His Wedding Ring Of Revenge. Julia James

realised the villa was not deserted after all.

      Someone had been standing at the top of a short flight of stone steps that led from the upper terrace down to the pool area. Male, late teenage, maybe even twenty, obviously Italian. Very slim. Tall.

      For a moment he had gone on standing where he was, unmoving.

      Then, slowly, he had begun to walk down the steps.

      He’d been wearing cream-coloured chinos, immaculately cut and styled. One hand had been thrust into a pocket, tautening the material across a washboard stomach. A tan leather belt had snaked around his lean hips. An open-necked, cream-coloured shirt had been rolled back slightly at the cuffs, and around his shoulders an oatmeal jumper.

      He had descended the steps with an indolent, lethal grace that had stopped the breath in Rachel’s lungs.

      Her eyes had been dragged from the column of his throat, revealed by the open-necked shirt, and as they’d reached his face she had felt every muscle in her body tense unbearably.

      It was the most beautiful face she had ever seen.

      Sable hair, feathering slightly over a tanned brow, sculpted cheekbones, planed jaw and nose, and a mouth…a mouth that made jellyfish squirm inside her stomach.

      He’d worn dark glasses, and he’d looked just so cool, so glamorous, as if he’d just stepped out of a scene from a film, or off a poster.

      Her stomach had tensed with nervous awareness, making her feel stupid and dazed.

      He had stopped at the bottom of the stone steps, about two metres from the edge of the pool. He had looked at her. His dark glasses had veiled his eyes, but she’d suddenly—despite the sporty cut of her swimsuit—felt incredibly exposed.

      Had he known she was supposed to be here?

      She hadn’t had the faintest idea who he was, but she had known instinctively that he was the sort of person who knew who he was—and that was someone who could go anywhere he pleased. It wasn’t just his breathtaking looks, there’d been a natural, arrogant grace about him that would have elicited instant accommodation to any wish he might have.

      Especially by females. He was the sort of male girls would just drool over, fight over, play totally, bitchily dirty to get his attention.

      With a horrible sort of dawning embarrassment Rachel had realised that, right then, it was she who was getting his attention.

      And she hadn’t liked it.

      It hadn’t been just that her housemistress’s parting warning about the predilections of Italian males towards young females was ringing in her ears. She’d felt self-conscious, horribly so. Because, whoever he was, he’d obviously known he had every right to be there, but, given the unexpectedness of her arrival, he might not have known that she had too. It had also been due to the way he’d looked down at her, his face, what she’d been able to see of it, given that his eyes were veiled, expressionless.

      Her costume might have been the world’s least glamorous swimwear, but for all that it had moulded her body and exposed her legs and arms, shaping her figure.

      She didn’t have a very good one; she had known that. Compared with some of her age group she’d been pretty underdeveloped, especially in the bust department, and all the sport she’d played had made her arms muscular. As for her face—well, it was OK-ish, she supposed, but it was pretty ordinary.

      For a male like the one who had been staring down at her, ‘ordinary’ might as well not exist.

      She had known exactly what kind of girls he would date. The A-list girls, the ones oozing sex appeal, who looked fabulous every moment of the day. The ones who totally outclassed all the other girls and who knew exactly just how hot they were.

      Any other girls could just forget it. Give in. They wouldn’t even register on his radar.

      All this had gone through her mind in a few scant moments, and she had realised that, since she was not an A-list female—even one far too young for him—she wouldn’t even exist for him as a member of the female species. So what would it matter if he thought her swimsuit unalluring and her face and figure likewise?

      What had mattered, though, was that he might think she was trespassing—or gatecrashing, or something—some tourist chancing it at a deserted posh villa.

      He had continued looking down at her, one hand still thrust into his trouser pocket, the other hanging loose, his expression blank and unreadable. Had he been waiting for her to say something? Explain her presence?

      Embarrassment had flushed through her. She’d raised a hesitant hand in a sort of wave, or some sign of visual communication. The moment she’d done it she felt a fool. But it had been too late to back off.

      ‘Hi,’ she said awkwardly. ‘You’re probably wondering who I am, but—’

      The moment she started speaking she realised she was an even bigger fool. She was speaking English, and it was totally obvious that he was Italian. No English male could ever look that svelte, that beautiful…

      He cut her short.

      ‘I know exactly who you are,’ he said. He spoke in English, completely fluent, his Italian accent doing nothing to soften the flat harshness of his words. ‘You’re the bastard daughter of my father’s whore.’

      CHAPTER TWO

      ELEVEN years later his voice was just as harsh, just as flat, the Italian accent just as unsoftened.

      ‘So, you’ve finally decided to cash in your last asset.’

      His eyes went on surveying her, completely without expression.

      Yet as his unblinking, impassive gaze rested on her she could see, very deep at the back of his eyes, a flash of gold.

      Emotion pinpointed her, like a sniper’s bullet. And just as deadly.

      That flash of gold came only at two moments.

      The first was when, as she knew he must be now, he was keeping a leash on that tight, white rage that could lash out with such lethal devastation.

      He had done that with the very first words he had ever said to her.

      If she’d had any instinct whatsoever for survival then, she knew, with bitter accusation, she would have made sure they were the last words he’d ever spoken to her.

      But that stupid, gormless fourteen-year-old had had no such instinct. Only one for encompassing with sure, deadly accuracy her own total ruin.

      She felt her nails curve with a minute jerk into the soft leather of her handbag. And that was why she knew about the other moment when that flash of gold in his eyes came.

      Out of nowhere, after the last seven years of ruthless, relentless suppression of any feeling to do with the man who was now sitting there, not three metres away from her, came a bolt of memory that she would have given her right hand not to be remembering now, here.

      No! No!

      She forced the memory aside.

      You are here for one thing only. One purpose. One aim.

      A single business transaction.

      She sharpened the focus of her gaze on him.

      Feel nothing. Remember nothing.

      He sat there, waiting for her to pitch. He knew she would pitch. It was what he had let her in to do. It was the sole justification for her continued existence as a data field in his mind. She didn’t exist otherwise.

      Did I ever exist?

      The question came, treacherous, pointless.

      No, she had never existed for him. Not her, not Rachel Vaile.

      Not the person she was—her soul, her mind, her personality, her likes and dislikes—nothing, about the person she was existed