His For Christmas: Christmas in Da Conti's Bed / His Until Midnight / The Most Expensive Night of Her Life

The person she was now wouldn’t dream of letting her nipples peek out from behind her splayed fingers, while she pouted at the camera. These days she would rather die than hook her thumbs in her panties and thrust her pelvis in the direction of the lens. But she’d needed to do it, for all kinds of reasons. Reasons the uptight Niccolò da Conti wouldn’t understand in a million years.

‘You were notorious, Alannah,’ he continued. ‘And that kind of notoriety doesn’t just go away. It sticks like mud.’

She looked at him in despair. He was telling her that? Didn’t he realise that she’d been living with the consequences of that job ever since? No, of course he didn’t. He saw what he wanted to see and no more—he didn’t have the imagination to put himself in someone else’s shoes and think what their life might be like. He was protected by his wealth and position and his arrogance.

She wanted to go up and shake him and tell him to think outside the box. To wipe that judgemental look from his face and to start seeing her as a person, instead of someone who’d once behaved rashly. She could see exactly why Michela had been so scared of him when they’d been at school together. Was it any wonder that the Italian girl had rebelled from the moment he’d dropped her off at the exclusive Swiss finishing school where Alannah’s mother had worked as school matron?

‘The most important thing for me,’ she said slowly, ‘is that Michela wants me there. It’s her day and she’s the bride. So, short of tying me up and kidnapping me—I intend to be there tomorrow.’

‘Unless we come to some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ She tilted her head. ‘Tell me more.’

‘Oh, come on, Alannah.’ He smiled. ‘You’re a streetwise woman. You’ve been around. There must be something in your life that you’d…like.’

‘Something in my life that I’d like?’ she repeated. ‘You mean like a cure for the common cold, or an alarm that doesn’t make you want to smash the phone every time you hear it?’

‘Very amusing. No, nothing like that.’ He paused, and his black eyes glittered. ‘I am a very wealthy man—and I’m willing to make it worth your while to tell Michela that you’ve changed your mind.’

She stared at him in disbelief.

‘Let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You’re offering me money to stay away from your sister and not be her bridesmaid?’

‘Why not?’ He gave a cold smile. ‘In my experience, if you want something badly enough you can usually get it. The tricky thing is negotiating the right price—but that is something I should imagine you’re very good at.’

‘But that’s…bribery.’

‘Try thinking of it as common sense,’ he suggested softly.

She was shaking her head. ‘You know, Michela used to tell me how unbelievably controlling you were,’ she said. ‘And part of me thought she might have been exaggerating. But now I can see that every word was true.’

‘I am not seeking your approval of my character,’ he clipped out. ‘Just think why I’m making you this offer.’

‘Because you’re a control freak?’

‘Because Michela means everything to me,’ he said, and suddenly his voice grew harsh as he remembered how he’d fought to protect his sister from the sins of their father. And their mother. He thought of their flight from Sicily—his mother pregnant with Michela and not knowing what lay ahead. Niccolò had been only ten, but he had been the one everyone had relied on. He had been the man around the house. And it was hard to relinquish that kind of role or those kinds of expectations…

‘Michela is the only family I have left in the world and I would do anything for her,’ he ground out.

‘Except give her the freedom which a woman of her age has the right to expect?’ she retorted. ‘Well, I’m glad she’s had the courage to stand up to you. To maybe make you realise that you can’t keep snapping your fingers and expecting everyone else to just leap to attention. I’m not going anywhere until after the wedding. Better deal with it, Niccolò.’

Their gazes clashed and Niccolò felt the flicker of something unknown as he returned her stare. Oh, but she was a one-off. She took defiance to a whole new level and made it seem erotic. She made him want to take her in his arms and dominate her—to show her that he could not and would not be thwarted. He took a step towards her and a primitive surge of pleasure rippled over him as he watched her eyes darken. Because she still wanted him, he realised. Maybe not quite as much as he wanted her—but the desire he could read in her eyes was unmistakable.

And couldn’t desire be the most powerful weapon of all? Didn’t sex give a man power over a woman who wanted it?

‘Why don’t you think about what I’ve said?’ he suggested. ‘So that by the time I see you at the pre-wedding dinner later, you’ll have had the sense to change your mind about my offer.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘But…’

He raised his eyebrows. Suddenly, she didn’t look quite so defiant. Suddenly she looked almost unsure of herself. ‘But?’

‘I…’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s just that…well, Michela said you were probably going to skip the dinner and that we wouldn’t see you until tomorrow. Something to do with a business deal. Some new apartment block you’ve recently built in London.’

