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'And you're sure my req
uirements won't be a problem for you, Nick? I know you don't have a large staff,' Ricardo said blandly.
'Absolutely not. Lucy said that Carly jumped at the chance. In fact she begged for it.' Nick laughed. 'And I don't suppose anyone can blame her. After all, when you've been used to the best of everything all your life and suddenly it isn't available any more, and you're a decent-looking woman, I suppose you're bound to look forward to spending time with a rich man.'
'She's looking for a rich husband?'
Nick grinned.
'Who said anything about marriage? Anyway, come up to the office and I can introduce you to her.'
'I think you said earlier that she is your wife's partner?'
'Employee. The three of them—Lucy, Julia and Carly—were at school together. Neither Julia nor Carly have put any money into the business, though.'
'So financially the partnership is—'
'Just me and Lucy,' Nick informed him.
'Carly normally does all the financial and administrative stuff, but to be honest I don't think she's up to the job. You'd be doing me a favor by taking her off my hands for a week or two, so that I can get the financial side of things sorted out properly. Lucy's a loyal little soul, and devoted to her friends—you know the type, all breeding and no brains.' He shrugged. 'I don't want to say too much to her. Anyway, having Carly with you won't be too much of a hardship—she's a good-looker, and obliging too, if you know what I mean—especially if you treat her generously. Like I said, Carly has her head screwed on.'
'Are you speaking from personal experience?' Ricardo asked him dryly.
'What? Hell, no. I'm a married man. But let's just say she let me know that it was available if I wanted it,' Nick boasted.
He was well aware that Carly didn't like him, and it amused him to think of what he was setting her up for. Discrediting her wouldn't do him any harm in other ways either, he congratulated himself. For one thing she wouldn't be able to go tittle-tattling to Lucy.
'Carly is very good at getting other people to pay her bills for her—as both Lucy and Julia already know. She's even managed to blag a rent-free room in Julia's lat. If she can't find a rich man to finance her, then the lifestyle that working for Prêt a Party gives her is the next best thing. All that first-class travel and accommodation provided by the clients, plus getting to mingle with their guests.' He winked at Ricardo. 'Ideal for her type of woman. Once I've introduced you, I'll get her to go through the list of our upcoming events with you so that you can cherry pick the ones you want to attend.'
'Excellent.' Inwardly, Ricardo decided that Nick sounded more like a pimp than a businessman. Or in this business did the two go hand in hand?
They had reached Prêt à Party's office, and Nick pushed open the door for him.
'Ah, there's Carly,' he announced. 'I'll call her over.'
There was no way she could pretend not to be aware of Nick's summons, Carly had to acknowledge reluctantly, and she walked towards him. She was wearing her normal office uniform of jeans and a tee shirt—the jeans snugly encased the slender length of her legs but irritatingly, the tee shirt skimming the curves of her breasts had pulled free of the low waistband of her jeans. It was a familiar hazard when one was almost five foot ten tall, give or take one eighth of an inch, and it exposed the lat golden flesh of her taut stomach. Whenever she could, Carly ran—mostly on her own, but sometimes with a group of fellow amateur runners—and her body had a sensuous grace of which she herself was totally unaware.
Long thick hair, honey-brown, with natural high lights, swung past her shoulders as she walked calmly towards Nick—and then missed a step as she saw the man standing to one side of him.
If she were in the market for a man—sex-wise, that was, because she would not want one for any other reason—then this was definitely a man she would want. She could feel the power of his sexuality from here; she could breathe it in almost. And it was very heady stuff. Far more potent than any champagne, she thought dizzily.
A vulnerable woman—which, of course, she was not—would find it almost impossible to resist such a man. He was a living, breathing lure for the whole male sex. Except for her. She had exempted herself from such dangers.
Ricardo frowned in immediate recognition as he watched her walking towards them and coldly came to two very separate decisions.
The first was that he intended to have her in his bed, and the second was that she embodied everything he most disliked about her class and type.
She was stunningly beautiful and irritatingly coni dent. And he already knew from listening to Nick that she was a woman who judged a man by his wallet and how much she could extract from it. A gold-digger, in other words.
'Hello, gorgeous. Let me introduce you to Ricardo— oh, and by the way, Mike Lucas rang me to tell me how much he enjoyed your company last night,' Nick told Carly, as he put his arm round her shoulders and drew her close to his side.
