The Christmas Eve Bride

Amber stared back at him in shock. ‘Are you kidding?’

‘Only making a statement of fact. But don’t get excited,’ Rocco advised with silken scorn. ‘I’m not asking.’

Unfamiliar rage whooshed up inside Amber and she trembled. ‘Tell me, are you trying to goad me into physically attacking you?’

‘Possibly trying to settle a score or two.’ With that unapologetic admission, Rocco studied her with cloaked eyes, his hard bone-structure grim. ‘But let’s cut to the baseline. You can only be working here to spy on the Wintons for some sleazy tabloid story—’

‘I beg…your pardon?’ Amber cut in unevenly, her eyes very wide.

Ignoring that interruption, Rocco continued,’ Harris is a friend. I intend to warn him about you—’

‘What sleazy tabloid story? Warn him about me?’ Amber parroted with helpless emphasis. ‘Are you out of your mind? I’m not spying on anyone… I’m only the gardener, for goodness’ sake!’

’P-lease,’ Rocco breathed with licking contempt. ‘Do I look that stupid?’

Amber was gaping at him while struggling to master her disbelief at his suspicions.

‘How much money did you make out of that trashy kiss-and-tell spread on me?’ Rocco enquired lazily.

‘Nothing…’ Amber told him after a sick pause, momentarily drowning in unpleasant recollections of the events which had torn her life apart eighteen months earlier. A couple of hours confiding in an old school-friend and the damage had been done. What had seemed like harmless girly gossip had cost her the man she loved, the respect of work colleagues and ultimately her career.

Rocco dealt her a derisive look. ‘Do you really think I’m likely to swallow that tale?’

‘I don’t much care.’ And it was true, Amber registered in some surprise. Here she was, finally getting the opportunity to defend herself but no longer that eager to take it. But then the chance had come more than a year too late. A time during which she had been forced to eat more humble pie than was good for her. She had stopped loving him, stopped hoping he would contact her and stopped caring about his opinion of her as well. After he had ditched her, Rocco had delighted the gossip columnists with a series of wild affairs with other women. He had provided her with the most effective cure available for a broken heart. Her pride had kicked in to save her and she had pulled herself together again.

‘You already have all the material you need on the Wintons?’ Rocco prompted with strong distaste.

The rage sunk beneath the onslaught of sobering memories gripped Amber again. ‘Where do you get off, throwing wild accusations like this at me? What gives you the right to ignore what I say and assume that I’m lying? Your superior intellect?’ Her green eyes flashed bright as emerald jewels in her heart-shaped face, her scorn palpable. ‘Well, it’s letting you down a bucketful right now, Rocco—’

‘My ESP is on overload right now. I don’t think so,’ Rocco mused, studying her with penetrating cool.

A hollow laugh was wrenched from Amber’s dry throat. ‘No, you naturally wouldn’t think that you could be wrong. After all, you’re the guy who’s always one hundred per cent right about everything—’

‘I wasn’t right about you, was I? I got burned,’ Rocco cut in with harsh clarity, hard facial bones prominent beneath his bronzed skin.

I got burned. Was that how he now viewed their former relationship? Amber was surprised to hear that, but relieved to think that the hurt, the embarrassment and the self-recriminations had not only been hers. But then he was talking about his pride, the no-doubt wounding effect of his conviction that she had somehow contrived to put one over him. He wasn’t talking about true emotions, only superficial ones.

‘But not enough,’ Amber responded tightly, thinking wretchedly of the months of misery she had endured before she’d wised up and got on with her life without looking back to what might have been. ‘I don’t think you were burned half enough.’

‘How the hell could you have expected to hang onto me after what you did?’ Rocco demanded with a savage abruptness that disconcerted her. His spectacular eyes rested with keen effect on her surprised face.

‘Only two possible explanations, aren’t there?’ The breeze clawing stray strands of her honey-blonde hair back from her flushed cheekbones, Amber tilted her chin, green eyes sparkling over him where he now stood only feet from her. ‘Either I was a dumb little bunny who was indiscreet with an undercover journalist or…I was bored out of my tiny mind with you and decided to go out of your life with a big, unforgettable bang!’

‘Dio…you were not bored in my bed,’ Rocco growled with raw self-assurance.

Rocco only had to say ‘bed’ in that dark, accented drawl and heat pulsated through Amber in an alarming wave of reaction and remembrance. Punishing him for her own weakness, she let a stinging smile curve her generous mouth. ‘And how would you know, Rocco? Haven’t you ever read the statistics on women faking it to keep tender male egos intact?’

