The Sicilian Boss's Mistress

The Sicilian Boss's Mistress
PENNY JORDAN

His mistress, for one night… Alessandro Leopardi prides himself on his ability to sort the women from the girls. So when he finds Leonora Thaxton piloting his private jet, he’s outraged! Firstly, he doesn’t employ females – too distracting. Secondly, she’s a ravishing beauty – and he can’t quite believe he was duped. Leonora won’t be getting away with it!The dark-hearted billionaire needs a no-strings mistress for one night, then he’ll let her go. But when the public show becomes a private seduction, Alessandro realises she may be worth more to him than he’d thought…The Leopardi Brothers Sicilian by name… Scandalous, scorching and seductive by nature!

This really wasn’t a good idea,Alessandro warned himself. Shewasn’t his type—and anyway, herrole in his life was only going to betemporary. But what harm couldit really do? In fact it could onlyadd authenticity to their roles.

Alessandro was going to touch her, kiss her— do something more than that, perhaps.

‘You said you didn’t want me,’ Leonora reminded him as he reached for her and drew her towards him with one lazy movement of his arm.

‘You said you didn’t want me,’ he taunted her, rubbing his nose erotically against her own in a way that sent a jolt with the power of a dozen jet engines surging through her body. His words were a whisper as soft as morning clouds against her lips as he added meaningfully, ‘And you lied.’

THE LEOPARDI BROTHERS

Sicilian by name… Scandalous, scorching and seductive by nature!

Three darkly handsome Leopardi men believe it is their duty to hunt down their missing heir— as Sicilians, as sons, as brothers!

‘We must none of us repeat our father’s mistakes. His bitterness and resentment mark him like a physical brand.’ ‘He has accepted now that Antonio did not father a child?’ ‘Reluctantly. I have looked into every relationship Antonio had, even those lasting no more than a matter of hours, and the facts prove beyond any doubt that there is no child.’

While Falcon halts the search, Alessandro has other distractions…ones more worthy of the fiery Sicilian blood running through his veins!

Look out for the final story in this

fabulous new trilogy from Penny Jordan!

THE SICILIAN’S BABY BARGAIN in August

Penny Jordan has been writing for more than twenty years and has an outstanding record: over 170 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Penny Jordan was born in Preston, Lancashire, and now lives in rural Cheshire.

Recent titles by the same author:

CAPTIVE AT THE SICILIAN BILLIONAIRE’S

COMMAND (The Leopardi Brothers)

TAKEN BY THE SHEIKH

THE SHEIKH’S BLACKMAILED MISTRESS

VIRGIN FOR THE BILLIONAIRE’S TAKING

THE SICILIAN BOSS’S MISTRESS

BY

PENNY JORDAN

(http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CHAPTER ONE

THE bed on which they both lay naked was high, draped with richly sensuous silk fabric. But its touch against her flesh was nowhere near as sensuously erotic as his touch, nor could the whisper of the fabric’s kiss compare with the fierce passion of his kiss.

His face was in the shadows, but she knew its features by heart—from the burning intensity of his dark eyes through the arrogance of his profile to the explicit sensuality of his mouth. Excited pleasure curled and then kicked through her. Simply looking at him awoke and aroused the woman in her in a way and at a level that no other man ever could. Just as she was the only woman who was woman enough to truly complement him as a man. They were made for one another, a perfect match, and they both knew it. Only here, with him, could she truly be herself and let down her guard to share her longing and her love.

He made her ache for him in a thousand—no, a hundred thousand different ways, and the way his knowing smile lifted the corners of his mouth told her that he knew that her whole body shuddered in mute delight at the slow, deliberate stroke of his fingertips along the curve of her breast.

She sucked in her breath and closed her eyes. His stroking hand moved lower, over her quivering belly, and then lower…

Guiltily Leonora shook herself out of her daydream and warned herself that if she didn’t start getting ready and stop wasting time she was going to be late.

What a fool she was. Her brothers would certainly think so. She could just imagine the hoots of derision with which they would have greeted her fantasy—and the secret of her own deeply sensual nature.

That was the trouble with growing up a girl sandwiched in the middle of two brothers. The three of them had been born so close together that Piers was only eighteen months older than her, and Leo a year younger. The fact that they had lost their mother so early, killed by a speeding driver as she was on her way to meet them from junior school, had naturally affected them all—including their father, an ex-professional sportsman who had retired from his sport to manage and then take over a sportswear manufacturing company. Their father had believed in fostering competition between his children as a way of preparing them for the adult world. He was also very much a stiff-upper-lip kind of man. After their mother’s death Leonora had felt she had to work even harder at being ‘one of the boys’ for her father’s sake, so that she wouldn’t let the side down by crying like a girl.