‘Is that what she said?’ He smiled. ‘Well, not any more. I’ve decided business can wait, because something much more important has come up.’ There was a pause as he looked at her and suddenly it was easy to forget the pressing needs of his billionaire clients and friends. ‘What is it they say? Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. And I want you very close for all kinds of reasons, Alannah. You’d better believe that.’

CHAPTER TWO (#u28fcd623-d7d3-51d6-808d-cf8c103bc13d)

ALANNAH PULLED UP the zip of her cocktail dress and stared at her pale-faced reflection in the mirror. She’d tried deep breathing and she’d done a quick bout of yoga, but her hands were still trembling and she knew why. Slipping on a pair of high-heeled shoes, she felt a wave of self-recrimination washing over her.

She thought about the things Niccolò had said to her earlier. The way he’d insulted her and looked down his proud, patrician nose. He’d been judging her in the most negative way possible, but that hadn’t stopped her wanting him. She shuddered. Where was the self-respect she’d worked so hard to get back? She wondered what had happened to the cool, calm Alannah who wasn’t going to let him get under her skin. How had he managed to puncture her self-possession with nothing more than a heated ebony gaze, which reminded her of things she’d rather forget?

Because memory was a funny thing, that was why—and sometimes you had no control over it. It flipped and jerked and jumped around like a flapping fish on the end of a hook. It took you to places you didn’t want to visit. It could make ten years seem like a minute, or a minute seem like an hour. It could put you back inside the skin of the person you’d once been.

And suddenly she was a teenager again. Seventeen years old and about to break the rules. Off to a party wearing the make-up which her Swiss finishing school strictly forbade, when really she should have been tucked up in bed in the dormitory. Wearing a tiny little micro-mini because she had been young and carefree—because back then she hadn’t realised that a woman’s body could become her enemy, instead of her friend…

By rights, someone like her shouldn’t have been a pupil at the exclusive all-girls academy, tucked high in the beautiful mountains of Switzerland. She wasn’t rich. She wasn’t well-connected. She was just the illegitimate daughter of a single-parent mother who happened to be Matron at the fancy boarding school. And while this meant that Alannah got herself a great education, her ‘charityʼ status meant that most of the girls simply tolerated her.

Michela da Conti was different. She was the only one who had held out the hand of genuine friendship—maybe because they had something in common, despite their rich-girl/poor-girl pairing. Alannah had spent her life rebelling against her super-strict mother while Michela had known real tragedy in her short life, plus she wanted to escape the strictures of her controlling brother, Niccolò.

Their youthful rebellion usually stretched no further than going out for illicit under-age drinks in one of the nearby bars after lights-out, or hanging out of the dormitory window, trying to inhale cigarettes without being sick.

But one night they heard about a party. A glitzy twenty-first birthday celebration for one of Niccolò’s godsons—which was being held in one of the neighbouring mountain valleys.

‘And we’re going!’ declared Michela excitedly.

Alannah remembered frowning. ‘But what about your brother? Won’t he be there?’

‘You’re kidding.’ Michela had given a smile of satisfaction. ‘Apparently, he’s miles away in some obscenely expensive resort in Barbados, with his latest ghastly supermodel girlfriend. So we’re safe.’

Alannah remembered walking into the crowded room, where coloured lights were flashing and music was blaring out loudly. Her borrowed silver minidress was clinging to her body like honey and she was getting lots of requests to dance, but she turned down every one because all the boys seemed too loud and too brash to be interesting.

She did her best to enjoy herself. She sipped a soft drink and admired the snowy view. Found a sleeping kitten on her way back from the loo and spent an enjoyable ten minutes stroking its furry tummy and wishing she could go home. When eventually she went back into the main room to find Michela to suggest they got a cab back to school, she couldn’t find her anywhere. So she went and stood in a quiet corner of the room, losing herself in the shadows while everyone else partied—and that was when she saw him.

Him.

She had never forgotten that moment. It was like being struck by something with no sense of warning that it was coming. As if a velvet sledgehammer had hit her very hard. She was aware that he was tall and his hair was as black as the night sky. His eyes were black too—even from this distance she could see that. He was dressed in a dark suit, which made him look outwardly sophisticated, but she could sense something primitive about him. There was something predatory in the gleam of his eyes, which should have scared her as he began to walk towards her, with a sense of purpose in his step.

But she wasn’t scared.

It was the most illogical thought she’d ever had, but at that moment she felt as if she’d been waiting all her life for him to arrive, and here he was.

Here he was.

He looked her up and down—as if it was his right to study a strange woman as he might study a car he was thinking of buying. But surely no car would make him smile like that—a smile which seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, one that pierced her heart and made her knees feel as if they might have difficulty supporting her.

‘I think you need to dance,’ he said.

‘I’m not a very good dancer.’