The Italian's Defiant Mistress

Only the tension in his broad shoulders betrayed the strength of his ruthlessly controlled emotion as he located Luca.

Raphael didn’t flinch, but the light from the screen showed the sudden shuttered stillness of his face as he watched his brother pick a strand of hair from the slickly glossed lips of Eve Middlemiss. She was looking up at Luca trustingly, her lips pouting and slightly parted, and once he had moved the stray hair, with much careful concern, she tentatively pressed them together. It was a movement that was curiously childlike, but at the same time piercingly erotic.

Gripping the remote control, Raphael saw his knuckles show bone-white through the suntanned skin of his hands. Dimly, as if from a great distance, he was aware of the pounding blood in his ears. He was a man who lived on his instincts, whose survival in the volatile Columbian underworld of drugs gangs and hired killers had depended on his ability to make split-second decisions. Every nerve and fibre of his being was telling him to go down and drag Eve Middlemiss away from Luca.