Kitabı oku: «Bedding His Virgin Mistress», sayfa 2

CHAPTER TWO

‘AND you’re sure my requirements won’t be a problem for you, Nick? I know you don’t have a large staff,’ Ricardo said blandly.

‘Absolutely not. Lucy said that Carly jumped at the chance. In fact she begged for it.’ Nick laughed. ‘And I don’t suppose anyone can blame her. After all, when you’ve been used to the best of everything all your life and suddenly it isn’t available any more, and you’re a decent-looking woman, I suppose you’re bound to look forward to spending time with a rich man.’

‘She’s looking for a rich husband?’

Nick grinned.

‘Who said anything about marriage? Anyway, come up to the office and I can introduce you to her.’

‘I think you said earlier that she is your wife’s partner?’

‘Employee. The three of them—Lucy, Julia and Carly—were at school together. Neither Julia nor Carly have put any money into the business, though.’

‘So financially the partnership is—’

‘Just me and Lucy,’ Nick informed him.

‘Carly normally does all the financial and administrative stuff, but to be honest I don’t think she’s up to the job. You’d be doing me a favour by taking her off my hands for a week or two, so that I can get the financial side of things sorted out properly. Lucy’s a loyal little soul, and devoted to her friends—you know the type, all breeding and no brains.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t want to say too much to her. Anyway, having Carly with you won’t be too much of a hardship—she’s a good-looker, and obliging too, if you know what I mean—especially if you treat her generously. Like I said, Carly has her head screwed on.’

‘Are you speaking from personal experience?’ Ricardo asked him dryly.

‘What? Hell, no. I’m a married man. But let’s just say she let me know that it was available if I wanted it,’ Nick boasted.

He was well aware that Carly didn’t like him, and it amused him to think of what he was setting her up for. Discrediting her wouldn’t do him any harm in other ways either, he congratulated himself. For one thing she wouldn’t be able to go tittle-tattling to Lucy.

‘Carly is very good at getting other people to pay her bills for her—as both Lucy and Julia already know. She’s even managed to blag a rent-free room in Julia’s flat. If she can’t find a rich man to finance her, then the lifestyle that working for Prêt a Party gives her is the next best thing. All that first-class travel and accommodation provided by the clients, plus getting to mingle with their guests.’ He winked at Ricardo. ‘Ideal for her type of woman. Once I’ve introduced you, I’ll get her to go through the list of our upcoming events with you so that you can cherry pick the ones you want to attend.’

‘Excellent.’ Inwardly, Ricardo decided that Nick sounded more like a pimp than a businessman. Or in this business did the two go hand in hand?

They had reached Prêt a Party’s office, and Nick pushed open the door for him.

‘Ah, there’s Carly,’ he announced. ‘I’ll call her over.’

There was no way she could pretend not to be aware of Nick’s summons, Carly had to acknowledge reluctantly, and she walked towards him. She was wearing her normal office uniform of jeans and a tee shirt—the jeans snugly encased the slender length of her legs but irritatingly, the tee shirt skimming the curves of her breasts had pulled free of the low waistband of her jeans. It was a familiar hazard when one was almost five foot ten tall, give or take one eighth of an inch, and it exposed the flat golden flesh of her taut stomach. Whenever she could, Carly ran—mostly on her own, but sometimes with a group of fellow amateur runners—and her body had a sensuous grace of which she herself was totally unaware.

Long thick hair, honey-brown, with natural highlights, swung past her shoulders as she walked calmly towards Nick—and then missed a step as she saw the man standing to one side of him.

If she were in the market for a man—sex-wise, that was, because she would not want one for any other reason—then this was definitely a man she would want. She could feel the power of his sexuality from here; she could breathe it in almost. And it was very heady stuff. Far more potent than any champagne, she thought dizzily.

A vulnerable woman—which, of course, she was not—would find it almost impossible to resist such a man. He was a living, breathing lure for the whole female sex. Except for her. She had exempted herself from such dangers.

Ricardo frowned in immediate recognition as he watched her walking towards them and coldly came to two very separate decisions.

The first was that he intended to have her in his bed, and the second was that she embodied everything he most disliked about her class and type.

