Gavin’s outraged voice made Cassie slowly count to ten as she pulled a dress from the small wardrobe and laid it in her open suitcase. With a smile of confidence she was far from feeling, she turned round to face him.
‘For heaven’s sake, Gavin,’ she chided gently. ‘Living in your flat was only ever a temporary stay! I’m twenty-one and this is the twenty-first century—why, in some cultures I’d have been married off at the age of fourteen!’
Gavin’s blue eyes bored into hers. ‘So he’s offering to marry you, is he? This Giancarlo whatever-his-name is?’
‘Vellutini. His name’s Vellutini,’ she said, liking the way her lover’s name tasted like velvet on her lips—a soft and sensuous caress, just like his mouth. Until the rest of Gavin’s words broke into her daydream and tainted it with the stark edge of reality. ‘No, of course he isn’t offering to marry me! We’ve only just met.’
‘You’ve only just met and yet you’re moving in with him?’
‘So I’m being impulsive!’
‘You’re being ridiculous.’
‘That’s your opinion, Gavin—and I don’t happen to agree with it.’
‘You know he’s a billionaire?’
Cassie stared at Gavin, her heart missing a beat. ‘I knew he was wealthy—of course I did—but how the hell did you find out a detail like that?’
‘Oh, come on, Cassie—don’t be so naïve! You think someone like that doesn’t have a huge profile on the Internet? I looked him up. He’s thirty-five, for heaven’s sake—and he’s an international playboy! While you’re just a sweet, ordinary girl from Cornwall who’s batting way, way out of her league.’ He glowered. ‘A man like that will just chew you up and spit you out when he’s finished with you.’
Cassie bit back the indignant retort which flew to her lips, telling herself that Gavin only had her best interests at heart. He’d known her since they’d been at school together and she knew he had feelings for her himself. She’d never encouraged those feelings—but in a way that had only inflamed his protective interest in her. Good-looking himself, in a blond and even-featured kind of way, he had no trouble attracting women—but it was the one who eluded him who held the most allure. Maybe that was the case with all men, thought Cassie with a sudden dejection—remembering the almost indecent haste with which she had accepted Giancarlo’s offer to be his mistress. In which case, it didn’t hold out much hope for the future.
But she wasn’t holding out any hope for the future. She wasn’t completely stupid. She was simply being a modern woman and taking the relationship for what it was, like lots of women did. Surely that was enough.
‘He’s my lover,’ she told Gavin boldly, because it still sounded like a foreign word. ‘Women do have lovers, you know. And I’m going to live with him for a few weeks.’
‘And then what?’
‘Then nothing.’ Cassie shrugged with what she hoped was just the right amount of nonchalance. ‘I’ll be going back to Cornwall to carry on with my life while he carries on with his.’
‘You think it’ll be that easy, do you?’
‘Yes, Gavin,’ she said firmly—because deep down Cassie knew that she wanted this far too much to risk listening to the frightened little voice which made her wonder if he was right. ‘Actually I do.’
He scowled. ‘Well, you know where I am when you need all the pieces picking up.’
It wasn’t the blessing she would have chosen but Cassie was determined not to let anything dent her excitement. How could it, when Giancarlo’s unbelievable request over lunch had sent her senses into overdrive? And how could she possibly have resisted when he had made the arrangement sound like the perfect solution—and the only sensible option to take? He had leaned across the restaurant table and his ebony gaze had washed over hers, making her feel weak and warm inside and overwhelmed by an irresistible urge to have him kiss her again.
‘I am feeling a little guilty, mia bella,’ he had murmured. ‘As if I had sat you down for a sumptuous banquet and then whisked you away after the first course. If I’d known that you were inexperienced, I would have—’
He had paused at this point, leaving Cassie to peer at him anxiously. ‘Would have what?’
‘I made an assumption that there had been other lovers before me,’ he said, quickly skating over the question. ‘Why wouldn’t I have done? A woman of your age is usually experienced. And a man makes love differently if a woman is innocent. The pace is different—and so are his expectations. Your introduction to sex is not what I would have wished—despite the fact that I gave you much pleasure.’ Dark eyes had glittered with a message which had made her heart race. ‘So come and stay with me and I will show you even more. How does that sound?’
Cassie had blushed. It had sounded like heaven, even when he had said something else—something which would have had any sensible woman running for the hills.
‘You know that this—arrangement—is of a purely temporary nature, bella? That it ends when it ends—and that means it’s over. I need to be honest with you about that.’
Was that honesty or was it cruelty? Cassie didn’t care. She could handle it because she wanted him far too much to listen to the voice of reason. As she hugged Gavin goodbye and ran outside her Greenford flat to find Giancarlo’s car sitting purring at the kerbside she couldn’t quell a great surge of exhilaration. Because this was the most exciting thing to have ever happened to her and she was going to enjoy every second of it.
Ignoring the nagging little voice which questioned whether this was going to be a romantic high-point from which she would never recover, Cassie settled back in the car as she was driven to Giancarlo’s house.
The door was opened by Gina, a careful smile on her face—her expression impossible to read behind the trendy, black-framed spectacles.
‘Hello, Cassandra,’ she said. ‘I understand that I am to welcome you. Giancarlo won’t be back from the office until six—but he said you were to settle yourself in. Shall I show you to your dressing room—so that you can unpack—or would you prefer me to do that for you?’
Cassie hesitated. Gina didn’t sound at all fazed by the fact that a stranger was moving into her well-ordered house. Did she have to cope with this scenario on a regular basis? she wondered. And the last thing she wanted was the elegant housekeeper giving her rather humble clothes the once-over. But she hid all her misgivings behind an equally careful smile. ‘Thanks—but I can unpack myself.’
She followed Gina upstairs to a previously unseen room which led directly off the master bedroom—one containing shelves, cupboards, floor-length mirrors and another swish en-suite bathroom. It was ridiculously large for her meagre amount of belongings but, once Gina had gone, she unpacked. And once she’d put away her few bits and pieces and placed a framed photo of her parents on the window sill it felt a lot more like home.
Six o’ clock seemed like ages away and she took a long bath and washed her hair, luxuriating in the scent-filled steam from the bathroom, and was just sitting wrapped in a towel in front of the dressing table when the door opened—and in walked Giancarlo.
It was the first time she’d seen him since lunch yesterday—and her heart began to pound with a trembling kind of excitement as she turned round to find his gaze raking over her. For a moment he didn’t say anything—just studied her from between narrowed eyes—and Cassie sat frozen like a statue. What if he was now regretting his decision—if the reality of coming home and finding her in situ was threatening his bachelor independence?
She swallowed. Say something. Don’t just sit there. ‘H-hello.’
Once more he allowed his eyes to rake over her—at the soft white towel covering