* * *
Cristo had a troubled night of sleep. He dreamt that he was pursuing a woman with the longest legs possible across a misty landscape. Every time he got close she pulled away and laughed and her resistance made him want her more than ever, lust pounding through his veins like an explosive charge. But when he finally caught up with her, she was a different woman, pale blonde hair falling back from her piquant face to highlight big blue enquiring eyes and instantaneous recoil wakened him. He had broken out in a cold sweat, angry frustration and guilt slicing through him for the one woman he couldn’t enjoy having even in his dreams...Betsy, his brother Nik’s estranged wife. His jawline rigid, Cristo sprang out of bed and went for a shower.
His eyes closed tight shut below the refreshing blast of the power shower. He hadn’t meant to wreck his brother’s marriage. There had been no intent on his part to inflict damage, he reasoned painfully. Betsy had come to him for support, devastated by what she had learned from Zarif. But, unhappily, it had been Cristo who first gave Zarif the destructive news that had ruined Nik’s relationship with his wife. Cristo had broken his brother’s confidence and spoken out of turn, but he had never ever at any stage planned to harm Nik or hoped to steal Betsy from him.
For his own benefit, however, he listed the sins he had committed. He had thought that Nik didn’t deserve a woman like Betsy. He had stood by watching while his brother took his wife for granted and he had not warned him of what he was doing. With the basest disloyalty, he had cherished feelings for his brother’s wife. That was why Gaetano’s mess in Ireland was his mess to clean up, Cristo reflected grimly. Nik already had enough on his plate to deal with and Zarif was still suffering the fallout from the loose-tongued confession that had wrecked Nik’s marriage because ever since then the three brothers had barely spoken to each other.
* * *
‘Very mumsy,’ Isa pronounced the next morning with a raised brow when she saw what Belle was wearing. ‘Did that skirt belong to your mother?’
Belle paled. ‘Yes, I kept a couple of things just to remember Mum by. It’s a little big but it looks all right with the belt.’
‘Which is more than you can say about that flapping cardigan and the beads round your neck with that fussy blouse,’ Isa groaned disapprovingly. ‘You look like a young woman trying to look older.’
‘Yes but that’s because you know the truth. It’s daylight now and I need to make a better impression than I did last night,’ Belle pointed out anxiously.
‘Even daylight couldn’t penetrate the amount of make-up you’ve got on,’ her grandmother said drily. ‘But you’re right—it does age you.’
‘Look, I accept that Cristo is eventually going to find out the truth but I want that adoption idea off the table first,’ Belle told her.
‘Even at the cost of infuriating him?’ Isa asked. ‘Gaetano had a very low threshold for provocation.’
‘Whatever happens, I’ll deal with it.’
‘I can’t see how,’ Isa said bluntly. ‘You’re pretty much powerless up against his wealth and intellect.’
Belle trudged up the drive in her high heels, striving not to feel like someone got up in fancy dress. She was not powerless. Money wasn’t everything, nor was intellect. She was not stupid. She had a first-class degree in business and economics and she had the power of the unexpected on her side. He thought she was who she had said she was and, whether he knew it or not, that meant he would be fighting with one hand tied behind his back. Where her mother would have rolled over on command for a Ravelli and said thank you very much for the attention, Belle was programmed to fight dirty.
Cristo watched her approach from the window in the drawing room. No miniskirt in evidence today, but high-heeled court shoes with pointy toes embellished those award-winning legs. He gritted his even white teeth together, stamping out that inappropriate thought. So, she was an attractive woman. It was par for the course: his father’s lovers had always been beauties even while his wives were more of the plain variety. Gaetano had always rated wealth and class above looks. Cristo wondered how much money it would take to persuade the older woman into his way of thinking. He was a skilled negotiator and envisaged few problems because Mary Brophy had not been enriched in any way by her relationship with his father and was currently penniless. Furthermore she couldn’t be the brightest star in the firmament when she had given the wily older man five children he could never have wanted and kept on slogging away for him as a humble housekeeper.
Surprisingly a rare shard of pity stabbed Cristo at that acknowledgement, making him register that where Mary Brophy was concerned he didn’t want to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. He didn’t want to threaten or intimidate her into doing his bidding; he simply wanted a neat and tidy solution to a very messy and potentially embarrassing problem for all their sakes.
‘MR RAVELLI IS in the drawing room,’ Rafe informed her.
Breathing in deeply and slowly to maintain her calm front, Belle walked into the over-furnished room where the ornate drapes and blinds cut out much of the daylight. Cristo swung round to study her and instantly her every sense went on high alert, her backbone stiffening, her slim legs bracing, her soft pink lips parting as she dragged in a sudden extra shot of oxygen.
Cristo scanned her appearance, his nostrils flaring with sudden impatience. She was dressed in a frumpy skirt and cardigan that a maiden aunt might have worn and she had inexplicably teamed that look with the kind of bold make-up a streetwalker might have flaunted like a signpost. And he realised then that there was something he wasn’t seeing, something he wasn’t grasping about this woman, because so far her long-term affair with his father wasn’t adding up at all. Whatever else might have been said about Gaetano, he had been a connoisseur of women and a sophisticate and there was no way his father had returned again and again to Ireland in order to take advantage of the charms of the woman currently standing in front of him.
‘Mr Ravelli...’ she said breathily and she turned her head away to glance out of the window, her hair a sunburst of colour, her fine profile delineated against the light, soft, glossy mouth full and pouting peach pink, long lashes fluttering up on big eyes as green and verdant as Irish grass.
And Cristo ground his perfect white teeth together on the smoulderingly sexual pull of her in that instant, recognising that she had buckets of that inexpressible quality that reduced the male mind to mush and turned a man on hard and fast. For a split second, he wanted to snatch her up into his arms and crush every line of the remarkable body concealed by the unattractive clothing to his own while he discovered if that voluptuous mouth of hers tasted as impossibly good as it looked. His hands closed into fists of restraint while he fought off the erection threatening, struggling to think of something, anything, that would take his thoughts off her mouth and her breasts and her legs and, even worse, what lay between them. That she could be affecting him on such a level outraged his every principle.
Trying to avoid direct contact with those spectacular dark-as-night eyes of his, Belle could feel her colour heightening, awareness of him leaping and pounding through her in an uncontrollable surge. She stared at him, breathless, frozen like someone cornered by a wild animal, and all the time she was noticing things about him: the way his sleek ebony brows defined his eyes, the way the faint line of colour accentuated the hard masculine angle of his high cheekbones, the way the pared-down hollows below enhanced his wide, sensual mouth. Very, very good-looking but, yes, she had noticed that before, certainly didn’t need to keep on noticing it. The atmosphere thickened and the silence screamed at her nerves as every muscle in her body tightened defensively. It was as if there were nobody else in the world but them and what she was feeling: the insidious warmth blossoming in her pelvis, the sudden tightening discomfort of her nipples.
Lean,