The instant those provocative words escaped her, she was shaken by her own unusual venom. But she was even more taken aback by the level to which she had sunk in her instinctive need to deny even the physical hold he had once had on her. Ashamed of herself and furious with him for goading her to that point, she added, ‘Look, why don’t you just forget you ever saw me out here and we’ll call it quits?’

‘Faking it…’ His brilliant dark eyes flared to stormy gold, his Italian accent thick as honey on the vowel sounds of those two words. He had paled noticeably below his bronzed skin and it was that much more noticeable because dark colour now scored his hard masculine cheekbones. ‘Were you really?’

Connecting with his glittering look of challenge, Amber felt the primal charge in the atmosphere but she stood her ground, none too proud of her own words but ready to do anything sooner than retract them. He was sexual dynamite and he had to know it. But he need not look to any confirmation of that reality from her. ‘All I want to do right now is get on with my work—’

Without the smallest warning, Rocco reached for her arm to prevent her from turning away and flipped her back. ‘Was it work in my bed too?’ he demanded in a savage undertone. ‘Did you know right from the start what you were planning to do?’

Backed into the constraining circle of his arms, Amber stared up at him in sensual shock, astonished at the depth of his dark, brooding anger but involuntarily excited by it and by him. Mouth running dry, breath trapped in her throat, she could feel every taut, muscular angle of his big, powerful body against hers. She shivered, conscious of the freezing air on her bare arms but the wanton fire flaming in her pelvis, stroked to the heights by the potent proof of his arousal, recognisable even through the layers of their clothing. The wanting, the helpless, craving hunger that leapt through her in wild response took her by storm.

‘I wouldn’t touch you again if I was dying…’ As swiftly as he had reached for her, Rocco thrust her back from him in contemptuous rejection, strong-boned features hard as iron.

Her fair complexion hotly flushed, Amber turned away in an uncoordinated half-circle, heartbeat racing, legs thoroughly unsteady support. ‘Good, so go—’

‘I’m not finished with you yet.’ Leaving those cold words of threat hanging, Rocco strode off.

In a daze, she watched him walk away from her. He had magnificent carriage and extraordinary grace for a male of his size. He soon disappeared from view, screened by the bulky evergreen shrubs flourishing below the winter-bare trees that edged the lawn surrounding the house. Amber only then realised that she was trembling and frozen to the marrow, finally conscious of the chill wind piercing her thin T-shirt. She grabbed her sweater out of the tumbledown greenhouse where she had left it and fumbled into its comforting warmth with hands that were all fingers and thumbs.

What had Rocco meant by saying he wasn’t finished with her yet? She tried to concentrate but it was a challenge because she was so appalled by the way he had made her feel. Suppressing that uneasy awareness, she tensed in even greater dismay. Only minutes ago, he had told her that he intended to warn Harris Winton about the risk that she could be spying on him and his wife in the hope of selling some scandalous story to a newspaper.

Dear heaven, she could not afford to lose her job, for it might not pay well but it did include accommodation. Small and basic the cottage might be, but it was the sole reason that Amber had applied to work for the Wintons in the first place. Indeed, the mere thought of being catapulted back into her sister Opal’s far more spacious and comfortable home to listen to a chorus of deeply humiliating ‘I told you so’s’ filled Amber with even more horror than the prospect of grovelling to Rocco!

CHAPTER TWO

ROCCO was certain to be lodged in the main suite of the opulent guest wing, Amber reckoned. Just to think that she had probably fixed that huge flower arrangement in there purely for Rocco’s benefit made her wince as she headed for the rear entrance to the sprawling country house.

Helping out the Wintons’ kindly middle-aged housekeeper, who had been run off her feet preparing for guests the previous month, had resulted in Amber finding herself landed with another duty. The minute that Kaye Winton had realised that their gardener had done the magnificent floral arrangement in the front reception hall, she had demanded that Amber should continue doing creative things with flowers whenever she and her husband entertained.

A time-consuming responsibility that Amber had resented, however, was now welcome as an excuse to enter the house. How on earth could she have let Rocco take off on that chilling threat? His suspicions about her were ridiculous, but she knew why he believed the Wintons might be the target for media interest of the most unpleasant kind. Harris Winton was an influential man, who was often in the news. But, for goodness’ sake, the whole neighbourhood, never mind the staff, knew about Kaye Winton’s extra-marital forays! Sometimes, men were so naïve, Amber reflected ruefully. A newspaper reporter would only need to stop off in the village post office to hear chapter and verse on the voracious brunette’s far-from-discreet affairs!