Her father loved them all very much, but he was an old-fashioned man’s man, and he hadn’t been very good at showing that love to a motherless daughter. Not that Leonora blamed him for anything. In fact she was fiercely defensive of both him and her brothers, and they were even as adults a close-knit family. But not so close knit that they hadn’t welcomed their new stepmother when their father had remarried three years ago. But watching her father unbend and get in touch with his emotions under the gentle tutelage of his second wife had reinforced for Leonora how much she had lost with her mother.

It was only her pride that kept her going sometimes, as she struggled with her growing need to be the woman she instinctively knew she might have been against the often harsh reality of being the competitive tomboy girl her father had taught her to be. Sometimes she felt so helpless and lost that she was afraid that she would never find her real self. Sometimes when she was being true to her real self and one of her brothers laughed at her she felt so crushed that she retreated immediately into the combative sibling hostility of their childhood.

And sometimes, like now, she took refuge in private dreams.

The fact that she needed to fantasise about being with a man who loved and desired her, and with whom she could have wonderful sensual sex, instead of actually knowing what it felt like from first-hand experience was, of course, partly a result of the way she had grown up. Listening to her brothers discussing their own sexual experimentation had made her wary of being judged and found wanting, as they so often seemed to judge other girls.

Leonora didn’t consider herself to be the cringing, oversensitive type, but there was something about the way her brothers, as pubescent boys, had talked about girls—giving them scores for availability, looks and sexual skill—that had made her believe that she never, ever wanted to wonder if some boy was talking to his friends about her in the way that her brothers had about girls. Because of that she had fought against and denied the depth of her own passionate nature, concealing it instead with a jokey ‘one of the boys’ manner.

Whilst other girls had been learning to be confident with their sexuality on their way to becoming women, somehow she had learned to fear hers.

It was different now, of course. Her brothers had grown up and, at twenty-seven and twenty-four, were well past the teenage stage of discussing their sex lives and their girlfriends with anyone.

She had grown up too, and at twenty-five felt uncomfortably self-conscious about her still-virginal state, and very thankful that no one, most especially her brothers, knew about it. Not that she allowed herself to think about her lack of sexual experience very often, other than in that self-protective jokey way she had developed. She had more important things to worry about, such as getting a job. Or rather getting the job, she admitted, as she stepped into the shower and turned on the water.

As children, all three of them had been skinny and tall. Whilst Piers and Leo had broadened out, Leonora—whilst not skinny—was still very slender for her five-feet-nine-inch height. But her skin was still golden from a late October holiday in the Canary Islands the previous year, and her breasts were softly rounded, with dark pert nipples, and just that bit too full for her to go braless. In her tomboy days she had longed to be able to do so, hating the unwanted restriction of ‘girls’ clothes’ as she struggled to compete with her elder brother and at the same time make sure that her younger brother knew his place.

The life-long fate of the poor middle child, she thought ruefully, and a struggle that was still ongoing now.

She was out of the shower as speedily as she had stepped into it, crossing her bedroom floor on long, slim legs and drying herself as she did so, her long dark hair a tangle of damp curls.

Her pilot’s uniform lay on the bed, and her heart did a somersault as she looked at it. Leo had complained so much about the loss of his spare uniform over Christmas, when they had all gone home to Gloucestershire to spend Christmas, that she had felt sure that someone in the family would suspect her—especially as Leo had already promised to let her take his place. But luckily nothing had been said.

Poor Mavis, who worked at the dry cleaners two streets away from the tiny London flat Leonora rented, had protested that there was no way she could adjust the jacket to fit her, never mind the hat. But Leonora had told her that she had every faith in her, and ultimately that faith had been rewarded.

Leonora knew that many of her friends thought that she was very lucky to work freelance, giving private lessons in Mandarin, but it hadn’t been with becoming a language coach in mind that Leonora had honed her gift for languages, adding Russian and Mandarin to her existing French and Italian.

Life just wasn’t fair at times, and it seemed to treat a person even more unfairly when she was a girl with two brothers. She had been the one to say first that more than anything else she wanted to learn to fly and become an airline pilot, but it was her younger brother who was now on his way to having her dream job—piloting the privately owned jet of the billionaire owner of a private airline based near Florence—whilst she, with all her flying qualifications, was teaching Mandarin. But then, as her elder brother had commented on more than one occasion, it was her own fault for insisting on qualifying in a world in which it was always going to be difficult for a woman to make her mark.

There were women pilots, of course—any number of them, but a humdrum job flying in and out of one of Britain’s regional airports wasn’t what Leonora wanted. Nor was it what she had trained for. No—her aspirations went much higher than that.