Bedded by the Italian Playboy (7 page)

“We’ll
just take it from a bunch of rich guys,” Lyra had said. “Simple.”

“Billionaires,”
Penny laughed. “Why the hell not. You remember when we all waitressed at that
posh restaurant? They were always the ones with the wandering hands and the
leers. Most made their money through schemes and lies, so why the hell not?”

From
those first jokey comments. The plan grew and before they knew it, they’d
started researching marks. Back then Rachel had gone along with it with an air
of amusement. She never really believed they would pull it off. Then, when they
presented her with a picture of Dominic Rimeria, she’d laughed herself silly.
“There’s no way I’ll be able to fool him into handing over his money!”

“No
need to,” Lyra had said. “You just need to get close enough to him to get to
his money. It’s a completely different thing.”

“I’m
not going to prostitute myself!” Rachel had shrieked.

“Pants
stay firmly on,” Penny insisted, “and take a look at this.”

She’d
fanned a bunch of other pictures across the table, each one featuring a petite
blonde. They all looked like her. “Who?”

“His
exes,” Penny said. “Not really ex-girlfriends because none of them last past a
few weeks. He fucks them and chucks them, one after the other.”

“Well,
he’s not fucking and chucking me!”

“No,
you don’t get it,” Lyra interrupted. “He’ll be intrigued with you
because
you won’t let him into your
pants. You’re perfect, exactly the sort of woman he desires. Look at these
pictures. They’re all blonde and petite with massive tits, but most are fake,
the tits and the hair, I can tell. But you’ve got it all. Everything about you
is real and he’ll lap it up. You’ll make him burn, Rach. He’ll be desperate for
you, and when men are desperate, they are so easy to fool.”

“And
then what?”

“Then
this.”

Another
picture, this one of a room, an office, in fact. “There’s his safe,” Penny
said, pointing out a cupboard to the left of the desk.

“I
can’t pick locks like you, Pen!”

Penny
shook her head. “You don’t need to, just pick his pocket. His manager deposits
cash in there every Monday, not loads because most pay with cards these days
but some, tens of thousands at least. So get the key before then and help
yourself. If you do it right, if people have already seen you with him, they
won’t question your presence there.”

“You’re
serious?”

“Absolutely.”

From
that moment on Rachel had done as much research on Dominic Rimeria as she
could. Her sisters had left her be to go through all the online reports she
could find. Mostly him with his arm around one woman after another. But they’d
told her other things too. About how rich he was. How he seemed to spend his
time working and partying and not much else. A playboy with more money that he
needed who thought with his cock. He was perfect for their scheme and all
Rachel had to do was spend enough days in his company to get the key and make
it so her presence wasn’t questioned.

Of
course Penny could have snuck into his office and picked the lock herself,
lifting the cash before Dominic even realized, but when the sisters had agreed
on their plan, they’d
all
agreed to
do their parts. It could not all be left up to Penny. Her mission was already
difficult enough. She was stealing the majority of the cash they needed
straight out of Sebastian Demetrious’ safe, and she was picking locks, not pockets,
because pickpocketing was, and always had been, Rachel’s specialty.

Pickpocketing.

She
sighed. It would be worth it in the end, she thought as she looked around the
suite. All those teenagers left to fend for themselves, they would have
somewhere to go, people to count on, and all it was going to take to make that
dream a reality was for her to act the part.
You can do this!
How many times had she thought that? But those
words were harder to hold on to now, and all because he’d kissed her.

Just
a tiny little kiss but the worst part was that Rachel just knew that a full-on
kiss might well have been enough for her to let him do whatever else he wanted.
The moment his palm had rested against her face, her stomach felt like it had
hit the floor, and then the moment his lips had touched hers everything
changed. Her breasts seemed to grow in size. They ached, her nipples hardened,
and she’d felt moisture wet her panties.

All
sensations she’d felt before, only never like this. And never had she wanted to
do something so desperately to assuage them. She did now though. She wanted him
to kiss her again…and God help her, more than that.

“How
is your salad?” Dominic asked, interrupting her frantic thoughts.

She
looked up and met his eyes. The intensity in them made her shiver all over
again and she was suddenly glad she’d put one of the little cardigans Lucinda
had sent over her T-shirt. God knew she didn’t want Dominic to realize that her
nipples were stiff.

“Lovely,”
she replied. “I love avocados.” She didn’t but it seemed that she, the
character she was playing—one she
had
to hold on to—should, so Rachel chewed on them even as she wanted to spit them
out.

“They’re
a favorite food of mine,” he said. “The salmon I’ve ordered for our main course
is also delectable. You will enjoy it.”

Salmon?
Rachel hated fish of any sort and yet again she smiled and nodded. “I’m sure I
will.”

They
made it through their starter and main with a minimum of conversation. In
truth, Dominic supplied most of it. Rachel simply smiled, shivered, and added a
word here and there. She got the impression that this approach worked quite
early on which was good, because truthfully she wasn’t sure she could manage
much more. Still Dominic was a confident, powerful man, and didn’t all such men
like to talk about themselves? The thought made her smile and Rachel lifted her
water glass to her lips to disguise it.

When
their dessert was brought out by the waiter who seemed to just sort of hover
with a deferential smile, Dominic switched topics, and Rachel paused, her spoon
in her fruit sorbet, the moment she realized what he was saying.

“A
long weekend seems hardly long enough to really see everything
London
has to offer,” he
was saying. “It seems to me that you would do better with a week minimum.”

“It
was all I could afford,” Rachel replied carefully. “
London
is an expensive city.”