She was stunningly beautiful and irritatingly confident. And he already knew from listening to Nick that she was a woman who judged a man by his wallet and how much she could extract from it. A gold-digger, in other words.

‘Hello, gorgeous. Let me introduce you to Ricardo—oh, and by the way, Mike Lucas rang me to tell me how much he enjoyed your company last night,’ Nick told Carly, as he put his arm round her shoulders and drew her close to his side.

Pulling herself free, Carly extended her hand to Ricardo and smiled at him with genuine pleasure. After all, he was going to be releasing her from the unpleasantness of Nick’s unwanted company.

Well, she certainly didn’t believe in wasting any time, Ricardo thought cynically as he took the hand Carly had extended and shook it firmly.

‘Ricardo wants to have a look at our upcoming events so that he can decide which ones he wants to attend. You can use my office, Carly,’ Nick told her benignly.

His office? Carly had to look away. ‘His office’, as he called it had, until he had come onto the scene, been her office. In fact it still was her office, she reflected, since she was the only one who did any work in it. Nick’s only appearances in it were when he came in to ask her to countersign another cheque.

Carly smiled as she led the way to the small sectioned-off cubicle where she worked. Ricardo had lost count of the number of women who had smiled at him the way Carly was doing right now—with warmth and promise—especially women of Carly’s type. Upmarket, privately educated pampered women, contemptuous of the very idea of supporting themselves, whose goal in life was to find a man to financially underwrite their desired lifestyle.

His gaze narrowed. Female predators were a familiar risk to any man to whom the press attached the label ‘wealthy’; he had discovered that a long time ago. He had been twenty-two and merely a millionaire the first time he had encountered the type of well-bred young woman who believed that a man like him—a self-made man who had come up from nothing—would be delighted to spend lavishly on her in exchange for the social cachet of being connected with her.

She had been the sister of the thrusting young entrepreneur with whom he’d had business dealings. Initially he had thought he must be mistaken, and that she couldn’t possibly be coming on to him as openly as she’d seemed to be. He had indeed been naïve. There had been an expensive lunch to which she had invited herself, he remembered, and an even more expensive afternoon’s shopping, when she had pointed out to him the Rolex watch she wanted. Like a besotted fool he had gone back to the shop and bought it for her the moment she had left him to return to her brother. He had then, even more besottedly, booked himself out of his hotel room and into a huge suite, had ordered a magnum of champagne and the most luxurious meal he could think of, and then wasted more time than he cared to think about dreaming of the pleasure that lay in store for them both. He would make love to her as she had never been made love to her before, and then, in the morning, he would kiss her awake and surprise her with the watch…

He had very quickly been brought back to earth when, instead of relishing his tender caresses, the object of his adoration had told him peevishly to ‘hurry up’, and then pouted and sulked until he produced her watch. The final blow to his pride, though, had been unwittingly delivered by her brother, who had informed him that his sister was as good as engaged to an extremely wealthy older man. Fortunately, although his illusions had been shattered, his heart had been left intact, and the whole experience had taught him what he considered to be a valuable lesson: the only difference between spoilt, pampered society women and the prostitutes of Naples was that the prostitutes had no option other than to sell themselves if they wanted to feed their children.

He had yet to meet a woman whose desire for him did not go hand in hand with her desire for his money, no matter how much she might initially deny it. Indeed, if he hadn’t been so fastidious he knew that he would have found it cheaper to hire the services of a professional than to satisfy the financial demands of the society women who had shared his bed. The discovery that the last one to do so had been contemplating being unfaithful to him with an elderly billionaire old enough to be her grandfather had confirmed his cynical belief that no woman was too beautiful or too well born to be above using her ‘assets’ to secure financial security.

He would take Carly to bed and he would ensure that both of them enjoyed the experience, and that would be that. Why shouldn’t he take advantage of what she was? She was a beautiful woman, and it was a very long time since he had last had sex, but her social standing cut no ice with him, and nor was he impressed by it—quite the opposite, in fact.

‘Here’s a list of our upcoming events and their venues,’ Carly announced a little breathlessly, after she had printed it off from the computer.

