himself into her tight, wet warmth and exploding like a bomb. How long had it been? Clearly too long if he was getting jumpy at this outrageous little flirt. Holly Perez was a troublemaker. It might as well be branded across her forehead. He wasn’t going to fall for it. He was not at the mercy of his hormones...or at least he hadn’t been before now.
Holly moved around his office with cat-like grace. Slinky, silent, sensuous. Dangerous, if stroked the wrong way. Although when he checked he noticed she didn’t have claws. Her fingernails were bitten down to the quick. When she lifted her hand to push her hair back off her face he noticed a long white scar on the fine blue-veined skin of her wrist. ‘How did you get that scar?’ he asked.
A mask came down over her features as she pushed down her sleeve. ‘I broke my arm when I was a kid. I had to have it pinned and plated.’
Julius let a silence slip past. He watched as she fiddled with the hem of her sleeve, her fingertips tugging and twisting the light cotton fabric as if it irritated her skin. Her eyebrows were drawn together, her forehead pleated, her expression broody. It intrigued him how quickly she had switched from impudent vamp to bad-tempered brat.
‘Would you like to look around the villa?’
She gave an indifferent shrug. ‘Whatever.’
Julius had intended to get Sophia to give Holly a guided tour but he decided he would do it. He told himself it was so he could check she didn’t pilfer any of his belongings or carve her initials or a curse word into one of his antiques. Why on earth had he agreed to this? God knew what she would get up to once out of his sight.
He led the way out of his office. ‘I detect a trace of an English accent,’ he said as they walked along the hall. ‘Are you originally from the UK?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We moved out here when I was young. My father was Argentinian.’
‘Was?’
‘He died when I was three. I don’t remember him, so there’s no need to get all soppy and sentimental and feel sorry for me.’
Julius glanced down at her walking beside him. She barely came up to his shoulder. ‘Is your mother still alive?’
‘No.’
‘What happened?’
‘She died.’
‘How?’
Holly threw him a hardened look. ‘Didn’t Natalia show you my file?’
Julius was a little ashamed he hadn’t read it in more detail. But then he hadn’t planned on having anything to do with her. Apart from Sophia, he didn’t have much to do with his staff on a personal level. They did their job. He did his. He’d focussed on Holly’s rap sheet without looking at the story behind the miscreant behaviour. Some people were born bad, others had bad things happen to them and they turned bad as a result. Where did Holly fit on the spectrum? ‘I’d like you to tell me.’
‘She killed herself when I was seventeen.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She gave another careless shrug. ‘So what about your parents?’
‘They’re both alive and well.’ And driving him nuts as usual.
Holly stopped in front of a painting. It was a landscape he’d bought at an auction his sister, Miranda, had given him the heads-up on. Miranda was an art restorer, yet another Ravensdale sibling who had disappointed their parents by not treading the boards.
Holly resumed walking, idly picking up objects he had on display, turning them over in her hands and putting them down again. Julius hoped she wasn’t sizing them up for later theft.
‘You got any brothers or sisters?’ she asked after a long silence.
Julius was finding it a novel experience, meeting someone who knew nothing about his family. Didn’t the girl have a smartphone? Internet access? Read newspapers or gossip magazines? ‘I have a twin brother and a sister ten years younger.’
She stopped walking to look up at him. ‘Are you identical?’
‘Yes.’
Her eyes suddenly danced with impish mischief, dimples appearing either side of her mouth, completely transforming her features. ‘Ever swapped places with him?’
He put on what his kid sister called his ‘I’m too old for all that nonsense’ face. ‘Not for a very long time.’
‘Can your parents tell you apart?’
‘They can now but not when we were younger,’ he said. Mostly because they hadn’t been around enough. Their fame was far more important to them than their family. Not that he was bitter. Much. ‘What about you? Do you have any siblings?’
‘No.’ Her dimpled smile faded and the frown reinstated itself on her forehead as she resumed walking along the corridor. ‘There’s just me...’
Julius heard something in her tone that suggested a resigned sense of profound aloneness. He hadn’t expected to feel sorry for her. He had strong values on what constituted good and bad behaviour. The law was the law. Breaking it just because you’d had a difficult childhood wasn’t a good enough excuse, in his opinion. But something about her intrigued him. She was light and dark. Moon shadows and bright sunlight. She reminded him of a complicated puzzle that would need more than one attempt to solve it.
Maybe his housekeeper’s mission would prove far more interesting than he’d first thought.
Holly stopped in front of the windows overlooking the formal gardens. ‘Do you live here alone?’ she asked.
‘Apart from my staff, yes, but they have separate quarters. Sophia is the exception. She has a suite on the top floor.’
Holly turned and looked at him with a direct gaze. ‘Seems a pretty big place for a single guy.’
‘I like my own space.’
‘Must cost a ton to keep this place ticking over.’
‘I manage.’
‘Yeah, well, money and possessions don’t impress me,’ she said, turning to look at the gardens again.
‘What does?’
She swivelled to face him and tilted one of her hips, lowering one shoulder lower than the other so her thin chain-store sweater slipped to reveal the creamy cap of her shoulder. She looked at him through eyes half-shielded by the thick dark fans of her lashes. ‘Let’s see...’ She pursed her full lips in thought before releasing them on a breath of air. ‘I’m impressed by a man who knows his way around a woman’s body.’
Julius was doing his darnedest not even to think about her luscious little body. Or that full-lipped mouth and the mayhem it could cause if it came too close to his. He had a feeling she was testing him. Testing his motives. Seeing if he was going to exploit her. Had she been exploited before? Was that how she viewed all men? As manipulators and bullies who forced their will on her?
He might
