Mistresses: The Italian's Inexperienced Mistress / Emerald Mistress

Her smooth brow indented. ‘A present?’

She lifted her hand to examine the new watch in shock and dismay. Gold, diamonds, a famous designer name. Painful early memories of similar expensive gifts surfaced. Revulsion ripped through her and she struggled with desperate fingers to take it off again but the intricate clasp defeated her. ‘No, thanks, I don’t want it. Look … how do you get this off?’

Angelo rested his stubborn jaw on the heel of his hand and surveyed her with deceptively sleepy tawny eyes. ‘I want you to wear it—’

‘What for?’ Her Delft-blue eyes flashed into direct contact with his narrowed gaze for the first time and the angry distaste etched there startled him. ‘So that you can kid yourself that you’re really a kind, generous guy? Or so that you can belittle me by paying me in jewellery for what I just did with you? Well, I may be stuck living in your stonking great status symbol of a mansion and forced to wear the fancy clothes that you paid for but—’ Gwenna had to pause just to draw breath.

‘But?’ Angelo encouraged, outraged that his generosity could be twisted into an insult and rejected.

‘I refuse to wear jewellery you give me.’

Angelo, confounded by her behaviour and furious with her, finally released her from his weight. ‘You will if it pleases me. Consider it part of the role you took on of your own accord.’

‘And do I have that role all to myself?’ The question flew off Gwenna’s tongue before she even realised that she intended to ask it. But just as quickly she accepted that she had to know, she simply had to know, whether or not she was one of a crowd.

His stunning dark gaze veiled; he was a veteran at facing down awkward questions from the women in his life. ‘No comment.’

Gwenna read only one meaning into that unrevealing response. And she felt as if he’d punched a hole right through her and sent the ground beneath her feet crashing away. He wasn’t even willing to be faithful to her? That new knowledge was like a jagged iceberg settling in her stomach and his unapologetic attitude was a humiliating slap in the face. How much lower could he make her sink? She was appalled by his attitude.

Distaste sliced through her. ‘Then, I suppose what we just did is the equivalent of a one-night stand.’

His lean bronzed face was grim as he pulled himself up against the pillows. ‘I don’t do those,’ Angelo growled with incredulous bite.

‘Perhaps I can only face thinking about this arrangement one day at a time.’ Gwenna had already been stripped of virtually everything she valued. Everything he said merely heightened the frightening sense that she was no longer in control of her own life.

Suddenly all the bewildered misery and anger and hurt she had been holding back just broke free of restraint and overflowed. ‘For goodness’ sake, I don’t even like you! You’ve taken my home, my garden, my very history from me and marooned me in a city where I don’t belong. You’ve even taken Piglet!’ she launched in a wild, almost incoherent surge of condemnation, scrambling out of bed to shoot into the bathroom at speed and noisily bolt the door behind her.

Angelo heard her sob and he sprang out of bed. Outrage powering him, he pulled on his boxers. So, let her cry, get it out of her system. She was overwrought. He always gave women in tears the widest possible berth. I don’t even like you!

‘Gwenna …’ Angelo reached the bathroom door without having taken a conscious decision to move in that direction and knocked once. ‘Open this door.’

Her eyes wet, Gwenna sucked in a ragged breath and turned on the bath taps to drown him out. Womanising louse, all sweet-talk one moment, ice-cold, heartless and utterly immoral the next. How could she have just sleepwalked into becoming the mistress of such a man?

Angelo rapped on the door again. ‘I want to know you’re okay. And I want to know right now.’

Blocking him out because she had absolutely nothing left to say to him, Gwenna slid into the warm bathwater. The hint of an intimate ache between her thighs made her pale and, reaching hurriedly for the soap, she washed with helpless urgency. Tears inched down her quivering cheeks and she dashed them away with a furious hand. Why was she crying? She never, ever cried!

Angelo tried the handle one more time and then pulled on his clothes in haste. He kicked the door at the weakest point beneath the lock and it burst open, slamming back against the wall. She was in the bath, drenched blue eyes enormous with fright, honey-blonde waves of hair cloaking her and trailing in the water.

‘I’m sorry if I scared you but you should have unlocked the door,’ Angelo murmured with measured quietness. ‘I was concerned.’

Trembling, Gwenna stared at him, absorbing the sight of his shirt hanging loose, disclosing a muscular wedge of bronzed hair-roughened chest. Shock was rippling through her. He had called her bluff. He had kicked in the door. She couldn’t believe he had done that. She tipped up her chin to snatch a glance at his lean strong face and then hurriedly jerked her head away, out of breath and more tense than ever.

Angelo crouched down by the side of the bath. ‘Look at me …’

‘Do you have to be so intimidating?’ she muttered tautly, sitting knees to chin in the water, naked and cornered.

