Mistress for a Month Page 5

  Rico was confident Renée would enjoy herself with him just as much, once he got past her defences.

  Because, of course, she wasn’t going to be pleased when she read his demand. She was, in fact, sure to be downright furious.

  Too bad. A bet was a bet. You had to pay up. In full. Renée knew that.

  Rico didn’t doubt the merry widow would deliver. But not happily, or willingly. At least, not to begin with…

  His challenge was to bring her round, to make her see that being his mistress was a very pleasurable way to spend the next month. The thought of seducing her totally to his sexual will was almost as exciting as looking at the unbelievable hand he was holding.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Charles said impatiently. ‘Let’s see your hands.’

  Charles’ speaking at this juncture jolted Rico. He’d forgotten what his best friend’s reaction would be once his less than gentlemanly demand was made public. Charles would be shocked, and disapproving. Ali, not so much, Rico imagined. His ideas on women and sex were along more primitive lines. Whenever Ali met a young lady he fancied at the races here in Sydney, he often invited her to accompany him home here to the presidential suite for the night, then on to his property for the following week. But she was always returned the following Friday. And was never invited again.

  Despite his one-week affairs being common knowledge around Sydney’s racing set, he still had no trouble finding willing companions. Frankly, Ali had even less trouble getting women to share his bed—even on this temporary basis—than Rico. Jasmine had once described the Arab prince as sex on legs.

  Of course, his billions added considerable impetus to his sex appeal, as it did with all seriously wealthy men. But if the women who went with Ali thought they would ever catch him for a husband, then they were sorely mistaken. Ali had once confided in Rico he had no interest in marriage. Or having children. His horses were his children and women were just a pleasant diversion.

  No. Ali would not be shocked by Rico’s demand. Not one iota.

  Charles, however, was another matter.

  Too late to worry about that, however. It was time to put his cards on the table. Time to claim his prize.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘TOGETHER, then?’ Rico suggested, too excited now to care what anybody thought.

  Renée’s shoulders lifted in a seemingly nonchalant shrug but he detected a flash of something in her eyes. Surely not panic. Was she afraid, suddenly, that she might lose?

  Her hand trembled slightly as she placed her cards down just before his. So she was worried.

  She had every right to be, came the devilish thought when he saw her cards. Four nines was a good hand. But not nearly good enough.

  ‘Hope you’re not bluffing, pal,’ Charles said as Rico exposed his own incredible hand.

  Renée sucked in sharply whilst Charles openly gaped.

  ‘My God!’ he exclaimed. ‘A royal routine. You know, I’ve never seen one of those before.’

  ‘I have,’ Ali said drily. ‘How wicked of you, Enrico, to trick Renée into such a wager with such a hand.’

  ‘Renée didn’t have to agree,’ Rico retorted, his elation refusing to give way to guilt. ‘It was up to her to gauge what kind of hand I was holding. She should have known I wasn’t bluffing.’

  ‘I did,’ Renée said, composed once more. ‘I just didn’t realise your hand was unbeatable. I did have pretty good cards myself, you know.’

  Rico frowned over at her. She should have been more disappointed. More angry with him.

  Still, she hadn’t read his demand yet. What would happen when she did? If Rico was any judge of character at all—something Renée insisted he wasn’t—he would bet that she wouldn’t make a scene. She would be cool and controlled, till she got him in private. Then, she’d let him have it.

  In a perverse kind of way, he was looking forward to that moment. The only thing about last Sunday that he’d enjoyed was seeing her in a temper over him.

  Heated dislike was much preferable to cold uninterest. Her admission that she thought him physically attractive had not been forgotten, either. Hell, he was depending on it!

  When she reached for the two envelopes, his stomach suddenly twisted into the most awful knot. But she bypassed the one which had his name on it and picked up the other one.

  ‘I can have this back now, can’t I?’ she said with a saucy tilt of her chin. ‘That was the deal. The loser gets to keep his—or her—heart’s desire secret.’

  ‘It’s no secret from me,’ Rico snapped, irritated by the delay in her opening his envelope. ‘I know exactly what you asked for.’

  ‘You only think you do,’ came her cryptic comment.

  Rico could not believe it. Even in his moment of triumph, she had to make some smart remark which would distract him and make him wonder. He wished now that he hadn’t made that particular condition of the bet. He would have preferred to see for himself exactly what she’d written. As much as he was pretty sure that she would have asked for his share of Ebony Fire, now he’d never know for certain.

  And she’d never tell him. He knew Renée well enough to know that!

  ‘This is all getting too much for me,’ Charles grumbled. ‘Just open Rico’s envelope, for pity’s sake, and let’s see what he wants. But I hope you’ve got plenty of money, Renée, because with that hand Rico could have asked for the world!’

  ‘I doubt our Italian friend would have asked for anything which could be bought,’ Ali said quietly and with his usual insight. ‘I suspect it will he something only Renée could give him.’