She hadn’t expected to be so acutely aware of Ricardo’s powerful and sensually invasive sexual aura. She wasn’t used to this kind of man, and there was an unfamiliar flutter in her stomach and a hyped-up sensation of excitement in her head. She felt both excited and apprehensive, as though somehow her whole body had moved up into a higher gear, a more intense state of awareness. It was simply her hormones responding to his hormones, she told herself prosaically. Her office was way too small for the two of them.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw that he was removing his suit jacket, and she discovered that she was sucking in an unsteady breath of reluctant female appreciation. Beneath the fine cotton of his shirt she could see the muscular hardness of his body. She had recently read an article in a magazine about the new fashion for men to wax their chest hair. He obviously didn’t subscribe to it.

The author of the article had propounded the theory that women found the abrasion of male body hair unwelcome against their own flesh. Carly’s tongue-tip touched her lips. A fine mist of sensual heat had broken out on her skin. Beneath her tee shirt her bra-covered breasts suddenly ached, her nipples pushing against the restraining fabric.

How could she be having such intensely sexual thoughts about a man she had only just met? It must be because she had been talking about sex to Lucy and Jules. Yes, that was it; her mind was obviously more focused on sex than usual.

He was still studying the list she had given him, plainly oblivious to what she was experiencing, and of course she was glad about that—wasn’t she? After all, she had never been the kind of woman who felt piqued because a man didn’t show any interest in her.

Because until now she had not met the right kind of man?

‘Perhaps if you were to tell me what kind of event you are thinking of having I might be able to pick out the best events for you to attend,’ she suggested hastily.

‘I haven’t made up my mind as yet.’

Carly looked blankly at him. She had naturally assumed that, like their existing clients, he must have a specific event in mind.

Ricardo permitted himself a small cynical smile. If his plans went ahead as he expected, the first event Prêt a Party would be organising for him would be a party to celebrate his acquisition. But of course he wasn’t going to tell Carly that. She, he had already decided, would be one of the first surplus-to-requirements ‘assets’ of the business to be offloaded.

‘I understand you are responsible for the administration and accounts of the business?’

‘Er, yes…’

‘You must be very well organised if you can carry out those duties and still have time to accompany clients to their events.’

‘I don’t normally. That is, I stand in for the others sometimes.’

She was making it sound as though she had to be coerced into doing so, Ricardo thought cynically. Of course he knew better.

‘Carly, your mother’s telephoned. She wants you to ring her—Oh, I’m sorry.’ The young girl who had burst into the office came to an abrupt halt, her face pink, as she realised that Carly wasn’t on her own.

‘It’s all right, Izzie, I’ll ring her later. Thank you.’ But as she thanked the younger girl Carly’s heart was sinking beneath her professional smile. She already knew what her adoptive mother would want. More money.

Carly did her best, but the truth was that the woman had no real understanding of how to manage money. The fortune her adoptive father had once had was gone, swallowed up in lavish living and unwise investments. A stroke had made it impossible for him to do any kind of work, and so Carly found herself in the position of having to support them as best she could. But it wasn’t easy. Her adoptive mother ran up bills and then wept because she couldn’t pay them—like a small child rather than an adult. Their anguished unhappiness and despair made her feel so guilty—especially when…

She was so lucky to have friends like Lucy and Jules, Carly reflected emotionally. She might get on reasonably well with her adopted parents now, but that had not always been the case. Without Lucy and Jules what might she have done to escape from the misery and the wretchedness that had been her own childhood? Taken her own life? She had certainly thought about it.

Where had she gone? Ricardo wondered curiously, watching anxiety momentarily shadow her eyes before she blinked it away. He cleared his throat.

‘Right. Here are the events I wish to attend.’

Pushing back her private thoughts, Carly leaned over the desk to study the list he had tossed towards her.

He had selected three events: a private party in St Tropez on board a newly acquired private yacht, to celebrate its acquisition; a media event in the Hamptons to launch a new glossy magazine, to which old money, new names and anyone who was anyone in the fashion world had been invited and a world-famous senior rock star’s birthday bash at his French château.

Carly started to frown.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘The St Tropez yacht party is next weekend, and only four days before the Hamptons do. It might be difficult co-ordinating flights and all the other travel arrangements.’

