The Multi-Millionaire's Virgin Mistress. Cathy Williams

reached out and caught her wandering hand in his. ‘I said talk, Megan. And we can’t talk in here.’

      ‘Have your friends gone?’

      ‘They weren’t my friends.’

      He dropped her hand and turned away, walking out of the bedroom so that she was obliged to follow him. He couldn’t think straight when Megan was anywhere near the vicinity of a bed—especially when she was wearing an outfit that revealed every single curve of her fabulous, sexy little body.

      ‘And put something on,’ he commanded, without looking round.

      ‘Oh, right. They’re the people who are going to change the direction of your life.’

      En route, she grabbed one of his shirts. He only wore white shirts, which she had told him was a very boring trait indeed. She had tried to even the balance by buying him a garishly coloured Hawaiian shirt, with a pattern of lurid coconut trees against a brilliant blue background, but he had yet to wear it. She suspected that it had been shoved at the bottom of his wardrobe somewhere.

      She sensed him stiffen at her throwaway remark, but he didn’t say anything. Just flung himself on the sofa that occupied one side of the space in his modest student accommodation, which only someone massively optimistic could call a sitting room.

      It was literally a poky box, as he had told her on more than one occasion. But he had worked like a slave, he said, to put himself through university, and his destiny was to become master. Master of all he surveyed. Once he left, he would never look back

      Megan didn’t like to think too hard about where all of this mastery and conquering of the universe stuff was going to take him. Out of her life, she guessed. But who knew? Eternally optimistic, and madly in love for the very first time in her life, she was happy to put any thoughts about an uncertain future on hold. She was nineteen. She had her own college life to think about. She didn’t want to foresee a day when her life wasn’t going to be joined up with his.

      ‘So who were they, anyway?’ she asked now, settling on the sofa next to him and tucking her legs underneath her. She had to stop herself from reaching out and touching his face.

      It still surprised and delighted her that she had been lucky enough to fall in love for the very first time with a man so absolutely perfect in every way. Her friends all led chaotic love-lives, constantly euphoric or depressed, or else hanging on the end of the line waiting for some guy to call. Alessandro had never done that. He had taken her virginity and cherished the gift she had given him, never taking her for granted or making promises he had no intention of fulfilling.

      ‘They were…some fairly important people, Megan.’

      He turned to look at her. Her hair was all over the place—soft, blonde hair, the colour of vanilla. Her cheeks were flushed, because he had obviously surprised her dozing. Only Megan could fall asleep in the space of seconds. Whilst wearing a ridiculous outfit. And after having made a complete fool of herself.

      ‘Sorry,’ she said in a contrite voice. Then, because she just couldn’t help herself, she leaned towards him and stroked the side of his face with the back of his hand. ‘I can understand why you were a bit put out when I appeared unannounced. Or should I say when I was brought in? Would have given anyone a shock. Especially an old man like you, Alessandro. Twenty-five years old! Practically over the hill! Do you realise it’s just a matter of time before you’re collecting your pension?’

      She laughed, a rich, warm laugh which he had found infectious from the very first minute he had heard it across a crowded room, in a club to which he had been dragged by one of his colleagues at university who’d seemed to think he needed a break from his books. Every time he heard that laugh, which was often, he wanted to smile. Not, however, now.

      ‘Here’s how it was supposed to go. In an ideal world I would have made a dramatic entrance…or at least the cake would have made a dramatic entrance…and I would have leapt out of it, like the Marilyn Monroe equivalent of a Jack in the Box, stunning you with my wonderful outfit. Then I would have sung you ‘Happy Birthday’, even though I’ll be the first to admit that my voice is pretty average…’

      ‘Unfortunately…’ He edged away and looked at her with a shuttered expression. ‘Unfortunately you couldn’t have chosen a worse moment for your little surprise.’

      ‘No, well…’ Always so comfortable in his presence, Megan could feel stirrings of unease nibbling away inside her, even though really he no longer looked angry. ‘You never told me that you were expecting guests. You said that you would be working, and I just thought that it would be kind of nice to be surprised. You work too hard.’

      ‘I do what I have to do, Megan. How many times have I told you that?’

      ‘Yes, I know. You hate this place, and you work hard so that you can get out of it and do something with your life.’

      ‘I intend to do more than just something with my life.’

      His father had done just something with his life. He had left poverty in Italy, hoping to find that the streets of London would be paved with gold. In the event they had been paved with tarmac and cement, just like everywhere else, and his father’s talents, his tremendous mathematical brain which had so enchanted Alessandro as a young boy, had become lost in the mindless boredom of manual work—because he had not been qualified to do anything else, and provincial little England had not been kind to a man whose grasp of English was broken. Never mind that his wife was English. An English rose with as few qualifications as her Italian husband. An English rose whose hands had been prematurely old from the cleaning jobs she had held down so that they could afford a small holiday once a year by the cold British seaside.

      Alessandro didn’t like to think of the mother he had only known for the first ten years of his life. He liked even less to think of his father, loyally working for a haulage firm for twenty-five years, only to be made redundant at a time when he had been too old to get another job.

      To his dying breath he had continued to tell his son what a wonderful life he had led.

      To Alessandro’s way of thinking his father’s talents had been wasted, by lack of opportunity and the cruelty of a world that judged a man’s worth by bits of paper. He would, he had determined from an early age, get those bits of paper, and he would control the world so that it could never control him the way it had his father.

      ‘Those three men,’ he said, keeping that unaccustomed drift of memory to himself, ‘who were treated to your impromptu performance, are instrumental in my plan for the future.’

      ‘You mean, the pinstriped crew?’

      He paused. ‘You need to grow up, Megan.’

      That one statement, delivered with a coldness she had never heard before, was shocking. Yes, they were total opposites. They had laughed about that a million times. But he had always indulged her. She’d drag him away from his books with homemade picnics in the park and he would laugh at the sausage rolls and packets of biscuits and cheap wine. She would make a fool of herself singing karaoke, and he would shake his head in good-natured wonder and tell her never to consider a career in singing. He had never told her to grow up—and certainly never in that tone of voice.

      ‘It was just meant to be a bit of fun, Alessandro. How was I to know that the instruments of your plan would be here? And why do you have a plan, anyway? Really? Life’s not a chessboard, you know.’

      ‘That’s exactly what it is, Megan. A chessboard. The life we end up getting depends entirely on the moves we make.’

      ‘I know you want to do stuff with your life, Alessandro, but…’ Megan shot him a look of bemusement. This wasn’t quite the sort of talk she had been expecting, but it was certainly revealing. ‘You can’t plan everything. I mean, I really hope that I end up being a good teacher…’

      ‘In a small country school somewhere…’

      ‘What’s wrong with that?’

      ‘There’s