The Unlikely Mistress

‘Oh, I’m not complaining,’ he murmured, as his eyes drifted over her. ‘Your cheekbones are quite exquisitely pronounced and your legs are just the right side of slender. I suppose you have to work at it, the same as every other woman.’

Sabrina let her gaze fall from his face, staring instead at the pink-tipped toes which peeped through her strappy sandals, remembering how she’d forced herself to paint them, telling herself that out of such small, unimportant rituals some kind of normal life would be resumed.

‘Sabrina,’ he said softly. ‘What’s the matter? It was supposed to be a compliment. Have I insulted you? Embarrassed you?’

She looked up again. Now would be the perfect time to tell him that the weight had simply fallen away after Michael’s death. But tell him that and she would be back playing the unwanted role of the bereaved fiancée. Was it selfish of her to want to play a different part? To want to feel the sun warm and alive on her cheeks and see the unmistakable glint of appreciation in the eyes of the man who stood looking down at her? To feel alive again, instead of half-dead herself?

She shook herself out of her reverie and forced a smile which, to her suprise, felt as if it wanted to stay on her mouth. ‘By telling me I’m thin? Come on, Guy—did you ever hear of a woman who was offended by that?’

Her smile was like the sun nudging out from behind a cloud, he thought. ‘I guess not.’ Come to think of it, he didn’t have much appetite himself, and certainly not for conventional fare.

Instead, he found himself wondering how her lips would taste and what the scent of her breath would be like against his. He shook his head to dispel the sensual imagery. ‘Why don’t we have coffee and a pastry at one of these cafés in the square?’ he suggested steadily. ‘It’s warm enough to sit outside in the sunshine.’

They found a vacant table and ordered pastries with their coffee, the lightest and most beautiful cakes imaginable, and Guy thought that they tasted like sawdust in his mouth. And saw that Sabrina had taken exactly two mouthfuls herself.

‘It must be the heat.’ She shrugged in response to the mocking question in his eyes.

‘So it must.’ He echoed the lie, knowing that their lack of hunger had nothing to do with the temperature.

He marched her through the city like a professional tour guide, as if determined that he should show her everything. Sabrina wondered what had provoked this sudden, relentless pace, but she was too bewitched by him to care.

They stood side by side on the Bridge of Sighs and stared into the dark waters beneath.

‘Look down there,’ said Sabrina suddenly. ‘And think of the thousands of tourists who have stood here like this and been affected by this amazing city.’

His heart missed a beat as enchantment washed over him. ‘You mean the way it’s affecting us now?’

‘Yes.’ She told herself it wasn’t that remarkable for him to have echoed her thoughts, but still her voice trembled. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

He wanted her, he thought. And she wanted him. ‘Are you going to have dinner with me tonight, Sabrina?’ he asked suddenly.

She didn’t even stop to think about it, or bother to wonder whether she’d made it too easy for him. ‘You know I am.’

He nodded, the thrill of anticipation making his heart pick up speed. ‘Tell me where you’re staying and I’ll pick you up at eight.’

‘You don’t have to do that.’

Her reluctance sharpened an appetite already keenly honed. ‘Oh, but I insist,’ he contradicted softly.

But pride made her match his determination. He must be some kind of hot-shot to be staying at that hotel. She didn’t want him seeing her humble little pensione, emphasising how great the differences between them. Just now they were as close to equal as they would ever be and she wanted to hold onto that. ‘I’ll meet you in the square. Honestly, Guy, I’m an independent woman, you know!’

‘Well, sometimes a man doesn’t want an independent woman,’ he ground out. He couldn’t believe he’d just said that, but he had. Or that he’d caught her by the arm to feel the soft tremble of flesh where his fingers burnt so delectably against her bare skin. ‘Are you always this damned stubborn?’

Something in the heated frustration of his question made Sabrina’s blood sing with a glorious inevitability, and she had the sense of being led towards something which defied all logic. It was liberation at its most intense and powerful, and she was no longer heartbroken, bereaved Sabrina. For one enchanted moment she stood poised on the brink of something magical.

She smiled. ‘Only if I need to be.’

There was a long and dangerous pause. ‘But I’m used to getting my own way,’ he told her steadily.

‘I know you are. It shows.’

