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‘If you didn’t want the truth, you shouldn’t have asked,’ Mina dared, priding herself on not having told a single lie. And, since what she had pretended to confess would naturally be a total turn-off for a man as fastidious as Cesare, hopefully he would now leave her alone.
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bsp; With a nerve-racking abruptness that made her flinch, he swung away from her and then disconcertingly swung back, his strong face set like stone. ‘Presumably he bought the clothes you were wearing last night?’
‘Yes.’ Roger worked for his grandfather, managing the family estate. Roger financed Winona’s wardrobe.
‘Clearly you have spent all the money.’
‘I have a small overdraft.’ Gosh, this dialogue was fun, she thought nastily, enjoying the feeling that she had Cesare on the run.
His eloquent mouth was flattened into a bloodless line but there was an arc of darker colour highlighting his savage cheekbones and the stark clarity of his gaze. ‘Without shame, you admit to me that you are——’
‘Morally weak.’
‘The activities you confess to are not one step removed from prostitution,’ Cesare condemned with the oddest tremor interfering with his usually perfect diction.
Mina lost colour but held fast. He was absolutely disgusted. Another few minutes and he would be gone, put to flight by her moral depravity.
‘Haland?’ he enunciated.
Mina reddened fiercely. ‘No!’
‘Madre di Dio…God has some mercy…’ Cesare expelled his breath and surveyed her with fiercely narrowed eyes. ‘You will not communicate in any way with this man again,’ he told her with menacing harshness. ‘Nor will you ever offend me again by referring to the liaison.’
Events had taken a sudden violently off-balancing swerve into unknown and unexpected territory. Mina blinked rapidly. ‘I——’
‘Not another word,’ Cesare cut in rawly. ‘Dio! How the hell could you tell me such truth? Could you not have lied?’ He spat something in angry Italian, slashed a furious hand through the air, making her jump back a step, and then appeared to get a grip on his rage again. ‘No, it is better that I know the truth.’
‘I think you should go now.’ Mina was keen to give him a helping hand back in the direction of the exit she had been expecting him to make.
‘Why?’ Cesare slung her a derisive look of smouldering aggression. ‘When you’ve just given me the price——’
Without understanding, she frowned. ‘What price?’
‘You’re the one who has told me that you are any man’s possession for the right price, and I’m prepared to pay it to have you in my bed,’ Cesare drawled with a positive shudder of unconcealed fury.
Sharply disconcerted by the even less anticipated response he was now making, Mina licked her dry lips. ‘I——’
‘You told me quite deliberately, you shameless…’ With a seething hiss, Cesare clenched his even white teeth and bit back whatever he had been about to call her. ‘You know how much I want you. You just stuck on a pricetag!’
Mina almost choked in an effort to swallow. Cesare had withstood that farrago of gruesome lies about her lover in the country? He might be within a death-defying inch of reaching out and choking the life out of her for her apparent promiscuity and greed but, on the brink of murder or otherwise, he was ready to embark upon financial negotiation for her sexual favours.
Mina had never been more appalled or more shattered. It was not a compliment, but Cesare wanted her that much? He had been so cool, so controlled last night. This afternoon he was neither. She had never seen him out of control before. Involuntarily she was fascinated by the play of vibrant, strong emotions across his rawly handsome features. He was fighting a very close fight between a desire to kill her and a desire to—oh!
A flush of heat prickling across her skin, every muscle tightening, Mina dredged her attention from the explicit sexuality of the all-male gaze roaming hotly over her.
‘I don’t think I’m really your type,’ she muttered weakly, beginning to wonder if she belonged in an asylum.
‘Someday, somehow, perhaps when I have sated this obscene craving for your body, I will take this out on your hide,’ Cesare swore, like someone making a blood oath over a grave. ‘I will punish you for this filthy negotiation that reduces me to the level of an animal!’
Dry-mouthed on the feeling that she had foolishly unleashed a whole lot more than she could handle in that brooding Sicilian temperament, Mina backed to the window, still refusing to look at him, not trusting herself, not trusting him, feeling with every fibre of her body the passion flaming reckless fingers of fire into the atmosphere between them. ‘Cesare…I didn’t mean to——’
‘To think I could have saved myself from this,’ he grated. ‘The first day when you walked into that interview I decided I could not possibly employ a woman whom I wanted to strip and fling onto the nearest bed!’
Helplessly her head flew up. She couldn’t believe her ears.
‘I gave you a nightmare interview…and you took it,’ Cesare condemned with lingering disbelief at such unfeminine strength of will and staying power.