Pulling herself free, Carly extended her hand to Ricardo and smiled at him with genuine pleasure. After all, he was going to be releasing her from the unpleasantness of Nick's unwanted company.
Well, she certainly didn't believe in wasting any time, Ricardo thought cynically as he took the hand Carly had extended and shook it firmly.
'Ricardo wants to have a look at our upcoming events so that he can decide which ones he wants to attend. You can use my office, Carly,' Nick told her benignly.
His office? Carly had to look away. 'His office', as he called it had, until he had come onto the scene, been her office. In fact it still was her office, she reflected, since she was the only one who did any work in it. Nick's only appearances in it were when he came in to ask her to countersign another cheque.
Carly smiled as she led the way to the small sectioned-off cubicle where she worked. Ricardo had lost count of the number of women who had smiled at him the way Carly was doing right now—with warmth and promise—especially women of Carly's type. Upmarket, privately educated pampered women, contemptuous of the very idea of supporting themselves, whose goal in life was to ind a man to financially underwrite their desired lifestyle.
His gaze narrowed. Female predators were a familiar risk to any man to whom the press attached the label 'wealthy'; he had discovered that a long time ago. He had been twenty-two and merely a millionaire the first time he had encountered the type of well-bred young woman who believed that a man like him—a self-made man who had come up from nothing—would be de lighted to spend lavishly on her in exchange for the social cachet of being connected with her.
She had been the sister of the thrusting young entrepreneur with whom he'd had business dealings. Initially he had thought he must be mistaken, and that she couldn't possibly be coming on to him as openly as she'd seemed to be. He had indeed been naive. There had been an expensive lunch to which she had invited herself, he remembered, and an even more expensive afternoon's shopping, when she had pointed out to him the Rolex watch she wanted. Like a besotted fool he had gone back to the shop and bought it for her the moment she had left him to return to her brother. He had then, even more besottedly, booked himself out of his hotel room and into a huge suite, had ordered a magnum of champagne and the most luxurious meal he could think of, and then wasted more time than he cared to think about dreaming of the pleasure that lay in store for them both. He would make love to her as she had never been made love to her before, and then, in the morning, he would kiss her awake and surprise her with the watch...
He had very quickly been brought back to earth when, instead of relishing his tender caresses, the object of his adoration had told him peevishly to 'hurry up', and then pouted and sulked until he produced her watch. The final blow to his pride, though, had been unwittingly delivered by her brother, who had informed him that his sister was as good as engaged to an extremely wealthy older man. Fortunately, although his illusions had been shattered, his heart had been left intact, and the whole experience had taught him what he considered to be a valuable lesson: the only di
fference between spoilt, pampered society women and the prostitutes of Naples was that the prostitutes had no option other than to sell themselves if they wanted to feed their children.
He had yet to meet a woman whose desire for him did not go hand in hand with her desire for his money, no matter how much she might initially deny it. Indeed, if he hadn't been so fastidious he knew that he would have found it cheaper to hire the services of a professional than to satisfy the financial demands of the society women who had shared his bed. The discovery that the last one to do so had been contemplating being unfaithful to him with an elderly billionaire old enough to be her grandfather had confirmed his cynical belief that no woman was too beautiful or too well born to be above using her 'assets' to secure financial security.
He would take Carly to bed and he would ensure that both of them enjoyed the experience, and that would be that. Why shouldn't he take advantage of what she was? She was a beautiful woman, and it was a very long time since he had last had sex, but her social standing cut no ice with him, and nor was he impressed by it—quite the opposite, in fact.
'Here's a list of our upcoming events and their venues,' Carly announced a little breathlessly, after she had printed it off from the computer.
She hadn't expected to be so acutely aware of Ricardo's powerful and sensually invasive sexual aura. She wasn't used to this kind of man, and there was an unfamiliar flutter in her stomach and a hyped-up sensation of excitement in her head. She felt both excited and apprehensive, as though somehow her whole body had moved up into a higher gear, a more intense state of awareness. It was simply her hormones responding to his hormones, she told herself prosaically. Her office was way too small for the two of them.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw that he was removing his suit jacket, and she discovered that she was sucking in an unsteady breath of reluctant female appreciation. Beneath the fine cotton of his shirt she could see the muscular hardness of his body. She had recently read an article in a magazine about the new fashion for men to wax their chest hair. He obviously didn't subscribe to it.
