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CHAPTER ONE
GIANCARLO CARDINALE arrived in the doorway of Knight’s executive dining room to the surprise discovery that some kind of function was taking place. The remains of a gourmet-style lunch still lay in evidence amongst a scatter of empty wine bottles, and the twenty or so people who were gathered there were now standing around in small groups talking while they sipped at champagne.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked the man beside him.
‘Lunch between presentations to one of our best clients,’ Howard Fiske explained. ‘And Edward really should have made the effort to be here for it.’
His anger was clear. If it wasn’t bad enough that the corporate chairman himself should have turned up here unexpectedly, to have done so on a day when Edward should have been presiding over such an important meeting, annoyed Howard intensely.
Giancarlo said nothing, but he sympathised. He knew all about Edward’s irresponsible streak, after all. In fact Edward’s flagrant lack of responsibility on all fronts was the sole reason for his being in London. He had come to deal with it once and for all, and the sooner he got it over with the better it was going to be for everyone. Which left him with only one question he needed answering before he got down to the nasty business of dealing with the problem.
Which one was she?
As he stood there, still unnoticed by the rest of the gathering, his gaze began moving over the newly refurbished ultra-modern room with its beech-wood surfaces and flashes of so-called inspirational colour—all paid for with his money in an attempt to haul Knight’s out of the dark ages.
But it was not so easy to revamp the people, he observed, seeing the same starched collars and the same grey faces, with their grey little minds which collectively helped to keep the company in a state of near peril.
His teeth came together on a snap of irritation. Edward had promised to restructure his workforce last year when they’d discussed merging Knight’s into the Cardinale Group. In fact, Giancarlo had insisted upon it before he would agree to ratify the deal. Edward might be his brother-in-law but the Cardinale Group was not run as a charity. As a venture capitalist Giancarlo looked for potential in any proposed merger before he even considered putting together a rescue package.
Edward had been told this, had understood it, and had agreed to all the provisos at the time. So—other than for laminate flooring and some splashes of colour on the walls—where had all the money he had been steadily shelling out to Edward gone? For none of these grey, slightly bored faces he could see in here showed a hint of a change in attitude.
Which was why Giancarlo had no problem at all picking out his quarry, since she was the only one that fitted the description his source had provided him with, of a young, very nubile, bottle redhead, with an inherent ability to distract any man.
If this really was Natalia Deyton, then Edward could certainly pick them, Giancarlo decided as he stood watching the way she worked around the room like a true professional.
Professional in what? he then found himself pondering cynically as his darkly lashed gaze shifted from her admittedly exquisite profile to the revealingly flushed one belonging to the young man she was talking to at present. Her job description had her down as the personal assistant to Knight’s namesake and managing director. But with a face and a figure like that, it wasn’t surprising that Edward Knight had given her job title a whole new twist.
Anger suddenly began to bite as he stood watching the provocative way she was teasing that blushing young fool. Tying him in knots, he saw. Making it plain that she was open to suggestion.
Brazen bitch, he thought sourly. Then—
Brazen bountiful bitch, he found himself extending when the crowd suddenly shifted and he got a glimpse of what it was that was hooking their attention. She had the kind of cleavage a man could dive into—as her skimpy white top with its dipping neckline was blatantly advertising!
No wonder half the men in here looked hot about their starched collars. And no wonder Edward couldn’t keep his damn hands off her, Giancarlo added harshly when he felt even his own more discerning loins give him a stinging kick that actually forced him to draw the muscles in around his sex to stop the obvious from happening.
‘Dio,’ he breathed, when as if sensing his scrutiny she suddenly turned to look straight at him.
Those eyes, those amazing eyes! He had never encountered anything like them! Blue, they were blue. A smoky, steamy, sultry blue that had his imagination shooting into overdrive as he began to wonder what happened to those eyes when she was beneath a man and in the throes of an orgasm.
Did Edward already know? Was he still man enough to acquire that heady kind of knowledge? Giancarlo’s sister said no. In fact his sister had been quite disconcertingly open about Edward’s recent inability to satisfy her on that front. But this was different. The woman standing here could incite a dying man to take one last sip of the nectar.
Without any warning, a new kind of emotion was suddenly overwhelming him. It was a hot, tight, primitive emotion that sank its roots deep into his possessive psyche, where it lashed him with the burning message that he did not want Edward to know what Natalia Deyton was like in bed. He didn’t want any other man but himself to know what, in that single blinding hot flash of a moment, he knew he fully intended to make his exclusively…!
Oh, good grief! Natalia found herself gasping inwardly as she caught the full heat of the stranger’s expression. In all her life she had never encountered a look quite like it. Men looked at her and wanted her, she was used to that. She would be lying if she tried to deny an effect she had been having on the opposite sex for most of her adult life.
But the way this man was looking at her was something else entirely. It was hot and compulsive and so very possessive that she actually felt as if he were crawling right inside her skin and claiming total occupancy.
Stunned and shaken by the whole experience, she quickly dragged her eyes away. But too late to stop a tight, breathlessly excited feeling from permeating her blood, and, although she tried very hard to concentrate on the conversation taking place around her, she was really he
aring nothing but a strange roaring taking place in her head. Her eyes had glazed over, leaving only a mirror image imprinted on her retina of a tall, lean, very attractive stranger with black hair, olive skin and dark, dark compelling eyes that even now, while she wasn’t actually looking into them, still made her feel as if she were being invaded. Who was he? What was he? Why was he standing there looking at her like that?
It was almost impossible not to look back at him—just to check that he was real and the small sip of champagne she had allowed herself hadn’t started her hallucinating.
It was most definitely a relief to find Howard Fiske had claimed his attention. But the power of the physical man still seriously disturbed her. Everything—everything about him from the long, slightly hooked shape of his nose that should have spoilt his playboy good looks but didn’t, to the lean tight structure of his body clothed in the finest Italian tailoring, affirmed the man’s sexual appeal. He oozed it, pulsed it, threatened and promised it.
Oh, my God—she looked away again, so appalled by her own lustful thoughts that they made the sexual way he had been looking at her fade into insignificance.
‘Are you feeling all right, Natalia?’ a voice from what seemed like a long distance off managed to squeeze its way into her consciousness.
