Damiano Leone Fabrino De Santis, the 34-year-old supreme head of the great and vast De Santis banking empire also called Dami by his very close friends.
A tense little quiver made a sudden strike down Charley’s front, and in pure self-defense, she snatched up a silvery silk crocheted snug from the bed and hurriedly tied it across her front while wishing to goodness that she didn’t experience that same crazy tense quiver every time she let herself think about him.
He was strange—a truly intimidating mix of smoothly polished, cool sophistication and lean, dark, sexy good looks. Adelina purred around him like a sleek kitten, which seemed to amuse him, but then Adelina was Italian, and as a race of people they were like that, open and warm and more touchy-feely than the British—her, Charley thought, making the rueful distinction.
She’d never purred around any man and couldn’t imagine ever wanting to—which made the way she quivered around Dami De Santis all the more disturbing to her peace of mind. He wasn’t her type. He was too much of everything. Too big and tall, too lean and dark, too sexy and handsome—too crushingly cool and terrifyingly enigmatic, she decided as she hooked up her little silver beaded evening bag and headed for the door.
They’d met only once before she came to Milan, in London several months ago, at the private dinner Adelina’s parents had held to introduce their future son-in-law to their English friends. Dami had come as such a shock to Charley that she had not been able to stop her eyes from constantly drifting in his direction because he was so far from her idea of the kind of man her friend liked.
"What do you think?" Adelina asked her.
"Intimidating," she said, because that evening was the first time the tense quiver had struck. "He scares me to death."
Adelina just laughed, but then she’d been laughing at everything. happy—in love again—high as a kite. "You’ll get used to him, Charley," she promised. "He isn’t nearly as awesome once you get to know him."
Want to bet?
The next time she’d met him had been just a week ago, she recalled as she pushed the button to call the lift. He’d arrived here at the hotel looking for Adelina and found Charley standing in reception, having just arrived in Milan. He’d come over to her—of course he would do that with impeccable manners like his, she reasoned. Yet she still had not been able to stop the next quiver from making its strike.
He’d been angry that Adelina had not been at the airport to meet her—she’d seen the anger snap at his handsome, dark features just before he’d blanked it out. When she’d said quickly that she hadn’t been expecting to be met, his wide, sensual mouth had tugged into a telling flat line of disapproval.
Cool, calm, and used to ordering people around, he’d then taken it upon himself to organize her arrival by making sure she had a nice suite of rooms and had even gone so far as to escort her up here to check the suite out for himself.
It had been the moment when his hand arrived at the base of her spine to politely usher her out of the lift that the next quiver had struck, shooting down her front like a flaming arrow and making her jerk away from him like a scalded cat, only to make her feel really foolish for doing it. Other than to send her one of his cool, steady looks, he’d let his hand fall to his side and thankfully made no comment.
Now here she was waiting to ride the same lift down to the mezzanine floor of the hotel, where they were all gathering for drinks before they left. And if she’d avoided Dami De Santis like the plague for the rest of this week, Charley had a horrible suspicion she was not going to be able to do that tonight. The party was too small, and the reserved boxes at La Scala were too intimate. Her only hope was to manage to wrangle it so she sat in a different box from him.
There was a mirror hanging on the wall by the lift, and she diverted her attention to it to push the stray curl off her brow. It flopped back down again like a renegade. She should not have decided to pin it all up because it just wasn’t going to behave, as she predicted. But giving in and letting her hair hang down around her shoulders in a tumble of loose, glossy corkscrews had only made her face look paler and her grey-green eyes look too big.
Like a frightened rabbit, she compared herself, wrinkling her nose as she gave the errant curl a teasing tug and watched it spring back into place again.
It had to be that precise moment when the lift doors slid open to reveal none other than the great man himself. Their eyes clashed for a startled second. Knowing he’d caught her pulling silly faces at her own reflection was enough to flood color into Charley’s cheeks.
