Hired For Romano's Pleasure. Chantelle Shaw

me. You are so wrong.’ She leapt to her feet, her breasts rising and falling jerkily. Now that she was standing, she was closer to Torre and trapped by the chair behind her knees. He watched the pulse hammering at the base of her throat and wanted to press his mouth to it, lick his way along her collarbone and taste her silken skin.

      ‘Jules and I are friends. He’s sweet and kind, but I don’t suppose you can understand that it is perfectly possible for a man and woman to have a platonic relationship. You’re so...macho.’ She made it sound like an insult, like she was too refined to bear the idea of hard, raw masculinity. ‘Not everything is about sex.’

      ‘My stepbrother is a man, like any other man,’ Torre said flatly. ‘He wants to have sex with you and it’s not hard to see why.’

      He roamed his eyes over her, noting how her silk dress moulded the small, perfect mounds of her breasts with their jutting nipples. He could hear the harsh sound of his own breaths and the quickening of hers, and he saw the expression in her eyes change from anger to awareness that darkened those green flecks in her gaze to olive.

      ‘At lunch I watched Jules panting over you like a dog when it catches the scent of a bitch on heat. He’s besotted with you, and you give him just enough encouragement to keep him sniffing around you like a devoted puppy.’

      The colour fled from her face, leaving her skin so pale it was almost translucent, and the fine blue lines of her veins were visible beneath the surface. ‘You’re disgusting.’ Her voice shook slightly. ‘What the hell gives you the right to talk to me like that?’

      ‘I like and respect my stepbrother and I’m not going to sit back and watch him make a fool of himself over you when it’s obvious what your game is.’

      ‘And what is my game?’ she snapped.

      ‘The same game that you tried with me eight years ago. But even though you played your trump card and lost your virginity to me—presumably in the hope that I would marry you—I recognised that you had the same mercenary tendencies as your mother when I found you trying to steal some jewellery that had belonged to my mother.’