Bedding His Virgin Mistress

Bedding His Virgin Mistress
PENNY JORDAN

Ricardo Salvatore despised greedy women–was Carly just one more? He planned to take over the company that Carly managed. So why not include her in the bargain…? Unloved and unwanted as a child, Carly had never let anyone this close. She and Ricardo were working closely together, and their sizzling attraction boiled over.In the heat of passion, there was no hiding place: Ricardo was stunned when he learned the real truth about Carly, just as she discovered his real reason for bedding her….

EXCLUSIVE! Tall, dark and handsome billionaire Ricardo Salvatore has proved he’s just as good at spending millions as he is at making them—and it’s all on a new woman…

She’s London-based party planner Carly Carlisle. And the pretty blonde has been on his arm at parties in St. Tropez, the Hamptons and a chi-chi French château. At every event they flew in on his private jet or his chopper—and stayed in exclusive private and luxurious villas near the party venues, no expense spared. Ricardo even splashed out nearly £10,000 in St. Tropez on designer frocks for Carly Carlisle, fuelling rumors that the rather shy (and allegedly virginal) Carly is now almost certainly his mistress.

All the society snipers are speculating that Carly is just another bimbo after his cash. After all, the St. Tropez shopping expedition was simply because Carly “lost her suitcase”—and they think that’s the oldest trick in the book. But my sources confirm that Carly Carlisle is actually very generous. And there is no mistaking the sheer lust between these two—we’re talking hot, hot, hot! And I say lucky you, Carly—Ricardo is a legend between the sheets….

PENNY JORDAN has been writing for more than twenty years and has an outstanding record: over 150 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honor and Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Penny Jordan was born in Lancashire, England, and now lives in rural Cheshire.

Penny Jordan

BEDDING HIS VIRGIN MISTRESS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

CARLY glanced discreetly at the small mixed party she was minding in her role as partner in one of the country’s most prestigious and exclusive event-organising businesses, and wondered how long it would be before she could leave. The event was a fortieth birthday party for a banker and he’d chosen to have it at the London Nightclub CoralPink. It would not have been the venue she would have chosen but in a business where ultimately the customer was always right that was not her decision to make.

Already, though, she could see that their client’s wife was beginning to look less than pleased at the amount of attention her husband was giving the upmarket eye candy on view. There were already half a dozen empty bottles of Cristal champagne on their table, and another of the men was chatting up a girl who had been walking past, inviting her to join them. Male libidos and wifely tempers were both beginning to rise ominously in the club’s hormone-drenched heat, Carly realised dispiritedly.

She had balked at this assignment all along, knowing it wasn’t her cup of tea. She preferred the kind of event she had supervised over the weekend—a jolly surprise eightieth birthday party held for a sharp-witted grandmother by her large family. It had taken some delicate finessing of finances on Carly’s part to ensure that everything they had wanted was achievable within their modest budget, and she had been justifiably proud of the end result.

Mike Lucas’s wife was going to explode in a minute if he didn’t stop flirting with the young girl he had grabbed. Carly swiftly got up and made her way towards him, intent on defusing the situation before it got out of hand.

Ricardo didn’t know why the hell he had allowed himself to be persuaded to come here. His appetite for the proposed business deal that had brought him here had already soured. The whole set-up was everything he loathed, and could best be summed up as rich, immoral men being pursued by greedy, amoral women, he decided cynically.

His attention was caught by the occupants of a table several feet away. A group of forty-something men, paunchy and sweating from a combination of the club’s heat and the effect of the skimpily dressed young women thronging the room. Their wives and partners might be younger than they, but they were nowhere near as young as the girls the men were watching—apart from one. She was younger than the rest but still a woman and not a girl, and as Ricardo watched her she got up from her seat and walked round to the other side the table, where one of the men had started to paw a giggling leggy brunette for whom he had just ordered a bottle of champagne.

‘Mike.’ Carly smiled as she leaned towards him, strategically placing herself between him and the unknown girl.

‘Hello, sexy. Want some champagne?’

Mike Lucas made a grab for her, pulling her down onto his knee and putting his hand on her breast.

