more vulnerable? Jazz cringed at the suspicion and dismissed it because she hadn’t actively thought about Vitale in years and years. He had only come to mind when she’d seen him in some glossy magazine, squiring some equally superior beauty at some sparkling celebrity event and, like Cinderella in real life, she thought sadly, she had known how impossible her dream had been at fourteen. He was what he was: a prince, born and bred to a life so different from hers that he might as well have been an alien from another planet. He wasn’t a happy prince either, she thought with unwilling compassion. Even as an adolescent she had recognised that Vitale didn’t really know what being happy was.
When she was informed that she had another coaching session late that afternoon, she was incensed to learn that it was in deportment. She put in the time with the instructor and then knocked on Vitale’s office door.
‘Yes?’ Vitale looked up from his laptop and then sprang upright with the perfect courtesy that was engrained in him. Woman enters room: stand, she reflected ruefully, and it took just a little bit of the edge off her temper and the faint unease she had felt at seeing him again so soon after that kiss. It definitely didn’t help, though, that he still looked gorgeous to her from the head of his slightly ruffled black hair down to his wonderful dark deep-set eyes that even now were clearly registering wariness. She knew exactly what he was thinking and almost grinned. He was still waiting to be attacked over the kiss.
‘Deportment?’ she queried drily instead. ‘Don’t you think that’s overkill? I don’t slouch and I can walk in a straight line in heels. What more do you want?’
His dark eyes flared gold and he tensed, reining back all that leaping energy of his. ‘I thought it might be necessary but if it’s not—’
‘It’s not,’ Jazz cut in combatively.
‘Then we can wave goodbye to that session,’ Vitale conceded mildly, watching her walk across his office to look out of the window. She was wearing that damnably ugly skirt and heels again, but had he been of a literary bent he could have written a poem along the lines of what that cheap fabric did to the curve of her little rounded bottom where he had had both hands clasped only hours earlier. It had felt every bit as good and femininely lush as it looked, he acknowledged, thoroughly unsettled by that thought and the pulse at his groin. The effect she had on his body was like a kind of madness, he decided then in consternation.
‘I have some questions about this bet and you may not think I’m entitled to answers,’ Jazz remarked stiffly. ‘Who are you planning to say I am at the ball?’
His winged ebony brows drew together in bewilderment. ‘What do you mean?’
Jazz threw her shoulders back. ‘Well, I assumed you’d be giving me a fake name.’
Vitale frowned, currently engaged in noticing how red and full her lips seemed, wondering if he had been rough because he had felt rough, drunk on lust and need, out of control. ‘Why would I give you a fake name?’
‘Because if I’m pictured with you anywhere the press might go digging and wouldn’t they just love pointing out that the Prince has a housekeeper’s daughter on his arm?’ Jazz extended stiffly, gooseflesh rising in the claustrophobic atmosphere and the intensity of his gaze.
‘So?’ Vitale prompted thickly, acknowledging that kissing her had been one of the most exhilarating encounters he had ever had and cringing at the awareness. He was an adult man with a great sex life, he reminded himself doggedly. As Angel would say, he really needed to get out more.
‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ Jazz asked in surprise.
‘No. Why would it? I’m not foisting a fake personality or some sort of scam on the public. This bet is for private consumption only,’ Vitale explained. ‘There’s nothing wrong with being a housekeeper’s daughter.’
‘No, there’s not,’ Jazz agreed with the glimmerings of her first real smile in his presence and the startling realisation that Vitale was not quite the snob she had believed he was. It was as if a giant defensive barrier inside her dropped and, disturbed by the discovery, she quickly turned to leave him alone again.
‘Jazz...once you get clothes delivered tomorrow we’ll be going out to dinner in the evening,’ Vitale informed her, startling her even more. ‘Your first public appearance.’
Dining out with Vitale, Jazz ruminated in wonder as she returned to her room, planning an evening composed of a long luxurious bath, washing her hair and watching something on TV.
JAZZ COULDN’T SLEEP. Accustomed to a much more physically active existence, she wasn’t tired and at two in the morning she put the light back on and tried to read until hunger took over and consumed her. She knew she shouldn’t but she loved a slice of toast and a hot drink before bed and the longer she lay awake, the more all-consuming the craving became. Inevitably she got up, raising her brows at her appearance in the faded long tee shirt she wore to bed. No dressing gown, no slippers in her wardrobe but so what? If she was quiet she doubted if she would wake up the very correct Jenkins.
The stairs creaked and she didn’t like moving round in total darkness but a light could rouse someone likely to investigate. By touch she located the door at the back of the hall and through that a flight of stairs, which ran down into the basement area where she assumed the kitchen lay. Safely through that door, she put on lights and relaxed. The kitchen was as massive as a hotel kitchen and she padded about on the cold tiles, trying not to shiver. She located bread and the toaster and milk and then, wonder of wonders, some hot-chocolate powder to make her favourite night-time drink. Jazz was grateful she wasn’t like her aunt, who joked that she only had to look at a bar of chocolate to gain an inch on her hips.
Her toast ready, she sat down at the table to eat with appetite, eyes closing blissfully as she munched hot butter-laden toast, which was the first glimpse Vitale had of her as he strode barefoot through the door.
‘You can’t wander round here in the middle of the night!’ he began impatiently. ‘My security team wakened me.’
‘Your security... What?’ Jazz gasped, startled out of her life by the interruption and even more startled by the vision Vitale made bare-chested and barefoot, clad only in a pair of tight jeans. He was completely transformed by casual clothing, she conceded in awe.
Vitale groaned out loud. ‘The whole house is wired with very sensitive security equipment and I have a full team of bodyguards who monitor it.’
‘But I didn’t see anything and no alarm went off.’
‘It’s composed of invisible beams and it’s silent. As soon as the team established that it wasn’t an intrusion but a member of the household they contacted me, not wishing to frighten you.’
‘Well, I’m not frightened of you,’ she mumbled round a mouthful of toast that she was trying to masticate enough not to choke when she swallowed because, in reality, Vitale was delicious shorn of his shirt and her mouth had gone all dry.
He was a classic shape, all broad shoulders, rippling muscular torso sprinkled with dark curls of hair leading down into a vee at his hips and a flat, taut stomach. Clothed she could just about contrive to resist him, half-naked he was an intolerable lure to her eyes.
‘They saw you on camera, realised that you weren’t fully dressed and surmised that the sudden intrusion
