Playboy's Lesson

Lottie quickly refashioned her features into her customary ice-princess mask, although inside she was still seething like a kettle left too long on the boil. ‘I can handle him. He’s just a little boy who hasn’t grown up.’

‘He looks all grown up to me.’ Madeleine gave a twinkling smile and waggled her neatly groomed eyebrows as she added, ‘Or at least he did judging by that spread we saw of him in that London tabloid.’

Lottie flickered her eyelids in disdain and swung away. ‘I do not want to be reminded of what that man gets up to in his spare time.’

‘Then make sure he doesn’t have any,’ Madeleine said. ‘Keep him busy with errands. You could do with a bit of practice at delegating. You know you have a tendency to over-control things.’

‘That’s because I’ve always found if I want a good job done I have to do it myself,’ Lottie said. ‘Every time I’ve trusted someone to do the right thing they let me down and I’m the one who ends up with egg dripping off my face.’

Madeleine made a little moue with her lips. ‘You’re not including me in that statement, are you, ma petite?’

There was no point arguing the point. Madeleine liked to think she was the model older sister. Nothing she ever did was wrong. Their parents never criticised her because she had always done well at school and didn’t have to study for hours to get facts and figures to stay in her head long enough to recall them for an exam. The press never found fault with her. She never wore the wrong thing or said the wrong thing or frowned at the wrong time. She didn’t bite her nails when she was nervous. She hadn’t caused a scandal the first time she had been let loose at finishing school. She hadn’t been taken in by false charm and imagined herself in love with a boy who had only slept with her because she was a royal.

No.

Madeleine was perfect.

Lottie let out a long-winded breath. ‘No, of course not.’

Her sister turned around again on the stool. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you loosened up a bit? Got out a bit more, let your hair down? It’s been years since—’

‘Don’t.’

‘You need to get over yourself. It’s been—what?—five years since Switzerland? You won’t even talk about it. Don’t you think it’s time—?’

‘That’s because it’s in the past and I want it to stay there.’ Lottie gave her sister a cautioning look.

‘Every time the word Switzerland is mentioned you flinch. There, you just did it again.’

Lottie pointedly opened the wedding planning folder. ‘The last dress fitting is the week before the wedding. It’s at 10:00 a.m. sharp.’

‘But you haven’t had a date since.’ Madeleine was like a dog with a serious bone addiction. ‘You can’t lock yourself away for ever, you know. One bad love affair doesn’t have to ruin your life. You’re twenty-three years old, for pity’s sake. You should be out partying and having a good time. You’re missing out on the best years of your life.’

‘I’m not missing out on anything.’ Lottie said the words with what conviction she could summon. Although she had never been as outgoing as her sister, she hadn’t been a shrinking violet either … more of a daisy that faded once the sun went down. But her first sexual relationship when she was eighteen had taught her a valuable lesson in trust. Finding pictures of her most intimate moments with her boyfriend on his phone that he had shared with his friends had bludgeoned her innocence to an aching pulp. Fortunately her father had been able to block any further circulation of the images but she had never been intimate with anyone since.

She told herself she didn’t miss it. The sensual glide of flesh touching flesh, the heat and passion of mouth against mouth, the erotic glide of tongue against tongue and the release of pent-up primal urges were things she no longer allowed herself to think about. Passion was too overpowering. It took away rational thought and self-control.

The sensual part of her had shrivelled up and died from neglect … or so she had thought until this afternoon when Lucca Chatsfield’s large masculine hand had encased hers. Trapped hers. Shivers of awareness had cascaded in showers down her spine like the dance of champagne bubbles poured into a crystal glass. She could still feel the stirring of her blood, the way it moved through her veins as if powered by high-octane fuel.

She gave herself a hard mental slap. The very last man on earth she would ever get involved with was a promiscuous playboy with fewer morals than a back-alley tomcat.

No. No. No. A thousand million, squillion, gazillion times no.

She would put him to work instead.

Lucca was sipping a martini—shaken, not stirred—when he heard a sharp businesslike rap on the door of his penthouse suite. He slipped his feet off the ottoman, stood, gave a full-body stretch and sauntered over to the door. ‘Well, hello there, little princess. And bang on time too.’

The look he got from those green eyes would have felled a three-hundred-year-old elm tree at thirty paces. Her chin came up and her chest inflated on a deeply indrawn breath as if she were calling upon some inner reserve to confront him. He found her feistiness strangely endearing given her tightly controlled temperament. So buttoned up and yet positively steaming on the inside.

