Italian Bachelors: Steamy Seductions

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Topsy got into bed, weak as a twig blown down in a storm: mentally and physically, he exhausted her. In the back of her mind she had been thinking that they could have an affair. He had worn her down, weakened her into thinking such a development could be acceptable. While it was true that she had come to Italy ready to extend her experience of men if the right opportunity offered, Dante Leonetti was so far off her scale of what was acceptable in a lover that he made her think more of disaster than opportunity.

An affair wasn’t a game to her and she didn’t want to get hurt. Instinct was already warning her that the confusion of emotions she experienced around Dante went dangerously beyond basic attraction. Possibly it was infatuation, she reasoned uneasily, but only children played with fire without fear of getting burned and Topsy didn’t want to suffer so much as a scorch mark. So, on that score, Dante was strictly off limits.

CHAPTER SIX (#u95c271be-54f6-5730-b3ca-5097daaa36e0)

VITTORE TOOK A last dissatisfied glance at the gold pendant. ‘It’s so plain,’ he lamented, clearly longing for a more bold and sparkly design.

‘I think Sofia will like it,’ Topsy told him firmly.

Vittore nodded and proffered his credit card. ‘We’ll go for coffee before I head into the office,’ he said, casting her a glance. ‘My first appointment isn’t until ten-thirty. What are you going to do?’

‘My plans are fairly loose but I think I’ll do the Uffizi again. My last visit felt rushed,’ she confided.

‘Do you get homesick for London?’ Vittore asked her, having ordered coffee at a pavement café opposite the office he used.

‘No, I’m enjoying the change of scene.’ Topsy hesitated, seeing her opening, moving to grab it. ‘When were you last in London?’

‘More than twenty years ago,’ Vittore told her, looking reflective.

‘Was it a holiday?’ she prompted, sipping at her cappuccino.

‘No. I moved to London to start up a business but it all went pear-shaped,’ he volunteered wryly.

‘What happened?’ Topsy asked quietly.

‘I fell in love with the wrong woman and she emptied my bank account,’ Vittore admitted, giving her a rueful look when she could not hide her shock at that admission. ‘That was the end of the affair and the end of my business venture. I came home to lick my wounds and never went back.’

Topsy was frowning. ‘Did you tell the police?’

‘No, I wrote it off to experience. I don’t think the police could have helped me. After all, I trusted her and gave her free access to my account. What happened was my own fault. Back then I was still young and foolish,’ he declared with a fatalistic shrug of his shoulders. ‘Maturity does have some advantages.’

Topsy wanted so badly to ask if the woman concerned had been called Odette Taylor but if she mentioned her mother’s name she would have to come clean and tell all and she wasn’t ready to do that yet. Could the woman who had robbed Vittore be her mother? It was a depressing suspicion and only made the challenge of tackling the thorny mystery of her parentage more difficult, for if Odette had been the thief, Vittore would very probably be appalled to learn that he might have fathered a child with her. Already painfully aware of numerous occasions when her mother had been greedy and dishonest with money, Topsy had little difficulty picturing her avaricious parent in such a scenario. Odette had even admitted to her that she had chosen to lie and tell her polo player lover that he was the father of her youngest daughter because he had impressed her as a better financial bet than Vittore.

‘You look very thoughtful,’ Vittore quipped.

Topsy glanced up from her coffee cup and blinked in consternation at the tall male figure striding across the square towards them: it was Dante as she had never seen him before, his lean powerful thighs sheathed in tight-fitting faded denim, a blue-striped short-sleeved shirt casually open at his brown throat. Black hair ruffled in the slight breeze, strong face cool and calm, he looked breathtakingly beautiful to her stunned gaze. She moistened her lower lip with a nervous flick of her tongue. ‘Dante’s coming this way,’ she warned the older man.

Vittore frowned, his air of relaxation vanishing. ‘He didn’t even mention that he was coming into town today.’

Topsy was covertly engaged in admiring the gloriously neat fit of Dante’s jeans across his narrow hips and long muscular legs and in the midst of that wholly inappropriate appraisal drained her cappuccino in an effort to suppress her thundering pulses and an almost painful attack of self-consciousness. Soft pink highlighted her cheeks as Dante approached their table. ‘I thought I’d find you here. According to my mother this is your favourite breakfast bar,’ Dante remarked silkily.

‘It is and your timing is excellent because I was about to abandon Topsy to keep an appointment,’ Vittore remarked, turning his head to smile at Topsy. ‘You could find no better guide to this city than Dante. Florence is the original home of the Leonetti Bank and where he embarked on his gilded career.’

