Toying idly with a spiralling curl, Lizzy shifted her lips into a stubborn purse.
On a heavy sigh he turned and strode away from her. She heard the rustle of clothes. Reluctantly allowing herself a glance in his direction, she saw the jacket to an iron-grey suit land on the back of a bedside chair. By the time he turned back to face her, his tie had been loosened from around the collar of his blue striped shirt and her stomach muscles curled and stung.
The man meant business—she could tell by the look of determination she glimpsed on his lean, sleek honey-gold face before she quickly looked away.
He came back to where she was sitting with her long bare legs curled beneath her and the contract still resting across her thighs. Glancing around him, he reached out for a pretty pale blue brocade chair and brought it close to the sofa, then sat down.
‘Listen,’ he said, leaning forward to rest his forearms on his elegantly clad knees. ‘I cannot marry you unless you sign the prenuptial agreement.’
‘Shame,’ Lizzy drawled, unperturbed, ‘because I don’t agree with it.’
He pulled in a breath. ‘It is purely a business necessity,’ he explained, keeping his voice deliberately level and calm. ‘I am the head of a very prestigious bank. I am also worth more than a king’s fortune. If you don’t sign this my shareholders will lose confidence in me for being too weak to protect myself.’
‘Then don’t tell them,’ Lizzy said rationally.
‘They will find out. Things like this inevitably get out,’ he reasoned. ‘You will be judged a greedy gold-digger and I will be judged a fool.’
‘So I will be judged a greedy gold-digging marriage-breaker.’ Lizzy shrugged. ‘What’s one more label when I’m already covered in them?’
His hand snaked out. He took the book from her fingers and grimly tossed it aside. Next he picked up the fountain pen and held it under her nose.
‘Sign,’ he insisted.
Lizzy stared at the pen but didn’t take it.
‘Please,’ he added.
She released a sigh. ‘Strike out the bit about who gets the children in the event of a divorce,’ she said heavily.
Without uttering a single word in protest Luc picked up the contract, found the relevant clause and struck lines through with the pen and even added his signature in a bold, sure, elegant scrawl.
‘Now do the same with the one about me getting—whatever amount you’ve had put in there,’ she murmured.
‘No,’ he refused.
‘Take it or leave it,’ Lizzy warned stubbornly.
‘Then I will leave it.’ He stood up with the contract and walked away. ‘Our marriage is off. You have an hour to pack your things and get out of my villa, Miss Hadley,’ he informed her. ‘Take my advice and leave by the servant’s entrance if you don’t want to be swamped by the waiting press. Oh, and don’t forget to tell your father that he owes me five and a half million pounds and the bank another five and a half million pounds.’
With that he hooked up his jacket and headed to the door.
Lizzy shot to her feet. ‘All right, I’ll sign!’ she snapped, furious with herself for taking it so far that she’d lost the higher ground.
He paused, all lean, dark, sexy male with a way of holding himself that made Lizzy hate the trickle of awareness she felt heating up her insides.
He turned, that, oh, so clever face revealing absolutely nothing but cool authority as he walked back to her, dropped his jacket on the back of his vacated chair, then silently handed her the contract and the pen.
Spinning away, Lizzy stepped up to a little table by the window and scrawled her signature, then spun back to hand him the contract and the pen.
He took them in his long brown fingers—then calmly dropped them on the floor. The next thing she knew she was locked in his arms. Her shocked exclamation earned her nothing but the fierce pressure of his mouth and the hot, hard, probing thrust of his tongue. In the dim distant swell of her own pounding heartbeat, she was aware of the hunger he fed into that kiss and the tension locked into his hard-muscled frame. One of his hands took rough hold of her hair while the other was a clamp on her hip that kept her pressed tightly up against him.
And if she had never experienced the full force of a man’s passion before, then she was learning all about it now. He kissed her deeply until she whimpered; he let her feel the growing power of his desire. He muttered something when she trembled against him, then he swung her off her feet and carried her to the bed.
‘Don’t,’ she choked out when he lowered her down there and looked as if he was going to follow.
But he didn’t follow. He stood there looking down at her, making her feel small and weak and very vulnerable as he flicked the burning gold heat of his gaze over the hectic rise and fall of her breasts and her tensely curling bare toes.
Those eyes came back to her eyes, then dropped to the reddened swell of her mouth. ‘That’s three euros paid off your debt to me, Miss Hadley,’ he informed her coolly and turned, went to recover the prenuptial contract, his pen and his jacket, and strode out of the door.
But not without Lizzy seeing the heat that streaked across his high cheekbones, or the visible signs of his arousal he’d found impossible to control. Curling up on the bed, she hugged herself and wished she understood what was making her tick these days. Wished she understood why watching him lose his unflappable control had excited her so badly she had to press her thighs together in a futile attempt to smother the sensation.
A helicopter arrived to transport her to her wedding. Shiny white and sparkling, it landed on the stretch of lawn that overlooked the lake. That morning a famous designer had arrived from Milan bringing her wedding gown. He was the first person she had seen besides Luc and the household staff for a week. She knew her father was here in Italy because she’d spoken to him on the phone. She knew that Luc was staying not far away because she’d seen a different helicopter with the De Santis logo glinting gold on his tail fly over the villa twice a day.
And she knew she was still the centre of a media frenzy because a maid had told her, giggling and excited about it, whereas all Lizzy could think was—how was she going to cope when her secure haven here in the villa had been taken away?
The gown bore no resemblance whatsoever to the one that Bianca had been going to wear, she was relieved to discover.
And it was truly beautiful. She hadn’t a clue how the designer had managed to make it to fit her so perfectly and refused to ask the question, but the romantic drift of floating white silk made in the Grecian style disturbed her oddly when she viewed the finished effect in the mirror because she looked so soft and sensually curvy and—vestal.
Luc’s idea of how a bride should look?
‘Don’t chew your bottom lip like that, signorina,’ the designer advised with a critical frown. ‘Your mouth is ripe enough to drive Luciano crazy without you plumping it up some more.’
Lizzy released her lip from her anxious white teeth and slithered her eyes over the silky fall of her hair. Carla the giggly maid had done it for her—washed it, conditioned it, actually almost tamed it. And the barely there hint of makeup applied by Carla’s steady fingers made her look—
‘It is now no mystery to me why he risked ridicule to replace la bella Bianca with what I see standing here,’ the designer said.
‘Don’t,’ Lizzy responded, her voice sounding shaky and thick the way it left her tense aching throat.
Her loyalty to her best friend would not allow anyone to mock Bianca. And she missed her. She wanted to see her, talk to her, find out why she’d