She looked down at his tanned fingers which still lay against her white skin, and he let his hand fall, perplexed by his own actions. He was a man whose reputation hinged on being in control—so why was he acting as if he were auditioning for the leading role in a Western movie?

‘Was I being unbearably high-handed?’ he asked her, missing the satin feel of her skin beneath his fingertips.

She took one last look at him as she stepped into the water-taxi which had slid to a halt beside them. Not unbearably anything, she thought. You wouldn’t know how to be. ‘Only a little.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll see you tonight at eight.’

And Guy was left staring at the back of her bright blonde head, his heart thundering with a mixture of admiration and frustration.

CHAPTER THREE (#uffc8f8ce-24dc-5584-8131-b3fdf187f3a8)

SABRINA was twenty minutes late. Guy had never had a woman keep him waiting in his life and he couldn’t decide whether to be irritated or intrigued. He glanced down at his watch for the umpteenth time and actually began to wonder whether he’d been stood up.

But then he saw her crossing the square, wearing some slinky little silver-grey dress with a filmy silver stole around her pale shoulders, her legs looking deliciously long in spindly, high-heeled shoes.

Sabrina spotted his tall, brooding figure straight away, as if he had been programmed to dominate her whole horizon. He was wearing a pale grey unstructured suit which did nothing to disguise the hard, muscular body beneath. And, outwardly at least, he looked completely relaxed, but as she grew closer she could see a coiled kind of tension, which gave him the dark, irresistible shimmer of danger. He looked completely relaxed, but there was no mistaking the watchful quality which made his grey eyes gleam with subdued promise.

She had very nearly not come tonight, lifting the telephone to ring Guy’s hotel more than once, telling herself that this was fast turning into something she hadn’t planned. Something she wasn’t sure if she could handle.

Or stop.

But something had prevented her cancelling—something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Maybe it was the memory of that first, glorious sight of him. Leaving behind the knowledge that if she were never to see him again, then the world would never seem quite the same place.

His smile widened as she approached, but he made no move towards her. Let her come to me, he thought. He wanted to watch the way she moved—her hips unconsciously thrusting forward, the fluid sway of her bottom. He imagined those hips crushed beneath the hard contours of his own, and swallowed. Come to me, baby, he thought silently. Come.

‘Hello,’ Sabrina said breathlessly, but something in the darkening of his eyes seemed to have robbed her of the ability to suck air into her lungs.

‘Hello.’ So. No blurted little excuses for being late. No shrugged or coy reasons. Her carelessness sharpened his desire for her even more intensely and he felt his senses clamour into life. ‘Where would you like to eat?’

There was a new, dangerous quality about Guy tonight, Sabrina thought. A danger which should have frightened her, but instead filled her with a sense of almost unendurable excitement. And inevitability. ‘You know the city far better than I do,’ she said huskily. ‘You choose.’

‘OK,’ he said easily, and for a moment felt the penitent shimmer of guilt. As if he hadn’t just spent an hour under the hammering power of the shower, deciding exactly where he wanted to take her. He had opened his mouth to the torrent of water which had beaten down on him, his body growing hard with frustration as he remembered that Sabrina had stood naked beneath these same icy jets.

Except that he doubted whether she had needed an ice-cold shower to ward off a desire which was stronger than any desire he could remember.

The restaurant was close by and its menu was famous. It was private and discreet but not in the least bit stuffy; he wondered whether she would comment on its proximity to his hotel, but she didn’t.

And it wasn’t until they were seated in the darkened alcove he had expressly requested that he relaxed enough to expel a long, relieved breath. She was here, he thought exultantly. Sabrina was here. Her hair was all caught back in a smooth pleat at the back of her head and he wanted to reach out and tumble it all the way down her back.

‘You look beautiful,’ he said slowly.

The way he was looking at her made her feel beautiful. She savoured the compliment, held onto it and tried it out in her mind. ‘Why, thank you,’ she said demurely.

‘I thought you weren’t coming.’ He couldn’t believe he’d just said that either. Hadn’t the hard lessons of his childhood meant that he’d spent his whole life striving for some kind of invulnerability?

‘I nearly didn’t.’ Oh, God, she thought, please don’t ask me why. Because I might just have to tell you that I knew, if I came, where I might end up spending the night.

‘What changed your mind?’