eyes slid to her smooth, high cleavage as he levered himself upright in one fluid motion. With one hand he smoothed back her hair from her face before planting a warm, lingering kiss on her parted lips.
‘It only seems fair, cara,’ he husked, ‘as you torment me.’
It was true, though the urgency of his desire had ebbed, it was never far away when he looked at her or even thought of her. He had never known anything like it.
‘What are you thinking?’ he asked, studying her face with the unnerving intensity that always made her feel he could see into her head and read her thoughts.
Dervla shook her head. ‘I was just thinking…’ She watched through her lashes, her attention drifting as he fastened the belt across his slim hips and began to button his shirt across his flat, muscle-ridged belly. ‘It’s just all this—’
The expressive sweep of her slim arm took in the Tuscan landscape, of rolling hills dotted with olive groves and the sensitively and expensively restored palazzo, which, with the exception of a few years when Gianfranco’s father had lost it in a poker game, had been in his family since the fifteenth century.
A year ago life had been much simpler. She had been a nurse, philosophical about the fact that there was no way she could afford to get on the property ladder in London.
Now she was mistress of this vast estate and several other luxurious homes across Europe including a London Georgian town house complete with the obligatory underground pool and leisure complex, and wife of the powerful enigmatic man who earned the billions for their upkeep.
‘It’s so far away from my old life.’
There had been so many changes in the past year that sometimes when she caught sight of her reflection in a mirror Dervla hardly recognised the woman reflected there, and she wasn’t talking designer outfits!
The changes went much deeper.
But then she hadn’t actually had much choice but to adapt when she’d found herself plunged into a totally alien environment and dramatically out of her comfort zone. She’d had to develop a few new skills to cope.
And she had.
A year ago she would have laughed hysterically at the suggestion that she had the ability to get a children’s hospice—funded by the charitable trust funded by Gianfranco’s financial empire—from the drawing-board stage to bricks-and-mortar reality.
Similarly she would have had a panic attack at the notion that she could attend and, even more scary, host glittering events where the guests could be as diverse as politicians, Hollywood royalty and the real thing—who ever knew there were so many princes in Europe?
Maybe some of Gianfranco’s—not entirely realistic in her view—confidence in her ability to do whatever he threw at her had rubbed off, because she had done both.
And become a stepmother.
A small frown puckered the smooth skin of her brow as her thoughts turned to her stepson, whom she adored.
That might have been the biggest challenge of all if Alberto had displayed even the remotest resentment of her, his new stepmother, or if Gianfranco had made it quite clear on the one occasion she had found herself in the middle of a father-son tussle that when it came to his son he made the decisions.
She had forgotten what the minor disagreement had been about, but not his words when he had referred to the incident when they were in private.
‘There has been just Alberto and me for a long time now…what we have works.’
Dervla’s admiration was sincere. ‘I know you’re a great father. I was only—’
‘I will not have you undermining my authority with my son, Dervla.’
‘I wasn’t trying to—’
He brushed aside her protest with an impatient motion of his hand. ‘Children,’ he told her, apparently unaware of the insult he had offered her, ‘need continuity.’
‘You mean children are permanent and wives are temporary.’
His irritation was written clear in his steely stare as he retorted coldly, ‘If you wish to put it that way.’
She hid her hurt behind aggression. ‘You put it that way.’
His careless shrug made her resentment spill over into an unwise—she knew it the moment it left her lips—reference to his dead first wife.
‘I don’t suppose you told Alberto’s mother it was not for ever when you proposed to her?’
His expression iced over, making him seem austere and distant. ‘My marriage to Sara is not relevant. I did not marry you to give Alberto a mother.’
‘I sometimes wonder why you married me at all,’ she slung back childishly.
The white-hot blaze in his eyes as he grabbed her by the shoulders and dragged her up against his long, lean body made her knees fold as he gave his driven response to her question.
‘I married you because you wouldn’t be my mistress, because I couldn’t think straight without you in my bed and because I will not share you with another man.’
No mention of love, but he kissed her and she told herself she didn’t care. About three seconds later she stopped thinking entirely.
Dervla sighed. It was always that way the moment Gianfranco touched her: her principles and pride vaporised. Which was why she had ended up married to a man who never even pretended he loved her, though for one split second when he had proposed her mind had made that understandable assumption.
‘But you barely know me!’ she protested. ‘It takes time to fall in love, Gianfranco and—’ She stopped, the colour seeping from her face as the truth—as she saw it then—hit her.
Time had not the first thing to do with falling in love. And for some people it actually didn’t take long at all…in her case it had taken about a second, and now it seemed that amazingly it had been the same for Gianfranco…? Only he had had the sense to recognise it.
She lifted her dazed eyes to his lean, devastatingly handsome face and thought, I really do love you. A shuddering sigh left her parted lips; a smile of wondering joy spread across her face.
Gianfranco, she saw, was smiling too, only his smile twisted his mobile lips into a cynical grimace and left his incredible eyes unusually cold.
‘I am not looking for love.’
Her face remained frozen in the smile, but the light had gone out of her eyes as he expanded on the theme.
‘If such a thing actually exists…?’
‘You don’t think so, I take it.’
One dark brow moved in the direction of his hairline and he sketched a sardonic smile. ‘Outside fairy tales? Do you know how many marriages actually last more than a few years?’
‘So how long do you propose our—our hypothetical marriage
