Mistress Material

‘ARE you sure they won’t mind?’ asked Suzanna hesitantly as, with a flick of charcoal, she completed the small portrait she’d been doing of her friend, just as the plane began to make its final descent towards Rome airport.

‘Who?’ Francesca was too busy batting her eyelashes outrageously at the uniformed male flight attendant to pay much attention to her schoolfriend.

‘Your family, of course.’ Suzanna flicked her pale auburn plait back over her shoulder. ‘It’s very kind of them to invite me to stay with them.’

Francesca shrugged. ‘They don’t care who I invite—they’re never around. Papà’s always working and is away a lot on business, and my stepmother’s away in Paris, apparently. She’ll probably be trawling the streets looking for gigolos—’

‘Francesca!’ exclaimed Suzanna in shocked horror. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘Aren’t I?’ queried Francesca with unfamiliar bitterness. ‘She’s twenty years younger than my father. She spends his money like water, and she flirts with anything in a pair of trousers,’ she finished, in disgust.

‘So why does he stay with her, then?’ asked Suzanna softly.

‘Because she’s beautiful. Why else...?’ Francesca’s voice tailed off momentarily, and when she spoke again it was with her customary, rather sardonic verve. ‘Which only leaves big brother—and he’s worse than any jailer. But at least with you there you can be my alibi.’

‘Alibi?’ echoed Suzanna uncertainly.

‘Sure.’ Francesca’s dark eyes flashed. ‘He tries to stop me going out with boys, so I don’t tell him any more. And if he asks you anything, then you tell him you last saw me praying in church!’

‘Francesca!’ said Suzanna uneasily because she didn’t know sometimes whether to take her effervescent friend seriously, and her fingers began to pleat the hem of her white dress nervously. ‘You know you don’t mean that!’

‘I know that going home for the holidays is going to cramp my style,’ muttered Francesca. ‘The discos I go to during term-time are fantastic —I wish you’d come along too.’

Suzanna shook her head. ‘Discos aren’t really my thing.’ In discos she felt gangly, awkward. And when you stood at almost six feet in your stockinged feet that was inevitable.

‘That’s because you’ve never given them a chance!’ Francesca’s attention was caught by the thumbnail sketch in Suzanna’s hand. ‘Hey! That’s good—it’s me, isn’t it?’

‘Do you like it?’ smiled Suzanna.

‘Yeah. May I keep it?’

‘Sure.’

The plane was coming in to land, and there was little time for talking again until they were seated in the back of the shiny, chaffeur-driven limousine and heading towards the Caliandro mansion. Francesca spent the entire journey chattering as she freed Suzanna’s hair from her plaits and teased it into a blazing and magnificent furnace of waves, and Suzanna was so enraptured at the spectacular landscape passing them by that the subject of alibis was all but forgotten.

Suzanna and Francesca were both at finishing school in Switzerland. ‘It’s bound to finish me off sooner or later!’ Francesca always joked. It was the expensive kind of school which was intended to produce young ladies. Daughters of the rich and the noble attended, most of them from privileged but broken homes.

Suzanna’s own father had died, leaving a wife, a son and a daughter, and a car-manufacturing plant which her brother had over-ambitious plans for. Money was tight, but a savings plan taken out at her birth had ensured that at least Suzanna’s expensive education would be paid for. But she worried about her mother’s well-being, and she worried about her feckless brother, Piers, being in charge of the family business...

Francesca’s own mother had died a few years back, and her father had quickly remarried. A mistake, according to Francesca, and it seemed that there was little love lost between her and her stepmother. ‘And my brother really hates her!’ she’d added. ‘He can hardly bear to be in the same room as her.’

It didn’t sound like a very happy house, thought Suzanna suddenly.

Francesca’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘We’re here!’ she exclaimed as the car swept down a gravelled drive and came to a halt in front of an imposing white building, and then her voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. ‘And here comes Pasquale, my brother—so don’t forget—if he asks whether I date men you just tell him that I’ve shown bags of disinterest!’

Through the window of the limousine, Suzanna could see the most handsome man she had ever set eyes on, and her heart lurched painfully in her chest. She blinked several times, as if afraid that she’d simply dreamt him up.

Quite unbelievably, she hadn’t.

He was tall—quite spectacularly tall for a man of Italian origin. His shoulders were strong and wide and his hips were narrow. His nose was a proud Roman curve and his eyes were dark and glittering. For Suzanna, naive and unused to men, the experience of staring up into the face of Francesca’s brother was like something out of the romantic novels she’d read since her early teens; she looked, and was, completely smitten.

Afterwards, she was to tell herself that she had been ripe to fall for someone—anyone. It was just unfortunate that it had happened to be Pasquale...

He greeted his sister with a kiss on both cheeks and then held his hand out formally to Suzanna.

