Gianni's Pride (2 page)

She was beautiful.

As usual Miranda woke sixty seconds before the alarm was set to go off. This morning it had been set to go off early. Her house-sitting duties involved more than the feeding of the family pets she had imagined and, having a strongly developed
work ethic, she was determined to fulfil every task that her new employer had outlined so meticulously in one of her lists—there were a lot of lists.

The menagerie all had names that were not quite sorted in Miranda’s head yet: the ancient horse, the Shetland pony and the donkey, even the ducks and hens. Her employer had jotted down the list in her own neat hand. She had jotted a lot down, including a cleaning schedule that to Miranda, who didn’t mind a bit of clutter, seemed a little excessive, but she was being paid, and paid quite well, for having what her dad had called a holiday. That was before she had admitted that actually she wasn’t going back at the start of the new term; she had handed in her notice. Her
paid holiday
had then become a demeaning job for someone with her skills and qualifications.

Miranda sighed and wriggled a little deeper into the soft mattress, refusing to replay the argument in her head. She was escaping, not running away. The distinction was important and her actions long overdue …
Think positive
.

Although she hadn’t welcomed it at the time … Oh, all right, she had pretty much felt as though the sky had fallen in on her head and she still couldn’t bring herself to say it was a good thing, but if it hadn’t been for her sister Tam sweeping the man Miranda had wanted to grow old with off his feet things could have gone on as they were indefinitely, with her cutting a pathetic figure hoping that one day Oliver would notice she was something other than a dependable teacher of domestic science.

No, not dependable, exceptional, Miranda silently corrected in line with her new philosophy of ‘if you’ve got it, flaunt it’. If she’d flaunted her not at all bad figure in the sort of designer clothes that Tam wore it was possible that Oliver would have noticed more than her raspberry muffins.

Heartbreak aside, Miranda realised she actually felt good.
She normally had a problem sleeping in a strange bed but last night she had gone out like a light and, apart from some strangely realistic dreams that were already slipping away, she had slept through the night. Perhaps it was a good omen.

Eyes still closed, she rolled over towards the window set in the uneven wall where the age-blackened exposed oak beams stood out dark against the bright blue paint. There were a lot of bright colours in the cottage. It had been a combination of the view across the rolling countryside from the window and those beams that had made Miranda select this room when Lucy Fitzgerald had said she could choose any one she liked—that and the enormous, hedonistically soft bed with the carved wooden headboard.

‘Lush,’ she murmured sleepily under her breath as she snuggled into the layers of feather mattress. Her right hand brushed the headboard, her left touched warmth and hardness … Still half asleep, she slowly turned her head.

The initial stabbing jolt of fear lasted a half beat before she relaxed and smiled. Obviously this was a dream because no man had a face like that.

It was a masterclass in perfection, Miranda decided as she studied the shade and shadow of dark fallen-angel features, fascinated by the sharp angles and strong curves that made this a face that went beyond mere symmetrical prettiness. This face represented a perfect combination of planes and hollows, the masterful nose aquiline, the razor-sharp cheekbones high and slanting, the forehead broad and intelligent. Miranda stared, feeling an almost physical tug as she looked into velvety dark heavy-lidded eyes fringed by long spiky lashes and set beneath strongly delineated ebony brows.

It was some moments later when with a small sigh she let her gaze stray to the fantasy mouth, the sculpted lips somehow managing to be stern and overtly sensual at the same
time. The small crescent-shaped scar a few centimetres from the right corner of that extraordinary mouth, startlingly white against the uniform toasty gold of his skin, somehow emphasised how perfect everything else was.

‘Good morning.’

Her eyelashes fluttered against her sleep-flushed cheek. Like the face, the voice belonged in a dream. Deep, throaty—it even had the tantalising hint of an accent. The man with broad, taut, heavily muscled shoulders, the dark shadow on his square jaw, was the sort of man many women’s dreams were made of … Though he seemed awfully real for a dream and wasn’t she awake …?

