Castiglione's Pregnant Princess. Lynne Graham

but so what? If she was quiet she doubted if she would wake up the very correct Jenkins.

      The stairs creaked and she didn’t like moving round in total darkness but a light could rouse someone likely to investigate. By touch she located the door at the back of the hall and through that a flight of stairs, which ran down into the basement area where she assumed the kitchen lay. Safely through that door, she put on lights and relaxed. The kitchen was as massive as a hotel kitchen and she padded about on the cold tiles, trying not to shiver. She located bread and the toaster and milk and then, wonder of wonders, some hot-chocolate powder to make her favourite night-time drink. Jazz was grateful she wasn’t like her aunt, who joked that she only had to look at a bar of chocolate to gain an inch on her hips.

      Her toast ready, she sat down at the table to eat with appetite, eyes closing blissfully as she munched hot butter-laden toast, which was the first glimpse Vitale had of her as he strode barefoot through the door.

      ‘You can’t wander round here in the middle of the night!’ he began impatiently. ‘My security team wakened me.’

      ‘Your security... What?’ Jazz gasped, startled out of her life by the interruption and even more startled by the vision Vitale made bare-chested and barefoot, clad only in a pair of tight jeans. He was completely transformed by casual clothing, she conceded in awe.

      Vitale groaned out loud. ‘The whole house is wired with very sensitive security equipment and I have a full team of bodyguards who monitor it.’

      ‘But I didn’t see anything and no alarm went off.’

      ‘It’s composed of invisible beams and it’s silent. As soon as the team established that it wasn’t an intrusion but a member of the household they contacted me, not wishing to frighten you.’

      ‘Well, I’m not frightened of you,’ she mumbled round a mouthful of toast that she was trying to masticate enough not to choke when she swallowed because, in reality, Vitale was delicious shorn of his shirt and her mouth had gone all dry.

      He was a classic shape, all broad shoulders, rippling muscular torso sprinkled with dark curls of hair leading down into a vee at his hips and a flat, taut stomach. Clothed she could just about contrive to resist him, half-naked he was an intolerable lure to her eyes.

      ‘They saw you on camera, realised that you weren’t fully dressed and surmised that the sudden intrusion of a strange man could scare you.’

      ‘On camera?’ she repeated in horror, striving to recall if she had scratched or done anything inappropriate while she was in the kitchen, bracing her hands on the table top to rise to her feet and move away from it.

      Vitale shifted lean dark hands upward in a soothing motion. ‘Relax, they’ve all been switched off. We’re not being monitored right now.’

      ‘Thank goodness for that,’ she framed tremulously, the perky tips of her nipples pushing against the tee shirt below Vitale’s riveted gaze. ‘I only got up to get something to eat.’

      ‘That’s perfectly all right,’ Vitale assured her thickly, inwardly speculating on whether she was wearing anything at all below the nightshirt or whatever it was. ‘But for the future, I’ll show you a button you can press just to let security know someone’s wandering around the house and this won’t happen again.’

      ‘OK,’ Jazz muttered, still shaken up at the idea that she had been watched without her knowledge by strange men.

      Vitale ran a surprisingly gentle hand down the side of her downturned face. ‘It’s not a problem. You haven’t done anything wrong,’ he murmured sibilantly, his accent catching along the edges of his dark, deep, masculine voice.

      A shocking flare of heat rose up from the heart of her as he touched her face and Jazz threw her head back in mortification, her green eyes wide with diluted pupils.

      ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Vitale framed hoarsely. ‘You have the most beautiful eyes... You always did. And I didn’t intend to say that, don’t know which random brain cell it came from.’

      An overpowering need to smile tilted Jazz’s tense lips because he sounded so stressed and so confounded by his own words. Beautiful eyes, well, that was something, her first and probably only ever compliment from Vitale, who worked so hard at keeping his distance. But he had touched her first, she reminded herself with faint pride in what felt vaguely like an achievement. Her body was taut as a bowstring and breathing was a major challenge as she looked up into dark, smouldering golden intensity. Ditto, beautiful eyes, she labelled, but she didn’t really think women were supposed to say things like that to men so she kept quiet out of fear that he would laugh.

      ‘Troppa fantasia... I have too much imagination,’ Vitale breathed, being steadily ripped in two by the conflicting impulses yanking at him. He knew he should let her go and return to bed but he didn’t want to. He was ridiculously fascinated that, even in the middle of the night and fresh from her bed with tousled hair, she looked fantastic. And so very different from the women he was used to, women who went to bed in make-up and rose before him to put on another face to greet the dawn, and his awakening, plastic perfect, contrived, artificial, everything that Jazz was not. Jazz was real right down to her little naturally pink toenails and that trait was incredibly attractive to him. With Jazz what you saw was literally what you got and there were no pitfalls of strategy or seduction lined up to trip him.

      ‘I would never have thought it,’ Jazz almost whispered, so painfully conscious of his proximity that the little hairs were rising on the back of her neck. ‘You’re a banker.’

      ‘And I can’t have an imagination too?’ Vitale inserted with a sudden flashing smile of amusement that would have knocked for six the senses of a stronger woman than Jazz.

      ‘It’s unexpected,’ she mumbled uncertainly, all of a quiver in receipt of that mesmerising, almost boyish grin. ‘You always seem so serious.’

      ‘I don’t feel serious around you,’ Vitale admitted, tiring of looking down at her and getting a crick in his neck. In a sudden movement that took her very much by surprise, he bent, closed his hands to her tiny waist and lifted her up. He settled her down on the end of the table. He was incredibly, ferociously aroused but Jazz seemed curiously unaware of the chemistry between them, almost innocent. No way could she be that innocent, he told himself urgently, because he would never touch an innocent woman and he desperately needed to touch her. His lovers were always experienced women, who knew the score.

      ‘But then you never know what you’re feeling,’ Jazz quipped. ‘You’re not into self-analysis.’

      ‘How do you know that?’ Vitale demanded with a frown.

      ‘I see it in you,’ Jazz told him casually.

      Vitale didn’t like the conversation, didn’t want to talk either. He spread his hands to either side of her triangular face and he tasted that alluring pink mouth with unashamed passion.

      Jazz was afraid her heart was about to leap right out of her chest, her breathlessness as physical as her inability to think that close to him. She felt nebulously guilty, as if on some level her brain was striving to warn her that she was doing something wrong, but she absolutely refused to listen to that message when excitement was rushing like fire through her nerve endings. Her nipples tightened, her slender thighs pushing firmly together on the embarrassing dampness gathering at the apex of her legs.

      ‘Per l’amor di Dio...’ Vitale swore, fighting for control because he was already aching. ‘What do you do to me?’

      ‘What do I do to you?’ Jazz whispered, full of curiosity.

      She excited the hell out of him but he was too experienced to let that salient fact drop from his lips. ‘You tempt me beyond my control,’ Vitale heard himself admit regardless and was shocked by the reality.

      ‘That’s all right,’ Jazz breezed, one hand smoothing up over a high cheekbone, the roughness of his stubbled jaw lending a brooding darkness to his lean, strong face in the dimly lit kitchen, her other hand tracing