The sun was behind her and seemed to create a halo of golden-red around her hair—or so Francesca whispered to her later that night when Suzanna’s heart was still pounding in that strange, unfamiliar way which hadn’t left her since she’d first set eyes on Pasquale.

The short white cheesecloth dress she wore merely hinted at the outline of the smooth young flesh which lay beneath, but when he looked at her a stillness and a watchfulness came over Pasquale Caliandro. He caught her small hand in his firm, warm and masculine grip and as she gave him a look of helpless fascination his eyes narrowed, his mouth hardening as he stared down at her.

‘I think my brother fancies you,’ Francesca said that night as they got ready for bed. ‘He gave you a real mean, hungry look!’

‘Rubbish!’ said Suzanna, blushing furiously. Of course it was rubbish, she convinced herself as she dived into the pool one morning, a few days after she’d arrived. Men who fancied you didn’t virtually ignore you in a way which she thought bordered on downright rudeness. And they certainly didn’t speak to you in that awful, brusque way he had of addressing her. One day he’d actually had the nerve to tell her to stop hanging her head and to be proud of her height!

Sometimes, she thought as she ploughed up and down the swimming pool in an effort to get rid of the heat in her veins which just wouldn’t go away—sometimes she thought that Pasquale almost disliked her—his manner towards her was so abrupt.

And yet at others...

She shivered. Other times she would turn around to find him watching her. Just watching her with a dark and brooding intensity which frightened the life out of her, yet thrilled her at the same time.

Just about the only nice thing he’d said to her had been when he’d found her sketching quietly in the garden one day.

He had stood silently looking over her shoulder for at least a minute, and had given a little nod as he’d watched her long fingers cleverly recreating the glass summer house, which was overhung with vines.

‘That’s good,’ he observed. ‘Good enough to make it your career, I think.’ And Suzanna had blushed furiously at the unexpected praise.

She turned on her back and lazily kicked her legs around in the cool water. It was indeed a strange household she was staying with, she reflected. Francesca seemed to spend her whole time concocting schemes to get to one of the discotheques in the city, but so far she hadn’t succeeded, since Pasquale vehemently blocked every suggestion. ‘You’re far too young,’ he’d told her emphatically, and then his eyes had narrowed and he had given Suzanna one of his rare looks. ‘Do you girls go to many discos?’ he’d queried, his dark eyes suspicious.

‘Never!’ Suzanna and Francesca had replied in unison, but Suzanna hadn’t been able to stop herself from blushing at Francesca’s easy lie, and she was certain that Pasquale’s sharp eyes had noticed, for he’d frowned severely.

Francesca and Pasquale’s father she hardly saw at all. A still handsome man of sixty, with streaks of silver in his dark hair, he seemed to spend most of the time working—as Francesca had prophesied—making it home only in time for the evening meal. Usually at dinner it was just the three of them, as Pasquale always seemed to be out on a date with one of the many glamorous-sounding women who telephoned him, and their stepmother was still in Paris.

But today Suzanna was alone in the house. Pasquale was working and Signor Caliandro had flown to Naples for the day. Francesca had gone to visit her godmother on the other side of the city. She’d invited Suzanna to go along, but Suzanna knew that the elderly lady spoke little English and had decided that it would be fairer to let Francesca go alone. Besides, she rather liked having this luxurious house to herself.

The swimming pool was vast and deliciously cool and Suzanna dived to the depths of the turquoise water and swam around. She’d almost used up all her air, when the devastatingly sharp pain of cramp stabbed ruthlessly at her calf.

Perhaps if she’d had a lungful of air and hadn’t been near the bottom of the pool she wouldn’t have panicked, but panic she did, doing the worst thing she could possibly have done—she gulped water down, her arms and legs flailing wildly in all directions.

Her head and chest felt as though they might actually burst, but suddenly she felt a pair of hands tightly grasping her waist. She tried instinctively to wriggle free, but whoever was holding her had an indomitable strength and would not let her go.

She found herself being propelled to the surface, where her mouth broke open and greedily sucked in air, and she fell back against the chest of her rescuer, a solid, hard wall of muscle, but she knew without turning to look at him that it was Pasquale.

His arms were still around her waist, and his head dropped briefly to rest on hers.

‘Dio!’ he exclaimed savagely, and kicked off and swam towards the pool steps. He climbed out first, then picked her up easily and carried her to lay her down on the soft, sun-warmed grass.

She realised that he had dived in fully dressed—that he had not even bothered to kick off his beautiful, soft, handmade shoes, which were now sodden. His silk shirt clung to him like a second skin and his sopping trousers now etched every hard sinew of the strong shafts of his powerful thighs.

His eyes were blazing. ‘You fool! You crazy little idiot!’ he cried out, and he ran his hands thoroughly but dispassionately over her body, like a doctor examining for broken bones.