Summer Surrender: Capelli's Captive Virgin / Italian Boss, Proud Miss Prim / The Italian's One-Night Love-Child

Closely followed by a lifetime of heartache.

‘I’m not interested in a meaningless affair with someone whose values I don’t respect. And we’re talking about you, not me. I just don’t think you should get involved with anyone else for a while,’ Lindsay said tactfully and Ruby’s eyes clouded slightly.

‘Don’t worry. I’ve learned that lesson.’

Lindsay stared at her cold coffee now.

Had she?

Or was Ruby in the middle of yet another wild, crazy affair that would undoubtedly lead to another major emotional crash?

Her thoughts driving her almost demented with worry, Lindsay reached for her phone and called everyone she knew one more time. But still no one had any news of Ruby.

So now what?

Feeling helpless, she glanced at the clock on the wall of the café. Ruby had less than an hour to make the flight.

She tried to think positively.

There was still time for Ruby to turn up. She knew the importance of reliability in the employment market—she wouldn’t let Alessio Capelli down …

Suddenly Lindsay felt an ominous stabbing pain above her eye and winced as she recognised the beginnings of a migraine. Oh, no, not now. And not here, in a foreign country where nothing was familiar.

Gritting her teeth, she reached into her bag for the packet of tablets she carried with her. But there was no sign of them. With a frown, she emptied the contents of her handbag over the table and rummaged through it. No tablets.

Infuriated with herself for forgetting to replenish the tablets last time she’d used them, Lindsay swept the items back into her handbag and tried to think clearly. Normally she’d take a tablet, lie down for a few hours and emerge revived.

This time she had no tablets and the hands of the clock were relentlessly moving towards four o’clock. She didn’t have time for a headache. She knew what Ruby was capable of doing—

Drenched with sudden panic, Lindsay forced herself to breathe slowly—to think.

What could she do?

With something approaching desperation, Lindsay pressed her fingers against her temples, searching for alternative options.

The knifelike pain in her head increased and she closed her eyes. But with her eyes closed she had a sudden vision of Ruby’s pale lifeless face and she shot to her feet in the grip of an overwhelming panic. It took a moment to wrestle her overactive imagination back under control and remind herself that she had no evidence that anything bad had happened to Ruby.

There was probably a perfectly simple explanation for all this.

Perhaps her phone was broken, or perhaps she’d simply lost track of the time and had every intention of returning to the Capelli offices in time for the Caribbean trip.

Perhaps she was there now, offering an apology for her lateness to Alessio Capelli.

Keeping that thought uppermost in her mind, Lindsay reached for her bag and paid for her coffee.

Perhaps, she thought as she left the café, this whole nightmare would have a swift and happy ending.

CHAPTER THREE

ALESSIO CAPELLI rode the glass elevator down to the ground floor of his office building, ignoring the insistent buzz of the telephone that was tucked in the pocket of his suit.

He should have been rejoicing. In one short meeting he’d gained another high-profile, influential client and, more to the point, he’d ripped him away from a rival law firm. Ruthlessly competitive, Alessio waited for the usual high that came from defeating an adversary, but this time there was nothing.

Instead his brain was dominated by a picture of a pair of troubled blue eyes and blonde hair so tightly secured at the base of her slender neck that not even a strand was likely to escape.

Control, he thought dryly. Lindsay Lockheart was big on control. She controlled her hair, she controlled her emotions, but most especially she controlled her little sister.

For a woman who made her living trying to modify human behaviour, Lindsay was appallingly naïve when it came to understanding the actions of her younger sibling.

He’d never met anyone so serious. She acted as though she were ninety, and yet he knew she was only in her late twenties.

He strode across the polished marble floor of the lobby, through the revolving glass door and out into the street where his car awaited.

As if conjured straight from his thoughts, there was Lindsay Lockheart. She was standing by his car wearing the same crisp white shirt and slim black skirt that she’d had on earlier, her small overnight bag clutched in her fingers. Her delicate chin was held at a certain angle and there was a hopeful look in her eyes that melted into anxiety as she saw that he was on his own.

His driver shot him a look of nervous apology and Alessio sighed, lifted a brow in sardonic appraisal and focused his gaze on her pale face. ‘If you want to spend more time conversing, then I’m going to have to bill you.’

She stepped towards him. ‘Has Ruby turned up?’

‘You are obsessed with your sister’s movements.’ He handed his case to his driver, noting the way her cheeks blanched. It was a strange sibling relationship, he mused. Just how far was Lindsay prepared to go for her wayward sister? And, more interestingly, why?

‘I love my sister,’ she said huskily, ‘and I won’t apologise for that. Nor do I intend to explain myself to you.’

‘A decision that leaves me quite weak with relief,’ Alessio confessed in a lazy drawl, his eyes drawn to the tempting thrust of her breasts through her perfect white shirt. ‘I can’t imagine anything more likely to challenge my attention span than a summary of your family history. So, if you haven’t come to bore me, why are you here?’

‘I was checking whether you’d heard anything. I thought she might have turned up to do her job.’

‘Sadly for Ruby, the answer is no.’

Her slim shoulders sagged slightly as he delivered what was clearly a very unwelcome piece of news. ‘Could you give her a few more minutes? Just in case?’

‘No,’ he said gently, ‘I couldn’t.’

She closed her eyes briefly and he saw that her lashes were long and thick, the skin on her eyelids as pale as the rest of her face. ‘Please—’ Her voice cracked and when she opened her eyes again there was desperation there. ‘I—I know we don’t agree on things, but this is really important to me. Is there anything I can do to stop you firing her?’

The wild and wicked side of him took over. ‘Come in her place.’

He made the demand in absolute confidence that she would refuse.

The way they lived their lives was diametrically opposed.

On the surface they clashed, conflicted and disagreed.

But perhaps the biggest discordance lay under the surface. The powerful pull of sexual attraction disturbed her and he had a strong feeling that the roots of that disturbance were to be found deeper than the obvious restrictions posed by her ridiculously idealistic belief system.

He knew there was no way that Lindsay would ever voluntarily put herself in his path, so when she responded with a shocked ‘I can’t do that,’ he shrugged, reflecting on the fact that being constantly right could border on the tedious.

‘Of course you can’t.’ He couldn’t resist goading her a little more. ‘To be trapped with me in a romantic Caribbean hideaway would be a completely unfair test of your willpower. I understand.’