the fashion model on his arm a blank appraisal.
‘That dress was the star of the Lavroff show I walked for in the spring.’
A designer gown, surely a little rich for a junior doctor’s salary? Although perhaps not too expensive for a doctor whose dying patient had left her everything she possessed, Rio reflected sombrely. It was starting to occur to him that he had underestimated Ellie and how much trouble she was capable of causing. He could see at a glance that she already had Beppe wrapped round her little finger. In fact, her hand was resting comfortably on the older man’s arm. Rio dragged in a sudden breath, his lean, darkly handsome features tensing into tough lines of restraint. Was that what he had to fear?
Ironically that risk hadn’t even crossed his mind because Beppe lived a celibate life and had never been known to seek out female companionship. But Beppe had been acquainted with Ellie’s mother, and if Ellie’s mother had been even half as beautiful as her daughter, she would hardly have been forgettable. Back then, however, Beppe had been safely married and now he was not and he was making no attempt to hide his delight in Ellie’s company. Rio stationed himself where he could watch his godfather and he was sharply disconcerted by the level of familiarity he could already see developing between the pair. Ellie whispered something in Beppe’s ear and he chuckled and patted her hand fondly. He moved her on with him to another group of guests, giving her no opportunity to stray.
At his elbow, Carmela was still whinging on enviously about the Lavroff gown. Rio wasn’t interested. He often paid for the designer clothes his lovers wore but he took no interest in the names or the cost, writing the expenses off as the cost of maintaining a reasonable sex life. His entire focus remained on Ellie. He listened to her making intelligent conversation, heard her laugh several times and learned that she had toured the Uffizi gallery with Beppe. Inferno, she certainly didn’t need to be taught how to best please a much older, lonely man with a lifelong love of art. But she would soon learn her mistake if she persisted on her current ambitious trajectory. Rio would destroy her before he would allow her to hurt Beppe Sorrentino.
And what if she’s pregnant? Rio backed away a step as Carmela tried to get closer to him. He studied Ellie as they were seated at the dining table and strove to imagine that shapely body swollen with his child. The idea unnerved him but it also excited him in a peculiar way, which only had the effect of unnerving him even more.
Ellie barely touched the food on her plate. She eavesdropped on Carmela’s airheaded views on suntans as affected by climate change. She noticed that Rio didn’t listen to a word his companion said and appeared to be tuning her out like an irritating noise. She watched him, as well, catching the downward slant of his beautifully shaped mouth, the tension in his exquisite bone structure that hardened his exotic cheekbones and placed hollows beneath them. He was furious with her, she knew he was. Rio had a temper like a flamethrower and he was boiling like a cauldron of oil.
But Ellie was angry too. Only the day before he had been with her and last night he had been waiting for her in her hotel room. And now he was with a beautiful blonde model, who operated off one very talkative brain cell. Why was she hurt? Why the hell was she hurting over his rejection of her as a woman? Time after time over the years Ellie had learned that men didn’t really want career-driven, independent women. She wasn’t feminine enough, she wasn’t soft enough, she could deal with a spider just fine but a mouse sent her screaming. She was stubborn and contrary and choosy and he didn’t fit the bill for her either, so why was she agonising? Why would she want a gorgeous, arrogant, shameless man whore in her life anyway? She was far too sensible and strait-laced for a male of his ilk. Sheer lust had put her in his arms and she had got what she deserved, she told herself repressively.
Beppe took her and several other guests to admire his latest painting acquisition in the hall. Rio and Carmela joined them. Carmela wondered out loud if the seventeenth-century subject of the portrait was wearing hair extensions. Ellie whispered a polite, ‘Excuse me...’ in Beppe’s ear as he guided the group into his library to show them something else and she walked down the corridor to the cloakroom instead. Freshening up, she grimaced at her anxious reflection in the mirror. Why was it that when Rio was around he dominated everything? Including her thoughts?
When she emerged, Rio was standing waiting for her, his lean, dark face stormy and tense. ‘I want a word,’ he told her grimly.
‘But I don’t,’ Ellie told him as he snapped a hand round her wrist and pulled her outdoors onto the cool, formal loggia with pillars that ran along that side of the house.
‘You’re such a bully, Rio!’ Ellie objected, rubbing her wrist the instant he released it as though he had bruised her.
Rio backed her up against the stone wall behind her by the simple expedient of moving forward, shutting out any view of the gardens and forcing her to tip her head back to look up at him. ‘What did you tell Beppe about us?’ he demanded in a raw undertone.
‘Very little. That we met at the wedding and that you called on me at the hotel the day I arrived,’ Ellie proffered. ‘I didn’t tell him what you said or threatened or anything of that nature. I simply wanted to clear the air. Pretending we were strangers... I mean, why would I mislead Beppe like that? I’ve got nothing to hide—’
‘Not according to the report I had done on you,’ Rio reminded her darkly.
Ellie bridled at that reference, fully convinced that any close and proper check on her background would reveal that she was innocent of any wrongdoing. ‘I didn’t intend to cause friction between you and Beppe. I didn’t think of that angle,’ she admitted guiltily. ‘But I’m sorry that I embarrassed you like that—’
‘Are you really?’ Rio lifted a sardonic ebony brow, staring down at her, noting the mere hint at her neckline of the pale valley between her full breasts and entranced by the new discovery that showing so little could actually be sexier than showing a lot. As he tensed, inescapably recalling his own response to those luscious curves the day before, he whipped his gaze up to her face in the hope of lowering his temperature. ‘I think you dropped me in it deliberately to cause trouble,’ he contended.
‘But then you would think that because you always think the worst of me,’ Ellie shot back at him in exasperation. ‘Exactly what is your problem, Rio?’
Rio ran his fingertip along the succulent curve of her lower lip and watched a tiny pulse flicker fast at the base of her elegant white throat. ‘You’re my only problem, principessa,’ he told her huskily. ‘We had our moment and that was supposed to be it—’
‘It is it!’ Ellie seethed, furious that he was cornering her when he had brought another woman to dinner.
‘Not for me,’ Rio confided, letting a coppery corkscrew curl coil round his finger like a vine, his stunning dark golden eyes hot and hungrily gripping hers by sheer force of will. ‘I’m not done yet—’
‘But I am,’ Ellie spelled out thinly. ‘You’re ruining my holiday—’
‘When we’re done, I’ll tell you,’ Rio asserted, bending down to nip at her full lower lip with the edge of his teeth.
A violent shiver ran down through her taut body, that tiny sting of pain somehow setting off a chain reaction of electrified awareness and sensitivity. He lowered his head and he took her mouth with a raw sexual demand that momentarily stole Ellie’s wits. She fell back against the wall, knees weak, melting heat surging in her pelvis.
‘Rio!’ a voice interposed curtly, and both of them froze.
Rio lifted his dark head and stepped back to study his godfather, keen