"Oh," she said, just too disconcerted to keep the dismay from sounding in her voice. "Are you staying here too?" I didn’t know.
Brief amusement lit the unusual gold color of his eyes. "Good evening, Charlotte." He always called her Charlotte in that dark, deep, slightly lilting Italian accent of his. "Are you coming in?"
She let her eyes run over him. He was wearing a conventional black silk dinner suit and was leaning casually against the rear wall of the lift, which should have helped to diminish his daunting height a little and that overwhelming sense of presence he always carried around with him—but didn’t.
And the idea of stepping into a lift with him again did strange things to the nerves in her legs as she made them move. Finding a tense smile to flick his way, she then turned her back on him to watch as the doors closed on them.
Silence hummed as they waited. She could feel his eyes on her. Tension made her bite into the soft tissue of her inner lip.
"You look very beautiful tonight," he murmured softly.
Charley had to fight down an inner wince. She knew what she looked like, and she knew what he was seeing—the poor best friend decked out in the dress his betrothed had worn a couple of months ago at the party in London.
So, "no, I don’t," she therefore responded curtly.
It was a relief when the lift doors opened onto the elegant splendor of the hotel’s mezzanine lounge bar. As she went to step out, that hand again arrived at the base of her spine, and this time she froze where she stood.
It just wasn’t fair. Why did she always do something like this around him?
"Shall we?" he prompted smoothly.
Charley made herself walk forward, stingingly aware of how his hand remained exactly where it was this time—as if he were taunting her for her silly reaction to him. The first person her eyes focused on was Adelina’s mother, looking stunning in sparkling diamonds and unrelieved black. "Oh, there you are, Charley," she said, hurrying towards them with an anxious expression threatening to ruin her perfectly made-up face. "Damiano," she greeted, her dark eyes skimming warily over her future son-in-law’s face before she returned them to Charley. "I need a quick word with you, Cara," she begged. ‘Of course.’ Charley smiled, automatically softening her tone for this tiny, elegant woman whose nervous disposition made her worry about everything—and everything usually encompassed her beautiful daughter. "What’s Adelina done now?" she asked. It was only when the man standing behind her said coolly, "Nothing, I hope," that she realized she’d spoken out of turn in front of him. Carina Alonzo
Then Dami was striding forward to take hold of Adelina’s slender fingers and lift them to his lips. Whatever he said to his betrothed brought a sheen to Adelina’s eyes and a vulnerable tremor to her oh, so beautiful mouth. He loves her; Charley realized that in that moment. An odd little sensation clutched at her chest. Frowning slightly, she turned away from the two lovers and was relieved to feel the sensation fade. They were ferried to the opera in a fleet of sleek limousines. Estelio Alonzo was obviously meant to partner her tonight, and he made her laugh, which made her relax more and more as the evening wore on. La Scala was fabulous, an experience Charley really enjoyed—mainly because she’d successfully managed to avoid being placed anywhere near her best friend’s disturbing fiancé. Afterwards, they moved on to have dinner in a beautiful sixteenth-century palazzo on the outskirts of Milan. It was all very stylish, very much a glimpse of how the richer half lived. There was d
"Oh, my God," Charley gasped in skin-quivering consternation. They weren’t even dancing any longer! And he was looking down at her with one of those dreadful mocking smiles tugging at the corners of his mouth! Dropping her eyes to his throat, Charley wished with all her pounding heart that the ground would just open up and swallow her whole. "I’m so sorry!" She whispered, stepping back from him so violently that she almost went over on the spindly heels of her shoes. "In truth, I was rather flattered by the compliment." His hand snaked out to steady her. Fortunately, I sensed it coming, which is why we are now standing outside on the terrace away from curious eyes... Outside—? Glancing dizzily around her, sure enough, Charley discovered that they were indeed standing on a shadowy terrace she had not even known was here! The realization hit as to how engrossed she must have been in him that he’d been able to maneuver her through a pair of open French windows out into the cooler ev
