The Italian's Trophy Mistress

Many women would have killed their own grandmothers to hear those words from his lips!

Bianca Jay had simply looked through him and walked away!

No one, but no one, humiliated Cesare Andriotti and got away with it!

His ebony brows flared as he bit out an expletive in rawly vented Italian. Then, collecting himself, he dragged in a deep breath, meant to be calming but not quite hitting the mark.

He had wanted Bianca Jay from the very first moment of seeing her. She hadn’t been a pushover but he’d got what he’d wanted from her in the end. But somehow, on a level he’d never encountered before, it had been far more complicated than the slaking of physical lust within the confines of a sophisticated affair.

The beautiful, elusive Bianca had begun to intrigue him. In bed they shared a mind-blowing ecstasy but out of it she kept him at a distance, never letting him get to really know her.

She’d flatly refused to move in with him and put their relationship on a semi-permanent basis, and had made it abundantly plain that she would accept none of the gifts he had instinctively wanted to shower on her, had refused to speak of her background, her family, easily and prettily changing the subject whenever he’d brought it up.

And although he’d increasingly wanted to know what made her the woman she was he’d respected her need for privacy, battening down his ever-growing desire to solve the mystery of her, pin down the elusiveness that was part of her tantalising contribution to their relationship.

Impatiently sloshing another inch of whisky into his glass, he took it to his desk and extracted a slim notebook from one of the drawers. Riffling through it, he found the number he wanted.

What had happened this evening had changed all the rules. Respecting her privacy was now completely out of the frame.

Sitting on the comfortably upholstered swivel chair, he reached for the phone, his shoulders relaxing, his eyes darkening and narrowing as his anger hardened into something darker, needier.

Don’t get mad, get even!

‘It’s not going to work, is it?’ Jeanne said decisively as she stirred the third spoonful of sugar into her breakfast coffee.

Dressed this morning in a light tweed skirt and cotton blouse, every iron-grey curl in its designated place, she looked what she was: sensible, stolid and utterly reliable. Sighing, Bianca had to agree with her aunt’s blunt statement. In the past she had coped alone with her mother’s growing excesses, her startling mood changes, but after the overdose episode she had been really frightened.

For the first time ever she’d sought outside help in the shape of her widowed Aunt Jeanne. Her amber eyes misted with tears as she recalled her aunt’s immediate offer. ‘She can stay with me in Bristol while you wind things up that end and find somewhere else to live. And I’ll spend the next week or two with you until she’s feeling more herself, keep an eye on her while you’re out at work. From the sound of it she shouldn’t be left too much on her own.’

Bianca had grasped the offer with both grateful hands. The lease on this house expired in a couple of months. Hunting for a flat she could afford, holding down her demanding job, deciding what to do about the furnishings—all while coping with her mother’s problems—would have been a nightmare.

Newly discharged from hospital, feeling frail and needy, Helene had listlessly agreed. But on the evidence of last night’s return to her former addictions, alcohol and men, it was obvious that she wouldn’t settle for five minutes in her sister’s tidy little semi in a quiet road on the outskirts of Bristol.

‘I love my sister but I can’t take the responsibility; it wouldn’t be fair on either of us,’ Jeanne admitted. ‘What she needs is professional help—one of those fancy clinics you read about, where film stars and footballers go to get themselves sorted out.’

‘If only!’ Bianca gave a wry smile as she passed her aunt a rack of fresh toast and sat to pour herself some desperately needed strong hot coffee. ‘She refuses to see her GP about her problems, mainly because she won’t admit she has any. But she’d probably go for a fancy, up-market clinic. It would suit her image!’ She took a grateful sip of the aromatic brew in her cup and added prosaically, ‘Unfortunately, there’s no way we could afford that sort of treatment.’

‘Nothing left of the settlement?’

‘That went years ago.’ Bianca lifted her shoulders in a weary shrug. Her mother’s divorce settlement had been recklessly spent on the latest designer clothes, lavish parties, an endless supply of drink.

‘Then ask your father to pay for treatment. He’s extremely wealthy, by all accounts. And it’s mostly his fault she’s the way she is.’ Jeanne spread butter lavishly on her toast. ‘You know, I always used to envy my little sister. When she married Conrad Jay I thought she had everything. Wealth beyond her wildest dreams—a bit “new money”, but you can’t have everything. At least his financial clout bought their way into the most glittering social circles. She was so beautiful and I was plain. But now I’m glad—about being plain.’ She took a healthy bite. ‘If you’ve never had any looks you can’t lose them and get all bitter and twisted about it. That said, you should approach your father for help.’

‘No.’ The refusal was instinctive. Seeing Jeanne’s quick frown, Bianca knew she had to elaborate and excuse her apparent stubbornness.

Although the sisters had kept in touch through the years, via the occasional phone call or letter, their lives had barely touched. There was so much her aunt didn’t know. And because Helene was sleeping off the effects of last night’s binge and the resulting aftermath, when she’d thrown her sister’s offering of a mug of sweet cocoa—‘To help you settle, dear’—at the sitting-room wall then had hysterics, Bianca and Jeanne could at least have a frank and full discussion.

‘I only met my father once. I was twelve,’ Bianca explained. ‘It was New Year’s Eve and he was visiting London—he was living in the States at that time. He wanted to see me—he’d never shown an atom of interest before. I went to his hotel hating him, not because he’d never so much as acknowledged my existence, but because of what he’d done to my mother.’

