The Italian Millionaire's Virgin Wife. Diana Hamilton
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her the glass, his brow cleared. Those amazingly big blue eyes were drenched with sympathy—maybe something could be done about them—mud-coloured contact lenses, perhaps?
Lowering himself beside her, he congratulated himself that at last she was on side. After what he’d told her she would be seeing through whatever sob story Trisha had come out with. No more righteous and misguided accusations of cruelty to make her prim her mouth and categorically refuse to do as he wanted.
Her heart swelling with pity and something else entirely as the devastating Italian again joined her on the press, Mercy stared at the glass in her hands. She hadn’t asked for it and didn’t want it—already her head was feeling peculiar. But she felt so achingly sorry for him she just couldn’t bring herself to thrust it back at him. Poor, poor thing!
He was so gorgeous, so vital, how could he believe no woman could love him for himself and not his bank balance? She could throttle his cynical old grandfather for planting the idea in his head! He must feel so lonely!
‘Howard…’
‘Yes, sir?’ Mercy glanced up at his low-pitched murmur then hurriedly transferred her gaze back to the glass she was holding. His eyes were a gleam of pure silver beneath the heavy dark fringe of his lashes and the long line of his mouth had softened with outrageous sensuality. Like a man looking at an object of desire.
Her cheeks blossoming with wild colour, she berated herself for thinking like a lunatic and buried her nose in her glass for something to do with herself just as he said, ‘Cut out the ‘‘sirs’’. We’re friends, right?’
He’d angled himself so that he was looking directly at her and here, in the intimacy of his bedroom, with him so close, close enough to smell the faint lemony drift of his aftershave, feel his body heat, it made her insides curl up with tension, her breath come in strange little gasps, her entire body tingle in a way she had never experienced before.
‘Er—right,’ she gulped strainedly and frantically tried to pull herself together. ‘Friends’ was okay. Normal, really. And with his track record he’d be used to looking at a woman—any woman from one-year-old to a hundred—that way. Just a habit. She was busy blaming her silliness on her unaccustomed intake of alcohol until he said, his dark velvet voice liberally smeared with honey, ‘I have a proposition to put to you.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘AND that is?’ Mercy tried her best to sound bright and interested. Difficult when her tongue felt three feet thick. If this was what being tiddly was like she hated it. Cursing her foolishness in so innocently drinking that first glass as if it were as innocuous as fruit juice and then taking polite sips of the unwanted second, she did her best to concentrate on what he was saying.
‘I want you to model for me.’
For a moment she could only gape at him. Had the alcohol affected her hearing too? Messed with her brain? Mercy’s poleaxed eyes clung to his. Big mistake, she groaned inwardly. He was looking at her that way again, soft silver lights in those stunning eyes as they held her own confused gaze, his bewitching lips parted in a sensual half smile. She swallowed thickly and shook her head, trying to clear it of the muddle inside.
‘What did you say?’
‘That you’d be perfect for a project I’m currently working on.’
To her intense amazement and quivering delight his lean long-fingered hands softly cupped her face, lifting it to his openly assessing gaze. Mercy shook with inner tremors as her whole body seemed to catch fire, burn and shiver at the same time.
He looked as if he were about to kiss her, she thought wildly as her veins pulsed with dangerous excitement. Unbidden, her soft mouth parted with yearning anticipation as his eyes roamed over every feature then slowly dropped to what he could see of her body—mainly and shamingly the way her regrettably generous breasts were pushing against the now rather grubby grey fabric of her overall.
‘You’d have the small but absolutely pivotal role in the commercial we’re about to film…Just a few hours of your time…Coronet…You’d be so perfect…’
There was a strange buzzing sound inside her head. Mercy simply couldn’t process what he was saying. It all sounded so incredible she didn’t have a clue to how she could begin to understand it. She only knew she deeply mourned the loss of the sizzling, paralysing effect of his cool skin against her burning cheeks when he dropped his hands and took the dangerously tilting wineglass from hers, then mentioned a payment that sounded so crazily huge she could only gulp in frantic disbelief.
‘Think it over,’ he advised, still employing the silky-soft seductive tone that made every muscle, bone and nerve-ending she possessed go into meltdown. Elevating his lean frame with effortless ease, he took her hands and drew her to her feet, her body brushing against his as she rose, making her need, quite desperately, to sit straight back down again because her legs had gone.
But he was crossing the floor, long energetic strides taking him to the door. Holding it open for her, he gave her the benefit of that totally charismatic smile. ‘If you agree you’d be doing me a big favour. Sleep on it, and we’ll iron out the details in the morning.’
Having to call on every scrap of will-power she possessed, Mercy managed to stay upright and relatively steady as she left the room and headed for her bed, all thoughts of supper and the hot bath she’d promised herself abandoned in the pressing need to seek oblivion. All the while she shakily promised herself that she’d figure out exactly what had happened in his room this evening when her brain wasn’t in shock and fuddled with alcohol.
‘Oh, wow!’ Carly screeched.
Mercy snatched the mobile phone off her ear and shifted in one of the comfy armchairs in her private sitting room, only returning to the conversation when she judged she was in no further danger of having her eardrum split.
‘I didn’t take it in properly last evening—’ she came clean ‘—I’d had the best part of two huge glasses of wine and—’
‘You never!’ Carly groaned theatrically. ‘You know it goes straight to your head! Remember that Christmas when you got squiffy on one spoonful of rum sauce!’
‘Well, the wine was given to me with all good intentions and it seemed rude not to drink it,’ Mercy excused lamely then went on to recount what she’d thought had been said, editing out her crass stupidity in thinking for one moment that he had been about to kiss her. As if!
‘But he cleared it up this morning when I took him his breakfast.’ A warm smile lit her features. He’d looked really pained at first but he’d eaten every scrap of the kedgeree after she’d told him, very firmly—no messing—that fish was good brain food. ‘I’m to go to the studio next Monday and present myself to Make-up and Wardrobe. They’ll start filming my part some time after midday, depending on how the location shots go, apparently. And he’s paying mega bucks so I’ll really be able to make a huge difference for James. He can forget about taking out further student loans in the forseeable future.’
Carly heaved a sigh. ‘I don’t believe this!’
‘No, neither do I,’ Mercy confided. ‘How anyone could think I’d be a perfect model for a TV ad—’
‘I mean I don’t believe you wouldn’t want to spend at least some of all that dosh on nice things for yourself,’ the other woman corrected tartly. ‘For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve always put yourself and what you wanted last on your list of priorities! But I guess nagging won’t change you.’ Her tone lightened. ‘And I do believe you’d make great model material. Your brilliant boss must have taken one look at you and seen the potential. Haven’t I always told you you could be drop-dead-gorgeous if you took trouble with your appearance? Stopped buying the dreary stuff you call essentials from charity shops, had your hair done properly and let me do your make-up. He obviously looked at you and saw star material!’ she enthused as Mercy struggled not to hoot out loud at that unlikely