Mediterranean Millionaires

The smooth brown breadth of his muscular shoulders shifted in a casual shrug. ‘I always sleep alone. I’ll see you in the morning.’

The door closed. I always sleep alone. She had spent a lifetime sleeping alone too and could not comprehend why she should now feel rejected by his withdrawal. Exhaustion soon kicked in, however, to blur her troubled thoughts and sink her into a deep slumber.

She woke with a start, unsure of her surroundings and of what might have wakened her. In a rush she remembered that she was in Angelo’s house and she fumbled for the light switch by the bed. She was sitting up when she heard a disturbing sound from his room. A cry? Without further thought she slid out of bed and snatched up the shirt he had left in a careless heap. Hastily donning it, she opened the communicating door between their rooms.

In the dawn light filtering through the shutters she could see Angelo tossing and turning in the big bed. He was moaning something in his own language. The sheer terror in his voice grabbed her by the throat, shook her up and sent her flying straight to his side. She scrambled up on the mattress to get within reach of him and rested a soothing hand on his shoulder. His skin was as hot as fire.

‘Angelo…wake up!’ she whispered urgently, shaking him slightly.

Angelo wrenched himself up in a sudden movement that startled her. He was trembling, muttering in Italian. With a gruff exclamation, he raked rough fingers through his dishevelled black hair and he turned to study her with a frown that drew his sleek ebony brows together. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You were having a bad dream—’

‘I don’t get them—’

‘You cried out and woke me up!’

‘I couldn’t have,’ Angelo growled, dark eyes defensive, the fierce tension in his big powerful frame communicating itself to her.

Gwenna loosed a rueful sigh. Evidently, macho men didn’t have bad dreams. In the dim light he was a dazzling bronzed vision of raw masculine appeal. With his hair ruffled and blue-black stubble outlining the aggressive set of his jaw line he looked startlingly handsome, but it was the grim cast of his lustrous eyes that made Gwenna shimmy closer on her bottom and wrap her arms round him. ‘I get nightmares sometimes…’

‘Really?’ Angelo said very drily, but she noticed he didn’t push her away.

Gwenna rested her chin on his shoulder, absently drinking in the warm and already familiar scent of his skin. ‘I wasn’t there when it happened but I used to dream I saw my mother’s car crash. Then when I was at boarding-school—’

Angelo tensed. ‘When was that?’

‘I was ten when Dad first set up home with Eva and her daughters. Unfortunately, Penelope and Wanda didn’t take to me and, for the sake of peace, I was sent off to school. I hated it.’

‘Why…were you bullied?’

‘For waking the other girls up with my nightmares and being a terrible cry-baby.’ Gwenna winced in remembered shame over her past weakness. ‘I was horribly homesick—’

Angelo reached behind him with a long arm and tipped her round and deftly forward into his lap. ‘I was too, but I didn’t have a home to go to any more.’

‘You boarded too?’

‘My mother was dead and her generous employer paid for my education at an exclusive school. I didn’t fit in. Sardinian mothers spoil their sons. I spoke lousy English, and I was a science geek and very small—’

Gwenna squinted up at his shadowy profile. ‘Small?’ she interrupted in disbelief.

Angelo nodded. ‘Tiny…I didn’t shoot up until I was well into my teens.’

‘Were you bullied too?’

‘Of course not.’

But Gwenna caught a certain intonation in his dark-timbred drawl and sighed. ‘Yes, you were. I can tell.’

‘How? With your crystal ball, bella mia?’ Long, taunting fingers explored beneath the shirt she wore and she shivered, her breath catching in her throat. He cupped a pouting breast and in coaxing its tender pink nipple to straining prominence he provoked a gasp from between her lips.

‘Stop trying to distract me…’ she muttered breathlessly.

Angelo swung her down onto the bed beside him and shifted over her in one lithe motion, angling his hips into the soft cradle between her thighs to acquaint her with his thrusting hardness. Scorching eyes scorned her reproachful scrutiny. ‘Is that what I’m doing?’

‘But I want to know…I really want to know what happened to you to make you sound so scared!’ she protested.

His fabulous bone structure clenched hard and he was pale. ‘I was burned with cigarettes, kicked where it most hurts and beaten up.’

‘Oh my word…’ She was overcome by horror and consternation, and her eyes glistened, awash with moisture. ‘Angelo…that’s awful. And you still dream about it?’

‘Sì…’ Even as he wondered why the hell he had told her, Angelo was surveying her reaction in fascination.

Gwenna struggled to fight off the tears of sympathy without much success. She gulped, swallowed, sniffed and finally linked her arms tightly round him and hugged him hard. She was thinking of that bewildered and bright little boy, suddenly deprived of a loving mother and plunged into an alien environment.

‘It made me tough…I was too soft, bellezza mia. It was good for me—’

‘Don’t talk rubbish!’ Gwenna gasped, sucking in a steadying breath of oxygen. ‘I mean, I was just teased and scolded. But you were brutalized—’

‘Do you think I deserve a sympathy shag?’ Angelo enquired in silken interruption.

Her clogged lashes lifted on troubled blue eyes. ‘Sometimes you can be really offensive.’

Almost imperceptible colour scored his superb cheekbones.

‘And the answer is no…not because I’m annoyed with you but because—and I find this very embarrassing—I think I would find it rather uncomfortable right now.’ Grinding to a mortified halt as she referred to the fact that she was rather sore, she bit her lip and turned her face away.

Angelo hadn’t thought of that possibility and guilt came out of nowhere and attacked him full force. It was less then forty-eight hours since she had been a virgin and he had been pretty demanding as well as passionate. Either he had a cold shower or he introduced her to a more creative way of satisfying his high sex drive.

‘I can be a selfish bastard,’ he remarked and waited confidently for her to argue that description.

But it did not even occur to Gwenna to contradict him for a statement she considered accurate. ‘Maybe we could…later.’

‘Later I’ll be in New York, cara mia,’ Angelo groaned in frustration, releasing her reluctantly from his weight but tugging her into his arms, fully intent on attacking her learning curve.

Gwenna squinted at the face of the clock by the bed and gasped. ‘My goodness, is that the time?’

‘It’s only half past six,’ Angelo told her gently.

‘In less than an hour it’ll be feeding time at the pet hotel and I don’t want to be late,’ she lamented, pulling free and rolling over to vacate his bed at a frantic pace. ‘The staff don’t mind me going to give Piglet breakfast because he wouldn’t eat otherwise. But they do like me to fit in with their routine and they don’t like visitors between eight and nine in the morning.’

Barely able to credit that harried explanation, Angelo sat up. ‘Give me a moment,’ he urged tautly. ‘Are you telling me that you’re running over there every single morning to feed that animal?’

‘Evenings too…he has a very tiny tummy,’ Gwenna told him defensively. ‘You should see him on the webcam in his kennel…he’s so depressed, it would break your heart. He won’t even look at the TV or play ball any more.’

Her departure from his room was hasty. Angelo cursed vehemently while he took a cold shower and strode out of the wet room determined to get a look at Piglet malingering on the webcam. And there he was, the clever little tyke, curled up on his gilded four-poster bed with his head sunk between paws, little round eyes dull and his ridiculous bat ears drooping. In no need of canine acting lessons, he was the very picture of full-blown doggy misery.

But Gwenna was devoted to her pet. Totally devoted and obsessed, Angelo reflected dourly. And why not? How much love and attention had she got from her sleazy father and a mother who had probably only had her in an effort to destroy her lover’s marriage? He lifted the phone. When Gwenna got out of his bed at dawn to trek across the city simply to feed the dog, it was time to release Piglet from captivity.