Taming the Notorious Sicilian

Another doorman led them straight through to the club, which heaved with bodies and pulsated with loud music, leading them up a cordoned-off set of sparkling stairs.

Her heart lifted to see one of the man mountains who’d been guarding the club the other afternoon standing to attention by a door marked ‘Private’.

Surely that meant Francesco was here?

A young hunk dressed in black approached them and led them to a large round corner table. Six iced buckets of champagne were already placed on it.

‘Oh, wow,’ said Melanie. ‘Is this for us?’

‘It is,’ he confirmed, opening the first bottle. ‘With the compliments of the management. If you need anything, holler—your night is on the house.’

‘Can I have a glass of lemonade, please?’ Hannah asked, her request immediately drowned out by the hens all badgering her to have one glass of champagne.

About to refuse, she remembered the promise she’d made to herself that it was time to start living.

She, more than anyone, knew how precarious life could be, but it had taken an accident on her bike for her to realise that all she had been doing since the age of twelve was existing. Meeting Francesco in the flesh had only made those feelings stronger.

If heaven was real, what stories would she have to tell Beth other than medical anecdotes? She would have nothing of real life to share.

That was something she’d felt in Francesco, that sense of vitality and spontaneity, of a life being lived.

Settling down at the table, she took a glass of champagne, her eyes widening as the bubbles played on her tongue. All the same, she stopped after a few sips.

To her immense surprise, Hannah soon found she was enjoying herself. Although she didn’t know any of them well, Melanie’s friends were a nice bunch. Overjoyed to be given the VIP treatment, they made sure to include her in everything, including what they called Talent Spotting.

Alas, no matter how discreetly she craned her neck, Hannah couldn’t see Francesco anywhere. She did, however, spot a couple of minor members of the royal family and was reliably informed that a number of Premier League football players and a world-championship boxer were on the table next to theirs, and that the glamorous women and men with shiny white teeth who sat around another table were all Hollywood stars and their beaus.

‘Thank you so much for getting knocked off your bike,’ Melanie said whilst on a quick champagne break from the dance floor, flinging her arms around Hannah. ‘And thank you for coming out with us tonight and for coming here—I was convinced you were going to go home after the meal.’

Hannah hugged her in return, holding back her confession that she had originally planned on slipping away after their Chinese, but that the lure of seeing Francesco again had been too great. It had almost made up for the fact Beth wasn’t there to share Melanie’s hen night. She wouldn’t be there to share the wedding, either.

The wedding. An event Hannah dreaded.

She felt a huge rush of affection for her little sister along with an accompanying pang of guilt. Poor Melanie. She deserved better than Hannah. Since Beth’s death, Hannah had tried so hard to be the best big sister they both wished she could be, but she simply wasn’t up to the job. It was impossible. How could she be anything to anyone when such a huge part of herself was missing? All she had been able to do was throw herself into her studies, something over which she had always had total control.

But now her drive and focus had been compromised.

Never had she experienced anything like this.

Hannah was a woman of practicality, not a woman to be taken in with flights of fancy. Medicine was her life. From the age of twelve she’d known exactly what she wanted to be and had been single-minded in her pursuit of it. She would dedicate her life to medicine and saving children, doing her utmost to keep them alive so she could spare as many families from the gaping hole that lived in her own heart as she could.

At least, she had been single-minded until a car knocked her off her bike and the most beautiful man in the universe had stepped in to save her.

Now the hole in her heart didn’t feel so hollow.

Since that fateful cold morning, her mind had not just been full of medicine. It had been full of him, her knight in shining armour, and meeting him in the flesh had only compounded this. She wasn’t stupid. She knew she would never fit into his world. His reputation preceded him. Francesco Calvetti was a dangerous man to know and an exceptionally dangerous man to get on the wrong side of. But knowing this had done nothing to eradicate him from her mind.

That moment when she’d been lying on the cold concrete and opened her eyes, she had looked at him and felt such warmth.... Someone who could evoke that in her couldn’t be all bad. He just couldn’t.

‘Come on, Han,’ said Melanie, tugging at her hand. ‘Come and dance with me.’

‘I can’t dance.’ What she really wanted to do was search every nook and cranny of Calvetti’s until she found him. Because he was there. She just knew it.

