Italian Bachelors: Steamy Seductions. Lynne Graham

to suppress his exasperation with her at her determination to keep that date. It was a novelty to be with a woman who wasn’t falling over herself to meet his every demand and expectation but that didn’t mean he liked it and he was confident that her attitude would soon change.

      * * *

      Topsy was embarrassingly conscious of Gaetano’s family’s very hopeful and constant scrutiny of their table. So far, she had met his mamma, his papa, one sister and two younger brothers, for the restaurant in the village was a family affair and every one of his relatives was delighted to see Gaetano dining out in female company. Gaetano had already taken her step by painful step through the story of how his childhood sweetheart and former fiancée, Daria, had gone off to study for a further degree and had fallen madly in love with another man and dumped him, leaving him with a half-built marital dream home.

      ‘Your liveliness reminded me of her...a little,’ Gaetano had told her, clearly thinking that was a compliment until she advised him that the best thing possible for him would be to seek a woman who reminded him not at all of his lost love. By that stage both of them knew that they would never be anything to each other than friends and Topsy didn’t have to feel the slightest bit guilty at not having experienced any romantic spark in his direction.

      ‘Dante seemed...er...attentive,’ Gaetano selected, eyes dancing with amusement. ‘When he brought you to the house.’

      Topsy blushed furiously. ‘I don’t think we’d have much in common.’

      Gaetano nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’re thinking of his wealth and his fancy title but it would be a mistake to assume that Dante always had it easy.’

      Topsy didn’t correct his assumption. ‘Hasn’t he?’ she pressed, full of a curiosity she could not suppress.

      Gaetano grimaced. ‘When he was sixteen, my father found him lying by the side of the road one night. He’d been badly beaten up, broken nose, broken ribs, in fact every finger of one hand was broken. He wouldn’t tell my father or the police who had done it.’ Gaetano hesitated. ‘My parents always believed it was his father, Aldo. The old count had a filthy temper.’

      Topsy had paled in shock, mentally picturing one of Dante’s long-fingered elegant hands, and she swallowed hard on her nausea. ‘If that’s true, he must have had a tough time as a child.’

      * * *

      That conversation was still lingering on her mind when she was climbing the stairs at the castle at the end of their evening. Just goes to show, never judge by appearances, she conceded ruefully just as she rounded the corner of the landing and entered the corridor to find herself face-to-face with the very man occupying her brain to the exclusion of all else.

      ‘Dante!’ she exclaimed, startled by his unexpected appearance.

      Dante scanned her face with intent gleaming eyes of green. ‘Your lipstick isn’t even smudged,’ he commented with unconcealed satisfaction.

      ‘And what the heck is that supposed to mean?’ Topsy flung back at him, dark hair dancing round her slight shoulders as she tossed her head in annoyance.

      ‘You didn’t let him touch you.’

      Topsy sucked in a deep, angry breath that filled her lungs to capacity. ‘And that is your business because...?’

      ‘Tonight you’re mine,’ Dante informed her with a level of unmistakable assurance that drove her breath right back out of her lungs again, deflating her when she could least afford the weakness.

      A split second later, Dante did nothing to help her condition because he did something even more shocking: bending down, scooping her off her feet as though she were a doll and anchoring both arms tightly round her.

      ‘Have you gone insane? What are you doing?’ Topsy exclaimed, keeping her voice low though because she did not want anyone to come investigating, indeed would have done just about anything to avoid being caught in such a compromising position by anyone living at the castle.

      ‘Stop acting dim—you know exactly what I’m doing!’ Dante asserted, boldly thrusting wide a door and striding into a room she had never entered before for the simple reason that it was his bedroom.

      ‘What on earth do you think you’re playing at?’ Topsy yelped as he put her down on the giant four-poster bed with scant ceremony.

      ‘You went on your date to which I very generously did not object.’

      ‘You’ve got no blasted right to object!’ Topsy hissed back at him full volume. ‘No right at all!’

      His features set rigid, his spectacular bone structure prominent. ‘I want you to spend the night with me.’

      ‘And even if you’d asked like any normal man, the answer would still be no!’ Topsy slung at him furiously, flushed and all of a quiver from the assumption he appeared to have made about her and anything but grateful to be forced to relive those deeply embarrassing and heated minutes in his car, which had led to his misapprehension that she would be so easily available that she would simply fall into his bed the instant he expressed the desire.

      Dante dealt her an incredulous look from scorching green eyes. ‘No?’ he repeated, as though it was a word he had never heard before from a woman in the bedroom.

      Topsy scrambled off his bed, retrieved a shoe that had dropped off and wedged her foot back into it at the same time as she smoothed down her rucked skirt. ‘I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression this afternoon but I’m not going to sleep with you,’ she told him squarely.

      She reminded Dante of a determined little bird rearranging her bright-feathered plumage, her slightly snub nose in the air, her heart-shaped face pink as one of his mother’s precious roses. ‘Yet you want me,’ he breathed between clenched teeth, for all he had thought about all evening when he should have been catching up on work was his fantasy of getting her in his bed where she belonged.

      ‘This afternoon...er...well that was an aberration and entirely your own fault,’ Topsy told him roundly, furious at the situation he had put her in, fighting her mortification that he could have thought she would be that easy. Of course when she hadn’t objected to that shameless little session of intimacy in the car, could she really blame him? And it did not help that when she looked at that gorgeous dark angel face of his she felt breathless and boneless and prone to reliving every madly exciting moment of his touch.

      ‘How was it my fault?’ Dante demanded.

      ‘You shouldn’t be so good at seduction,’ Topsy responded with every evidence of conviction in that belief. ‘If I’d had a moment to stop and consider, it would never have happened and we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.’

      Dante was furious with her for the ambiguous signals she had fed him, but for a split second he was startled to realise he was also on the edge of bursting out laughing at that response. ‘Perhaps we should begin again,’ he breathed instead, his hard mouth curling a little, for he had never said that to a woman in his life before, but then he could also not recall ever being quite so hot to have one.

      ‘No, we’re not going to begin anything!’ Topsy exclaimed, and then bent down as her heel dug into a sheet of paper on the rug, detaching it with careful fingers and lifting it up to see the columns of figures. ‘Oh, that’s wrong...’

      Already detaching from her hand the sheet that had escaped from the file that had fallen to the floor when he put her on his bed, Dante frowned down at her. ‘What’s wrong?’

      Topsy peered over his arm and stabbed a finger at one column. ‘It’s added up wrong.’

      ‘Of course it isn’t,’ he responded impatiently, setting the document down on the file beside his laptop.

      ‘Dante, I have a doctorate in advanced maths and the one thing I do know is figures and I assure you that that final entry is a mistake,’ Topsy said drily.

      ‘A doctorate in advanced maths?’ Dante