The Italian's Defiant Mistress

Eve’s gasp was lost in an explosion of flashbulbs and a deafening machine-gun rattle of shutters as every photographer in the room instantly went for a shot of Raphael di Lazaro.

His dark hair fell forward over his face. Shadows of fatigue and twenty-four hours of stubble emphasised the high, slanting cheekbones and the sulky, sensual mouth. Even unshaven, and in last night’s rumpled dark suit and white shirt, he was still savagely, effortlessly attractive. His face, as he pulled out a chair and slumped into it, was perfectly expressionless, but, watching him rake back his hair with long, suntanned fingers, Eve thought that he looked infinitely weary.

Her insides turned liquid with a potent mixture of loathing and lust.

Alessandra Ferretti was introducing everyone, her sexy drawl making it sound as if she was matchmaking at a cocktail party.

‘Dr Christiano is Signor di Lazaro’s consultant, and Dr Cavalletti is head of the cardiac team who will be responsible for his care.’ She gestured to the white-coated men, then turned to Raphael and laid a slim brown hand on his arm. ‘Raphael di Lazaro returned from Columbia only yesterday, but he has been with his father throughout the night.’

A tiny shock pulsed through Eve that Alessandra should mention Columbia so casually, but it was quickly submerged by a wave of irritation at the proprietary way her hand still rested on Raphael’s arm.

‘What’s Antonio’s condition now?’ asked a reporter from one of the Italian broadsheets.

‘Agiato,’ replied the doctor on the right—Eve was ashamed to realise that she hadn’t been paying enough attention to remember which one it was. ‘He is in the best possible hands.’

‘What treatment will he be undergoing?’

The other doctor cleared his throat self-importantly and launched into an in-depth medical lecture that had all the English-speaking journalists utterly bewildered. At the end of the table Raphael was leaning back in his chair, distractedly drawing on a notepad, totally oblivious to the intense attention of the media and of every woman in the room.

He had the face of a tortured saint in some religious tableau, Eve decided miserably, unable to stop herself from staring at him, or responding to that same aura of desolation she had noticed last night. She had spent the last two years inventing slow and painful deaths for this man, and suddenly she found herself wanting to walk right up to him, hold his face in her hands and kiss away all the anger and pain that she saw there.

She shook her head irritably. Maybe she’d been right yesterday. Maybe she really was possessed.

‘What about the perfume launch? Is it still going ahead?’ a journalist from one of the British glossies was asking.

‘We feel that Antonio would want it to,’ Alessandra Ferretti said smoothly. ‘He has lavished much attention on its planning, and some of the biggest celebrities across the globe are coming to celebrate the launch of Golden, Lazaro’s most exciting perfume ever, in what promises to be a glittering event in every sense of the word.’ Product plug over, she arranged her face into a compassionate smile and resumed a hushed, respectful tone. ‘Antonio always puts Lazaro first. It is his life, and to do anything other than carry on with business as usual would be utterly disrespectful of all he has worked so hard to create.’

Her answer was followed by another cacophony of questions, most of them directed at Raphael. How long was it since he had seen his father? Had he come back from South America because he knew Antonio was ill? How had Antonio seemed earlier in the evening?

He answered briefly, his voice harsh with tiredness. Eve kept her head down and her tape recorder raised to catch his answers, fearing that all it would be picking up was the frantic beating of her heart. Beside her, the tarty blonde was desperately trying to get noticed to ask a question.

‘Signor di Lazaro! Raphael!’

Suddenly he looked in her direction. Eve froze.

‘Where were you last night when Antonio was taken ill?’

‘At the retrospective.’

Eve didn’t dare breathe. If she kept her head down and stayed completely still perhaps he wouldn’t notice her. If only the damned girl beside her would shut up and let him move on to someone else. But she was still talking. A vaguely insinuating note had crept into her voice.

‘According to staff at the Palazzo Salarino, it took some considerable time to locate you. What were you doing?’

The silence that followed seemed to go on for ever. Slowly, and with a paralysing sense of dread, Eve dragged her eyes upwards from their intense study of the pattern on the carpet. And found herself looking straight into his.

It was like running at full speed into a wall of ice.

His expression was utterly blank as he held her in his dark gaze. Excruciating, yet indescribably erotic, like being intimately caressed while lying on a bed of nails. His voice, when he eventually replied, was very soft.

‘That, it suddenly appears, is a very good question.’

For a second Raphael thought that tiredness had got the better of him and he was hallucinating. But there was no mistaking those eyes, or the softly rounded lips that had filled his head with pleasure during the long hours he’d spent, halfway between sleeping and waking, in a chair at his father’s hospital bedside.

So she wasn’t a model. It was even worse than that.

She was a journalist.

His grip tightened on the pen in his hand as a wave of self-recrimination swept through him. Going too long without sleep had made him irrational and careless, but that was no excuse for his stupid behaviour last night. Thank goodness that the maître d’ had found him before things had gone any further, otherwise he might have been waking up to his name all over the front pages in headlines featuring the words ‘passion’, ‘playboy’, and probably ‘love-rat’.

He looked across to where she stood, head bent, her face partly hidden by a curtain of hair, the tip of her pen held between her softly parted lips, and felt his heart—along with other more basic parts of his anatomy—harden.

In his eyes journalists came a little below single-cell organisms in the evolutionary scale. Just because this girl had the wide-eyed innocence of a blonde Virgin Mary, it would be unwise to rule out the possibility that she might still attempt to concoct some kind of kiss-and-tell story. He would just have to track her down and make sure she didn’t.

She’d have her price. They all did. That was what was so disappointing.

‘Taxi! Taxi!’

Eve let out a shriek of outrage as yet another of Florence’s distinctive white cabs sped past her. That made five. She was beginning to wonder if she might just be invisible.

But of course she wasn’t. If she were she would have been spared public humiliation at the hands—or eyes—of Raphael Di Lazaro.

How dared he? she spluttered inwardly. How dared he look at her like that? As if she was some kind of inferior life-form from the Planet Vulgar, and way beneath his contempt?

‘Taxiii!’

If the street had not been crowded with intimidatingly glamorous Italian women, looking cool and inscrutable behind their designer sunglasses, Eve would almost certainly have sat down on the pavement and given in to tears. As it was, there was only one thing left to do.

Find chocolate.

The café nearby was small—just a handful of tables spilling out onto the pavement—but the enticing aroma of fresh coffee and hot pastries was irresistible. Taking her place in the queue of beautiful people at the counter, Eve wondered why everyone in Florence was so annoyingly good-looking. She had just arrived at the conclusion that Calvin Klein must be doing a casting session nearby, when, from the depths of her bag, she heard the tinny trill of her mobile.

Clamping her purse beneath one arm, she dug beneath the layers of old bus tickets, leaky Biros and odd gloves, triumphantly managing to unearth it before it stopped ringing.

‘Lou…!’

‘Hi, babe. You tried to call me. Everything OK?’

‘Where were you? I needed you!’

‘I was here. I’m just not answering my phone in case it’s Marissa. I’m supposed to be at death’s door, remember? The trouble is I got quite carried away with the story when I rang her to tell her, and now I can’t remember all the details. Anyway, never mind that. How’s it going?’

At the comfortingly familiar sound of Lou’s voice Eve felt the sting of tears at the back of her eyes again. The need to offload was overwhelming.

‘It’s awful. I’ve completely messed everything up!’

‘God, Eve, you’d better not have. Marissa will strangle me with one of her garish designer scarves if she finds out I made up all that stuff about your past modelling success and your dazzling journalistic career. Tell me it’s not that bad.’

Eve swallowed nervously.