She leaned back in her chair, remembering that dreadful day. ‘A week before, something had gone wrong for Helene—don’t ask me what, I can’t remember—but she’d started drinking and getting maudlin and told me I was old enough to be told what a louse my father was.

‘She was twenty-one when she met and married him. For two years she was blissfully happy, living the high life, and then she suspected he was seeing someone else. So she deliberately got pregnant with me, thinking that would stop him straying. But it didn’t work. He left her for the latest sex symbol on the social scene. As part of the divorce settlement he bought a twenty-five-year lease on this house. And that was that; she never saw him again. I think she had loved him desperately, and never really got over it.’

Bianca shrugged, knowing she was probably about to shock her ultra-respectable aunt. ‘I grew up in the changing company of a variety of “uncles”. She could have married any one of them—they always seemed to be besotted. But there was always something wrong with them—in a nutshell they weren’t Conrad Jay. She never stopped loving him but she needed these men in her life to convince herself that she was still desirable, worth something.’

She pulled a wry face. ‘So there was I, twelve years old and hating my father, when that surprise phone call came through. Helene put me in a taxi to the hotel and my father put me in another to take me home.

‘In between I told him exactly what I thought of him for the way he’d hurt my mother and said that under no circumstances would I ever agree to see him again. All this in front of his latest new wife. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years older than me. So perhaps you understand why he is the last person I would ever appeal to for help. I have no idea how to contact him, even if I wanted to. And the moral of this story is something Helene once said to me—never marry a rich man. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’

Advice which had stuck more firmly than she’d realised, cemented in place by the damage such a marriage had done to her mother, the years of coping with the after-effects. Advice which had stood her in good stead when Cesare had made that shock offer of marriage.

Pushing him and what he had come to mean to her roughly out of her head, Bianca rose from the table and forced herself to think instead of how to handle the problem of helping Helene and holding down the job that was essential if she were to provide for them both.

Right at this moment it seemed completely impossible.

CHAPTER THREE

HE HAD her!

Had her exactly where he wanted her!

Cesare slid the sleek black Ferrari into a fortuitously vacant kerbside slot in front of the Hampstead house and switched off the ignition, the iron fist of inner harshness crushing that gut-punch of triumph, hardening his icy resolve.

His mouth flattened into a line of grim determination. Whatever the beautiful minx thought, he hadn’t finished with Bianca Jay yet, not by a mile. The information he had at his fingertips would ensure that, until he said it was over, their affair would continue. On his terms this time, not hers. His Italian pride demanded it.

She would be taught that no woman brushed an Andriotti male aside as if he were of no more importance than a fly! It was a salutary lesson he would take great pleasure in giving.

Flicking a glance at the façade of her home, he battened down the recurring upsurge of anger with steely control. Don’t get mad, get even, he reminded himself. Her carefully hoarded secrets were his now and he would use every last one of them to his own advantage.

Exiting the car, he activated the top-of-the-range security system, his mouth hard and flat as he mounted the steps and pressed the doorbell.

Yesterday’s phone call to her boss, Stazia Lynley, had elicited the information that she had just received a surprise call from Bianca herself, requesting an indefinite period of unpaid leave, so unless she was in the habit of going shopping at eight in the morning she would answer the summons.

His loins kicked and hardened at the mere thought of seeing her again, of drowning in the witchery of her beautiful amber eyes, in the special just-for-him look of steamy sultriness that swamped the glorious, glowing depths when they lay together in tangled sheets. Two eager bodies, hours of mind-melting passion, melding her physically to him. Yet keeping her just out of reach, he reminded himself. Because he’d never known the truth of her; the real Bianca Jay had been carefully kept from him.

Until now.

Switching off lust was far harder than blocking out anger, he conceded edgily as he pressed his thumb against the bell-push again and kept it there. But by the time he heard the rasp of the bolts being drawn back his face was as bland as a slashing bone structure, a blade of a nose and a passionate mouth could ever hope to be.

‘Cesare—’ His name on the lushness of her lips was a falling sigh, as if seeing him here was more than she could hope to cope with, and as the quick flush of telltale and immediate colour receded he noted that her skin was ashy pale, her eyes dark-circled as if she’s spent the past night in wakeful worry.

He hated to see that, although he knew he shouldn’t. Compassion shouldn’t come into the equation in his dealings with the witch who had taken his ego and stamped on it. Why should she sleep easily when he’d lain awake all night, alternately plotting revenge or consumed with anger and damaged pride?

Impatiently consoling the stubborn part of himself that felt pain at her distress with the knowledge that her anxiety over her mother would soon be ended, and quelling the stab of guilt over having brought her from her bed—as evidenced by the rumpled state of her long, silky black hair, the robe hastily flung on and belted over her naked body—he responded coolly, ‘We need to talk.’

‘There’s nothing to say.’ Her voice was wary and the hand that gripped the edge of the partly open door was white-knuckled. Her heart had leapt into her throat and was staying there, beating fast enough to choke her.

She had never thought to see him again, truly believing that having been told their affair was over he would watch her walk away with little or no regret, shrug his impressive shoulders and begin the process of finding the next willing candidate to share his night-time activities. It was the sort of thing men like him did.