CHAPTER ONE

      ‘I‘M AT the London apartment, so it won’t be long before I can see you. Yes, Jake’s away... No, no I haven’t told him. We’ll discuss it when I see you. Must go now, darling, but see you soon, I promise.’ Claire Winter replaced the receiver, a tender smile softening the classical loveliness of her features before she felt her scalp tingle with warning, felt the skin on her face go stiff. She slowly turned on the silk brocade-covered sofa, her aquamarine eyes shocked by the accuracy of her precognition as they homed in on Jake’s narrowed grey gaze.

      ‘You’re in Rome,’ she babbled, and immediately hated herself for her inaccurate inanity, despised herself even more when her stupid remark gave him the excuse to hitch up one dark sardonic brow and drawl mockingly,

      ‘Kind of you to put me right. I actually thought I was in Mayfair.’

      She watched him lever himself away from the door-frame where he’d been leaning, listening... How much of her telephone conversation had he heard...? And God, but he was beautiful. Every time she looked at him she was struck anew by his male magnificence. He was the dark stranger who haunted every woman’s secret dreams, a fantasy of masculine perfection come to life.

      And he knew it. He had more sex appeal than was good for him, so his arrogance over the opposite sex was understandable. Every woman he met drooled over him, fell at his feet. Even her own mother looked at him with a definite sparkle in her eyes and she, more than most, had good reason to be wary of anything in trousers. He had the looks, the wealth, the power and personality to turn the sanest woman’s head.

      She was firmly on her feet now, perfectly in control, presenting the image he expected—no, demanded. Cool, expensive, exquisitely groomed, her silky black hair cut stylishly short, the black and white heavy silk two-piece she was wearing emphasizing the elegant lines of her tall, slender body.

      ‘I didn’t expect you for at least another couple of days.’ She schooled her voice to coolness but couldn’t disguise the trace of accusation; it came through despite her best efforts and Jake picked it up, obviously, because he said drily,

      ‘So I gathered. Who were you phoning? Or is that a question a husband shouldn’t ask his wife?’

      ‘Liz,’ she answered, perhaps too quickly. Something made his narrowed grey eyes glitter. He didn’t believe she’d been talking to her mother.

      Watching him walk further into the beautiful main room of their London apartment, shedding the jacket of his exquisitely tailored grey suit, she lifted her chin, her eyes stubborn, giving no hint of the alarm she felt at the way her heart was behaving so unusually. It was thundering around inside her chest, frightening her.

      ‘And how is she? Well?’ He hooked a finger in the knot of his tie and dragged it away from the collar of his crisp white shirt. ‘I find myself with two unexpectedly free days. Perhaps we should visit her? I could persuade her to divulge whatever it is you haven’t been able to bring yourself to tell me yet.’

      So he had heard. And the unmasked derision in the look he sent her made her face turn to fire. And she felt too disoriented to invent something on the spur of the moment so she chose to attack, her slender fingers reaching unerringly for the folded newspaper on the rosewood coffee-table. She had opened it, spreading the newsprint on her lap far too many times throughout this long, quiet Sunday, knowing she shouldn’t yet unable to prevent it, like probing an aching tooth with her tongue.

      The paper fell open to the right page, out of habit, she supposed, her eyes darkening as the now all too familiar photograph of her husband leap out of the grey print, his arms around a woman who was achingly, unfairly beautiful.

      ‘Stripping assets of the romantic kind?’ The letters of the caption danced beneath Claire’s eyes. ‘Multi-millionaire Jake Winter caught playing away from home with the darling of Roman society, the irresistible Principessa Lorella Giancetti.’

      ‘The paparazzi must have had a field day,’ she clipped, flicking the photograph with a pearly oval fingernail, her eyes frowning as she watched a tiny smile curl at the corners of his hard, beautiful mouth while he scanned the page, anger battering at the wall of her chest.

      ‘Jealous, Claire?’ Mocking grey eyes held hers for a second before lowering, drifting down over her elegantly clad body, the mockery still to be glimpsed, though shadowed by thickly tangled black lashes, because he was comparing her slender, definitely understated curves with the voluptuous ripeness of the principessa‘s body which was almost flowing out of the expensive skimpiness of the glamorous evening dress she’d been pictured wearing.

      ‘No.’ She made the denial both mentally and verbally. ‘Disappointed. Before we married we made certain commitments. One of which, if I remember correctly, promised complete discretion in the possible area of extra-marital affairs. This—’ she flicked the newsprint again ‘—can’t, by any stretch of the imagination, be called discreet.’

      ‘No.’ His frown was sudden and ferocious as he agreed. ‘I apologies.’ He tossed the paper aside, rocking back on his heels, the whippy muscles of his long, lean body held together with a tension that had to be down to the unpalatable fact of discovery, Claire decided with weary cynicism as she set about collecting his discarded jacket and tie, settling into mundane domesticity rather than meet his eyes. Eyes that stalked her every movement, as the ripple of awareness down her spine attested.

      ‘Apology accepted,’ she stated, her fingers curling into the soft mohair and silk fabric of his jacket. The warmth of it. His warmth. It made her voice shiver unaccountably as she tacked on quickly, ‘I suggest we forget it.’ Then she took herself in hand. She was nervous, that was all. And why shouldn’t she be? She had turned the tables, fending off his questions, his disbelief, with the printed evidence of his own misdemeanors. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t turn back to his own attack.

      ‘Can I get you something to eat? To drink?’ It was too late to go out to a restaurant and she’d had her own sparse supper hours ago. There was little food in the apartment. She hadn’t expected him. He unfailingly let her know where he would be, and when, so that she could be there for him, getting everything organized, oiling the wheels of his busy life. This evening’s deviation,