The Sicilian's Innocent Mistress

Then why did she feel so increasingly uncomfortable about what she had done?

It was ridiculous.

Luc Gambrelli deserved everything he got!

When the doorbell rang, a little after nine o’clock, Darci knew she was relieved at the interruption in her tortuous thoughts. She didn’t in the least mind pausing the DVD to go and answer the door—any visitor would be a welcome diversion.

Until she opened the door and found that visitor was Luc Gambrelli…

Darci gaped at him, rendered totally speechless as she took in how suavely handsome he looked, in a black silk shirt and black tailored trousers worn beneath a tan suede jacket. The latter was almost a perfect match for his overlong, burnished gold hair, and the shirt and trousers gave the strong angles of his face and his superbly moulded mouth a slightly saturnine appearance.

All of it succeeded in making Darci feel completely vulnerable, dressed as she was in men’s striped cotton pyjamas, with her face completely bare of make-up, her hair tousled and her feet bare!

Her legs were in danger of buckling beneath her, she discovered, and she quickly put out a hand to clasp tightly onto the door, the panicky palpitations she could feel in her chest bringing a deep blush to her cheeks.

‘I—What—How—’ She was gabbling like an idiot, Darci recognised disgustedly. ‘What are you doing here?’ She finally managed to string a whole sentence together.

Luc took in Darci’s appearance in one sweeping glance: her tumbling hair, her flushed face, fevered green eyes. His gaze narrowed as he noted the men’s pyjamas she wore and wondered to whom they had originally belonged…

He shrugged broad shoulders. ‘I was concerned about you after receiving your message at the restaurant you weren’t well,’ he responded. ‘So I telephoned Grant and asked him for your address.’

Those green eyes widened. ‘And he just gave it to you?’

‘Why would he not?’ Luc replied.

‘Well, because—because—’ She gave an incredulous shake of her head.

‘Once I had explained to him that the two of us should have been having dinner together this evening he was quite happy to be accommodating,’ Luc assured her smoothly. ‘May I come in?’

‘I—Well—Yes, I suppose so,’ she accepted grudgingly as she moved back from the door.

Luc stepped inside, noting the crumpled duvet on the sofa before turning back to look at Darci. ‘The maître d’ at Garstang’s informed me that you have a fever.’

‘Yes,’ Darci confirmed, hoping the warmth she could feel in her cheeks looked convincing.

Because Luc Gambrelli was a totally disturbing presence in what she had always considered her private sanctum!

He seemed so big—he was well over six feet to her five feet nine inches—and he made the sitting-room seem somehow smaller, his steel-muscled body totally dominating and exuding a power, a barely restrained strength, that caused a rivulet of apprehension to skitter down the length of Darci’s spine.

Did he really believe she was ill? Or was his being here some form of retribution on his part for leaving him sitting in the restaurant all that time?

‘Have you consulted a doctor?’ he demanded to know.

‘I am a doctor,’ Darci informed him, and was rewarded by the raising of dark blond brows as he widened those chocolate-brown eyes.

She hadn’t expected—not in her wildest dreams!—that Luc would actually turn up at her apartment this way after she had stood him up. If she had, she would have kept the door locked and barricaded herself in her bedroom until he went away again!

But she had stopped shaking now, and while her heart was still beating far too wildly in her chest, the palpitations had thankfully ceased.

All she had to do was reassure Luc that her illness wasn’t a hospital case, and then maybe he would leave.

He had to leave!

Because just having him here in her apartment was more unsettling, more disturbing, than anything she had ever known in her life. The overhead light was making his hair appear silkily soft in contrast to the harder planes of his aristocratic face. It was enough to overwhelm a woman’s senses—any woman’s senses!—completely.

In fact, Darci wasn’t sure she didn’t have a fever, after all!

She was definitely more aware of Luc Gambrelli, more physically aware of him, than she had a right to be…

‘And what is your diagnosis?’ Luc persisted, slightly surprised—although why he should be he had no idea—at her choice of profession.

But, in his defence, no doctor he had ever consulted, on the rare occasions that he’d been ill, had ever looked like Darci Wilde.

In fact, he would have thought that just facing all that wild red hair, those come-to-bed green eyes, the full pout of her mouth and the temptation of her full, thrusting breasts across the desk in a doctor’s consulting room would be enough to raise any man’s temperature!

As his own was rising now, as he realised that she wore absolutely nothing beneath those striped pyjamas…

As garments, they shouldn’t have been in the least sexy. They were obviously meant for someone much bigger in size—the shoulders hanging loose and the sleeves falling over the slenderness of her hands, and the trousers only held in place by the tie-string at her slender waist as they bagged about her hips. With their awful green-and-cream striped pattern, the pyjamas should have been anything but sexually alluring. But the low neckline of the jacket revealed the slenderness of Darci’s throat and a creamy expanse of her bare breasts as they thrust pertly, her nipples taut, against the cotton material.

Luc could imagine nothing more erotic than slowly undoing the buttons down the front of the pyjama jacket to reveal those thrusting breasts, then lavishing the full attention of his lips and tongue across her hardened nipples…

‘My diagnosis?’ Darci echoed, moistening her lips before replying, although she was slightly disconcerted as Luc’s dark gaze followed the movement. ‘I have the start of a cold, I believe,’ she dismissed briskly, in an effort to dispel the air of—of—intimacy that slowly seemed to be surrounding the two of them.

Where was the cautious Kerry, the worrier, when Darci most needed her?

Although after Kerry’s anxiety over the last two days, she had a feeling her friend might have little sympathy with Darci’s present predicament. Especially as it was completely self-inflicted! Kerry, without having even met Luc Gambrelli, had warned Darci against interfering, seeming to know instinctively that it would be dangerous to wake this sleeping tiger.

It was a pity that Darci’s instincts hadn’t been as acute!

And that she hadn’t thought to pre-warn Grant that under no circumstances was he to reveal her address to Luc Gambrelli….

But it had never occurred to Darci, as she’d made her fiendish plan to leave Luc Gambrelli sitting at Garstang’s, that he would actually feel concerned enough about her supposed ill-health to actually seek her out!

The man was completely unpredictable, she decided.

‘As I’m sure you appreciate,’ she went on firmly, ‘there’s no actual cure for the common cold, and it’s also highly contagious. In fact, I don’t think you should even be here in the same room with me,’ she added, belatedly registering the intensity of his dark gaze as it roamed freely across her face and body.

Luc gave a slight smile as he recognised her skittishness for exactly what it was. ‘But I couldn’t possibly desert you when you aren’t well,’ he drawled huskily. ‘Do you live here alone?’ he probed, having thought it was rather a large apartment for just one person.

He wondered if the owner of the pyjamas didn’t live here, too… Although he would have thought Grant would be more circumspect about telling him of Darci’s living arrangements if that were the case…

‘My flatmate has gone out this evening,’ Darci informed him. ‘I have two flatmates, actually, but one of them is away at the moment,’ she finished.

Luc quirked blond brows. ‘Male or female?’

‘Both female, of course,’ she came back tartly. ‘Now, I really do think you should leave, Luc—’

‘And I think that you need someone to take care of you—at least until your flatmate returns,’ he cut in decisively as he slipped his jacket off and laid it across one of the chairs. ‘Point me in the direction of the kitchen and I’ll get you something cold to drink. It’s important to keep up your liquids when you have a fever, isn’t it?’ he opined, when she looked totally nonplussed.