She kept a tight rein on expenses—or at least she had done until Nick had started to interfere. They always booked cheap, no frills flights to overseas events if they weren’t being flown out by the clients.

Ricardo raised an eyebrow.

‘That won’t be a problem. We’ll be using my private jet.’ He gave a dismissive shrug of those powerful shoulders. ‘One of my PAs can sort out all the details. Oh, and they’ll need your passport, ASAP. I understand from Nick that your normal practice is to be in situ a day ahead of the actual event. That suits me, because that way I shall be able to see how things are organised.’

Too right he would, Ricardo decided.

He was standing up, and Carly followed suit. He was so tall—so big! She was suddenly aware of her reluctance to go through the doorway, because it would bring her too close to him. Too close to him? Get a grip, she mentally advised herself unsympathetically.

‘My PA will be in touch with you regarding flight times.’

She walked determinedly towards the door. She was almost level with him now. In another few seconds she would be through the door and safe. Safe? From what? Him pouncing on her? No way would he do that, she told herself scornfully.

And then she made the mistake of looking up at him.

It was like stepping through a door into a previously unknown world.

Her heart whipped round inside her chest like a spinning barrel. Against her will her head turned, her lips parting as her gaze fastened on his mouth. His top lip was well shaped and firmly cut, his teeth white and just slightly uneven, and his bottom lip…

His bottom lip. A smoky sensuality darkened her normally crystal-clear grey eyes as she fed visually on the promise of its fullness. How would it feel to catch that fullness between her own lips? To nibble at it with small biting kisses, to…

‘A word of warning—’ Ricardo began.

She could feel guilty colour staining her skin as her mind grappled with inexplicable thoughts.

‘It is imperative that full confidentiality as to the purpose of my attendance at these occasions is maintained at all times.’

He was cautioning her about the events—that was all! Carly exhaled in shaky relief.

‘Yes—yes, of course,’ she agreed quickly, as she finally made it through the doorway on legs that had developed a very suspicious weakness.

But she was unnervingly aware of him behind her.

‘And one more thing.’

‘Yes?’ she offered politely, automatically turning round to face him.

‘The next time you look at my mouth like that…’ he said softly, with a mocking smile.

‘Like what? I didn’t look at it like anything!’ Carly knew that her face was burning with guilt, but she had to defend herself.

‘Liar. You looked at it, at me, as though you couldn’t wait to feel it against your own. As though there was nothing you wanted more than for me to push you up against that doorframe and take you right here and now. As though you could already feel my hands on your skin, touching you intimately, and you were loving it. As though—’

‘No!’ Carly denied fiercely. And her denial was the truth—she hadn’t got as far as thinking anything so intimate as that!

To her relief she could see Lucy hurrying towards them to introduce herself to him.

It was over an hour since Ricardo had gone, and Carly was still thinking about him. But a woman would surely have to be totally devoid of any kind of hormones to remain unaware of Ricardo as a fully functioning man.

And that was her sole excuse, was it? She pushed back her keyboard and stood up. She was shaking slightly. Her face was burning and her body ached. She felt shocked. Guilty. Horrified, in fact, by the door she had unwittingly opened in her own head, and—even worse—was uncomfortably aware that she was physically aroused. Physically, but of course not emotionally—that was impossible. After all, she had sworn never to fall in love, hadn’t she? Never to fall in love; never to give herself emotionally to anyone; never to risk the emotional security she had given to herself.

She started to pace the small office. Her childhood had taught her all there was to know about the pain that came with being emotionally rejected. She had fought hard to give herself the protective air of calm self-confidence she projected to others, and for the right to claim their respect. The pathetic, needy child she had once been, desperate for approval and love, had been totally banished, and that was the way Carly intended it to stay.

So why was she thinking like this? No one was threatening her self-reliance, after all—least of all Ricardo Salvatore, who probably had the same loathing of emotional bondage as she did herself, if for very different reasons.

CHAPTER THREE

CARLY checked her watch—Lucy had given both Carly and Jules smart Cartier Tank Francaise watches for Christmas in the first year the business had made a profit—and then bent down and grabbed the handle of her case.

