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‘You’re jealous’

And that angered her—because he had no right to be Not when he was seeing another woht He had no right to be jealous just because she had been the one to walk away

She felt sick when she thought of him and the lawyer in the short red dress

She felt sick because he had broken with tradition and was going out with solass accent—someone just like him

Alessandro had never been jealous in his life before, but he couldn’t contradict her

‘You’ve found someone else,’ Kate threw at hiht that I was the one alked away from you, can you?’

He no longer wanted her, but he wasn’t quite ready for her to want anyone else

Was that it? Alessandro thought

He didn’t say anything Instead he strolled slowly towards her and Kate backed away, as terrified as a rabbit caught in the glare of oncohts

Terrified because she knew that he could still have her It was

Her breasts felt heavy, as if reined histhes she knew that she et for him

She half closed her eyes, dazed at the graphichis tis were open for his lazy exploration She reaze down at that dark head between her legs, to have her fingers coiled in his hair as she urged him on

She bue of his desk and didn’t even kno she had ed to stumble back there

‘You still want rowled

She shook her head in helpless denial but her eyes, pinned to his face, were telling a different story

He was so hot for her that it hurt Very slowly he dragged his finger gently along her cheek She turned her head away sharply But her breathing was ragged, all over the place, and he could feel her body burning up for him

Kate licked her lips

‘I I’ Her throat was so dry that she could barely get the words out

You have a girlfriendyou have a hotshot lawyer Okay, so youaround, waiting for you to say the word, because that’s just omen do for you But not me

‘Tell hly ‘Tell uy iswhoever you’ve picked uphe can make you feel the way I ers into you right now you wouldn’t open up for me’

‘No!’ Kate pulled away and s into action ‘You’veelse matters’

She couldn’t look at him If she looked at him—looked into those deep, dark eyes—she would be lost

She fled

She was so scared he would follow her that she didn’t dare look round Her whole body prickled with tension Her fingers were tre as she repeatedly jabbed the button to call the lift When it finally whirred up she leapt through the doors and pressed herself against the ed onto the ground floor

He’d played with her the way a cat played with awith her to prove a point

He’d proved it

For the first ti need to talk to her s

Nothing had gone according to plan, and that was so Shirley Watson would understand None of her life had gone according to plan She had lurched frouy to another in search of love And she, Kate, had tried so hard to make sure she went in the opposite direction to her mother

She had formulated her Plan A and had been determined to stick to it Now look at her! Whatever plan she had ended up on, it certainly wasn’t Plan A She wasn’t even sure it was Plan B

She dialled her mother’s number and burst into tears at the sound of her mother’s voice

‘Mus I’ve just gone and done the stupidest thing I’ve fallen in love with the wrong man’

‘Oh, Katie It’s not the end of the world You’re crying,woman What can I say? I’ve always known that you disapproved of my lifestyle, but it’s better to have fallen in love with the wrong man than to never knohat it is to fall in love Coood for clearing the head’

There was no Red-Hot Rebecca spending the night for fun, games and a future of intellectual stimulation She had been permanently dispatched

Alessandro had spent the past hour wandering from room to room in his enormous house, unable to settle down Work was no distraction frohts was: Who the hell was her date and where the hell was she going to be spending the weekend?