A Clash With Cannavaro by Elizabeth Power

quite relieved to give in.
    He couldn’t get over how he had found her, out in these unpleasant conditions, trying to free that dog. Any more than he could get over how a cunning, gold-digging little siren of her calibre fitted into a run-down, home-spun environment like this.
    Well, he would make her coffee and then he would tell her of his proposition. And if she didn’t like him being fully involved in his nephew’s life...then tough! She had had him to herself long enough. Now it was time for Daniele Cannavaro to know his father’s family and to grow up fully aware of just who he was and exactly where he came from, even if Lauren Westwood didn’t agree. There was no way he was going to relinquish responsibility for the boy, or abandon him, as his father had done. Nor would he ever allow him to feel pushed aside—as he himself had been.
    Staring out of the multi-paned window at the wet and murky stable yard, he was so deep in thought that he hadn’t realised that the water had stopped flowing in the pipes.
    Suddenly a sound behind him had him swinging round, and the sight that met him stalled the breath in his lungs.
    Lauren was coming through the doorway in a short silk floral robe that showed off every movement of her body—whether intentionally or otherwise—and her rough-towelled red hair, now left to dry naturally, was falling wildly about her shoulders. But every inch of her, right down to those long, slender feet with their clear varnished nails, was making Emiliano’s mouth go dry and, in spite of all the terrible things he had been thinking about her, a shaft of hot desire was suddenly scorching through him.
    * * *
    He was leaning back against the sink with a mug of coffee in his hand, looking every bit at home in her lowly kitchen as he’d looked in the shameless luxury of that five-star hotel.
    With his jacket discarded and his hair as wild and rumpled as his mud-stained shirt, he looked so untamed and spectacular that Lauren’s heart-rate pumped up a level.
    ‘Don’t stand on ceremony. Help yourself to a biscuit.’ The transparent jar in which she kept them beside the kettle had been pulled forward and its lid was on the counter, evidence that he had clearly helped himself already.
    ‘You will have to excuse my manners,’ he said, by way of an apology. ‘I am afraid I haven’t eaten for a few hours.’
    She glanced at the jar, which was missing the last two of Danny’s chocolate bourbons, leaving only the handful of plainer ones that she preferred. She wouldn’t have minded, but she couldn’t afford to replace them until she could cash her wages the day after tomorrow.
    And you accused me of trying to take from you.
    She didn’t say it but the green eyes clashing with midnight-black expressed that exact sentiment as she crossed to one of the wall cupboards and took out a large round tin.
    ‘I’m sorry it’s only plain Madeira,’ she said cynically as she was cutting a large chunk of the home-made cake on the kitchen table, ‘but I didn’t know you were coming. If I had, I would have definitely put something in it.’
    ‘Then perhaps it is lucky for me that you didn’t,’ he drawled with the barest trace of a smile, leaving her in no doubt as to his meaning.
    ‘Contrary to what you think about me, I don’t go round trying to poison Italian billionaires,’ she informed him bluntly. ‘Not until I’ve married them and got them to change their last will and testament in my favour.’
    He laughed, yet that harsh edge to the sound was unmistakable. ‘Is that what you had in mind when you seduced me, cara ?’ His dark eyes were hooded, but there was softness now in that false endearment that made Lauren’s legs feel as spongy as the cake she had just been slicing.
    ‘Of course not!’ Hot colour crept up her throat above the deep ‘V’ of her robe as she suddenly realised what she had as good as admitted to. And then, in an attempt to brush over it, she went on, with an