The car Ricardo Salvatore was sending to pick her up was due to arrive in exactly two minutes’ time. It was time for her to leave.

She heaved her suitcase off the floor, grimacing a little ruefully as she did so, remembering how Lucy had burst into the office the previous Thursday morning announcing, ‘Oh, my God, Carly—I’ve just realised! There won’t be anything in the Wardrobe that will fit you!’

The ‘Wardrobe’ was a standing joke between them all, and was in actual fact a small room in Lucy’s parents’ London home which housed the glamorous outfits Lucy and Jules, who were very much the same height and build, wore when they were ‘on duty’ at events.

The clothes—all designer models—were second hand, surreptitiously trawled from a variety of sources, and the subject of amused speculation between them.

‘Just look at this!’ Lucy had marvelled after their last expedition, as she held up what looked like a sequin-covered handkerchief with halter neck straps. ‘Who on earth would buy this?’

‘You did,’ Carly had pointed out, laughing.

‘Yes, but I only paid fifty pounds for it—it cost over a thousand brand-new.’

‘It’s very sexy,’ Jules had pronounced.

‘It’s repulsive,’ Carly had criticised. ‘Vulgar and tarty.’

‘Mmm…Well, Nick spotted it.’

But the Wardrobe contained nothing that would fit Carly, and so, that Thursday, Lucy had announced firmly, ‘Come on, Carly. We’ve got to go out on a trawl!’

Carly had tried to protest and resist, but Jules and Lucy had been insistent.

The result of their foray into the second-hand shops and market stalls of Lucy’s favourite haunts—which had emptied the clothes budget Carly had so carefully worked out—had been collected from the dry cleaners this morning and were now packed in Carly’s case, along with her own clothes.

Mentally Carly reviewed them—a white silk trouser suit which Lucy had cooed over, enraptured, pronouncing, ‘Oh, this is so retro—Seventies rock wife! And you’ve got the boobs for it, Carly.’

Maybe she had, but she certainly wouldn’t be wearing the jacket over bare skin and half open! There were also a couple of evening dresses, both of which were potentially so revealing that Carly had already decided she would be wearing a silk jacket over them.

She hadn’t been very keen on the designer swimsuit Lucy had found either. It was cut away in so many places that Carly feared it threatened to reveal more of her than the skimpiest of bikinis, but at least it had matching culotte pants and a jacket.

Her own classic casuals—the simple linen separates she favoured for summer and some up-to-the-minute accessories they had found in the likes of Zara—had all passed Lucy’s inspection and been declared perfect for the events she would be attending.

Dragging her suitcase behind her, Carly pushed open the door onto the street and stepped out into the late-morning sunshine.

Ricardo watched her from his vantage point in the back seat of the limo, as the driver moved the car out of the parking bay he had found further up the street.

Oh, yes, she was a typical example of her upmarket, ‘no expense spared but someone else pays’ lifestyle, Ricardo decided cynically as he watched her. Immaculate white tee shirt, perfectly fitting blue jeans, long shiny hair, minimal make-up, sunglasses, discreetly ‘good’ watch, penny loafers. The too-thin girl in designer clutter who was tottering past her on spindly heels, clutching a weird-looking handbag, couldn’t hold a candle to her. Because Carly had class.

What would she be like in bed?

He didn’t intend to let too much time elapse before he found out.

He thought of another society woman from his youth, one whom he had met when he was growing cynical but not yet completely hardened. Initially he had thought her pretty, but she hadn’t looked very pretty at all when he had flatly refused to meet her escalating demands—especially when he’d discovered they included a wedding ring in exchange for the supposed benefit of marrying into a higher social bracket. He’d told her that he preferred an honest whore.

Women like her, like Carly, might not openly demand money in return for sex, but what they were looking for was the richest and highest status man they could find—their bodies in exchange for his name.

It was a trade-off that nauseated him, as did those who participated in it.

He had no illusions about women or sex. He had lived too long and seen too much for that. His wealth could buy him any woman he wanted, and that included Carly. She had made that plain enough already, with the way she had looked at his mouth.

She hadn’t even tried to be subtle about it! She had stared openly and brazenly at him. If they hadn’t been in her office it would have been an open invitation to him to push her tee shirt out of the way and free her breasts to spill into his hands so that he could accept their flaunting invitation.

