But she was scared now, scared enough to please even the most merciless sadist. Not scared for herself ... but for her father. An old-fashioned gentleman, who had grown up in a far different world from Carlo Saracini’s.
She came to a halt in front of the door and briefly closed her eyes. Crawl, she told herself. That’s what he wants. And if he gets what he wants, maybe destroying her father would seem less appealing. She knocked the door and braced herself. It was opened almost immediately by a young man.
‘Come in, Miss Amory,’ he said gravely.
The lounge of the suite was unchanged. Her fluttering gaze fell on an overstuffed lemon brocade sofa and helplessly she thought, It started there. Her skin burned.
She heard Carlo say something in Greek. The product of a marriage between an Italian and a Greek, Carlo was . equally at home in either language. Her spine stiffened. He strolled into view and the door slid softly shut behind her.
Jessica couldn’t take her eyes off him. He repelled her. Every earthy, oversexed inch of him absolutely repelled her and there was a certain deadly attraction to that amount of revulsion, she told herself. He moved with the grace of a prowling tiger. He had the face of a dark fallen angel and the stunning magnetism of a very physical male.
She studied the dark planes of his impassive features, the clear golden eyes set beneath winged black brows and the savagely high cheekbones which lent such fierce strength to his face. Her gaze glossed over the stubborn jut of a decidedly Greek nose and the wide perfection of his narrow mouth before hurriedly falling away.
‘I bet he’s a voracious lover,’ her mother had murmured throatily the first time she met him. ‘He has an incredible sexual charge. I could feel it fifty feet away... any woman with red blood in her veins would. What’s wrong with you?’
Jessica shivered. The red blood in her veins was chilling fast. Carlo was so cold. Although he betrayed nothing visually, she could feel that. And for some reason she couldn’t understand that made her feel physically cold and threatened.
Suddenly the silence was something she might drown in and she leapt into speech. ‘Why did you invite me here?’
‘Take off your coat.’
Her tongue crept out and moistened her dry lower lip. ‘I’m not staying—’
‘Go, then,’ he murmured with a dismissive flick of one lean hand. ‘You waste my time—’
Her teeth clenched. She undid her sash, dropped the coat off her shoulders and cast it aside. ‘I asked you why you invited me here.’
‘I wanted to look at you.’ Burnished golden eyes skimmed over her slender figure, resting on the surprisingly full thrust of her breasts above her tiny waist and sliding with insulting cool down over the feminine swell of her hips.
Jessica had never been at ease with her own body. Her voluptuous curves and her silver-blonde hair drew male eyes like beacons. Both attracted the wrong kind of male attention. She looked like her mother and she despised that awareness. If she hadn’t possessed a distressingly opulent shape and unnaturally bright hair which ironically was entirely natural, she would never have caught Carlo Saracini’s attention six years ago.
Her eyes glittered like brilliant amethysts as she withstood his inspection with her chin as high as she could hold it.
‘Would you like a drink?’ he drawled.
‘No, thank you.’
He poured himself a glass of champagne. ‘I hate to celebrate alone but I understand that you’re afraid of touching alcohol around me. I’m surprised you’re still that naive,’ he remarked softly.
‘What are you celebrating?’ She ignored the dig about alcohol, drawing on every scrap of icy dignity she possessed.
‘You’re a widow,’ he delivered with smooth emphasis.
Jessica was shattered by his can dour, brutally reminded that Carlo had no inhibitions and, similarly, little respect for ordinary standards of decent behaviour.
‘My father—’
Carlo straightened to his full six feet three inches and shifted a silencing hand, dark golden eyes gleaming over her pallor. ‘He stole from me and from his employees. We know that. Do we really need to discuss it?’
‘Do you have to be so callous?’ Jessica demanded, abruptly unfreezing from the spot to move forward in unconscious appeal. ‘He made a huge error of judgement—’
‘The prisons are full of people who make huge errors,’ Carlo incised, his nostrils flaring. ‘Theft? Such a sordid crime and yet so personal—’
‘P-personal?’ Involuntarily, she stammered.
‘It was for your sake alone that I bought Amory Engineering at an inflated price. What you might call a gesture of good faith towards your family—’
‘Good faith?’ A choked laugh fell from her lips as she studied him with unhidden loathing and disbelief. ‘You don’t know what good faith is. It was blackmail. You tried to put pressure on me by playing on my family’s financial position—’
‘I was demonstrating that I look after my own,’ Carlo cut in with ruthless precision.
‘Your own?’ she repeated with revulsion. ‘I was never yours!’
A winged ebony brow was elevated. ‘You were mine the first moment our eyes met but you were too stupid and craven to face that reality—’
‘How dare you!’
‘How dare you enter this room where you lay with me and try to deny what happened here between us?’ Carlo demanded with blistering contempt.
She wanted to hit him. She wanted to scream back from the depths of her humiliation. But she wouldn’t allow herself to be drawn. ‘My father—’ she said very deliberately.
‘Was the most cosseted employee I have ever had,’ Carlo interrupted. ‘I allowed him complete autonomy over a company which was no longer his and in return I expected loyalty, not common theft.’
‘He can sell his house and pay back every penny!’ Jessica swore furiously. ‘Isn’t that enough for you?’
‘Your family home carries two mortgages. Why do you think he stole?’ Carlo returned drily. ‘I wish to hear no more on the subject.’
‘He’s desperately ashamed of himself.’ Jessica hadn’t known that the house was mortgaged. She concealed her dismay with difficulty.
‘This subject bores me.’ Carlo sent her a grim glance.
‘I have no interest in your father except as a means to an end. You can’t influence my judgement with sentimental pleas. There is no sentiment in business—’
‘So you simply brought me here to gloat?’ she gathered with flashing eyes and a look of glowing scorn. ‘You make me sick, Carlo. I will stand by my father through whatever you throw at him—’
‘You like weak men, don’t you?’ he said silkily ‘Men who need mothering and support, men who make you feel that you’re the one in the driver’s seat. Maybe if I’d wept and plucked violin strings instead of demanded, you would -have come to me instead...’
‘Don’t be crass.’ Jessica was trembling with a rage that was becoming increasingly hard to control. ‘I would never have come to you. I hated you for your primitive macho outlook and—’
‘I am not primitive.’ The insertion was immensely quiet but the temperature had shot up. ‘I have Greek blood.’
For a split-second she was tempted to laugh. So vast an amount of blatant pride and arrogance dwelt in that assurance. But then she clashed with golden eyes that burned with