‘I was horribly homesick—’
Angelo reached behind him with a long arm and tipped her round and deftly forward into his lap. ‘I was too, but I didn’t have a home to go to any more.’
‘You boarded too?’
‘My mother was dead and her generous employer paid for my education at an exclusive school. I didn’t fit in. Sardinian mothers spoil their sons. I spoke lousy English, and I was a science geek and very small—’
Gwenna squinted up at his shadowy profile. ‘Small?’ she interrupted in disbelief.
Angelo nodded. ‘Tiny…I didn’t shoot up until I was well into my teens.’
‘Were you bullied too?’
‘Of course not.’
But Gwenna caught a certain intonation in his dark-timbred drawl and sighed. ‘Yes, you were. I can tell.’
‘How? With your crystal ball, bella mia?’ Long, taunting fingers explored beneath the shirt she wore and she shivered, her breath catching in her throat. He cupped a pouting breast and in coaxing its tender pink nipple to straining prominence he provoked a gasp from between her lips.
‘Stop trying to distract me…’ she muttered breathlessly.
Angelo swung her down onto the bed beside him and shifted over her in one lithe motion, angling his hips into the soft cradle between her thighs to acquaint her with his thrusting hardness. Scorching eyes scorned her reproachful scrutiny. ‘Is that what I’m doing?’
‘But I want to know…I really want to know what happened to you to make you sound so scared!’ she protested.
His fabulous bone structure clenched hard and he was pale. ‘I was burned with cigarettes, kicked where it most hurts and beaten up.’
‘Oh my word…’ She was overcome by horror and consternation, and her eyes glistened, awash with moisture. ‘Angelo…that’s awful. And you still dream about it?’
‘Sì…’ Even as he wondered why the hell he had told her, Angelo was surveying her reaction in fascination.
Gwenna struggled to fight off the tears of sympathy without much success. She gulped, swallowed, sniffed and finally linked her arms tightly round him and hugged him hard. She was thinking of that bewildered and bright little boy, suddenly deprived of a loving mother and plunged into an alien environment.
‘It made me tough…I was too soft, bellezza mia. It was good for me—’
‘Don’t talk rubbish!’ Gwenna gasped, sucking in a steadying breath of oxygen. ‘I mean, I was just teased and scolded. But you were brutalized—’
‘Do you think I deserve a sympathy shag?’ Angelo enquired in silken interruption.
Her clogged lashes lifted on troubled blue eyes. ‘Sometimes you can be really offensive.’
Almost imperceptible colour scored his superb cheekbones.
‘And the answer is no…not because I’m annoyed with you but because—and I find this very embarrassing—I think I would find it rather uncomfortable right now.’ Grinding to a mortified halt as she referred to the fact that she was rather sore, she bit her lip and turned her face away.
Angelo hadn’t thought of that possibility and guilt came out of nowhere and attacked him full force. It was less then forty-eight hours since she had been a virgin and he had been pretty demanding as well as passionate. Either he had a cold shower or he introduced her to a more creative way of satisfying his high sex drive.
‘I can be a selfish bastard,’ he remarked and waited confidently for her to argue that description.
But it did not even occur to Gwenna to contradict him for a statement she considered accurate. ‘Maybe we could…later.’
‘Later I’ll be in New York, cara mia,’ Angelo groaned in frustration, releasing her reluctantly from his weight but tugging her into his arms, fully intent on attacking her learning curve.
Gwenna squinted at the face of the clock by the bed and gasped. ‘My goodness, is that the time?’
‘It’s only half past six,’ Angelo told her gently.
‘In less than an hour it’ll be feeding time at the pet hotel and I don’t want to be late,’ she lamented, pulling free and rolling over to vacate his bed at a frantic pace. ‘The staff don’t mind me going to give Piglet breakfast because he wouldn’t eat otherwise. But they do like me to fit in with their routine and they don’t like visitors between eight and nine in the morning.’
Barely able to credit that harried explanation, Angelo sat up. ‘Give me a moment,’ he urged tautly. ‘Are you telling me that you’re running over there every single morning to feed that animal?’
‘Evenings too…he has a very tiny tummy,’ Gwenna told him defensively. ‘You should see him on the webcam in his kennel…he’s so depressed, it would break your heart. He won’t even look at the TV or play ball any more.’
Her departure from his room was hasty. Angelo cursed vehemently while he took a cold shower and strode out of the wet room determined to get a look at Piglet malingering on the webcam. And there he was, the clever little tyke, curled up on his gilded four-poster bed with his head sunk between paws, little round eyes dull and his ridiculous bat ears drooping. In no need of canine acting lessons, he was the very picture of full-blown doggy misery.
But Gwenna was devoted to her pet. Totally devoted and obsessed, Angelo reflected dourly. And why not? How much love and attention had she got from her sleazy father and a mother who had probably only had her in an effort to destroy her lover’s marriage? He lifted the phone. When Gwenna got out of his bed at dawn to trek across the city simply to feed the dog, it was time to release Piglet from captivity.
ANGELO surveyed the huge crowded room with concealed dissatisfaction. He wondered why it was that when fate gave him what he believed he had always wanted he should find it so irritating. Clingy women who remained welded to him like superglue in company had always exasperated him.
In the course of a month, he had learned that Gwenna did not cling, shadow him round the room or continually seek ways to attract his attention. In fact, he sometimes felt like handcuffing her to his wrist or tagging her with a satellite-navigation system he could use to locate her when he wanted her back by his side. When she got talking to his guests, she lost track of time. She was wildly popular with the garden enthusiasts and had to be regularly rescued from those who took advantage of her horticultural knowledge to request free advice and even personal visits.
‘Where is she?’ Angelo was finally forced to ask Franco.
A few minutes later, his chief of security at his heels, he strode out to the rear terrace of his impressive London abode and looked down into the garden below. Her iridescent blue evening gown trailing across the damp grass in her wake, Gwenna was showing off a flowering wall plant to a man and a woman. The man was a notoriously lecherous Swiss banker.
