The Italian's Baby Bargain: The Italian's Wedding Ultimatum / The Italian's Forced Bride / The Mancini Marriage Bargain. Kate WalkerЧитать онлайн книгу.

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      KIM LAWRENCE lives on a farm in rural Anglesey. She runs two miles daily and finds this an excellent opportunity to unwind and seek inspiration for her writing! It also helps her keep up with her husband, two active sons and the various stray animals which have adopted them. Always a fanatical consumer of fiction, she is now equally enthusiastic about writing. She loves a happy ending!

       Look for Kim Lawrence’s latest exciting novels, Unworldly Secretary, Untamed Greek and Sophie’s Seduction, which are available in September 2010 from Mills & Boon© Modern™ romance and October 2010 from M&B™.

      Chapter One

      SAM identified the person who had come to stand behind her chair long before his hands came to rest lightly on her shoulders. Her heart rate quickened a little before she forced herself to relax. As she turned her head her smile stayed in place. It wasn’t easy, but Sam had reached the point where she felt pretty well qualified to give a master class in hiding her true feelings.

      She firmly steered her thoughts from the self-pitying direction they were drifting. Reality check, Samantha Maguire—you weren’t singled out for any particular cruelty from fate. Hearts get broken most days of the week!

      So live with it, girl, she told herself sternly.

      She was living; in fact she was living proof that there was life after a broken heart! Not that she was ever in danger of downplaying the disaster that was unrequited love—when the only person you had ever imagined spending the rest of your life with married someone else you didn’t become in-different overnight, or even after two years. But you did develop a protective shell; you had to.

      There were days now when Sam could go an entire morning without thinking about Jonny Trelevan. Admittedly on those occasions she hadn’t had a glass of champagne and he didn’t have his hand on her shoulder!

      Sam suspected that getting on with her life and not brooding on what might have been would probably have been easier if she could have erased him from her life, but that had never been a serious option. There were just too many connections. Not only were the Trelevan and Maguire families friends and neighbours in the small Cornish seaside town where she had been born and brought up, but Jonny’s twin, Emma, was one of her best friends. And now, after the christening that morning, they were both godparents to Emma’s first daughter, Laurie.

      ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding, Sam.’ Jonny bent down and his lips brushed gently against her cheek.

      She was surprised by the unexpected gesture. Jonny wasn’t normally a wildly tactile person—at least not with her—and, for a brief moment unable to shield her feelings, Sam dropped her chin and fixed her attention on the baby in her lap while she fought to regain her composure.

      Her god-daughter looked back at her and gave a gummy smile. Sam felt a stab of wistful envy for the childlike innocence.

      Why are you worrying? she asked herself as she grinned back at the baby and tweaked her button nose. ‘Are you laughing at silly Aunty Sam…?’ See—even a ten-month-old knows Jonny wouldn’t notice if you stripped naked.

      Or if he did it would only be to ask if she was warm enough! The bottom line was that to Jonny she was always going to be good old Sam—the slightly odd, skinny redhead from next door.

      As she lifted her chin a moment later, her serene just-good-friends smile firmly pinned in place, Sam’s unwary gaze connected head-on with the enigmatic hooded stare of Alessandro Di Livio, who was standing a little apart from a laughing group of guests on the other side of the room.

      She stiffened, and her smile guttered.

      A little apart just about described the man who, in Sam’s opinion, carried ‘aloof’ to the point of plain rudeness.

      With some men she might have suspected that the entire dark, brooding man-of-mystery thing was cultivated for effect, just to make people notice him. But Alessandro Di Livio didn’t need to make the effort.

      He got noticed!

      Of course he got noticed. He was tall, lean, and rampantly male, and if his body looked half as good without clothes as it did—Sam lost the thread momentarily as she thought about him naked. Face rosily tinged, she reined in her wayward imagination and concentrated on his face. Individually, his strong, dark features were memorable; collectively, they were nothing short of perfect. And that was before you even touched on the subject of the forcefield of raw sexuality that preceded him into any room!

      Even from this distance the unnerving intensity of his stare had her stomach muscles behaving unpredictably. Without dropping her eyes she rested her chin on the top of the baby’s silky head; his eyes really were the darkest she had ever seen—not dark warm, but dark hard. That man, she thought, repressing a shudder, wasn’t chocolate. Not even the dark, bitter variety. He was cold, hard steel!

      Despite the familiar wave of antipathy she always experienced when around the Italian financier, Sam forced her lips into a polite smile—while thinking, God, but there’s just something about you that sets my teeth on edge.

      Actually, not something, she admitted. Everything!

      From the way he walked into a room as if he owned it to the ability of his deep voice with its tactile quality and intriguing accent to make her skin prickle. Even the fact that his incredibly well-cut suit didn’t have a crease in it got under her skin. She knew it was totally irrational, and it probably made her a freak, considering that just about every other female she had ever met drooled when his name was mentioned, but she found his brand of arrogance and raw, in-your-face sexuality a total turn-off.

      When she had said as much to Emma, during Jonny and Kat’s belated wedding party, her best friend, who had a pretty warped sense of humour, had grinned slyly and suggested innocently that maybe all this hostility was because Sam was secretly attracted to the Italian.

      Well aware that if she showed how repugnant she found the joking suggestion Emma was going to take the she protests too much route, she had rolled her eyes and joked, ‘Sure I am—I dream about him every night.’ Trying not to think about that one shameful occasion she had almost successfully blanked from her mind—the one when she had woken with her entire body bathed in sweat and her heart pumping so fast she’d felt as if she was choking.

      Fortunately a girl couldn’t be held accountable for what her subconscious got up to.

      ‘I think we’ll make a lovely couple,’ she’d added.

      Disregarding the irony heavily lacing this prognosis, Emma grinned. ‘So, you think you’re the woman to get our famously commitment-phobic Italian stud to the altar? You do realise that the only time his name has ever been linked with marriage was with that woman…the lawyer…messy divorce, husband a junior minister or something.’ Her smooth brow furrowed as she failed to retrieve the name. ‘What was her name…?’

      ‘Marisa Sinclair.’ When the ring everyone had expected to see appear on her finger hadn’t materialised Marisa Sinclair had responded to prying