Miranda blew away a curl that was tickling her nose, smelling the musky, spicy scent of warm male and a hint of some sort of male fragrance…. Expensive, she decided. He was an expensive dream man. Her eyes brushed the stubble on his square jaw, following the curve of his sensual mouth. He was also raw and raunchy. Personally she was more into subtle and sensitive when it came to dream men.

Or one dream man. A smiling image of Oliver drifted through her head, a billion miles from raw or raunchy. Her lips parted to release a wistful sigh. Miranda had met her dream man, worked with him on a daily basis and accepted that he just didn’t think of her that way … Then oddly it turned out he did see her sister—identical twin sister, how was that for irony?—that way.

Miranda prided herself on the fact that she had been grown-up about the situation, concealing her pain so well that Tam had remained oblivious to her heartbreak, and avoiding the dreaded knowing looks and sympathy. Even when, on the day before the wedding, her sister had confided that she was pregnant Miranda had somehow said the right thing, though she still had no idea what. She had actually begun to wonder if she had not gone into the wrong profession—she
should have been an actor, not a teacher. But there were limits and Miranda knew she’d had to make a break—working in a school where Oliver, now her sister’s husband, was the headmaster was a non-starter.

While she and Tam had never shared the sort of empathic link that Miranda had read some identical twins enjoyed, there was no way even her twin, who was never that interested in things that did not directly involve her, would not catch on soon.

She directed her masochistically inclined thoughts from the imagined idyll Tam was enjoying on a Greek island with her bridegroom and concentrated on the man lying beside her. Now he was
definitely
raw—actually raw hardly covered the smouldering, in-your-face sexuality he exuded from every pore …
The man she was looking at?

There’s a man in my bed!

Her horrified gasp was drowned out by the alarm clock that began to shrill. It stopped when she lobbed it at the strange man’s head and in a seamless motion, her sleepy contentment a dim memory, produced a stumbling exit from the bed modestly wrapped, in the best tradition of old movies, in most of the bedding.

Eyes like saucers, clutching the quilt to her heaving bosom, she stared at the man lying there, trying not to think about the draught that was cooling her exposed bottom. The adrenalin in her veins was telling her to run, but to get to the door she had to get past the bed. Thoughts racing, hyperventilating dramatically, she glanced longingly towards the open door that connected with the next room, but her feet remained nailed to the spot as she was submerged by a massive wave of visceral, paralysing fear.

Attack, they always said, was the best form of defence … Act like a victim, she had read somewhere, and you became a victim.

‘Don’t move an inch!’
Or what, Miranda?
Her chin lifted, the defiance in her attitude an attempt to mask her fear as she played for time, waiting for her legs to move. ‘Or y-you’ll r-regret it!’

He had to have heard the quiver of fear in her voice … but on the plus side he hadn’t made any attempt to move. If he had … Miranda’s glance slid down the long, lean length of the stranger. Even in his present recumbent position his physical superiority was pretty apparent. His lean body was heavily muscled, not an ounce of spare flesh masking the power and vitality of a man at the peak of physical fitness.

He looked like the sort of fitness fanatic who could run marathons back to back without breaking sweat. He could swat her like a fly if he wanted to … Swatting was actually the least of her worries at that moment … Refusing to speculate on his intentions, she tried to breathe past the frantic pounding of her heart as, not taking her eyes off him, she surreptitiously reached out behind her for her phone. She could remember leaving it on the bureau the night before … Hadn’t she?

O
NE
hand pressed to his eye where the alarm clock she had lobbed as she exited the bed—not before he had got a glimpse of a lovely pert little bottom—had landed a glancing blow, Gianni looked at her through his uncovered eye and held up his free hand in a gesture of surrender. It did not take a genius to figure out what she was thinking.

‘Relax. This is a simple misunderstanding … a mistake …’ he soothed, making eye contact and experiencing a flicker of shock as he registered the quite extraordinary colour of her wide long-lashed eyes.

Extraordinary enough to make him briefly lose focus—an event in itself for the ultra-controlled Gianni—the deep, dark green made him think of cool, quiet forests, and the tiny flecks of amber recalled dappled sunlight shining through the foliage as she stared at him as though he were a coiled snake about to strike.