She was cute. Unique.

She had the sort of looks that grew on you. Not in-your-face beauty like her sister, but an underplayed elegance that was quite captivating the more he saw of her. She was wearing a different pair of glasses this time. A silver metal frame that was not as thick as the tortoiseshell ones, but they still made her look bookish.

‘We have work to do,’ she said without preamble.

‘We do?’

Her mouth was tightly set as if she was holding an arsenal of stinging retorts behind the barrier of her lips and only just managing to keep them there. ‘You are not here to party. You are here to help me. So help me you will.’

He leaned one shoulder idly against the doorjamb. ‘Would you like a drink?’

Her eyebrows snapped together. ‘Mr Chatsfield, I am not here on a social visit. I’m here to assign you specific tasks to do with the wedding.’

‘Humour me.’ He closed the door and smiled down at her lopsidedly. ‘I never do business with a clear head.’

Her eyes pulsed and flickered with such loathing he fully expected the lenses of her glasses to steam up right then and there. Or explode out of the frames. Her dislike of him was so intense and so palpable it made his scalp prickle and the base of his backbone tingle.

This was going to be much more fun than he’d thought.

She was full of passion and fire and yet she was so tightly wound up it made him all the more determined to press her buttons to see if she would explode like a firecracker. Was there a little bedroom firebrand behind that ice-princess thing she had going on?

She pushed the frames of her glasses back up her nose with a jerky movement of her hand. ‘I never do business without one.’

‘Then we’re a perfect match, don’t you think?’ He took a sip of his martini and watched as her eyes narrowed even further in disgust. Little did she know it but she was fulfilling every schoolmistress fantasy he’d ever possessed. She made no effort to disguise her disapproval of his lifestyle and his personality. What would it take to get that tightly compressed mouth to smile at him or to yield to him in a kiss?

He couldn’t stop himself assessing her trim little body with his eyes. She was wearing a classic knee-length beige linen dress with a thin black patent leather belt around her waist, and a matching black three-quarter-sleeved cardigan and low-heeled black court shoes. Although reasonably stylish, the clothes were the wrong colour for her and made her look like a child who had raided her grandmother’s wardrobe for a dressing-up game. She had a simple string of pearls around her neck and pearl studs in her ears, and her hair was still pulled back in that unflattering way, but it exposed her slim elegant neck where he could see a pulse beating like the heart of a hummingbird.

She turned swiftly and marched farther into the suite, stopping near the entertainment centre to face him again, her expression so frosty he was sure the temperature of the room went down ten degrees. ‘Have you been to a wedding recently?’

‘Nope. I generally try to avoid them.’

‘What about your twin brother’s?’ Her brows drew together again. ‘He’s married, isn’t he?’

‘Separated.’ Lucca took another sip of his drink and held it in his mouth for a moment. Orsino’s relationship with Poppy Graham had always been a little complicated. He suspected there was some unfinished business between his twin and his estranged wife but he didn’t like to cause any angst by asking too many questions. Although he was close to his twin, they lived quite different lives. ‘They had a quickie ceremony five years ago. You might’ve read something about it in the press. It got quite a lot of coverage at the time.’

‘I don’t make a habit of reading such unedifying rubbish.’

He gave a little laugh. ‘Nothing but the classics then, eh? Tolstoy? Hardy? Dickens? Dostoyevsky?’

Her eyes fired another round of loathing at him. ‘What about your other siblings? Are any of them married?’

‘No, none of us has been lucky—or unlucky, depending on your take on it—to meet their soul mate. Mind you, given the example our parents set for us it’s no wonder we’re all a little gun-shy in the marriage mart.’

There was a pregnant pause.

Lucca wished he hadn’t revealed quite so much about his background, not that she couldn’t read all about it online or in the gossip magazines if it took her fancy. People were still speculating on the whereabouts of his mother, who had finally walked out on the family soon after his youngest sister, Cara, had been born, leaving signed divorce papers on his father’s desk. No one had seen or heard from her since.

The train wreck of his parents’ marriage had affected all of his siblings in various ways. He liked to think he was the least affected but he knew it wouldn’t take too many sessions with a therapist to see his inability to connect emotionally with people was a hoof-mark of his childhood. He didn’t talk about it. To anyone. He didn’t even think about it. The bewildered little boy who had cried night after night for his mother was long gone.