Read Online A Clash With Cannavaro by Elizabeth Power - Free Book Online Page A

smile touched his mouth. It was clear that he was having as much of a battle as she was to bring his emotions back under control again.
    ‘How very modern of you,’ he breathed. ‘In which case, you should find my proposition more appealing than I had imagined.’
    Shakily she queried, ‘What proposition?’ She didn’t know what he had in mind, but she was certain that she wasn’t going to like it.
    ‘Simply this,’ he stated. ‘That you allow me to take Daniele away for a month, but with a new condition.’
    ‘Which is?’
    ‘That you accompany him.’
    He had to be joking!
    ‘For what reason?’ she prompted, her green eyes narrowing.
    ‘He knows you.’ His tone was clipped. ‘He will be happier if you are around.’
    Lauren looked at him cagily. ‘And what do you get out of it?’
    The mere lifting of one masculine eyebrow sent Lauren’s pulses sky-high.
    ‘Oh, don’t look so affronted, Lauren,’ he said. ‘We could so easily have been having a totally different kind of...intercourse...’ he glanced towards the ceiling ‘...up there if we had not called a halt to what we were doing just now. But it is clear we both still want what we indulged in two years ago, even though—as you say—we do not like each other. And to combine it with my getting to know Daniele—and vice versa—seems to me to be the perfect solution.’
    It would, Lauren thought, the idea of what he was proposing sending sensual shivers along her spine. Yet how could she want him so much physically, she wondered, when he still continued to despise her? Because, in spite of what she had said, she didn’t really believe that a woman could give her body so completely to a man without somehow getting herself emotionally involved with that man. She couldn’t, anyway.
    ‘And if I still won’t agree?’ She couldn’t believe how much her voice was shaking. ‘To let you take Danny, I mean. Either with or without me .’
    ‘You know very well what the answer is to that,’ he said in a voice that was brutally calm. ‘Don’t put me to the test, Lauren.’
    The test being that he would fight her for him. That was what he was saying. A fight she was more than just a little afraid she would lose.
    ‘I do not want to hurt you,’ he said softly. ‘But you will give me no choice if you refuse.’
    ‘So you’re giving me no choice instead?’ Bitterness tinged her voice as she struggled with his ultimatum.
    Another movement of an eyebrow said it all.
    As she’d already pointed out, he was rich and powerful. He could tear her heart out if he wanted to. And he probably wanted to! she thought bitterly. Instead, he was offering her ecstasy. Physical ecstasy in return for not taking Danny away from her. Unbelievable physical ecstasy. And a suitcaseful of self-degradation when it was all over.
    ‘All right. I’ll accompany my nephew,’ she told him with her voice cracking. ‘To look after him and make sure that where he goes and what he does is in his best interest. But if you think that you and I will be picking up from where we left off two years ago, then you’ve got another think coming! I won’t be your plaything, Emiliano. Not now or at any time in the future.’
    Which was a ludicrous thing to say, she realised, in the circumstances. Because, as he’d already said, if things had taken their natural course just now, they would have been up there, lying on her single bed, with her allowing him to do all sorts of intimate things with her. Her only redemption lay in the fact that he didn’t point that out to her for a second time.
    ‘I’ll be in touch in a day or two,’ was all he said, before grabbing his jacket off the back of one of her second-hand chairs and informing her that he would see himself out.
    It was only after the front door had closed behind him and she was listening for the growl of the powerful car that Lauren realised she had been so disconcerted by his proposition and by agreeing to accompany him that she