high, furious that she was dying of embarrassment like a schoolgirl, while he was behaving as though nothing untoward was happening. ‘Do you get a thrill out of insulting me like this?’
‘One woman’s insult is another woman’s compliment.’ Angelo sent her a dark smile of challenge. ‘It’s not my ego talking, but fact, when I tell you that a score of women would kill to have the same opportunity.’
Gwenna, who rarely lost her temper, learned now that she could want to kill another human being. His insouciance, his sheer arrogance, his silken insolence, indeed the whole glossy patina of his rich and rarefied existence, which he wore like armour, made her teeth grit. Absolute hatred hurtled through her in an acrid flow. ‘Well, I’m not one of them! I have higher self-esteem.’
‘Which makes you infinitely more desirable.’
‘So, you’re one of those men who always wants most what he can’t have?’
Angelo held her outraged blue gaze, more intrigued than ever by her resistance and the anger that had unexpectedly cut through her tranquil surface. ‘I have never met with a “can’t have”,’ he told her truthfully.
‘You just have,’ Gwenna told him grittily and turned on her heel. ‘My body isn’t something I’m prepared to barter, Mr Riccardi.’
‘Then your father will have to pay the piper and go to prison,’ Angelo murmured and she stopped halfway to the door and turned back, her raw pain at that likelihood etched in her candid gaze.
Torn between stalking out in angry mortification and the sinking conviction that she could not afford such a demonstration of disdain, Gwenna hovered. The very idea of her father going to prison appalled her. He had already lost so much: his job, his reputation, his friends, his financial security. His marriage might well soon slip into that same category of loss. She knew and she accepted that he had done wrong. But what dominated her thoughts was the debt she had owed to her father since the day that he had opened the doors of his home to her after her mother’s sudden death.
When her mother, Isabel, had fallen pregnant during her long-term affair with Donald Hamilton, she’d expected her lover to leave his childless wife, Marisa. Instead Isabel had learnt that she had not been his only extra-marital interest. Heartbroken and bitter, Gwenna’s mother had become a less than enthusiastic single parent.
When Gwenna was eight years old, Isabel had died in a car crash. Donald, still married to his first wife, had come to his illegitimate daughter’s rescue at a time when Gwenna had had nobody else whom she could call her own. Even though he had been almost a stranger, her father had made her feel as if she truly mattered to him. Even when his long-suffering wife, Marisa, forced him to choose between his daughter and his marriage, he had refused to put Gwenna up for adoption. Not long afterwards, Marisa had demanded a divorce. The older man had never reminded Gwenna of the price he had had to pay for choosing to raise his daughter. But in spite of her father’s subsequent remarriage to Eva, Gwenna had always felt very guilty. And the passage of time and the arrival of maturity had not altered her belief that she would always be in her father’s debt for the loving sacrifice he had made on her behalf.
‘Before you leave, hear me out,’ Angelo drawled softly, playing on Gwenna’s hesitation with skill and cool.
Blinking, Gwenna focused on him again.
‘If sufficient assets are signed over to set against the empty coffers here at Furnridge Leather and you agree to be my mistress, I will withdraw the current charges against your father,’ Angelo spelt out.
A long shiver ran through her taut, slender body. He wanted a lot, he wanted everything. Mistress? What was that fancy term for? A one-night stand? Was conquest that important to him? Could he really want to have sex with her that much? The extent of her own sexual ignorance annoyed her.
‘What does being a mistress encompass?’ she pressed without looking at him.
‘Pleasing me…’ Angelo trailed out the word with exquisite enjoyment.
She gritted her teeth. ‘I don’t think I’d be very good at that.’
‘I’m willing to give lessons at no extra cost.’
Furious resentment burned like lava inside her. ‘I think you just can’t stand being turned down…’
‘I don’t think you’re going to turn me down twice.’
Gwenna sucked in a jerky breath. Unable even to imagine taking her clothes off in front of a man without cringing, she blanked out all thought of the nitty-gritty details of actual intimacy. She was aware that lots of people had sex without making a big issue of it. It would be physical, not emotional. There was no need for her to make a major fuss about something that really wasn’t that important, she told herself urgently. She was a pragmatist. She might not be into sex but presumably she could put up with it. ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned it’s senseless and crazy, but if my sleeping with you one night will help my family—’
‘One night won’t suffice.’
Gwenna was as flattened by that unexpected comeback as if a giant rock had been dropped on her. He wanted more than one night? The silence pulsed. Newly discovered defiance made her tilt her chin. She collided with brilliant dark eyes enhanced by spiky black lashes. If eyes were truly the windows of the soul, she thought helplessly, he lacked one. ‘Only hell has no time limit,’ she told him prosaically.
Disconcerted by that comment, Angelo studied her and then flung back his dark head and laughed with grim appreciation. ‘I like your sense of humour, cara.’
‘But I wasn’t trying to be funny. I need to know how long you envisage me filling such a strange role in your life.’
Angelo lifted a broad shoulder in a fluid shrug. But in a lightning-fast change of mood unfamiliar to him he was discovering that he had gone from amusement to an emotion very much akin to anger. He was a proud man and her parade of reluctance, which he refused to believe in, was fast becoming more insulting than intriguing. Long before they parted, she would sing a different tune, he swore inwardly. She would love him as his mother had once fruitlessly loved her con artist of a father.
‘I’ll want you for as long as you provide me with entertainment.’
‘You find it entertaining when a woman hates you?’ Gwenna asked fiercely.
Liquid gold flared in Angelo’s intense gaze and it was as if all the oxygen burned up in the atmosphere between them. ‘I promise you that hatred won’t be what you feel.’
Gwenna compressed her generous mouth and recalled that she was supposed to feel honoured by his interest, like some maidservant of old catching the eye of the lord of the manor. Loathing roared through her to such an extent that she felt dizzy. But then reality penetrated and she thought of her father and of how much she loved him. Angelo Riccardi was giving her the chance and the power to protect her father from prosecution and gaol. How could she say no? How many years of freedom would her father lose if she said no? How would he endure years of being shut away from the world? He would not be the same man when he emerged from such an ordeal, whereas if she kept him out of prison he would find it much easier to embark on a fresh start. What right did she have to deny him that chance of redemption?
‘I want your answer now,’ Angelo told her flatly.
‘Yes…you’ve made me an offer I can’t refuse,’
