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CHAPTER ONE

‘ARE you Charlotte Warehaer from Kentham Brothers?’

Charlotte—Charley—Wareha Italian spring sunshine She had only just returned from a snatched, very late lunch—a sandwich and a cup of delicious cappuccino in a local café Her nitaries responsible for the restoration project on a derelict public garden, to be coarden’s creation, which she would be overseeing, had overrun badly

Theover her, whom she hadn’t met before, and who seery—very angry indeed—as he gestured towards the cheap faux stone urns and other replica samples she had shipped over for client inspection

‘And what, may I ask, are these vile abominations?’ he demanded

It wasn’t his anger, though, that had a coil of shocked disbelief tightening her whole body Di of sensation possessing her was instinctive fenition of a man so alpha that no woman could or would even want to deny him

This was a man born to stand head and shoulders above his peers—a e—a ive her such pleasure there that she would be bound to him by the mere memory for the rest of her life

She , Charley decided shakily Such thoughts were certainly not so she was normally prone to—quite the opposite

Sheher laptop down, rising fro, and standing up to confront her interrogator

He was tall and dark and as filled with furious rage as a volcano about to erupt He was also, as her senses had already recognised, extraordinarily good-looking His olive-toned skin was drawn smoothly over the tautly masculine bone structure of his face, and he was tall, dark-haired, with the kind of arrogantly proud chiselled features that spoke of patrician forebears His unexpectedly steely grey-eyed gaze swept over her with open conte the exact spot in a piece of marble where it was most vulnerable

Charley tried to look away froaze had somehow slipped to his aze away, but it refused toquivered over her skin, but it was already too late An unwanted jolt of awareness of hihtning cohtening for that unexpectedness Herbeneath her skin She could feel her lips softening and swelling as though in preparation for a lover’s kiss, and he was looking at theaze narrowed and unreadable, but no doubt filled with arrogant disdain for her weakness A man like this one would never look at her ht off guard by the sudden shock of knowing that his senses had torn free of hiswhat it would be like to feel her ainst his

Jerkily, her fingers treht for self-control, Charley pulled down the sunglasses perched on top of her head to cover her eyes, in an atte on her But it was too late He had seen it—and the conte his expression told her wh

at he thought of her reaction to hi with a mixture of shocked disbelief and humiliation as she battled to rationalise and understand what had happened to her She simply didn’t ever react to men like that, and it shocked her that she had done so now—and to thisneed to touch her own lips, to see if they actually were as softly swollen as they felt

What had happened must be some kind of reaction to all the pressure and stress she had been under, Charley tried to rationalise Why else would she be reacting in this uncharacteristic and dangerous way? Her senses, though, refused to be controlled The artist’s eye within her recognised the raw male power of the body that was cloaked by his undoubtedly expensive charcoal-grey suit Beneath his clothes he would have the kind of torso, and everything that ith it, that the medieval artists for which Florence was so justly famous had so loved to sculpt and paint

Too late she recognised that he was still waiting for her to respond to his question In a bid to regain the ground she felt she had lost, Charley lifted her small pointed chin and told hi not to wince as she looked at the haphazard line of pots and statues, their shoddiness laid bare by the stranger’s disdain, and then continued, ‘And the “vile aboood value for money’

The look of contempt that twisted his mouth into bitter cynicis Charley already knew about herself The truth was that she was as lacking in true beauty, style and elegance, and every other feht ad truly artistic And it was that knowledge—the knowledge that she had been judged and found wanting by a man as no doubt a true connoisseur of her sex—that prompted her to tell him defiantly, ‘Not that it is really any of your business…’ She paused deliberately before adding a questioning, ‘Signor…?’