CHAPTER TWO

      DEBBIE felt the room whirling around. She clung to the desk, fighting for breath, and then Colleoni was forcing her head down with a none too gentle hand on her neck till she was bent over double and breathing stentoriously.

      Conscious of the fact that she must present a rather provocative picture to the red-blooded Sicilian, she struggled to free herself and came up panting, her face puce with embarrassment and the effects of gravity.

      ‘That’s...’

      She gulped, not from dizziness caused at the shock of discovering that her husband was linked with a wealthy financier, but from that same financier’s touch. The strong hand drifted over her shoulder as it withdrew, leaving her skin alive with the sensation. Struck dumb, she struggled for a reason and decided she must be suffering from confusion. No one had ever had that effect on her—not that strong, that intense.

      ‘Sit down.’ When she was slow to respond, still trying to work out her extraordinary reaction, Colleoni said irritably, Tor God’s sake, sit down, woman!’

      ‘Bully,’ she muttered, resentful of more than the command.

      With a glint in his dark eyes, he put his firm hand on the centre of her back, unaware that he was sending more frantic signals to her brain. And, because she was dealing with the sexual messages and trying to deflect them, she offered no resistance.

      So she found herself by one of the deep armchairs which faced the picture windows looking out to Tower Bridge and the River Thames. One of the most expensive views in London, she thought hazily. And this man had bought the bank as if he’d been buying a bar of chocolate.

      ‘Sit down,’ he repeated, a little more gently. ‘I’d prefer you not to faint if you can possibly avoid it,’ he added drily.

      She sat. And felt a lot better. ‘I’ll do my best,’ she promised spiritedly, trying to gather her wits.

      ‘I hesitate to suggest that your dress ought to be eased. I don’t think either of us could cope with that, could we?’ he drawled.

      ‘No,’ she answered hoarsely; the thought of loosening anything in Colleoni’s presence was quite illogically unnerving. ‘Oh, my feet,’ she moaned, feeling them throb now that she’d sat down.

      ‘You ought to take those shoes off. They look tight too.’

      More touching! Her eyes became huge grey pools of anxiety. ‘No! I’ll keep them on, thanks.’

      ‘Yes.’ And he confounded her by kneeling at her feet and carefully beginning to untie the ribbon, his head close to her bare shins. ‘For the sake of your comfort and your quick recovery—which I’m sure we both want,’ he murmured.

      In the light from the window his hair gleamed with a depth of colour like those wonderful dark plums with that faint blue tinge—the kind of invitingly glossy, smooth texture that made you reach out and... She checked her fidgeting hand quickly.

      What was it about this situation that was making her feel so vulnerable? Was it the powerful and charismatic man at her feet, gently—and surely rather slowly—removing something she was wearing?

      She gasped. Colleoni’s fingers were lightly touching her ankle, nothing more, but a shudder had rippled through her body and he’d looked up, his eyes suddenly glowing with an indolent warmth.

      ‘Something wrong?’ he enquired silkily.

      ‘I’m ticklish,’ she croaked, and blushed because of the lie.

      For a couple of seconds he studied her soberly while she wondered if he was reading the truth: that she found him intensely compelling; that she felt horrified that her long-denied sexual hunger was spilling out to a complete stranger.

      ‘Really?’ he drawled softly.

      Miserably she watched him bend his head again and attend to the ribbons, knowing he’d recognised the signals being sent out by her body. Impatiently she waited, wondering why he was finding the laces so difficult to undo. But it gave her a chance to chill down her feelings.

      She was married. Unhappily, perhaps, certainly close to divorce. But, for the moment, she was legally tied and therefore unavailable. Her body must know that, surely?

      Curls of wicked, delicious pleasure wound up from her feet to her brain, touching every erogenous zone in between, and she realised that her body knew nothing of the sort and was telling her so in no uncertain fashion.

      ‘Please...’ she demurred huskily, finding it difficult to breathe.

      In protest, she reached down to stop him. Their hands met, their fingers entwined. For a brief second or two they both stilled—she because of the extraordinary sensation that had shot into her chest and stomach and was now warming her thoroughly, crawling through her veins like an electric charge. It appalled her. And he—well, she didn’t know why he had paused, because when his long, dark lashes lifted his eyes were big and glistening and molten but quite without expression.

      He seemed filled with a vital force and his energy had flowed into her like a bursting dam filling a channel. She’d heard the expression ‘a coiled spring’ before but had never understood it. Now she did. It was that—the tangible force—which had disturbed her and jolted her with a few hundred volts of electric power. Nothing sexual at all, she told herself, willing it to be true.

      ‘I’d be hard put to it to translate that plea,’ he drawled, and her lips parted in dismay because she couldn’t speak for the choking sensation in her throat.

      His mocking, contemptuous eyes never left hers. He continued to untie the ribbons; she continued to feel disorientated and uncomfortable under the intense, mesmeric stare. With tantalising gentleness, he lifted her feet from the shoes just as her hair fell forward, brushing his face, and she felt its silken strands drifting across the flawless darkness of his skin.

      And then, in a flash, he’d straightened and was standing again, leaving her flexing her released feet in relief. But she felt miserable and bemused and warily peered at his shadowed face and his husky body, which was outlined sharp and black against the glare of the sky.

      But in the darkness of his face his eyes burned feverishly, causing floodgates to open within her, a terrible rush of flowing heat pouring through her veins. His energy was invading her and she