Estelio’s company in the car made the journey a whole lot easier for Charley because she could pretend to doze while he and Adelina talked. It vaguely occurred to her that the conversation was hushed and heated, but she assumed Adelina was keeping her promise to give him a hard time for the trick with the wine, so she didn’t listen.And anyway, she did have a headache, one of those dull, throbbing aches that came when you didn’t like yourself and knew the feeling was not going to change any time soon. When the two cousins decided to have a last drink in the bar before they went to their rooms, Charley made her escape and spent the night with her head stuffed beneath her pillow, trying not to remember what she had done.But she should have listened to what the other two had been saying, as she discovered early the next morning when hell arrived with the sound of urgent knocking on her door. If she’d listened, she might have been able to stop Adelina from making the biggest mistake of h
Tension instantly grabbed hold of her throat and sent her heart sinking to her toes. Charley realized that he already knew about Adelina sent her heart sinking to her toes. It was stamped right there on his grimly cold face."You have a letter for me, I believe," Dami De Santis prompted. There was no greeting, no attempt whatsoever to make this easier for her.But then why should he—? "How did you know?" Charley dared to ask him.His eyes made a brief flick down her front, then away again. "She was to be my wife." The position made her vulnerable to a certain kind of low-life out on the street, so of course I had a security team watching her.But they didn’t stop her from running away with Charles? Charley would have loved to have asked the question, but the way he was standing there in a steel-dark, razor-sharp business suit and with his face carved into such cold, hard angles, the question remained just a thick lump in her throat as she made herself walk forward, feeling as if she w
"I..I suppose you’re wondering where your engagement ring is," she blurted out, needing to say something to fill in the unbearably tense empty space, and the ring had come up in discussion when Adelina’s mother had said the same thing."No," he denied without any inflection whatsoever. I would imagine that running off with a poor man has already sealed the ring’s fate.Charley winced, her cheeks heating at this cool reminder of the other issue in all of this she was having to deal with—the fact that the man Adelina had run off with also happened to be her very own brother."Charles isn’t poor." She felt compelled to defend Charles’s middle-class earnings. It was, after all, the only thing about him she felt she could defend right now."In your estimation or mine?"Oh, that was so very arrogant of him. Charley felt anger begin to rise, even though she knew she didn’t have the right to let it. "Look," with a tense twist, she turned to the door, "I think I had better leave you to—""Runn
"Let me test that," he offered. "You have known all along what they were planning."It was not a question. "No," Charley insisted. "I told you I did not know."But even as she said it, her insides were creasing guiltily because perhaps she had seen it coming, only if it had been so much simpler to just block it out."I did not have you down as a liar, Charlotte," he said coolly."I’m not lying!" Frowning, annoyed with herself as well as with him and this horrible position she’d been put in, "I did not see it coming," she insisted a second time, "but I admit I feel some responsibility because I think I should have done.""Because you knew they were lovers?"Did he have to put it as calmly as that? Shifting her tense stance, "Yes," she answered, deciding to be blunt with him since he didn’t seem to possess a single sensitive nerve in his body. "For a while, several years ago."‘Childhood sweethearts.’ His hard mouth flicked out the semblance of a smile.A bit more than that, she thought
Charley flushed. "Charles wanted to be an artist.""Oh, how romantically right for him," her persecutor mocked. "With his golden good looks and his ravaged sensibilities, he makes the perfect rescue for an impressionable thing like Adelina—whereas you," he went on before Charley could say anything, "make the perfect level-headed foil to keep Adelina’s starry eyes blinded to what your brother is really about."Charley straightened her trembling, tense shoulders. "Have you quite finished slaughtering my family?" she demanded, wanting to slap his face."Haughty," he remarked. "I like it.""Well, I don’t like you!" she hit back. "Adelina and I have been friends since we were twelve years old—her wealth or my lack of it has never been an issue between us because that’s not what true friendship is about! "My family works hard for its living," she said proudly. "All of us work hard!" My father did not waste his life swanning around the world enjoying the useless life of an overindulged playb