Melanie pointed at the dance floor, where a group of twenty-something men with more money than taste were strutting their stuff. ‘Nor can they.’

* * *

Francesco watched the images from the security cameras on a range of monitors on his office wall. Through them, he could see everything taking place in his club. The same feeds were piped into the office where his security guys sat holed up, watching the same live images—but the only eyes Francesco trusted were his own. Tomorrow he would head back to Palermo to spot-check his nightclub and casino there, and then he would fly on to Madrid for the same.

A couple of men he suspected of being drug dealers had been invited by a group of city money men into the VIP area. He watched them closely, debating whether to have them dealt with now or wait until he had actual proof of their nefarious dealings.

A sweep of thick blonde hair with pink bunny ears caught his attention in one of the central feeds. He watched Hannah get dragged onto the dance floor by another pink-tutued blonde he assumed was the hen of said hen party, Melanie.

Not for the first time, he asked himself what the hell Hannah was doing there.

She looked more than a little awkward. His lips curved upwards as he watched her try valiantly to move her body in time to the beat of the music. He’d seen more rhythm from the stray cats that congregated round the vast veranda of his Sicilian villa.

The half smile faded and compressed into a tight line when he read the slogan on her back: Horny Hannah.

That all the hen party had similar personalised slogans did nothing to break the compression of his lips.

It bothered him. Hannah was too...classy to have something so cheap written about her, even if it was in jest.

He downed his coffee and absently wiped away the residue on the corner of his lips with his thumb.

What was she doing here? And why did she keep craning her neck as if she was on the lookout for someone?

Since he’d dismissed her three days ago, he’d been unnerved to find her taking residence in his mind. Now was not the time for distractions of any sort, not when the casino in Mayfair was on the agenda. This particular casino was reputed to be one of the oldest—if not the oldest—in the whole of Europe. It had everything Francesco desired in a casino. Old-school glamour. Wealth. And credibility. This was a casino built by gentlemen for gentlemen, and while the old ‘no women’ rule had been relaxed in modern times, it retained its old-fashioned gentility. More than anything else, though, it was the one business his father had wanted and failed to get. This failure had been a thorn in Salvatore’s side until his dying day, when a life of overindulgence had finally caught up with him.

After almost forty years under the sole ownership of Sir Godfrey Renfrew, a member of the British aristocracy, the casino had been put up for sale.

Francesco wanted it. He coveted it, had spent two months charming Godfrey Renfrew into agreeing the sale of it to him. Such was Godfrey’s hatred of Francesco’s dead father, it had taken a month to even persuade him to meet.

What was more, if Francesco’s spies were correct, Luca Mastrangelo was sniffing around the casino, too.

This news meant he absolutely could not afford to lose focus on the deal, yet still he’d found himself, an hour before opening for the night, giving orders to his hospitality manager to reserve the best table in the club—for a hen party of all things. He’d only ever intended to have Melanie Chapman’s party on the guest list.

Under ordinary circumstances, free tables were given to the most VIP of all VIPs and only then because of the publicity it generated.

He hadn’t expected Hannah to be in attendance, but now she was here he couldn’t seem to stop his eyes from flickering to whichever monitor happened to be fixed on her.

* * *

Hannah tried heroically to get her feet moving in time with the music, aware her dancing was easily the least rhythmic of the whole club. Not that this seemed to put any of the men off. To her chagrin, a few seemed to be suffering from what her sister termed Wandering Hand Syndrome. One in particular kept ‘accidentally’ rubbing against her. When his hand brushed over her bottom the first time she’d been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, and had stepped away from him. The second time, when he’d been bolder and tried to cup her buttocks, she’d flashed him a smile and said in her politest voice, ‘Please don’t do that,’ he’d removed his hand. Which had worked for all of ten seconds. The third time he groped her, she’d ‘accidentally’ trod on his foot. And now the sleaze had ‘accidentally’ palmed her breast and was grinding into her back as if she were some kind of plaything.

Did people actually like this kind of behaviour? Did women really find it attractive?

Just as she was wishing she had worn a pair of stilettoes like all the other women there so she could bruise him properly, a figure emerged on the dance floor.