At The Italian's Command

At The Italian's Command
CATHY WILLIAMS

In the office…Millionaire businessman Rafael Loro dominates everyone around him. Until plain but determined Sophie Frey is assigned to work with him.After hours…Rafael is used to beautiful, well-groomed women who are eager to please him. Sophie's feistiness–and innocence–are driving him crazy!Who's in command?Rafael thinks bedding Sophie will end his torture, but soon this simple seduction turns into a real need to possess her–at any price….

A warm welcome to all our readers; it’s cold outside, but the books Harlequin Presents has got for you in January will leave you positively glowing!

Raise your temperature with two right royal reads! The Sheikh’s Innocent Bride, by top author Lynne Graham, whisks you away to the blazing dunes of the desert in a classic tale of a proud sheikh’s desire for the young woman employed to clean his castle. Meanwhile, Robyn Donald is back with another compelling Bagaton story in The Royal Baby Bargain, the latest installment in her immensely popular New Zealand-based BY ROYAL COMMAND miniseries.

Want the thermostat turned up? Then why not travel with us to the glorious Greek islands, where Bought by the Greek Tycoon, by favorite author Jacqueline Baird, promises searing emotional scenes and nights of blistering passion, and Susan Stephens’s Virgin for Sale—the first title in our steamy new miniseries UNCUT—sees an uptight businesswoman learning what it is to feel pleasure in the hands of a real man!

For Cathy Williams fans, there’s a new winter warmer: in At the Italian’s Command, the heart of a notoriously cool, workaholic tycoon is finally melted by a frumpy but feisty journalist. And try turning the pages of rising star Melanie Milburne’s latest release—Back in her Husband’s Bed, about a marriage rekindled in sunny Sydney, Australia, is almost too hot to handle!

For a full list of titles and book numbers, see inside the front cover (opposite)—and enjoy!

She’s his in the bedroom,

but he can’t buy her love…

Showered with diamonds, draped in exquisite

lingerie, whisked around the world…

The ultimate fantasy becomes a reality.

Live the dream with more

MISTRESS TO A MILLIONAIRE titles

by your favorite authors.

Available only in Harlequin Presents

At the Italian’s Command

Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

All about the author…

Cathy Williams

Cathy was born in the West Indies and has been writing Harlequin romances for over fifteen years. She is a great believer in the power of perseverance as she had never written anything before and from the starting point of zero has now fulfilled her ambition to pursue this most enjoyable of careers. She would encourage any would-be writer to have faith and go for it!

She loves the beautiful Warwickshire countryside where she lives with her husband and three children, Charlotte, Olivia and Emma. When not writing she is hard-pressed to find a moment’s free time in between the millions of household chores, not to mention being a one-woman taxi service for her daughters’ never-ending social lives.

She derives inspiration from the hot, lazy, tropical island of Trinidad (where she was born), from the peaceful countryside of middle England and, of course, from her many friends, who are a rich source of plots and are particularly garrulous when it comes to describing her heroes. It would seem from their complaints that tall, dark and charismatic men are too few and far between! Her hope is to continue writing romance fiction and providing those eternal tales of love for which, she feels, we all strive.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

EIGHT-THIRTY on a Sunday evening. Rafe heard the phone ring next to where he was sitting, in the room that had once been a library and was now his office away from the office. Global deals had no respect for English working hours, and Sundays were never days of rest for him. They were simply time when he could catch up with whatever needed doing, make calls to Australia, make sure, in essence, that everything was ticking over nicely.

Furthermore, he knew who would be on the other end of the line.

With a little sigh of half pleasure, half frustration, he picked up the receiver and as he’d predicted heard his mother’s voice on the other end of the line.

‘You’re working, Rafael. Aren’t you? You’re in that office of yours working. You shouldn’t be working on a Sunday. How many times have I told you that?’

‘Hullo, Mother.’ He smiled into the telephone, pushed his leather chair away from the desk and swivelled round, bringing the phone with him, so that he could stare out of the window. In the depths of winter, there wasn’t much to see outside, just the vague shapes of his back garden, which was large for a London house but small in comparison to the acres of land on which he had grown up. ‘How are you?’

‘I, Rafael, am fine. You, on the other hand, are heading for high blood pressure and an early grave.’

‘Thank you for that.’ He grinned and ran his fingers through his short, dark hair. ‘Never let it be said that a businessman’s life isn’t fraught with danger.’

He listened abstractedly as Claudia Loro continued more or less in the same vein for a few minutes, lecturing to him about his lifestyle, asking him about his health and punctuating his answers with pointed clucking and elaborate sighs. It was a familiar routine and one that he accepted with good-natured tolerance. He would never have allowed any other woman to preach to him about his life, and some had made the mistake of trying in the past, but his mother was different. He listened, even if he chose to ignore most of her advice.

She had now moved on to the topic of her week, bringing him up to date with what she had been doing, filling him in on what was happening in the little village where she lived and which had been his home until he’d moved down to London fourteen years previously. Already his mind was drifting off to Paul Glebe on the other side of the world, whose phone call had raised one or two problems that needed sorting out if his latest acquisition was to go ahead.

‘Anyway,’ he heard his mother say in a rounding-up tone of voice, ‘I haven’t called to witter on about my social life…’

‘Exciting though it may be.’

‘Certainly a great deal jollier than yours, my darling.’

‘My life, dearest Mama, is deeply exciting.’ He stretched out his long legs, resting them on the broad ledge of the window, and thought fleetingly of the current piece of excitement in his life. Five foot ten, legs up to her armpits and hair down to her waist. Intellectually undemanding but physically stunning. Just the way he liked them. What man needed a high IQ in his woman when all he wanted to do when he wasn’t working was give his fiercely active brain a well-deserved rest? In short, she was just the sort of girl his mother would heartily disapprove of. He wondered whether to stoke the fire by mentioning this particular fun element of his life, and decided against it.

‘But lacking in challenge, Rafael. Which is why I have a little surprise up my sleeve for you…’