It had told him that he could have yanked down her jeans and explored and enjoyed her and she would not have said a single word in denial.

And then in the morning she would no doubt expect to receive her payment—a piece of jewellery, a telephone call from an exclusive shop inviting her to choose herself something expensive…

That was the way things were done in her world.

He was wasting too much time on her, he warned himself. His primary reason for what he was doing was the potential acquisition of Prêt a Party, not the inevitable sexual acquisition of Carly Carlisle who, although she did not know it yet, would be one of the first in line to lose her job.

Carly frowned as the large, elegant steel-grey car drew up alongside her.

A limo, Lucy had said, and she had pictured a huge, shiny black ostentatious vehicle, not something so supremely understated. But the rear door was opening and Ricardo was getting out.

‘Is this all your luggage?’

She gaped at him as he reached for her case, and then looked uncertainly towards the chauffeur.

‘Charles is driving. I am perfectly capable of picking up a case,’ Ricardo told her dryly, following her uncertain look.

‘The…my case is heavy,’ she told him, but he ignored her, picked it up and put it in to the boot of the car as if it was as light as a feather pillow.

He was wearing a black tee shirt and a pair of tan-coloured casual trousers, and the muscles in his arms were hardening as he lifted her case. He looked more like a man who worked outdoors than one who sat at a desk, she acknowledged, unwilling to admit to the response that the sight of him was eliciting from her own body.

After what had happened when she had given her imagination its head, she was now keeping it on a controlling diet of bread and water, and that meant no thinking about the effect Ricardo could have on her! So he had a good enough body to carry off the macho male thing—so what? she told herself dispassionately.

But the sight of his black-clad back, bent over the open boot, suddenly transformed by her rebellious thoughts into a totally naked back bent over her equally naked body, evoked such a powerful sensual image that she felt as though she were transfixed to the spot.

So it was true. You could go weak at the knees, Carly reflected several minutes later as she sat primly straight in the back seat of the powerful car, dizzily aware that her private thoughts were anything but prim. All those enforced deportment classes at school had definitely left her with an automatic ‘sit up straight’ reflex.

She was accomplished, Ricardo admitted to himself. That cool, remote pose she had adopted, that said Pursue me would certainly work with most men. Unfortunately for her, he was not most men. He opened his briefcase and extracted some papers.

As soon as they were free of the city traffic the powerful car picked up speed. Carly was pleased that Ricardo was engrossed in his work, because that left her free to think about hers, instead of having to make polite conversation with him.

Since their clients were using their own yacht as the venue for their party there was no construction work in the shape of marquees on the like for her to oversee. The client’s chef and kitchen staff were being augmented by a chef from the upmarket caterers she had sourced. They were already on the yacht. Menus had been agreed, floral arrangements decided on—she would be meeting with the florists, who had also been flown in from London.

The arrival and deployment of the hostess’s hairdresser, make-up artist, and a dresser from the couture house she favoured were also Carly’s responsibility, plus a hundred or more other small but vitally important arrangements.

She had an inch-thick pile of assorted coloured and coded lists in her briefcase, most of which she had actually memorised.

‘You’re so much better at this than me,’ Lucy had told her ruefully before she left.

Carly had smiled, but she knew that it was true.

Carly shifted her body against the leather upholstery. It was ridiculous that she should be so acutely conscious of Ricardo’s presence in the car with her—and even more ridiculous that she should be so acutely aware of the impact he was having on her physically. So much for the ‘bread and water’ regime, then!

The grand slam of his raw sensuality had sliced through her defences, leaving an alarming trail of female awareness in its wake. Her jeans, normally a comfortable easy fit, suddenly seemed to be uncomfortably tight, clinging to her flesh in a way she could only mentally describe as erotic, as though somehow she were being caressed by the lean, powerful male hands she couldn’t resist looking towards.

She could feel the heat expanding inside her, dangerous little languorous curls of it thrusting against her sensitive flesh. She crossed her legs and then uncrossed them. Her arm accidentally brushed against her own breast and immediately she was aware of the hot pulsing of her nipples.