He moved suddenly, turned to her, and gripped her arms; she glimpsed the desperation in his eyes as he dragged her against his chest. "I will do whatever it takes to win you back, Kalila." "You are my wife, the love of my life, and I won’t let you go." His warm breath fanning the curls that framed her face, he pressed his lips to her temple, his eyes briefly closing as if in pain."I have told my father to name his brother Sulim as the interim ruler of Qubbah in the event of his dying before Hazem comes of age." Kate stared at him, shocked beyond words. "But... but why?" she finally stumbled.I thought that you were to rule until Hazem was older. "You are the King’s only son, and it is your duty." Ahsan shook his head. "My first duty is to my wife, and my father agrees." Even if he did not, I would still be here for you."Don't you understand, Kalila?" he asked urgently. "You are more important to me than Qubbah, my father, everything." You, me, and Hazem are a family, and the only thin
The still silence in the garden that followed his astounding statement was broken by the piercingly sweet song of a blackbird. Kate licked her suddenly dry lips, her heart beating so fast she was sure it would explode. "I don’t understand.""It’s quite simple." He sounded impatient and stared at her haughtily. But to her amazement, streaks of dull color highlighted his cheekbones, and his eyes veered from hers as if he were afraid to meet her gaze. "I love you, Kate."Her rebuttal was fierce and immediate. "No, you don’t.""I should have known you would want to argue about it, Kalila." A little of his tension left him, and his smile stole her breath."You don’t love me," she said again. It was probably some cruel trick, and she had more sense than to be fooled. "You married me for Hazem." You love Farrah. Malika said so.Malika said a lot of things, most of them untrue. Ahsan’s voice was suddenly harsh."But not the things she said about me," Kate said thickly. "My mother was a prosti
The blue sky was dotted with cotton wool clouds, and the warm breeze carried a scent of lavender and old-fashioned roses. There was no place on earth more beautiful than Ingledean on a spring day, Kate mused—except an oasis in the middle of the desert, where palm trees provided shade from the scorching sun and an azure pool glinted beneath a cloudless sky.She had been home for a month—although Ingledean no longer felt like home without Hazem. The image of his huge brown eyes and impish smile caused the familiar agonizing pain in her chest, and she bit down hard on her lip, tasted blood, and cursed the tears that slid unchecked down her face. She couldn’t cry forever. Somehow she was going to have to find the strength to move on, pick up the threads of her life, or maybe make a new one, far away from Ingledean and all its memories. But since she had left Qubbah, a terrible lassitude had settled on her, and she could not plan anything when the only two people she loved were far away on
In less than an hour, she was expected to attend the lavish dinner organized in honor of King Kabir’s recovery and his return as supreme ruler of Qubbah. And somehow she was going to have to do so without revealing that she was breaking up inside, which Kate acknowledged despairingly as she stared in the mirror at her paper-white face and red-rimmed eyes.When she first returned to the palace after her explosive confrontation with Malika, she locked herself in her dressing room and recalled, in stunned disbelief, everything the young Arab woman had told her. Could it be true? Had Ahsan always intended to divorce her once he’d gained custody of Hazem and marry his beautiful advisor?She did not know how long she’d sat there, but eventually her maid had knocked on the door and reminded her that it was time to prepare for the banquet. She should have made the excuse that she was ill—no one who saw her pallor would fail to believe her. But the steely backbone of pride that had seen her th
Despite the warmth of the early-evening sunshine, Kate shivered. "You’re talking nonsense," she said firmly, striving to sound confident despite the sudden lurch of her heart. She was perfectly aware of why Ahsan had married her, but he had given no hint that he wanted a divorce. Ahsan told me he was never engaged to you. She lifted her chin and glared at Malika, trying to ignore the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach."He wasn’t," Malika agreed, looking surprised. "I was engaged to Farhan; Ahsan was engaged to Farrah."The world seemed to tilt alarmingly for a few seconds, and Kate actually gripped the edge of the wall for support. Ahsan and Farrah! It couldn’t possibly be true, could it? "Jamila told me that Ahsan was in love with his fiancée," she said faintly. "She doesn’t know why the marriage didn’t take place."Malika gave a careless shrug. ‘Jamila knows. Everyone at the palace knows that Ahsan adored Farrah and that she eloped with his brother on the eve of their wedding.