‘I’m trying bloody hard not to be!’ Angelo flared back at her. ‘Stop cringing … you don’t have to be afraid of me.’

Gwenna dropped her head. How could she not be afraid?

‘I would never harm you.’

Gwenna thought about the kind of harm that had a more lasting effect than mere bruises.

Frustration was roaring through Angelo. She wasn’t listening to him. She often gave him the impression that she was only giving him part of her attention. Not in bed though, he reminded himself with grim satisfaction. But the rest of the time? Either he got the feeling she was holding back or she was lost in her own little world and he didn’t like either sensation. ‘I want to understand why you blew up over the watch.’

Gwenna studied the clear water lapping round her legs and compressed her full ripe mouth. ‘Dad was always giving stuff like that to my mother.’

His brows pleated. ‘So? He was her husband.’

Gwenna was surprised enough to look up again. She had forgotten that he had moved down to her level and she collided unwarily with lustrous dark eyes the colour of autumn. A very dangerous man with strikingly beautiful eyes that made her heartbeat race. She shut her eyes tight in self-reproach. What was the matter with her?

‘Gwenna,’ Angelo chided huskily. ‘I thought women loved to talk about themselves. What’s wrong with you?’

‘My father wasn’t married to my mother,’ she admitted flatly.

Angelo frowned. ‘I don’t follow.’

Gwenna reddened. ‘Mum had an on-off affair with Dad that dragged on for years and years. He was married to his first wife then.’

‘I wasn’t aware that your father had been married twice.’

‘Yeah, well, why would you be?’ Gwenna was mortified by the need to explain the unpalatable facts. ‘When Mum fell pregnant with me she thought he would leave his wife, who couldn’t have children. But he didn’t. Sometimes we didn’t see Dad for months on end and then he’d come visiting with extravagant pressies. My mother liked things like that … I don’t.’

‘But your father must’ve raised you … you have his name,’ Angelo pointed out flatly.

‘Mum died when I was eight and I went to live with Dad and he adopted me. His first wife wasn’t happy about that and they divorced.’

‘I had no idea.’ Angelo was furious that the confidential report he had had done on Hamilton had omitted such highly relevant details. He was astonished by the reality that her mother appeared to have been yet another one of the older man’s sadly deluded female victims. But no sooner had that angle occurred to Angelo than he reminded himself that she was still Donald Hamilton’s only child with the taint of his blood in her veins.

Gwenna watched him rise to his full imposing height, the sleek, hard planes of his darkly handsome features shuttered and cool. She assumed that the story she had just told him had made him think less of her. A lot of people had despised her mother for having an affair with another woman’s husband and giving birth to his child. Taunted and teased at primary school, Gwenna had had few friends. The locals had expressed their scorn and disapproval by excluding Donald Hamilton’s mistress and child from community activities.

In the uneasy silence, Angelo squashed the urge to ask further personal questions. He did not do personal in relationships. He kept it simple. He strolled out of the bathroom. I don’t even like you. That assertion rang clear as a bell in his head all over again, infuriating him. Since when had he cared whether he was liked or not? But then women made a real effort to please him. They were deferential, flattering … servile? The suspicion revolted him. Couldn’t he handle a challenge? Wasn’t he man enough to handle what could just be the very first honest woman he had met? At the last possible moment, Angelo paused in the doorway. Tugging a fleecy towel off the rail he shook it out and strode back to extend it to her. ‘Stop worrying about things.’

‘I’m not worried.’

‘You’re stressed out of your mind,’ Angelo corrected.

In an abrupt movement she scrambled up, water streaming off her slender curves in rivulets, and accepted the embrace of the towel. She felt manipulated, controlled, managed into doing what he wanted her to do. He lifted her out of the bath.

‘Don’t,’ she dared, drawing hurriedly back from him to firmly anchor the towel beneath her arms.

Gleaming eyes surveyed her from below a lush fringe of black lashes and she could feel her skin tightening and burning over her cheeks. Her lips felt full and moist and she imagined and immediately craved the scorching heat and pressure of his mouth on hers. She went rigid in rejection but still cruel sensation leapt and danced over her, wreaking havoc with her body. She was madly conscious and thoroughly ashamed of the straining prominence of her nipples and the wicked dampness of the tender place between her thighs.

‘You see, you may not like me, passione mia,’ Angelo murmured silkily, ‘but all I have to do is carry you back to that bed and you’re one hundred per cent mine.’

Gwenna was white with humiliation and self-loathing and she reacted with anger to that derisive gibe. ‘I’m not yours and I never will be because you can’t touch me where it matters,’ she launched back furiously. ‘I don’t care what you think of me, or what you say or do with anyone else either, because I gave my heart a long time ago to someone worth ten of you!’