‘Is it really?’ Topsy pushed away her cup and rose upright, keen to stress her independence, reluctant to be foisted on Dante like some hapless tourist in need of guidance and attention. She watched his eyes follow Vittore as he vanished through a door on the other side of the busy street.

‘I didn’t even know my stepfather had a job until today,’ Dante commented.

‘Your mother doesn’t approve because it takes him away from her but he does only work four mornings a week,’ she proffered, instinctively defensive on the older man’s behalf. ‘I would’ve thought you would be pleased that he makes the effort.’

‘When I consider the size of my mother’s income, it strikes me as a pointless demonstration of independence,’ Dante said drily.

‘Is financial worth your only marker of good character?’ Topsy asked with spirit. ‘Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity would see that Vittore is very well aware of his position and determined not to take advantage of it!’

His designer sun specs clasped in one hand, Dante gazed down at her, green eyes radiating irritation. ‘Why are you defending him?’

‘He adores your mother and he makes her happy,’ Topsy countered in quiet reproof. ‘I like him, I like both of them and it distresses your mother that you so obviously think so little of the man she chose to marry.’

A muscle pulled taut at the corner of his unsmiling mouth, his stunning green eyes silvering with cold anger at the reproof. ‘Maledizione! What right do you have to interfere in the private affairs of my family?’ he ground out with disdain. ‘Or even to express an opinion?’

Topsy paled and then reddened, feeling both embarrassed and irritated, knowing very well that she should have kept her thoughts to herself. The icy look of hauteur stamped on his face mortified her and she spun away to cross the square. A hand closed over her arm to hold her back.

‘Where are you going?’

‘The Uffizi.’

He sent her a derisive look. ‘At this time of day? It will be a suffocating crush of tourists and you will only gain entry if you have a pre-arranged ticket.’

‘I haven’t,’ she acknowledged ruefully.

‘It would be a nightmare. Give up on the Uffizi and I promise I’ll arrange a special pass for you some day so that you can browse in peace.’ His eyes locked with hers and her tummy hollowed, her muscles pulling tight while her world rocked dizzily on its axis as if someone had given her a sudden violent shove. In the grip of that almost intoxicating sense of disassociation from planet earth Dante was all that mattered, filling her mind with insane thoughts that turned her inside out, filling her body with frighteningly familiar reactions she couldn’t fight. She wanted him, wanted him in a way she had never wanted anyone before, craved him with every breath that she drew.

A slow, exultant smile slashed Dante’s expressive mouth as he flipped down his sunglasses, closing her off from that visual connection that had made her entire body hum with excitement. She blinked, momentarily dazed by the clawing lash of desire unfulfilled and dropped her head, fighting for self-control and staring in surprise at the hand that now gripped hers.

‘You haven’t even told me what you’re doing here,’ she breathed unsteadily.

‘My mother forgot to ask you to pick up her contact lens prescription,’ he said prosaically.

‘Oh...I should have remembered. She always has stuff for me to do here but I didn’t want to wake her up so early to ask.’ Topsy pushed her knuckles against her pounding brow as if she could force logical thought back into being again.

‘This is the original home of the Leonetti Bank founded centuries ago by one of my ancestors.’ Dante paused outside a tall sandstone building that bore all the hallmarks of ancient Florentine architecture. ‘I started work here when I was twenty-one and a few years later we centralised operations in Milan and donated the building to the city to become a museum.’

‘Twenty-one? You were young. Didn’t you ever want to be something other than a banker?’

‘What I would be was set in stone on the day of my birth,’ Dante informed her drily. ‘My father would have allowed nothing else and, fortunately for me, I inherited the Leonetti business gene and the affinity with numbers. You still haven’t told me how you managed to spot the error on that document the other night.’

Topsy flushed. ‘I could just see that it was wrong.’

‘But you only saw that document for seconds.’

‘I can’t help it if my brain works like a computer sometimes,’ she admitted soft and low, uneasy with the subject of the high IQ that had made her a gifted child and an even more gifted adult. ‘Where are you taking me?’

He walked into the lively and very busy little medieval streets between Via Maggio and Piazza Pitti, the artisan quarter of workshops. It was like stepping back in time as she walked past studios displaying the wares of bookbinders, violin makers, metal workers, sculptors and cobblers. Topsy was enchanted because it was a taste of Renaissance Florence as only a local could have shown her. She had spent several mornings wandering round the city with a guidebook in a never-ending crowd of equally studious tourists until after a while the sights began to blur and intermingle and her brain went into overload mode.

In a design studio she chose a pretty enamelled photo frame for Kat in her sister’s favourite colours and frowned in surprise when Dante attempted to pay for the purchase.

‘It isn’t for me, it’s a gift for my eldest sister,’ she commented as she politely refused to allow him to buy it for her.