Mediterranean Mavericks. Jane Porter

turned sharply, as if he could sense her standing here. She watched his eyes move in a possessive flow from her face to his shirt, then down her legs. The intimacy in the look conflicted with the coldness now in charge of his features. And she knew that not only had he brought himself under control, but she was now looking at the man she’d first met, undeniably attractive but cynical and hard.

      On a wavering grimace Rachel dropped her eyes from him and stepped back into the bedroom. When Elise had picked him to have her rebellious affair with, she had chosen the wrong man, she thought heavily as she closed the door.

      Pushing his free hand into his trouser pocket, Raffaelle suppressed the desire to either curse or sigh as he leant his lean hips against the edge of the desk while Daniella continued to yell in his ear.

      He was angry with the interfering press, who were taking it in turns to call up Daniella in their quest for more information. He was also fed up because the whole thing was now driving itself like a train with no damn brakes.

      And he was achingly bloody aroused and despising himself for feeling like that. Where did he get off, jumping all over a woman—a stranger—like some randy, feckless, uncontrolled youth—?

      No wonder she’d looked at him just now as if he had crawled out from beneath a stone. No wonder she had gone back in the bedroom and shut herself away. She knew she was trapped; he knew he was trapped!

      ‘No, Daniella,’ he grimly cut in to her half-hysterical ranting. ‘It is you who made the mistake two months ago. She was never Elise—have you got that?’

      His cold tone alone had the desired effect.

      ‘You mean you want me to say that I was mistaken?’

      ‘No. I am telling you that you are mistaken.’

      ‘So you have just got engaged to marry this Rachel Carmichael—the same woman who threw herself at you tonight?’

      ‘Si,’ he confirmed.

      ‘Just like that—?’She was almost choking on her disbelief.

      ‘No, not just like that,’ he sighed out. ‘I have been—courting Rachel over the last few months.’

      ‘Courting her—?’

      Bad choice of word. ‘Seducing her, then.’

      Her struck silence made him grimace and he couldn’t make up his mind if she was beginning to swallow the lies or simply being sensible for once and taking on board the grim warning in his voice.

      ‘Is she pregnant—?’

      ‘No!’ he bit out, jerking upright from the desk and swinging round as a sting of stark alarm shot down his back.

      Dio, he’d used nothing to stop it from happening, and he had not thought to ask her if she was protected!

      What kind of crass bloody oversexed fool did that make him? Or her for not thinking about it—?

      ‘And, since my personal life is no one’s business but my own, cara, can I suggest a simple no comment from you would make me happy? Or, better still, Daniella—take the telephone off the hook!’

      He cut the connection and tossed the handset back on its rest, then just stood there, not knowing what to do next.

      Sex without protection with a woman he barely knew. Flexing muscles rippled all over him as he took on board the consequences which could result from such a stupidly irresponsible act.

      With his luck tonight, she could already be in the process of conceiving his baby. Add all the other risks which came along with unprotected sex and he suddenly felt like a time bomb set to go off!

      A growl left his throat as he turned back to the bedroom. Chin set like a vice, he pushed open the door. The room was in darkness. He switched on the overhead light and went to stand at the bottom of the bed.

      She was nothing but a curled up mound beneath the duvet. ‘I did not use protection,’ he clipped out.

      The mound jerked, then went still for a gut-clenching second. Then it moved again and she emerged, sliding up against the pillows, flush-cheeked—wary, defensive—sensationally delectable.

      Dio, he thought.

      ‘Say that again,’ she shook out.

      ‘I did not use protection,’ he repeated tautly. ‘I am not promiscuous and I have never taken such risks before in my life,’ he added stiffly. ‘I like to think that I can respect my…partner’s history in the same way that she can respect mine.’

      Rachel looked at the way he was standing there like some arrogant autocrat caught with his pants down by his bitch of a wife. Only his pants were up; it was his shirt that was missing and the bitch of a wife in this case was the gift he’d been handed and enjoyed thoroughly—before he’d thought to wonder where she had been before she’d landed in his bed!

      As if it wasn’t bad enough that she was sitting in the bed belonging to a man she had only met for the first time tonight, wearing his shirt and his scents and his touch on her skin—she now had to endure the kind of conversation that belonged in a brothel!

      Next he would be asking how much he owed her for her services. Give him half a chance and she knew he would love to denounce her out loud as a whore.

      Well, what did that make him? Rachel wanted to know.

      ‘I am a clean-living, careful, healthy person,’ she snapped out indignantly.

      ‘I am relieved to hear it.’

      He didn’t look it. ‘I don’t sleep around! And if you hit me with one more rotten insult, Mr Villani,’ she warned furiously. ‘I think I am going to physically attack you!’

      ‘My apologies if it sounded as if I was trying to insult you—’

      ‘You did insult me.’ She went to slide back down the bed.

      ‘But we don’t know each other.’

      ‘You can say that again,’ Rachel muttered.

      ‘And it is an issue we need to address.’

      ‘Well, you addressed it very eloquently,’ she told him and tugged up the duvet with a now go away kind of shrug.

      If he read it he ignored it. ‘We have not finished with this.’

      ‘Yes, we have.’

      ‘No, Rachel, we have not…’

      It was the alteration in his voice from stiff to weary that forced her to take notice. ‘We still have the issue of another kind of protection to discuss.’

      Another kind…Rachel froze for a second, then slid back up the pillows again, only this time more slowly as she finally began to catch on.

      He put it in simple words for her. ‘I did not protect us against—conception. I need to know if you did.’

      It was like being hit with one hard knock too many; she felt all the colour drain from her face. ‘I don’t believe this is happening to me,’ she whispered.

      Taut muscles stretched as he pulled himself in like a man trying to field his own hard knock. ‘I presume from your response that it is a problem.’

      ‘I’ve told you once—I don’t sleep around!’ she cried out.

      A nerve flicked at the corner of his hard mouth. ‘You don’t need to sleep around to take oral contraception.’

      ‘Well, thank you for that reassuring piece of information,’ she said hotly. ‘But, in my case, and because I don’t sleep around, I—don’t take oral contraception either…’The heat in her voice trailed into a stifled choke.

      He cursed.

      Rachel covered her face with her hands.

      She had just indulged