Immediately Carly froze, warning anger zig-zagging through the glance she gave him, but Mike was too drunk to notice. Still grinning, he pulled the other girl towards him as well. Unlike Carly, she made it plain that she was enjoying the attention.

‘Look what I’ve got,’ Mike called out to his friends, one hand on Carly’s breast and the other on the other girl’s. He jiggled them inexpertly and boasted drunkenly, ‘Hey, what about this for a threesome, guys?’

Ricardo’s hooded gaze monitored the small unsavoury scene. The sight of women selling their bodies was nothing new to him. He had grown up in the slums of Naples, and these women—these spoiled, pampered, lazy society women, with their designer clothes and their Cartier jewellery—were, as far as he was concerned, far more to be despised than the prostitutes of the Naples alleys.

He pushed back his chair and stood up, throwing a pile of banknotes down onto the table. The man who had invited him to the club was talking to someone at the bar, but Ricardo did not bother to go over and take any formal leave of him before quitting the club.

As a billionaire he had no need to observe the niceties that governed the behaviour of other, less wealthy men.

Ricardo studied the newspapers the most senior of his quartet of male PAs had left on his desk for him. He read them as he drank the second of his ritual two cups of thick, strong black coffee. Some tastes could be acquired, but others could never totally be destroyed or denied. He frowned, a look that was a formidable blend of anger and pride forking like lightning in the almost basalt darkness of his eyes.

He was not a prettily handsome man, but he was a man who commanded and indeed demanded the visual attention of others—especially women, who were aware immediately of the aura of raw, challenging male sexuality he exuded.

He reached for the first newspaper, flicking dismissively and contemptuously through its pages until he found what he wanted. A smile, in reality no more than cynically bared white teeth against the warmth of the skin tone that proclaimed his Italian heritage, curled his mouth without reaching his eyes as he glanced swiftly down the newspaper’s much trumpeted, newly revised ‘Rich List’.

He didn’t have to look very far to find his own name. Indeed he could count on the fingers of one hand the names that came above his.

Ricardo Salvatore, billionaire. Estimated fortune…Ricardo gave a short, grim laugh as he looked at a figure that fell well short of his actual wealth.

Beneath his name there were also a couple of lines describing him truthfully as single and thirty-two years old, and untruthfully as having founded his fortune on an inheritance from his uncle. A further line offered the information that, in recognition of his charitable donations to a variety of good causes, it was rumoured that Ricardo Salvatore was to be given a knighthood.

Now Ricardo did smile.

A knighthood! Not a bad achievement for someone who had been orphaned by the deaths of his young Italian mother and British father in a rail accident, and who, because of that, had ended up growing up virtually alone in the worst of Naples’ slums. It had been a tough and sometimes brutal way to grow up, but occasionally Ricardo felt that he had more respect and admiration for the companions of his youth than he did for the people he now mixed with.

Family ties and close friendships were not things that had ever formed a part of the fabric of his life, but he did not feel their absence. In fact, he actively liked his solitariness, and his corresponding freedom from other people’s demands. He had learned young how to survive—by listening and observing—and how to make his own rules for the way he lived his life. He drew his strength from what existed within him rather than what other people thought of him. He had been just eighteen, fiercely competitive and ambitious, when he had gambled for and won the money that had enabled him to buy his first container ship.

He dropped the newspaper onto his desk, picked up the file adjacent to it marked ‘Potential Acquisitions’ and started to speed-read through its contents. Ricardo was always on the look out for promising new acquisitions to add to his portfolio, and Prêt a Party would fit into it very neatly.

The first time he had heard of the organisation had been when a business acquaintance had mentioned it in passing, commenting that he was a family friend of its young owner. In fact, knowing Marcus Canning as he did, he was rather surprised that a man as financially astute as Marcus hadn’t seen the potential of the business for himself.

He gave a small shrug. Marcus’s reasons for not acting on the potential of Prêt a Party were of relatively little interest to him. By nature Ricardo was a hunter, and, like all hunters, he enjoyed the adrenalin-boosting thrill of the chase almost as much as he enjoyed the ultimate and inevitable kill at the end of it.

Prêt a Party might only represent a small ‘kill,’ but Ricardo’s preparations for the chase would still be carefully planned.