Catering staff were bustling about the big kitchen. Leaving her muddy work boots in the passage and removing the clip from her hair to finger-comb it into a hopeful state of greater tidiness, Amber hurried up the stone service staircase in her sock soles. With a bit of luck, Rocco would be in his suite. If he was downstairs, what was she going to do? Leave him some stupid note begging him to be reasonable? Grimacing at that idea, Amber wondered angrily why Rocco was allowing his usual cool common sense and intelligence to be overpowered by melodramatic assumptions.

I got burned. Well, if Rocco imagined the slight mortification of that newspaper spread on their affair eighteen months back had been the equivalent of getting burned, she would have liked him to have had a taste of what she had suffered in comparison. Her life, her self-respect and her dreams had gone down the drain faster than floodwater.

In the guest wing, she knocked quietly on the door of the main suite. There was no answer but, as she was aware that several rooms lay beyond and Rocco might be in any one of them, she went in and eased the door closed behind her again. She heard his voice then. It sounded as if he was on the phone and she approached the threshold of the bedroom with hesitant steps.

Rocco’s brilliant dark eyes struck her anxious gaze and she froze. Clearly, he had heard both her initial knock and her subsequent entrance uninvited. Her skin heated with discomfiture when, with a fluid gesture of mocking invitation, he indicated the sofa several feet from him. He continued with his call, his rich dark drawl wrapping round mellow Italian syllables with a sexy musicality that sent tiny little shivers of recall down her taut spinal cord. She recognised a couple of words, recalled how she had once planned to learn his language. With a covert rub of her damp palms on her worn jeans, she sat down, stiff with strain. He lounged by the window, talking into his mobile phone, bold, bronzed features in profile, his attention removed from her.

He stood about six feet four and he had the lean muscular build of an athlete. Broad shoulders, narrow hips, long, long powerful legs. His clothes were always beautifully tailored and cut to fit him like a glove. Yet he could look elegant clad only in a towel, she recalled uneasily from the past. Her colour rising afresh at the tone of her thoughts, she looked away, conscious of the tremor in her hands, the tension licking through her smaller, slighter frame.

They had been together for three months when Rocco had ditched her. For her, anyway, it had been love at first sight. He had called her ‘tabbycat’because of the way she had used to curl up on the sofa beside him. When he had been out of the country over weekends and holidays, he had flown her out to join him in a variety of exotic places. Her feet hadn’t touched the ground once during their magical affair. All her innate caution and sense had fallen by the wayside. Finding herself on a roller coaster of excitement and passion, she had become enslaved. When the roller coaster had come to a sudden halt and thrown her off, she had not been able to credit that he’d been able to just abandon what she had believed they had shared.

That was why she had kept on phoning him at first, accepting that he was furious with her about that ghastly newspaper story, accepting that that story had been entirely her fault and that she had had to be the one to make amends. Loving Rocco had taught her how to be humble and face her mistakes.

And how had he rewarded her humility? He had kicked her in the teeth! Her delicate bone-structure tightened. She pushed her honey-blonde hair off her brow, raking it back, so that it tumbled in glossy disarray round her slim shoulders. Her hair needed cutting: she was letting it grow because it was cheaper. At the rate that her finances were improving, she thought ruefully, she would have hair down to her feet by the time she could afford a salon appointment again. Loving Rocco had also taught her what it was like to be poor…or, at least, how utterly humiliating it was, after a long period of independence, to be forced to rely once more on family generosity to survive.

Her tummy churning with nerves, she focused on Rocco again, noting the outline of his long, luxuriant black lashes, comparing them to Freddy’s… Freddy’s hair was as dark as Rocco’s was fair, black as a raven’s wing. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and prayed for concentration and courage.

‘To what do I owe the honour of this second meeting?’ Rocco enquired drily. ‘I thought we were just about talked out.’

Worrying at her lower lip, Amber tilted her head back. But she could still only see as high as his gold silk tie because he had moved closer. In a harried movement, she stood up again. ‘If you tell Harris Winton that there is the slightest possibility that I might be spying on him for some newspaper, I’ll get the sack!’