‘Still in one piece. But there’s been a visitor…and here’s the thing…’ The dress, which had seemed so temptingly beautiful, now stared balefully back at her from the mirror as she proceeded to tell her friend what had recently transpired. She kept getting muddled up because, in her head, all she could see was the stranger’s lean, dark, outrageously sexy face looking at her in a way that was both intrusive and scarily exciting and nothing at all like the way other boys back home had ever looked at her.

‘So you’re going out with him for dinner…Oh, God, let me think…okay, okay…might be for the best…’

‘Because…?’

Half an hour later, Bethany removed the offending dress, laid it on the bed because it would have to be dry-cleaned in the morning, and thought that there was a lot of truth about webs and lies and getting entangled. Catrina, the original house-sitter and cherished godchild of the hapless Amelia Doni, who was on a cruise a thousand miles away from Rome, was in London. In rehab. Very hush-hush, and all hell would break loose should loaded and doting godmother find out. So the task of house-sitting had fallen to Amy, with a code red level of secrecy but, Amy being Amy, Love had reared its head and her house-sitting mission had fallen quickly by the wayside. Thankfully, Bethany had been there, ever reliable and immune to being led astray. The sort of girl who enjoyed reading Italian books at night and thought that three glasses of wine qualified as a binge-drinking fest.

Now, as she stared down at the dress on the bed, Bethany wondered what had happened to Little Miss Reliability. The most daring thing she had done in ages had been to try that wretched dress on because yes, she really did enjoy curling up with a good book most nights and sometimes she even fulfilled that dreariest of clichés by curling up with a good book and a mug of hot chocolate.

But now she had accepted a dinner invitation from a guy who was sinfully sexy and ultra-sophisticated. Moreover, it was just going to be a one-night affair, and if, for once, she acted out of character, if she behaved like the kind of person who might conceivably have a holiday apartment dripping with designer clothes, the kind of woman who thought nothing of hanging around in a dress that cost a small fortune, then why not? She would be helping Amy out because no one, but no one, could get a whiff of Catrina drying out in a clinic in the UK and the last thing anyone needed was for some connected Italian guy to start asking questions.

Bethany felt a kick of excitement stir inside her. Of course, whatever she wore that night she would have dry-cleaned. She wasn’t that irresponsible. She was just going to have a couple of hours of fun…no harm there…

‘SO…TELL me about yourself…’

It was an inevitable question but it still made Bethany’s nerves jangle because after the initial crazy euphoria of wondering what it would be like to step into someone else’s shoes for a night had come the shattering reality that she was, in actual fact, going to spend a few hours in the company of a sex god under false pretences. Between Cristiano’s departure from the apartment and the sound of his voice four hours later on the intercom when he arrived to collect her, she had had ample time to concede that a man like him—sleek, sophisticated, extraordinarily handsome—would never have looked at a girl like her under normal circumstances. In fact, they would never even have met under normal circumstances.

Bethany, who had managed to fall back on most of her own clothes because leaving the house in someone else’s wardrobe seemed a bit rich, all things considered, wondered how best to answer his question.

She finally settled on a vague, nonsensical answer along the lines of being a free spirit.

‘What does that mean?’ Cristiano looked across at her. She intrigued him and he had found himself looking forward to their dinner more than he had looked forward to any date with a woman in a long time. Nor had she disappointed. When the elevator doors had pinged open and she had walked across the marbled foyer towards him, he had literally been stopped in his tracks. She might have had all the money she wanted at her disposal, but she had foregone the diamonds and pearls, the little black dress that screamed designer and the killer stilettos, and instead had dressed down in a pair of jeans and some flat tan loafers with a pale blue wrap over her shoulders. Cristiano liked it. It took a confident woman to go for comfort and it took a sexy one to pull it off.

‘What does that mean?’ Bethany’s natural warmth came out in her smile. Now that she was talking and not just gawping like a star-struck teenager, she could begin to relax a little and to enjoy the stolen moment in time. ‘You sound like someone who’s spent a lifetime living in a bubble.’

‘Living in a bubble…’ Cristiano looked at her thoughtfully. ‘I suppose I did grow up in a bubble of sorts. Coming from a privileged background can have that effect. You’re naturally supposed to do certain things…’

Bethany could only imagine. ‘Like what?’

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t experienced the same sort of thing. A certain lifestyle to which you conform, more or less, from an early age.’

Bethany thought of her own riotous Irish upbringing, the house always full of friends and family, boyfriends in and out, their two dogs and three cats and the general happy chaos that had made up her formative years. Conforming to anything from an early age was an alien concept.

‘I’m more of a non-conformist,’ she said truthfully. ‘I mean, I’m not a wild child or anything like that, but I was never told that I had to be a certain way or do certain things.’

‘Perhaps things work a little differently in your part of the world,’ Cristiano murmured. ‘Here, in Italy, I have always known what my future held in store for me.’ They had drifted outside into a balmy summer evening.

‘That must have been tough.’

‘Tough? Why?’ He was fascinated by the thought of any woman who could apply the adjective tough to any aspect of his life. Even the richest of women he had dated in the past had been impressed to death by the breadth of his power and privilege. ‘Since when is it tough to have the world at your disposal?’

‘No one has the world at their disposal!’ Bethany laughed, as they began walking slowly towards his car, which he had parked, he had explained, in the only free space at the very end of the long road.

‘You’d be surprised.’

Underneath the lazy, sexy timbre of his voice, she could detect the ruthless patina of a man accustomed to getting exactly what he wanted and she shivered. ‘You just think you have the world at your disposal because everyone around you is primed to agree with everything you say,’ she felt compelled to point out. ‘I think it must be one of the downfalls of having too much money…’

‘Too much money? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that expression cross a woman’s lips.’ He was privately amused that someone of presumably substantial private means could wax lyrical about the pitfalls of wealth but it was refreshing, for once, to find himself in the company of a woman who seemed to have a social conscience.

Bethany decided that if he was a learning curve for her, then why shouldn’t she be a learning curve for him? What did she have to lose? She guessed instinctively that he wasn’t a man who had much experience when it came to having his opinions questioned. The way he had asked her out to dinner, refused to concede that she might turn him down, indicated someone whose belief in the whole world being at his disposal was absolute.

‘What type of women do you mix with?’ Bethany asked, fascinated beyond belief by the wildly exotic creature looking lazily at her. His eyes were as dark as molasses, fringed by the most ridiculously long lashes imaginable, and the way his dark hair curled against the collar of his shirt, a little too long to be entirely conventional but not so long that he looked unkempt, brought her out in goosebumps.