Read Online Sicilian Nights Omnibus by Penny Jordan - Free Book Online

longing beneath the experienced touch of his hands on her breasts.
    ‘You were the one who brought me here,’ she told him fiercely.
    ‘And you were the one who was curious.’
    Leonora opened her mouth to deny his accusation, and then closed it again. Could she honestly put her hand on her heart and say that she had not been curious about what it would be like to be kissed by him, a man so far outside her own circles and way, way outside her personal experience? But surely it was only natural that she should have wondered? Wondering, though, did not mean that she had actually wanted him to kiss her. Had she? Not beforehand, perhaps, but once she had felt the warmth of his breath on her lips and the touch of his hands on her body, hadn’t she wanted more?
    ‘I’d like to go back to my room, if you could point me in the right direction?’ she told Alessandro, desperate to escape from her own thoughts as well as from him and his too-knowing questions.
    Nodding his head, he answered her. ‘This way.’ Striding across the bedroom and then into a large open-plan sitting-room-cum-office, he turned to look at her, frowning before telling her briskly, ‘Wait here.’
    What else could she do? She had no idea how to find her way back to her room, and she certainly didn’t fancy wandering all over the apartment dressed as she was, in a still very damp leisure suit.
    He wasn’t gone long, returning carrying a large taupe-coloured bath towel, which he tossed towards her saying, ‘You’d better wrap this around you,’ before going to open the door and waiting for her to join him. ‘Follow this corridor until you reach the stairs, then go past them and continue down the next corridor. You room is the first door on your right.’
    Thanking him, Leonora hugged the towel around herself and made her escape.
    * * *
    That was the trouble with women, Alessandro told himself as he returned to the work he had been doing before he had seen Leonora in the garden. They just could not resist giving themselves the ego boost of getting some man—any man, more often than not—hot for them.
    He sat at his desk, frowning as he re-read the e-mail he had found in his in-box earlier. His concierge service apologised, but the stylist they had found for him had cancelled, and they weren’t able to replace her with a substitute of equally high calibre. That left him with two options: to trust Leonora, or accompany her himself.
    No man of his wealth and position could get to the age Alessandro had without the experience of being coaxed, coerced, sweet-talked and seduced into accompanying beautiful women to expensive and exclusive designer shops—especially if they were Italian. And besides, sometimes it was easier and speedier to end a relationship that had served its purpose with a goodbye gift of a few designer outfits as a sweetener.
    Not that there had been anyone sharing his bed for the last year—or longer. Which was no doubt why Leonora Thaxton had had such an unexpected and powerful effect on his libido. His pride might not like the fact that she had aroused him but, looking at things from a more practical point of view, the fact that they had shared a handful of minutes of pre-coital sexual intimacy at least meant that there was a familiarity between them now, which could only work to his advantage in public. In private there would not be a repeat of that intimacy—that went without saying.
    But back to the matter of providing her with a suitable wardrobe—and quickly... His frown deepened, and then eased as he searched though his e-mail addresses until he found the one he wanted. Cristina Rosetti was one of a certain top-flight designer’s right-hand women, and she owed him a favour, having had to ask him once or twice to arrange for models to be flown to New York when their original travel arrangements had fallen through at the last minute. Several designers used his airline to freight their priceless one-off pieces of clothing