‘You mistakenly climbed in through the window and mistakenly took off your clothes and mistakenly got into my bed … That’s a lot of mistakes.’ Mine might be not keeping my big mouth shut, she thought as, picking up some of the slack of the quilt that trailed on the floor, she threw it awkwardly over her shoulder. Her rear now concealed by a heavy fold of fabric, she continued to feel exposed, just not to the elements.

Was the husky little rasp in her voice normal or a product of fear? Either way the tactile quality was extremely attractive, so much so that Gianni found himself curiously impatient to hear her speak again even if it was to hurl some more abuse.

‘When you put it like that it does sound bad,’ he admitted. ‘But I really am totally harmless.’

Do not hyperventilate, Miranda!

Struggling to maintain her hard-fought-for air of bravado, she sketched a tight little smile and thought,
Sure you are …
Anything
less
harmless than the man sprawled there like some sort of macho centerfold—after registering he was wearing nothing but an insubstantial pair of boxers she had kept her gaze above the waist—would have been hard to imagine.

He oozed sinister sexuality and was probably insane to boot! A predatory man had climbed into her bed … She shuddered—had he touched her …?

Her stomach responded violently to the lurid images forming in her head. ‘God, I think I’m going to be sick!’ she groaned suddenly as she dropped her chin to her chest, the blood draining abruptly from her face.

Her voice made even this prosaic statement sound seductive! ‘I’m getting that a lot.’

The dull metronome
thud thud
of her blood as it pounded against the delicate membrane of her inner ear drowned out his dry words.

What had Lucy said before she left …?
I hope you won’t be bored. I’m afraid nothing interesting ever happens here
. What would her employer call this—a slow Friday morning?

‘This is all an innocent mistake.’

She inhaled a deep sustaining breath and lifted her head, fixing the intruder with a look of loathing. ‘Do you say that
to all the women you try to molest?’ Amazingly her voice was steady, if on the shrill side.

Miranda’s fingertips brushed the phone before she heard it fall onto the polished boards—damn! Her teeth clenched, she fought down the panic she felt closing like a fist around her windpipe.
I will not be some crime statistic. I’ll survive
. ‘I’m going to leave now.’
Once I regain control of my limbs
.

‘I’m not stopping you.’ People feared his tongue, words written and spoken were his thing, and Gianni had rarely encountered a situation where he did not have the perfect response, but then up until now he’d never been viewed as a potential rapist. He found himself falling back on repetition.

He watched her eyes flicker around the room like a trapped animal seeking an escape route. ‘I’ve told you, this is simply a misunderstanding—a mistake.’

‘Yes, your mistake.’ How come her voice was working and her legs were not? The other way around would have been much more convenient. ‘You disgusting sleaze!’
How come I am saying the sort of things almost guaranteed not to placate a dangerous lunatic?
‘I know self-defence.’

He could see her shaking from here, her eyes didn’t leave his as she watched him, but she had guts, this redhead. Terrified, she still came out fighting. Gianni felt a stab of admiration as he pulled himself into a sitting position.

The action caused the petrified redhead to take a hasty step backwards.

Gianni, who did not like scaring women, produced a smile and struggled to channel harmless and innocuous—not so easy when you were a powerfully built six feet four and practically naked—as he studied the woman hiding behind the quilt she had dragged off the bed, along with half the blanket and sheets that now lay crumpled at her feet, and tried to figure out the best way to defuse the situation.

She was petite and slim and probably younger than Lucy.
Though it wasn’t always easy to tell, she had the sort of face that looked perennially young—good bones, he decided, studying her delicate heart-shaped face dominated by a pair of enormous green eyes set above a neat little tip-tilted nose. Noticing that she had a kissable mouth that would be soft and lush when it wasn’t curled into a scared snarl was not going to defuse anything, but it was impossible not to. It was the sort of thing any man could not fail to notice.

‘There’s absolutely no need to freak out this way.’

He actually had the cheek to sound vaguely impatient. Her trill of laughter emerged husky from her bone-dry throat. If ever a situation called for major freaking, this was it!