on the scent of a juicy bone.
‘Tell me about your mother,’ Angel invited smoothly.
Jazz gave him a brief résumé of their plight and confided that she had told her family that she was working for Vitale even though she strictly wasn’t. ‘But if it hadn’t been for the b-bet—’ she stumbled helplessly at letting that word escape ‘—Vitale wouldn’t have needed me in the first place.’
‘Bet,’ Angel repeated with a sudden flashing smile of triumph. ‘Zac, our kid brother, I surmise. And what is the bet? Vitale tells me everything.’
And since she had already given away half the story she gave him the whole. Angel gave her a shattered appraisal before he dropped down beside her on the sofa and burst out laughing, so genuinely amused at the prospect of her being coached for a public appearance at a royal ball that she ended up laughing too. Angel had always been so much more down-to-earth than his brother.
That was the point when Vitale entered the room, seeing his brother and Jazz seated close and laughing in a scene of considerable intimacy. That unanticipated sight sent a current of deep-seated rage roaring through Vitale like a hurricane.
‘Jazz...you’re supposed to be with Jenkins right now, not entertaining my brother!’ he bit out rawly, dark golden eyes scorching hot with angry condemnation on her flushed face.
‘Jenkins?’ she queried, rising upright.
‘Table manners,’ he extended crushingly, sending a tide of red rushing across her stricken face and not feeling the slightest bit guilty about it.
Jazz fled, mortified that he would say that to her in front of Angel as if she were a half-bred savage, who didn’t know how to eat in polite company. Was she? Ridiculous tears prickled at the backs of her eyes and stung. Did Vitale remember her as having had dreadful table manners when she was younger? It was a deeply embarrassing suspicion.
‘Well, wasn’t that unroyal eruption educational?’ Angel quipped as he sprang upright and studied Vitale with a measuring scrutiny. ‘Yes, she’s turned out quite a looker, our childhood playmate.’
* * *
Jazz was only a little soothed to learn that Vitale’s butler had been co-opted into teaching her about the right cutlery to use, rather than her manners. Furthermore, for once, she was receiving a lesson she needed, she acknowledged grudgingly, when she was presented with a formal table setting in the dining room that contained a remarkably bewildering choice of knives, forks and spoons. When that was done, she returned to her room and was seated against the headboard, reading a book she had got in a charity shop, when the door opened with an abrupt lack of warning.
It was Vitale and he was furious, as she had never seen him before. A dark flush lay along his high cheekbones, only contriving to accentuate the flaming gold of his spectacular eyes. ‘You spilled it all like an oil gusher!’ he condemned wrathfully. ‘Don’t you have any discretion?’
Stiff with discomfiture, Jazz scrambled off the bed in haste. ‘I let one word slip and then there didn’t seem much point in holding back,’ she admitted ruefully. ‘I’m sorry if you didn’t want him to know.’
‘You were too busy flirting with my brother to worry about what you told him!’ Vitale accused fiercely.
Jazz was stunned by that interpretation, particularly when her response to Angel had always been more like a sister with a big brother than anything else. She had never felt the smallest spark in Angel’s radius, while Vitale could set her on fire with a careless glance. ‘I wasn’t flirting with him!’ she replied forcefully. ‘That’s nonsense.’
‘I know what I saw,’ Vitale sliced in with contempt. ‘You were all over him like a rash!’
Anger began to stir within Jazz as she stared up at Vitale, who was towering over her like a particularly menacing stone wall. ‘I didn’t even touch him, for goodness’ sake! What the hell are you trying to imply?’ she demanded.
Already struggling to master a fury unlike any he had ever experienced, Vitale stared down at her, his lean brown hands clenched into fists because he felt incredibly violent. Angel was an incorrigible flirt and women went mad for him. Vitale had never had that freedom, that ready repartee or level of experience, and suddenly that lowering awareness infuriated him. His attention zeroed in on Jazz’s luscious pink mouth and suddenly he wanted to taste that mouth so badly it hurt, his body surging in a volatile wave straight from rage to sexual hunger. His brain had nothing to do with that unnerving switch.
Vitale snatched her up off her feet and kissed her in a move that so disconcerted her she didn’t fight, she only gasped. A split second on, the punishing, passionate force of his hard mouth was smashing down on hers, driving her lips apart, his tongue penetrating that moist and sensitive internal space. She shuddered with reaction, her arms balancing on his shoulders, her hands splaying round the back of his neck, fingers delving into the luxuriant depths of his black hair. A tsunami of excitement quivered through Jazz with every deeply sensual plunge of his tongue. It was like nothing she had ever felt in a man’s arms before and the very intensity of it was mind-blowing because it was everything she had ever dreamt of and nothing she had ever thought she could feel. He could certainly kiss, she thought helplessly, awash with the stimulation spreading through her heated body.
Without warning, it was over and Vitale was setting her back down on the floor, swinging on his heel and walking out again without a word, even closing the door behind him. Jazz almost laughed, her fingers rising to touch her tingling mouth, wild butterflies unleashed in her tummy. Vitale hadn’t said a word, which was so typical of him. He would walk away and refuse to think about it or talk about it, as if talking about it would make it more damaging.
But Vitale was genuinely in shock, throbbing with such raw sexual arousal he was in pain, dark golden eyes burning with the self-discipline it had taken to tear himself away. She tasted like strawberries and coffee but she had engulfed him like too much alcohol in his veins. He felt strangely disconnected from himself because his reactions, his very behaviour, were unacceptable and abnormal. He could barely credit that he had been so angry that he had wanted to smash his brother through the wall, couldn’t begin to explain what had awakened that anger. He loathed every one of those weird feelings and fought to suppress them and bury them deep. He stripped where he stood in his bedroom before heading for the shower.
In comparison, Jazz lay on top of her very comfortable bed and thought about that kiss, the ultimate kiss, which had shot her full of adrenalin, excitement and longing. She felt as if she had been waiting half her life to discover that a kiss could make her feel like that, but it was a terrible disappointment that Vitale had achieved that feat because there would be no interesting future developments happening in that quarter, she reflected wryly. It was just sex, stupid, confusing sexual urges that had neither sense nor staying power, and she should write it off to a silly impulse and a moment of forgetfulness. He wasn’t even the sort of guy she wanted in her life and he never would be. He was too arrogant, too reserved, too quick to judge...but, my goodness, he knew how to kiss...
Fate had short-changed her, she thought resentfully. She was still a virgin because she had always been waiting to meet a man, who would make her crave more of his touch. She had wanted her first lover to be someone whom she desired and cared about. Unfortunately, desire had evaded her in the invasive groping sessions that had been her sad experience as a student. Even worse, she still remembered the emotional hurt inflicted by her father’s abuse. How could she trust any man when her own father had attacked her? Jazz had been wary of the opposite sex ever since, even though she was now wishing she had a little more sexual experience because then she would
