Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Sinful Proposals. Cathy Williams

to do that without letting her temper explode. She would have to be cool, calm and collected whilst leaving him in no doubt that she wasn’t interested in whatever he had to say to her.

      She emerged and Stefano was almost surprised because he had half expected her to have disappeared through a back door. But there she was, in jeans and a T-shirt and, without the cap, her hair was long. Very long. Every shade of blonde feathering in curls down her back, although that didn’t last very long because, even as she walked towards him, she was stuffing it into a ponytail.

      She had the long, slender body of a ballet dancer and her movements were graceful. She was scowling, but not even the scowl could hide that startling, unusual prettiness. When she had been created, some small added ingredient had been thrown into the mix, elevating her from good-looking to unbelievably striking. Her green eyes were narrowed suspiciously on him as she finally came to a stop directly in front of him.

      ‘I want to know what you said to Katherine.’

      ‘You’re not, are you?’ Stefano stood up, towering over her, and she automatically fell back a step or two.

      ‘Not what?’

      ‘Sunny.’ He shoved his hands in his pockets as they headed to the door. ‘Your mother must rue the day she named you that. Unless, of course...’ he pushed open the restaurant door, allowing her to brush past him ‘...you’re sunny with everyone else but reserve all your bulldog belligerence for me...is that it? And, if so, why?’

      ‘My mother died when I was a child,’ Sunny said coldly. ‘What did you tell Katherine?’ She didn’t want him walking next to her...didn’t want him escorting her the short distance to her flat, but she felt as if she had no choice.

      ‘I told her that I wanted to discuss something with you of a personal nature and she was kind enough to provide me with your address.’

      ‘How dare you?’ She rounded on him, hands on her hips, so furious that she felt she might explode. ‘Do you have any idea how important that job is to me?’ A series of scenarios ran through her head, each worse than the one before. He had put poor Katherine in a position...he was so important that she had had no choice but to do as he had asked...but in the morning, she, Sunny, would be called in for a little chat...she would be told that fraternising with clients was frowned upon...she would be warned...she might even be sacked... She hadn’t been there very long and the last thing the company would want would be a lawyer who couldn’t be trusted around clients...she would lose her job, her career and everything that made sense of her life...

      And it would all be this man’s fault.

      ‘I don’t want anything to do with you and how dare you tell my boss that you want my address? So that you can try and come on to me? How dare you?’ Tears of anger and frustration were pricking the back of her eyes.

      With just the street lights for illumination, his face was all angles and shadows. He towered over her and she couldn’t read the expression on his face.

      Just in case he hadn’t got the drift, though, she thought that she should make herself perfectly clear.

      ‘I’m not going to sleep with you, Mr Gunn, and I don’t want you pestering me. I don’t care how rich or powerful you are or how much business you’re going to bring to the firm... I don’t come as part of what’s on offer to you!’

      Stefano was genuinely outraged that she had pigeonholed him as desperate and downright stupid enough to think about making a pass at her.

      ‘Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?’ he asked coolly.

      That threw her and for a few seconds she stared at him in sudden confusion.

      ‘Anyway, I hope I’ve made myself clear,’ she muttered, dragging her eyes away from him and walking briskly towards the flat. He kept pace with her.

      The flat she shared with Amy was cheap and thus located in a fairly dodgy part of town. A hop and a skip away, smart restaurants and trendy cafés lined the high street but here all of that gave way to rundown houses that were mostly let to people who couldn’t afford anything better, and a couple of off licences and corner shops that stayed open beyond the call of duty.

      ‘So—’ she stopped in front of the door that led up to the flat she shared at the top of the converted Victorian house ‘—I’d appreciate it if you just left me alone, and please don’t discuss me with my boss. It could jeopardise my position in the company.’

      ‘Like I said...you’re getting ahead of yourself here. I think you’re confusing me with the sort of sad loser who’s into pursuing reluctant women and can’t take no for an answer.’

      Sunny stared at him in silence, slowly realising that she had misunderstood the situation.

      Mortification swept over her in a hot, burning tide. ‘You said you had a proposition for me...’ she stammered, so taken aback that she was barely aware of him removing the key from her hand, opening the door and urging her inside.

      He shouldn’t be coming in. He definitely should not be coming in. Amy wasn’t going to be there. She was on nights and wouldn’t be back until the following morning and Sunny couldn’t imagine him being in the flat with her, just the two of them.

      Although he wasn’t interested in her, was he? When you thought about it, why the heck would he be? He could have any woman he wanted. He would just have to snap his fingers! She was so embarrassed at jumping to erroneous conclusions that she would happily have stepped into the hole if the ground had opened up beneath her feet.

      While this jumble of thoughts was chaotically running through her head, they took the stairs and he let them into the flat with the key, which she had failed to take from him.

      It was a very small two-bedroom flat with barely room to swing a cat. The décor was shabby and the furniture looked as though it had mostly been reclaimed from a skip somewhere. Not even the cheerful prints Blu-tacked to the walls could lift the place into something more cheerful. But it worked for both of them. They got along very well and, because Amy worked nights most of the month, they tended to see one another only in passing.

      Looking around him, Stefano realised that he had never been anywhere like this before in his life. He knew that by anyone’s standards his life had been one of unsurpassed privilege. The only child of a wealthy Scottish landowner and an Italian mother who, herself, had inherited a tidy sum of money when her parents had passed away, he had never had any occasion to find himself slumming it. Alicia, of course, had not had money but he had rarely ventured into the quarters she shared with her friends.

      Here, amidst this drab, unappealing ordinariness, Sunny was the equivalent of an orchid in a patch of weeds. He could almost understand why she had misinterpreted his intentions, although that did nothing to detract from the umbrage he felt.

      Although, a little voice whispered in his head, hadn’t he looked at her with sexual interest? It wasn’t going to happen.

      Stefano swept that unwanted thought aside as fast as it had come.

      ‘My daughter liked you,’ he said without preamble.

      ‘Did she? I have no idea why. I gave her work to do and I don’t suppose many eight-year-olds would have appreciated that.’ But she felt a rare bloom of pleasure at his words.

      Released from the discomfort of thinking that he was just someone else attracted to her because of the way she looked, Sunny knew that she should be able to relax, but she was still as tense as a piece of elastic stretched to breaking point. He had sprawled out on one of the chairs in the tiny sitting room and he was just so wildly exotic that she could scarcely look at him without her breath catching in her throat and a weird tension invading her body.

      ‘I had to bring Flora in with me because she managed to successfully see off the last nanny and my mother had to go unexpectedly to Scotland...’

      ‘Oh.’ Where was this going? Sunny was bewildered. ‘When you say see off the last nanny...’ This for no other reason than to