He
shrugged. “Yes, when you had to pay for a hotel, I can understand that. But you
are staying here now and I would be happy to put this suite aside for the next
two weeks for your use. Two weeks should be more than long enough to do
everything.”

She
lowered her eyes, looking into the swirls of iced fruit even as her heart
thudded. Two weeks would certainly give her enough time to get what she needed.
Certainly she’d worried that her self-imposed weekend was going to be cutting
things close. She’d decided on that early on, though. Keeping up her persona
for any length of time was always going to be difficult. A weekend seemed
plenty, only now…more time might work. It was the mission that counted after
all.
Make him burn.
But then there
was the kiss and Rachel wasn’t sure what that might mean.

“I
couldn’t,” she said making an on-the-spot decision, one that she knew was right
the moment she said it.

“Why
not?” he demanded.

“It
doesn’t seem right and I have things to do.”

“I
have yet to ask how you spend your days,” Dominic said, pouring a significant
amount of wine into her glass. “Tell me, do you work?”

Rachel
nodded slowly, a slight smile that she couldn’t quite help playing around her
lips. Work? The phrase was oddly out of place between them. She could give him
a litany of the jobs she’d done over the years she thought. Cleaning. Cooking.
Waitressing. Bar work. The list went on and on. And yet none of those jobs were
what he would expect her to say. A man like Dominic, the idea he had of her….
Likely he’d think she worked in a dress shop, or helped out on her parent’s
estate, or something ridiculous like that.

More
to play for time than anything else Rachel lifted her now full glass and took a
very small sip of the delicate wine. It was delicious, tasting of cherries and
musk, and yet she placed it back on the table the moment the flavors burst over
her tongue. She had no head for the alcohol and getting drunk would be a very,
very bad idea. The only time she could ever remember doing so was on her
eighteenth birthday. Penny and Lyra had taken her to a club and plied her with
cheap lager. Apparently—and still she had no memory of these events—she’d table
danced, vomited spectacularly all over a very nice guy’s expensive shoes, and
then spent the rest of the evening crying. Since then she’d restricted herself
to the odd glass of wine now and then. Of course, alcohol was a luxury they
could rarely afford anyway so it was sort of irrelevant.

“Rachel?”
Dominic prompted and she lifted her gaze to him, giving him her most demure
smile.

“I
do, yes,” she said softly. “Work, I mean.”

“Where?”
he asked.

“A
place called Little Ducks.” It was the best answer she could give, and though
she wasn’t actually paid for the hours she put in at the small day nursery on
their estate, those hours were some of the most satisfying of her life. It beat
telling him about the last job she’d had anyway. The bloody chicken packaging
factory.

“This
Little Ducks is what? Some sort of farm?” Dominic asked. “I recall you live in
the country.”

She
laughed. “No, it’s a nursery school. We take children aged between two and
five. Not quite babies but not old enough to go to school yet.”

“And
you work there?”

“Yes,
just in the mornings a few days a week.”

Dominic
nodded his approval. She could see it clear as anything in the depths of his
eyes. “A worthy job,” he said. “It suits you.”

She
nodded too even as she wondered how worthy he’d really think it was if he ever
saw Little Ducks. The name suggested an idyllic location. Swings, grass, trees.
She pictured the actual building in her mind. An old church hall, battered,
rough around the edges. The priest was an elderly man who opened his doors to
the small group of women who’d set the nursery up. Women who cared, who wanted
to make a difference. Even so, the toys were about a million years old, the
battle to get supplies such as paint and crayons never-ending, and the
children? Rachel’s heart clenched when she thought of them. Many were in
abusive households. They didn’t have enough to eat, often were dirty and just
crying for attention.

Sometimes
the parents didn’t even bring them. Only the promise of some free time to
themselves had them dropping the children off. It broke Rachel’s heart every
time she noticed a bruise or hugged an unwashed body and yet she kept
returning. It fulfilled something in her, even though she didn’t know what that
something was.

“I’m
very fond of children,” she said. “I enjoy being with them.”

Dominic
smiled that spectacular smile of his that made her chest tight and her heart
rate increase a million-fold. “As I suspected,” he said. “You are a traditional
woman. I appreciate that.”

Traditional?
Once again
Rachel felt like laughing at the absurdity of it all, the way he saw her versus
the woman she was. It was beyond ridiculous. You can pull the wool over any
man’s eyes Lyra had once told her and Rachel had shaken her head, not believing
it to be true. Only it was. Men like Dominic. Men who had it all and desired
and wanted and got were so blinkered. He saw her. The perfect woman in every
physical sense and she needed only to color in the spaces to his liking.
Easy as one, two, three….

 
“Really?”

“I
am all for women in positions of power,” he continued. “Many of my management
team are, in fact, female. My own mother is the CEO of a major media group.
However, for the women I like to spend time with in my personal life, I prefer
a more traditional arrangement.”

“Meaning
what?” Rachel asked.

“Meaning
the woman I will eventually spend my life with will stay at home with our
children, raise a family, and keep our home running.”

“I
see.”

“I
will spoil her and give her everything she possibly needs,” he added with a
shrug. “Why would she need to work?”

To
have a life of her own? To have her own interests? To be her own person? Rachel
wanted to say all of these things but didn’t. That did not fit her act, so
instead she smiled, nodded and wondered why it was that a man like Dominic
could make her feel the things he did.

She
knew he was controlling, knew he was commanding. She’s read all about him. How
his mother and sisters were indeed powerful women in their own rights. How his
father had died when he was very young, leaving him in charge of the small
hotel empire he’d built. How he’d grown that to the massive empire it was
today. She probably knew more about Dominic than most people who knew him well.
And she knew that she could not afford to let him get under her skin, could not
let him seduce her like he so clearly wanted to.