CHAPTER ONE

      VENETIA ADELE ROSS strode into the drawing-room without a thought in her head, the especially affectionate smile she reserved for her father curving her lush mouth, the pleasure of an afternoon’s successful shopping spree making her pale blue eyes sparkle like fine crystal.

      And then the world stood still. She actually felt it tilt on its axis and stop.

      ‘Venny, darling, what kept you?’

      No peevishness in the question, just warmth and affection. During the eighteen years of her life her father had never once chided her and meant it. She barely registered his voice, hardly saw him as he rose from his chair to walk to her side. And, for once, the room wasn’t dominated by the huge oil portrait of the mother she’d lost when she was only a few months old. It was dominated instead by the man who had made the world stand still.

      Carlo Rossi.

      She had almost forgotten he was coming to visit, put it out of her mind, because the arrival, for a few weeks, of her father’s cousin’s unknown son hadn’t put her in danger of dying from over-excitement!

      And now this moment when time stood still gave her a sense of inevitability, a deeper understanding of fate than she had ever experienced before. A single second, such a tiny fragment of time, had been enough to face the shocking immediacy of meeting the one man she would love all her life, of falling in love, quite literally at first sight.

      He was smiling at her across the width of the room. A smile that hovered between mannerliness and a kind of cynical interest. And her father was at her side now, taking her hand and giving it a small tug, as if he feared she’d grown roots into the Axminster-covered floorboards, and he was saying, ‘Come and say hello to Carlo, sweetheart.’ She turned her black-fringed eyes to his, bewilderment reaching out to him as if he could solve this ancient enigma for her, as if it were a problem he could smooth away as he’d smoothed her path through life ever since she’d been born.

      But this was no minor peccadillo; this was something major, beyond the control of a doting father’s love and lavish financial generosity. Besides, he didn’t know what had happened, did he? He didn’t know how she was shaking inside her skin with the suddenness of it all, with the enormity, the shock of what had her rooted to the spot.

      And his own bewilderment at her behaviour helped. He had no way of knowing why his normally confident, outgoing offspring looked as if she’d lost her wits. And his slightly impatient, ‘Shake hands with your cousin,’ had her smiling to herself, tugging all that confidence, the joy of living, the conviction that life was great, back into place. She set her long legs striding easily over the room, her smile frankly dazzling as Carlo Rossi held out a hand and disclaimed in a deep, slightly accented and thoroughly fascinating voice,

      ‘As our fathers are merely cousins then our relationship is almost too remote to be significant.’

      Venetia ignored the formally outstretched hand, but stood on tiptoe to brush a kiss on the side of his hard, tanned face instead, and did a little husky disclaiming of her own.

      ‘In Italian families, any relationship, no matter how remote, is prized,’ she said, and was astonished to find that he towered above her own five feet and ten inches, astonished moreover by how ultra-feminine she felt when she had to tilt back her head to meet his eyes. Heavily lidded, dark, magnificent eyes.

      Steadying herself to impart that supposedly cousinly embrace, she had grasped his upper arms, and, even though she was now firmly back on the soles of her feet, she held on.

      Venetia had a physical nature; she liked to touch, and the contact between the palms of her hands, the pads of her fingers and the warmth of the steel-hard muscles beneath the elegant pale grey suiting was little short of sensational.

      Carlo Rossi was gorgeous! He stole away her breath, not to mention her heart! And never mind that a slightly sardonic tilt of one heavy dark brow accompanied the firm yet insistent pressure of his hands as he removed her clutching fingers, because one day she would hear him begging her to touch him, she vowed with an inner giggle she was at pains to suppress, her lush mouth curling provocatively as she enquired in the husky tones that were so uniquely her own, ‘Has anything made any impact on you since your arrival?’ her eyes teasing, challenging him to admit that she had! ‘Though maybe it’s a little soon,’ she conceded with the smouldering pout, the Latin shrug that came from her Italian genes. ‘It’s your first time in England, isn’t it?’

      ‘Far from it. I know your country very well. I travelled extensively during my time here at university.’ His answer was smooth and suave, and definitely cool, and she could have bitten her tongue out because she remembered, now, about some age-old rift between the two branches of the family. Not even something romantic like a feud over a woman, but some boring business thing.

      Always highly perceptive where her father was concerned, she could sense his embarrassment over the forced admission that his cousin’s son had visited before, had actually lived here for a time, and had not felt obliged to trouble himself to pay his respects. She wished the inane words unsaid, because upsetting her father was about the last thing she ever wanted to do.

      ‘We’ll be dining late this evening, Venny. So if you’re ravenous, as usual, get Potty to give you some tea in the kitchen. And if I know you, you’ll have half a ton of shopping littering up the hall.’

      Her father’s intervention had covered up her gaffe and the slight embarrassment it had presented, and she was thankful for that. But need he have emphasised her healthy young appetite quite so strongly? Not to mention the way she never seemed to know when to stop when she indulged her passion for shopping in London?

      Her light-coloured eyes flicked sideways to Carlo, and sure enough he was smiling, merely a lazy curl at the corners of that sexy mouth, a slight glint of patronising amusement deep in the dark depths of his magnificent eyes. Enough to tell her, quite explicitly, that he was seeing her as a child who was not yet, not quite, boring him.

      Trying to check an emotion that was nearer to rage than melting adoration, she murmured something about seeing him later and headed for the door. She’d show him, she fumed, closing the panelled wood with unnecessary force. She’d show him she wasn’t a slightly amusing child!

      Venetia was fully