a full-body stretch and sauntered over to the door. ‘Well, hello there, little princess. And bang on time too.’
The look he got from those green eyes would have felled a three-hundred-year-old elm tree at thirty paces. Her chin came up and her chest inflated on a deeply indrawn breath as if she were calling upon some inner reserve to confront him. He found her feistiness strangely endearing given her tightly controlled temperament. So buttoned up and yet positively steaming on the inside.
She was cute. Unique.
She had the sort of looks that grew on you. Not in-your-face beauty like her sister, but an underplayed elegance that was quite captivating the more he saw of her. She was wearing a different pair of glasses this time. A silver metal frame that was not as thick as the tortoiseshell ones, but they still made her look bookish.
‘We have work to do,’ she said without preamble.
‘We do?’
Her mouth was tightly set as if she was holding an arsenal of stinging retorts behind the barrier of her lips and only just managing to keep them there. ‘You are not here to party. You are here to help me. So help me you will.’
He leaned one shoulder idly against the doorjamb. ‘Would you like a drink?’
Her eyebrows snapped together. ‘Mr Chatsfield, I am not here on a social visit. I’m here to assign you specific tasks to do with the wedding.’
‘Humour me.’ He closed the door and smiled down at her lopsidedly. ‘I never do business with a clear head.’
Her eyes pulsed and flickered with such loathing he fully expected the lenses of her glasses to steam up right then and there. Or explode out of the frames. Her dislike of him was so intense and so palpable it made his scalp prickle and the base of his backbone tingle.
This was going to be much more fun than he’d thought.
She was full of passion and fire and yet she was so tightly wound up it made him all the more determined to press her buttons to see if she would explode like a firecracker. Was there a little bedroom firebrand behind that ice-princess thing she had going on?
She pushed the frames of her glasses back up her nose with a jerky movement of her hand. ‘I never do business without one.’
‘Then we’re a perfect match, don’t you think?’ He took a sip of his martini and watched as her eyes narrowed even further in disgust. Little did she know it but she was fulfilling every schoolmistress fantasy he’d ever possessed. She made no effort to disguise her disapproval of his lifestyle and his personality. What would it take to get that tightly compressed mouth to smile at him or to yield to him in a kiss?
He couldn’t stop himself assessing her trim little body with his eyes. She was wearing a classic knee-length beige linen dress with a thin black patent leather belt around her waist, and a matching black three-quarter-sleeved cardigan and low-heeled black court shoes. Although reasonably stylish, the clothes were the wrong colour for her and made her look like a child who had raided her grandmother’s wardrobe for a dressing-up game. She had a simple string of pearls around her neck and pearl studs in her ears, and her hair was still pulled back in that unflattering way, but it exposed her slim elegant neck where he could see a pulse beating like the heart of a hummingbird.
She turned swiftly and marched farther into the suite, stopping near the entertainment centre to face him again, her expression so frosty he was sure the temperature of the room went down ten degrees. ‘Have you been to a wedding recently?’
‘Nope. I generally try to avoid them.’
‘What about your twin brother’s?’ Her brows drew together again. ‘He’s married, isn’t he?’
‘Separated.’ Lucca took another sip of his drink and held it in his mouth for a moment. Orsino’s relationship with Poppy Graham had always been a little complicated. He suspected there was some unfinished business between his twin and his estranged wife but he didn’t like to cause any angst by asking too many questions. Although he was close to his twin, they lived quite different lives. ‘They had a quickie ceremony five years ago. You might’ve read something about it in the press. It got quite a lot of coverage at the time.’
‘I don’t make a habit of reading such unedifying rubbish.’
He gave a little laugh. ‘Nothing but the classics then, eh? Tolstoy? Hardy? Dickens? Dostoyevsky?’
Her eyes fired another round of loathing at him. ‘What about your other siblings? Are any of them married?’
‘No, none of us has been lucky—or unlucky, depending on your take on it—to meet their soul mate. Mind you, given the example our parents set for us it’s no wonder we’re all a little gun-shy in the marriage mart.’
There was a pregnant pause.
Lucca wished he hadn’t revealed quite so much about his background, not that she couldn’t read all about it online or in the gossip magazines if it took her fancy. People were still speculating on the whereabouts of his mother, who had finally walked out on the family soon after his youngest sister, Cara, had been born, leaving signed divorce papers on his father’s desk. No one had seen or heard from her since.
The train wreck of his parents’ marriage had affected all of his siblings in various ways. He liked to think he was the least affected but he knew it wouldn’t take too many sessions with a therapist to see his inability to connect emotionally with people was a hoof-mark of his childhood. He didn’t talk about it. To anyone. He didn’t even think about it. The bewildered little boy who had cried night after night for his mother was long gone.
Lucca’s philosophy in life was to have fun. The only feelings he wanted were pleasurable ones, physical ones. He was a sybarite, through and through. He didn’t deny it and nor did he apologise for it. He had been born to enormous wealth and privilege and he made the most of it. Exploited it. He didn’t believe in working to live or living to work.
He lived to party.
He treated all his relationships as transitory things. Just like a party. He showed up for an hour or two, had a good time and then he left to move on to the next one. His relationships were simply casual hook-ups that had a common goal of pleasure, not permanency. He didn’t set out to deliberately hurt people—he wasn’t wired that way. He had suffered too much hurt in his childhood to make it his life’s mission to do the same to others. He used them certainly, but he always did it with lashings of his signature charm so no feelings were damaged. He got in and out of relationships so adroitly the women he dated hardly noticed they were being dispensed with. The closest he got to commitment was keeping someone’s number in his phone in case he ever fancied a booty call.
But as if the uptight little princess sensed his family background was a painful subject, or perhaps didn’t feel comfortable offering a sympathy she didn’t feel, she brusquely announced, ‘I would like to inspect the hotel ballroom. I would like you to accompany me.’
It was the very last thing she would like, Lucca thought, which made him wonder why she had suddenly changed her mind about including him in the wedding arrangements when she had been so vehemently opposed to it initially. Had her sister put the hard word on her? He knew Princess Madeleine was determined to have a glamorous wedding with all the trimmings and there was no better place than a Chatsfield hotel to put on a party to remember.
Was little
