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       ‘You will need a working wardrobe commensurate with your position,’ Raphael informed her.

      Charley looked at him. ‘I have plenty of clothes at home that my sisters can send out to me.’

      Raphael raised one eyebrow in a way that made her face burn. ‘Let me guess: these clothes that you have at home are dull, plain garments that are two sizes too big for you? Si? They will not be suitable for your new role. You will be dealing with artists and craftsmen who value beauty,’ he emphasised. ‘Why does the thought of wearing beautiful clothes fill you with such panic? Most women—’

      ‘I am not most women, and it does not fill me with panic,’ Charley denied. But of course he was right. She couldn’t tell him that she was afraid of beautiful clothes because she knew they would only underline how unworthy she was of wearing them.

      ‘You have already agreed to work under my direction and to abide by my conditions,’ Raphael reminded her.

      ‘As your project manager, not with you telling me what to wear,’ Charley retorted. ‘Work clothes for me mean a sturdy pair of boots and a properly fitting hard hat.’

      ‘You shall have those, of course, but I hardly think that even you would want to dress in such things for dinner.’

       Best-selling Modern Romance™ author Penny Jordan brings you an exciting new trilogy…

       NEEDED: THE WORLD’S MOST ELIGIBLE BILLIONAIRES

       Three penniless sisters, pure and proud…but about to be purchased!

      With bills that need to be paid, a house about to be repossessed and little twin boys to feed, sisters Lizzie, Charley and Ruby refuse to drown in their debts. They will hold their heads up high and fight to feed their family!

      But three of the richest, most ruthless men in the world are about to enter their lives…

      Pure, proud, but penniless, how far will the sisters go to save the ones they love?

      Lizzie’s story—

       THE WEALTHY GREEK’S CONTRACT WIFE

       Ilios Manos is Greek and ruthless. A dangerous combination! Lizzie owes him thousands, but he’ll take her as his wife in payment.

      Charley’s story—

       THE ITALIAN DUKE’S VIRGIN MISTRESS

       When project manager Charley is hired by demanding Raphael Della Striozzi, he’s adamant she must have a makeover! Now the dowdy frump has been transformed, she’s sexy enough for another role: his mistress!

      Look out for Ruby’s story, coming soon!

      The

      Italian Duke’s

      Virgin Mistress

      By

      Penny Jordan

       MILLS & BOON®

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      Penny Jordan has been writing for more than twenty years and has an outstanding record: over 175 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Penny Jordan was born in Preston, Lancashire, and now lives in rural Cheshire.

       Recent titles by the same author:

      A BRIDE FOR HIS MAJESTY’S PLEASURE

THE SICILIAN BOSS’S MISTRESS^*

      THE SICILIAN’S BABY BARGAIN^*

      CAPTIVE AT THE SICILIAN BILLIONAIRE’S COMMAND^*

      TAKEN BY THE SHEIKH

      THE SHEIKH’S BLACKMAILED MISTRESS

      VIRGIN FOR THE BILLIONAIRE’S TAKING

* The Leopardi Brothers

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘ARE you Charlotte Wareham, the project manager from Kentham Brothers?’

      Charlotte—Charley—Wareham looked up from her laptop, blinking in the strong Italian spring sunshine. She had only just returned from a snatched, very late lunch—a sandwich and a cup of delicious cappuccino in a local café. Her meeting with the two civic dignitaries responsible for the restoration project on a derelict public garden, to be completed for the five hundredth anniversary of the garden’s creation, which she would be overseeing, had overrun badly.

      The man now towering over her, whom she hadn’t met before, and who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, was plainly angry—very angry indeed—as he gestured towards the cheap faux stone urns and other replica samples she had shipped over for client inspection.

      ‘And what, may I ask, are these vile abominations?’ he demanded.

      It wasn’t his anger, though, that had a coil of shocked disbelief tightening her whole body. Dimly she recognised that the sharp, swift pang of sensation possessing her was instinctive female recognition of a man so alpha that no woman could or would even want to deny him.

      This was a man born to stand head and shoulders above his peers—a man born to produce strong sons in his own image—a man born to take the woman of his choice to his bed and to give her such pleasure there that she would be bound to him by the mere memory for the rest of her life.

      She must have been sitting in the sun for too long, Charley decided shakily. Such thoughts were certainly not something she was normally prone to—quite the opposite.

      She made a determined effort to pull herself together, putting her laptop down, rising from the faux stone bench on which she had been sitting, and standing up to confront her interrogator.

      He was tall and dark and as filled with furious rage as a volcano about to erupt. He was also, as her senses had already recognised, extraordinarily good-looking. His olive-toned skin was drawn smoothly over the tautly masculine bone structure of his face, and he was tall, dark-haired, with the kind of arrogantly proud chiselled features that spoke of patrician forebears. His unexpectedly steely grey-eyed gaze swept over her with open contempt, his look like a sculptor’s chisel, seeking the exact spot in a piece of marble where it was most vulnerable.

      Charley tried to look away from him and found instead that her gaze had somehow slipped to his mouth. Shocked by her own behaviour, she tried to drag her gaze away, but it refused to move. Prickles of warning quivered over her skin, but it was already too late. An unwanted jolt of awareness of him as a man had already struck through her like forked lightning coming out of a still, calm sky, and was all the more frightening for that unexpectedness. Her mouth had gone dry; a thousand tiny nerve-endings were pulsing beneath her skin. She could feel her lips softening and swelling as though in preparation for a lover’s kiss, and he was looking at them now, his gaze narrowed and unreadable, but no doubt filled with arrogant disdain for her weakness. A man like this one would never look at her mouth the way she had looked at his. He would never be caught off guard by the sudden shock of knowing that his senses had torn free of his mind and were imagining what it would be like to feel her mouth against his.

      Jerkily,

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