The Boss's Christmas Seduction: Unlocking her Innocence / Million Dollar Christmas Proposal / Not Just the Boss's Plaything. Lucy Monroe

ever had.

      ‘Well, you can have all the privacy you want from me,’ Ava snapped back at him. ‘But let me make one thing clear—if you walk through that door you don’t get back in again on any pretext!’

      His eyes shimmered and narrowed, his face tensing with the surprise and considerable hauteur of a male unaccustomed to any form of rejection from a woman. ‘You can’t be serious.’

      ‘That’s the way it is, Vito. Take it or leave it. I thought the practice of droit de seigneur went out with the Crusades and you’re not going to treat me like a late-night snack and get away with it!’ Ava slung tempestuously as she punched a pillow, doused the light to leave him poised in darkness and lay down again.

      Vito opened the door, hesitated—fatally, he later realised. He thought of waking up beside Ava. He shed his robe where he stood.

      As Ava felt the mattress give beneath his weight she thought about the power of ‘miraculous’ sex over a male and it made her want to punch him more than ever. He was spoilt by too much money and too many eager-to-please women.

      ‘Am I expected to cuddle as well?’ Vito enquired with sardonic bite.

      ‘If you value your life, stay on your own side of the bed,’ Ava advised bluntly.

      Silence fell, a silence laden with nerve-racking undertones. Ava grimaced in the darkness and wished she had kept quiet. You could lead a horse to water but you couldn’t make it drink, she reminded herself wryly, a situation not improved by the fact that he was stubborn as a mule. He didn’t do the cuddly sleeping-together stuff but she didn’t think she could do an affair without affection at the very least. Who are you kidding? she asked herself. She was only at the castle for another two weeks and the minute the party was done, she would be history. She needed to learn how to take each day as it came just the way she had done in prison, but there was no way on earth that she would live according to his rules alone.

      ‘I shouldn’t have lost my temper with you about Olly’s room,’ Vito mused very quietly.

      ‘I shouldn’t have gone ahead and touched it without speaking to you about it first,’ Ava traded, her stiffness receding a little.

      ‘I used to go in there and sit in the months after the funeral,’ Vito volunteered curtly. ‘Fortunately I managed to wean myself off that habit, so there was no reason to leave the room the way it was while he was alive.’

      Ava gritted her teeth and bit back hasty words because Vito was a stiff-upper-lip kind of male. ‘Why should you have had to wean yourself off going in there?’ she finally asked. ‘There was no harm in it if it gave you comfort.’

      ‘It was a weird thing to do,’ Vito asserted in a tone that warned her that he expected her to agree with him on that score.

      Ava suffered a truly appalling desire to hug him but she imagined him shaking her off and didn’t move a muscle in his direction. ‘No, it wasn’t weird. It was completely natural. He was on your mind. You didn’t need to fight off the urge as if it was wrong. You’re just terrified of feeling emotion, aren’t you? But all you did was make it harder for yourself.’

      ‘I am not terrified of feeling emotion!’ Vito grated in disbelief.

      Ava begged to disagree in silence. Macho man had not been able to cope with the threatening desire to sit in his kid brother’s room occasionally and quite typically he had walled his grief up inside himself, convinced that that was the best way.

      ‘I’m not,’ Vito repeated doggedly, wondering why he had conversations with her that he never had with anyone else while trying to recall emotional moments without success.

      Ava smiled and went to sleep.

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      FLOWERS would be old-fashioned, Vito reasoned five days later, during a boardroom meeting at his London headquarters that he was finding unbelievably tedious. He had another five hours to put in before he could call it a day. Impatient, he glanced at the wall clock again while his mind wandered to picture Ava clad in sexy lingerie reclining on his bed and then immediately discarded the fantasy. Unlike most of his past lovers, she would hit the roof if he gave her a gift like that. What am I? Your little sex toy? So attuned had he become to Ava’s feisty take on life, he could actually hear her saying it. No, definitely not the lingerie. What did you give a woman who acted as if your millions didn’t exist? Chocolate? Boring, predictable. Exasperation sizzled through his tall, powerful physique. He could not recall ever expending this much mental energy on anything so trivial. What did she need? Clothes. Ava was the proud possessor of the very barest of necessities. But she wouldn’t like him buying her clothes either. His big shoulders squared, his strong jaw line clenched. Dio mio, she would just have to put up with it.

      ‘Mr Barbieri …?’

      Vito focused on the speaker with a blankness of mind he had no prior experience of in a business setting. He wondered if he was ill. Maybe he had the flu, maybe he had allowed himself to get too tired. Yes, that was it, too much sex, not enough rest, he decided, relieved by the explanation but acknowledging that he was not about to change his ways … not with Ava under his roof. He stood up lithely and offered his apologies for his sudden departure while explaining that he had somewhere else to be.

      That same day, Ava made her decision over breakfast: she would go and see her father. It was a Saturday and the older man always liked to stay home and read the papers in the morning.

      Fear of rejection, nerves and guilt had kept her from the door of her former family home, she acknowledged ruefully. Her court case and prison sentence along with the newspaper articles written about her fall from grace had seriously embarrassed her family and her father, who worked as a member of Vito’s accounting team, had been convinced that her role in Olly’s death had ensured that he was passed over for promotion. For those reasons, she was certainly not expecting a red carpet rolled out for her but she wanted to say sorry and discover if there was any way of restoring some kind of bond with her relations. If it crossed her mind that there never had seemed to be much of a bond between her and them, she suppressed the thought and concentrated on thinking positively.

      The past week had proved incredibly busy but all the party arrangements were running smoothly and she had begun to decorate the house. She tried not to think too much about Vito while she was working. After all, in less than a week’s time she would be leaving and the affair would be over. That was not going to break her heart, she told herself firmly, but the hand in which she held her cup of coffee trembled. Hastily she set the cup down again. If she gave way to stupid feelings, started fancying that she was in love and all that nonsense she would be digging her own descent into despair by the time it ended. And no man was allowed to have that much power over Ava because in her experience, with the single exception of Olly, the people she loved had always hurt her badly. No, just as Vito didn’t do marriage, Ava didn’t do love.

      Admittedly she was attached to him in some ways, she acknowledged grudgingly. He kept on trying to take her out to dinner and places which she hadn’t expected, having assumed he would be as keen as her to keep their involvement with each other under wraps. Certainly the staff must have guessed but by the time such rumours spread further afield Ava would be long gone. She had told Vito she had nothing to wear that wouldn’t embarrass them both in public but it was just an excuse to hide the fact that she didn’t want people to know they were involved. Much wiser to stay under the radar, she reflected ruefully, having no desire to attract controversy or see Vito outraged or upset by people who would be appalled that he could have fallen into bed with the woman responsible for his brother’s death. That was life and Ava had learned not to fight it.

      Vito and her? It was just sex, she told herself every time he was with her. He couldn’t keep his hands off her but, to be honest, she couldn’t keep her hands off him either and the awareness that they had such a short time together had simply pushed the intensity to a whole