How arrogant was he?

Her eyes slid surreptitiously over him and she understood very well why he was as arrogant as he was. The guy was drop-dead gorgeous.

Lean, perfectly chiselled features, dark hair worn slightly too long, which emphasised his powerful masculinity rather than detracting from it, a tightly honed body that testified to time spent working out, even though he didn’t look like the sort of man who spent much time preening in front of mirrors and flexing his muscles. And those eyes... Sexy, bedroom eyes that made her skin burn and made her thoughts wander to what a dinner date with him might be like...

She forced herself to conjure up the hateful memory of her ex—Adam. He’d been good-looking too. Plus charming, charismatic, and from the sort of family that had spent generations looking down on people like her. Well, that whole experience had been a learning curve for Maddie, and she wasn’t about to put those valuable lessons to waste by succumbing to the phoney charm of the man in front of her with his sinful good looks and his I could make your body sing bedroom eyes.

‘Should I be?’

Maddie frowned. ‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’

‘Should I be interested in buying anything here? Look around you. This is a department store that’s gone to rack and ruin. I’m staggered that you would even have contemplated working here in the first place. The job situation in Dublin must be dire for you to have settled on this—and you’ve obviously had no on-the-job training because there isn’t enough money to go round for such essentials as training programmes. I’m pretty sure that if I looked I’d find an array of out-of-date merchandise and demotivated sales assistants.’

‘Who are you?’

Maddie looked at him narrowly. Was she missing something?

* * *

Leo met her stare and held it. He’d planned on a little incognito surveillance and he was going to stick to the plan—bar this little detour which, he thought, he could very well use to his advantage. She’d turned down his dinner date but he wasn’t fazed by that. Women never said no to him for very long.

Although...

He frowned, because this particular woman didn’t seem to fit the mould.

‘Just someone browsing,’ Leo said smoothly, and then he added, truthfully, ‘I don’t get to this part of the world very often and I wanted to see this store everyone seems to know about.’ He looked around him. ‘I’m less than impressed.’

The woman followed his gaze and said nothing, perhaps because she’d noticed those very same signs of disrepair. She seemed to suddenly realise that he was still watching her, his eyes narrowed.

‘I can see that you agree with me.’

‘Like I said, I haven’t been here for very long—but if you’re looking for something to buy as a souvenir of the store, there’s an excellent selection on the second floor. Mugs, tote bags, lots of stuff...’

Leo suppressed a shudder at the image of tackiness created in his head. Had the place moved with the times at all? Or had progress being quietly sidelined as Gallo’s money ran out?

He had a satisfying vision of what the place would look like under his dominion. High-tech, white glossy counters and open, uncluttered spaces, glass and mirrors, ranks of computers and accessories waiting to be explored—no irritating background elevator music and salespeople who actually knew what they were talking about.

‘If you have lots of money to spend, then we offer a range of leather handbags which we manufacture ourselves to the highest possible standard. They’re Italian, and really beautiful quality.’

‘Sadly,’ Leo said, easily giving voice to the lie, ‘my finances would struggle to stretch to one of your leather handbags.’

She nodded. He didn’t seem like the sort of broke, wrong-side-of-the-tracks kind of guy she had encountered during her life, but it was a fact that a good-looking man could look expensive in anything.

‘But I could probably stretch to one of those tote things you mentioned...’

‘Second floor.’

‘Take me.’

‘Come again?’

‘I want you to do your sales pitch on me.’

‘I’ll be honest with you,’ she said flatly, ‘if this is another way of trying to get me to have dinner with you, then you can forget it. I won’t be doing that.’

Leo wondered whether she would have had a change of heart had she known his true worth. Most definitely, he thought, with his usual healthy dose of cynicism. That said, he was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted—and the more he talked to her, looked at her, felt the pleasurable race of his pulses and the hard throb of his libido, the more he wanted to rise to the challenge of breaking down whatever walls she felt she had to erect.

For once, work and the reason he was in this sad excuse of a store had been put on the back burner.

‘You’re very arrogant, aren’t you?’ he murmured, watching her carefully as the slow burn of anger turned her cheeks a healthy pink. ‘Do you think that you have what it takes to make a man keep banging on a door that’s been firmly shut in his face?’

‘How dare you?’

‘You forget—I’m the customer and the customer is always right.’

His grin was meant to take the sting out of his words and make her realise that he’d been teasing her.