LITMIR.BIZ

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their phone. The press was full of his wild-partying, hooking-up lifestyle. He hadn’t had a single relationship that lasted more than twenty-four hours. He was a one-night-stand man. It was practically his brand, for God’s sake. What possible interest would he have in planning a wedding? She would be made a fool of and the whole world would be watching to see it. Argh!

      ‘You know he’s not going to do a minute’s work while he’s here,’ Lottie said, jutting her chin as she looked at her sister. ‘He’s only here for show. He’s using it as some sort of layabout holiday. He was disgustingly blatant about it. That shows how unprincipled he is.’

      Madeleine picked up her bronzing brush and swept it artfully across each of her regal cheekbones in turn. ‘Then perhaps you should take him on as a project. Put him to work. Get his nose to the grindstone and his shoulder to the wheel or whatever the saying is.’

      I’d like to get his back to the wall, Lottie thought with venom. I’d like to scratch his eyes out. I’d like to slap his arrogant face. I’d like to—

      Madeleine smiled at her in the mirror. ‘Well, look at you, Lottie, love. I’ve never seen you so fired up. He really has got under your skin, hasn’t he?’

      Lottie quickly refashioned her features into her customary ice-princess mask, although inside she was still seething like a kettle left too long on the boil. ‘I can handle him. He’s just a little boy who hasn’t grown up.’

      ‘He looks all grown up to me.’ Madeleine gave a twinkling smile and waggled her neatly groomed eyebrows as she added, ‘Or at least he did judging by that spread we saw of him in that London tabloid.’

      Lottie flickered her eyelids in disdain and swung away. ‘I do not want to be reminded of what that man gets up to in his spare time.’

      ‘Then make sure he doesn’t have any,’ Madeleine said. ‘Keep him busy with errands. You could do with a bit of practice at delegating. You know you have a tendency to over-control things.’

      ‘That’s because I’ve always found if I want a good job done I have to do it myself,’ Lottie said. ‘Every time I’ve trusted someone to do the right thing they let me down and I’m the one who ends up with egg dripping off my face.’

      Madeleine made a little moue with her lips. ‘You’re not including me in that statement, are you, ma petite?’

      There was no point arguing the point. Madeleine liked to think she was the model older sister. Nothing she ever did was wrong. Their parents never criticised her because she had always done well at school and didn’t have to study for hours to get facts and figures to stay in her head long enough to recall them for an exam. The press never found fault with her. She never wore the wrong thing or said the wrong thing or frowned at the wrong time. She didn’t bite her nails when she was nervous. She hadn’t caused a scandal the first time she had been let loose at finishing school. She hadn’t been taken in by false charm and imagined herself in love with a boy who had only slept with her because she was a royal.

      No.

      Madeleine was perfect.

      Lottie let out a long-winded breath. ‘No, of course not.’

      Her sister turned around again on the stool. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you loosened up a bit? Got out a bit more, let your hair down? It’s been years since—’

      ‘Don’t.’

      ‘You need to get over yourself. It’s been—what?—five years since Switzerland? You won’t even talk about it. Don’t you think it’s time—?’

      ‘That’s because it’s in the past and I want it to stay there.’ Lottie gave her sister a cautioning look.

      ‘Every time the word Switzerland is mentioned you flinch. There, you just did it again.’

      Lottie pointedly opened the wedding planning folder. ‘The last dress fitting is the week before the wedding. It’s at 10:00 a.m. sharp.’

      ‘But you haven’t had a date since.’ Madeleine was like a dog with a serious bone addiction. ‘You can’t lock yourself away for ever, you know. One bad love affair doesn’t have to ruin your life. You’re twenty-three years old, for pity’s sake. You should be out partying and having a good time. You’re missing out on the best years of your life.’

      ‘I’m not missing out on anything.’ Lottie said the words with what conviction she could summon. Although she had never been as outgoing as her sister, she hadn’t been a shrinking violet either … more of a daisy that faded once the sun went down. But her first sexual relationship when she was eighteen had taught her a valuable lesson in trust. Finding pictures of her most intimate moments with her boyfriend on his phone that he had shared with his friends had bludgeoned her innocence to an aching pulp. Fortunately her father had been able to block any further circulation of the images but she had never been intimate with anyone since.

      She told herself she didn’t miss it. The sensual glide of flesh touching flesh, the heat and passion of mouth against mouth, the erotic glide of tongue against tongue and the release of pent-up primal urges were things she no longer allowed herself to think about. Passion was too overpowering. It took away rational thought and self-control.

      The sensual part of her had shrivelled up and died from neglect … or so she had thought until this afternoon when Lucca Chatsfield’s large masculine hand had encased hers. Trapped hers. Shivers of awareness had cascaded in showers down her spine like the dance of champagne bubbles poured into a crystal glass. She could still feel the stirring of her blood, the way it moved through her veins as if powered by high-octane fuel.

      She gave herself a hard mental slap. The very last man on earth she would ever get involved with was a promiscuous playboy with fewer morals than a back-alley tomcat.

      No. No. No. A thousand million, squillion, gazillion times no.

       She would put him to work instead.

      Lucca was sipping a martini—shaken, not stirred—when he heard a sharp businesslike rap on the door of his penthouse suite. He slipped his feet off the ottoman, stood, gave a full-body stretch and sauntered over to the door. ‘Well, hello there, little princess. And bang on time too.’

      The look he got from those green eyes would have felled a three-hundred-year-old elm tree at thirty paces. Her chin came up and her chest inflated on a deeply indrawn breath as if she were calling upon some inner reserve to confront him. He found her feistiness strangely endearing given her tightly controlled temperament. So buttoned up and yet positively steaming on the inside.

      She was cute. Unique.

      She had the sort of looks that grew on you. Not in-your-face beauty like her sister, but an underplayed elegance that was quite captivating the more he saw of her. She was wearing a different pair of glasses this time. A silver metal frame that was not as thick as the tortoiseshell ones, but they still made her look bookish.

      ‘We have work to do,’ she said without preamble.

      ‘We do?’

      Her mouth was tightly set as if she was holding an arsenal of stinging retorts behind the barrier of her lips and only just managing to keep them there. ‘You are not here to party. You are here to help me. So help me you will.’

      He leaned one shoulder idly against the doorjamb. ‘Would you like a drink?’

      Her eyebrows snapped together. ‘Mr Chatsfield, I am not here on a social visit. I’m here to assign you specific tasks to do with the wedding.’

      ‘Humour me.’ He closed the door and smiled down at her lopsidedly. ‘I never do business with a clear head.’

      Her eyes pulsed and flickered with such loathing he fully expected the lenses of her glasses to steam up right then and there. Or explode out of the frames. Her dislike of him was so intense and so palpable it made his scalp prickle and the base of his backbone tingle.

      

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