He was suddenly aware that the children had finished their dance and everyone was waiting for his response. Kate had turned her head to him, frowning at his inattention, and he quickly clapped his hands in applause. Once the dancers had filed out of the marquee, his personal assistant Zaid appeared at his side and informed him that a group of local potters had brought their best work for his gracious inspection. Stifling a sigh, he led the royal party out into the blazing sunshine.The garden party continued all afternoon, and Ahsan was not in the best of moods when he strode back to the palace. He suddenly realized that he was too far ahead and slowed his pace, waiting for Kate to catch up with him. He frowned when he noted how pale she looked beneath her wide-brimmed hat. She made no attempt to speed up, and the dejected droop of her shoulders fueled his impatience."I appreciate that an afternoon spent admiring traditional crafts and customs is not likely to top your list of exciti
Her feet briefly touched the floor, and he spun her around, tugged her zip down her spine, and removed her dress before she had time to catch her breath. Her bra went the same way before he lifted her again and threw her onto the bed as if she were a rag doll, his eyes glittering with a mixture of anger and sexual hunger that made Kate’s stomach dip."At night, I’m happy to give you all the attention you could possibly want," he growled, his shoes, trousers, and shirt hitting the floor with barely controlled savagery until he stood in his silk boxers. "This is the only bed you’ll ever sleep in." The boxers joined the rest of his clothes, revealing his powerful, unashamedly aroused body in all its glory. "But I wouldn’t bank on sleeping for many hours yet."Kate stared up at him, her breath coming in shallow gasps as she struggled to control the wild excitement that was pounding through her veins. She was conscious that she was wearing nothing but a pair of tiny lace pants and the pric
Clearly embarrassed, Aaliyah determinedly changed the subject to Hazem and how fast he was growing. But although Kate smiled and made token conversation, her mind was whirling. If Malika’s family had expected her to marry Ahsan, was she the woman he had been engaged to years ago—the woman Jamila had said he had loved? But, if so, why had they not married? It didn’t make sense, and she brooded miserably as she stared at Ahsan. He was smiling at Malika and clearly enjoying her company. Perhaps they had argued and broken off their engagement. Was he now regretting his lost chance to marry a beautiful, clever Arab girl who would have made him the perfect wife?From that moment on, the party became a blur of faces and stilted conversation with people she had never met before. She was sure they viewed her as an oddity, with her pale skin and vivid hair—and her glaring lack of sophistication. But until his father had recovered, Ahsan was king, and one of her wifely duties outside of the bedr
As Ahsan had predicted, his team of advisors was waiting for him when they arrived back at the palace. Even on the journey across the desert, he’d had his mobile phone clamped to his ear, and Kate had sat silently beside him, lost in her thoughts. The honeymoon was over, and he had made it abundantly clear that he now saw her role as his wife as a walk-on part—or perhaps a lie-down part, she thought bitterly. But what had she expected? She had married him for Hazem, and he had married her for sex, and they had each gotten what they wanted.At least she had Hazem, she told herself later that evening, when she tucked the toddler into bed. She had missed him desperately, and his evident delight that she was back was a comforting balm to her raw emotions. She was Ahsan’s wife, a member of the Royal Family of Qubbah, and no one could ever take him away from her now.But as she prepared for the state banquet, her insecurities returned, and she felt sick with nerves. She had been horrified w