Bought With The Italian's Ring

“Twenty-three.”

“Quite an accomplishment for one so young.”

Her body was so aware of him that her mind couldn’t grapple with the intent in his words. “Please, stop. Just stop. I’m not...good at this.”

His thumb traced the veins over the back of her hand almost absently. “What is the this that you’re not good at?”

“Dealing with men like you. Playing ridiculous games. I’m not like other women you probably know. I’m nothing like the women I know.”

His gaze swept over the tiara in her hair, the diamonds at her throat. “I would say you’re doing just fine. From everything I see, you have Giovanni wrapped around your finger.”

“I don’t know how to decipher your words. I don’t understand why you’re determined to make a spectacle of me in this crowd. I don’t know why you’re—”

Her attraction to Gio’s godson was the last thing she needed. Especially when, clearly, he bore no goodwill toward her.

A finger under her chin, he tilted her face up to look at him. The stark beauty of him hit her hard again. “Why I’m what?”

“Why you’re even touching me like this... I don’t know why I’m reacting to you like this. Why my heart is beating so hard I feel like it might rip out of my chest. Why there’s this...” His eyes flared and Pia caught the words that were bent on pouring out of her mouth. “And why you’re so intent on proving that you affect me like that even as your eyes are full of contempt.”

His mouth lost that cynical curve; his eyes became searching, intent. It seemed she had finally shocked him.

His hold gentled and Pia slipped away. The marble floor was cold against her bare feet reminding her she had left her heels behind.

But she was no more Cinderella than Raphael Mastrantino was a prince.

* * *

Raphael ran a finger along his collar, his body humming with awareness, with unspent energy as if he were a randy youth.

His attraction to Pia—instant and all consuming—defied logic. She was not beautiful, not in the conventional sense, not sophisticated for all her dress and jewelry—and yet there was something irresistibly alluring about her.

Which woman among the society he lived in would so openly admit what she felt for him? And with that artless dismay that she was attracted to him?

No, first there were games, games that every woman played. Even his mother played them when Raphael refused to buy her the latest model of the Vito Viva. Either she cooked his favorite food every night or she shed phony tears over his father’s death—an entire episode meant to guilt him and remind him that he should be a good son who granted each and every one of her expensive wishes.

Even his four sisters played games, with Raphael, and with their boyfriends who had inevitably turned into husbands.

No one admitted in that raw, unsophisticated way what a man made her feel. No one moaned like that—as if she were sinking into a whirlpool of pleasure when a man touched her ankle. No woman that he knew stared at a man with those big, luminous eyes as if he was the answer to her every fantasy.

Coy looks, innuendoes laced with sexual tension, teases, throwing herself at other men to make him jealous—the list of things his ex-wife, Allegra, had tried on him a few years ago were innumerable.

I’m not good at playing games.

There had been a genuine quality to her distress, to her confusion. As if her body was betraying her and she didn’t know what to do.

Either she was truly naive—an anachronism with her faint blushes and her trembling mouth—or she knew just how to appeal to a man as jaded and cynical as he was. Perhaps she had decided that the right way to court his attention would be to cater to that traditional man in him, the Neanderthal that Allegra had called him so many times.

Was that it? Had she thought to counter his distrust by catering precisely to his tastes?

A chill ran down the length of his spine as he made his usual rounds through the mansion as he usually did when visiting.

He had no doubt about how much Gio would have talked about him over the last month. As his godson and his protégé, he was Giovanni’s pride and joy. Raphael had turned the small spare automobile parts company that Gio had handed him into Vito Automobiles, a leading manufacturing company.

Giovanni had been his lifeline when he’d been sinking as a seventeen-year-old. He’d been a light in a long, dark tunnel that Raphael’s weak father had plunged them all into.

Not that it stopped Giovanni from also being manipulative as hell. Throughout the evening, he had stood on the periphery of the crowd, watching, with a satisfied smile on his face. Like a puppeteer intensely delighted with the results of his string pulling.

Whatever the old man was up to, it would eventually fall to Raphael to clean it up. Just as he kept Giovanni’s hounding relatives at bay. Just as he ensured that the leftovers from Gio’s time on the board—men who would stab Raphael in the back before he could blink—didn’t leach away the gains he had made.

Just as he took care of the various and sundry branches of Mastrantino families without any expectations in return.

And yet, as he questioned one of the staff members about Pia, Raphael was suddenly aware that this was unlike any other responsibility he shouldered.

For no bickering ex-wife of Gio’s or grasping cousin of his mother had ever caused his blood to pound like this.

No woman had ever called to his baser instincts like this supposedly innocent granddaughter of his godfather.

CHAPTER TWO (#ucb8867c1-7b3b-5df9-b46d-1c2fd03eca3c)

COOL WATER SLUICED off her back and limbs as Pia swam lap after lap in the indoor pool on Gio’s estate as if the very devil were after her.

Raphael Mastrantino was very much the devil.

The man’s arrogance!

She worked off her fury in the water.

Of all the men to be attracted to.

She groaned and dunked her head in the water. He’d been so warm and solid around her. She could still feel the languorous weight of his hands on her waist. The length of his hard thigh rubbing against hers...

The only satisfaction left to her was that she’d surprised him even as he had mocked and taunted her.

She and Raphael Mastrantino lived in different orbits of life. He wouldn’t have even looked at her, much less danced with her, if she hadn’t been dressed up to the nines and if she wasn’t Gio’s granddaughter. What she didn’t understand though was why. Why had he pounced on her like that?

Her arms lagged on her strokes as her thoughts whirled. Just as she decided to get out of the pool, she saw Raphael standing at the edge.

The floodlights cast an outline along his broad frame.

His white shirt was unbuttoned to the middle of his chest giving a glimpse of ridges of tight muscle with sparse black hair. Her belly swooped. The raven’s wing of his hair had a distinctly rumpled look.

What would it take to shatter that arrogant cynicism, to bring a man like Raphael to his knees?

She shivered at the direction of her thoughts.

A bottle of Pinot Grigio and two wine flutes hung from his fingers. “I had to bribe one of the staff members for your location.”

“I don’t like you, Mr. Mastrantino.”