  ‘My thoughts, exactly,’ Renée remarked, coolly taking her time putting her envelope away in the handbag she always kept at her feet before finally picking up the envelope with Rico’s name on it. ‘Are we right, Rico?’ she asked, a small, knowing smile playing around her mouth as she turned her gaze on to him.

  Rico battled to stop his face from burning, a mammoth effort considering his body was on fire and his brain besieged by the most humiliating of realisations. She knew. Knew what he’d asked for. In essence, anyway. Ali suspected as well.

  Had he been so obvious these last couple of years? Had they all known how much he’d wanted her, how he’d sat there every Friday night in a torment of desire and need?

  Charles had guessed Rico’s supposedly secret feelings for the merry widow some time back, but Charles was his best friend and privy to Rico’s confidences. Rico hadn’t realised the other two had known what he was enduring as well. It was mortifying in the extreme.

  Once again, she’d struck at his pride. He tried not to glower at her, tried to keep his face from betraying the resentment raging within him. But he could never hide his feelings the way she could. He could feel his eyes blazing and his heart pounding with fury. He vowed to make her pay, in the only way he could.

  Some time during the next month he’d reduce her to begging for him. He’d make her whimper with need, and moan with desire. He might even make her fall in love with him!

  What a delicious revenge that would be for the way she’d constantly belittled him over the years; to have the merry widow surrender her soul to him, as well as her body.

  Even as she opened his envelope, he already knew what to expect. No visible reaction whatsoever. No shock. No anger. Not on the outside, anyway. She would protect her pride at all costs. To hell with his, though.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ was all she said, with just the slightest raising of her right eyebrow, the one she always cocked when she was being her usual sarcastic self. ‘I’m surprised, Rico. If that was all you wanted, you only had to ask. You didn’t have to wait for a million-to-one chance to have your heart’s desire.’

  Rico gritted his teeth and willed the angry flush away. ‘You mean you would have said yes if I’d just asked?’

  ‘Asked what?’ Charles demanded to know. ‘What has he asked for, damn it? Or aren’t we allowed to know that either?’

  ‘Don’t get your dander up, Charles,
’ Renée said soothingly. ‘Of course you can know. It’s nothing worth hiding. Rico just wants me to go out with him.’

  Rico could not deny her answer stunned him. He’d been sure she’d drop him right in it. But then the truth surfaced. Of course! She was protecting her pride again. She didn’t want the others to know what she’d be doing for the next month.

  ‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ Charles said with more than a touch of bewilderment in his voice. ‘If you wanted to ask Renée out, then why didn’t you just ask, like she said?’

  ‘Because he didn’t want to risk her saying no,’ Ali explained. ‘No man likes to be rejected.’

  ‘Renée wouldn’t have said no,’ Charles said firmly. ‘Would you, Renée?’

  ‘Absolutely not, Charles,’ Renée returned in that seemingly polite but cleverly mocking tone Rico knew only too well. ‘How could I possibly have resisted Rico’s charm?’

  ‘I have asked her out before,’ Rico pointed out through gritted teeth, his temper only just under control.

  ‘Only to family affairs,’ she countered. ‘Not on an intimate, one-on-one basis.’

  When she said one-on-one, her eyes met his and Rico could have sworn that he glimpsed a glitter of excitement, not mockery, in their depths.

  No, no, he had to be mistaken. She couldn’t possibly want to sleep with him. OK, so he was bargaining on her not finding him physically repulsive, but she’d made it quite clear last Sunday she didn’t like him one little bit. He’d be the last man on earth she’d choose for her lover.

  ‘Dominique is going to be tickled pink,’ Charles said with a delighted smile. ‘You two won’t be able to refuse her dinner invitations in future.’

  ‘We’re just going out a few times, Charles,’ Rico pointed out. ‘See if we can get along. Don’t make plans for our future just yet.’

  ‘Surely we could manage one little dinner party, Rico,’ Renée shocked him by saying. ‘I still feel guilty over refusing Dominique’s last invitation for us to go to dinner. Tell her to give me a call, Charles, and we’ll set a date soon.’

  Rico sat there, smiling his agreement on the outside but fuming on the inside. He didn’t want to have to pretend to be a real partner to Renée in front of his friends. That was not his plan. She was to be kept for the darkness of the night, to be used strictly for his private pleasure. When he took her out, it would be for drinks and dirty dancing in dimly lit clubs, dressed as only a mistress would be dressed. He didn’t want to have to play the gentleman. Not for a single moment.

  Somehow, he would wangle his way out of that dinner invitation.

  ‘James has supper ready,’ Ali announced, and began to rise from his chair.

  Supper on poker nights was nothing heavy, just a tasty selection of sandwiches and pastries and coffee, all set up on the large coffee-table where the four of them could sit on the surrounding seating and serve themselves. Except for the coffee part. James did the honours there, then hovered to one side with the coffee-pot, ready for top-ups.

  Rarely did supper last longer than half an hour, the drinking and eating usually interspersed by trips to the powder room. Renée always used the last ten minutes or so to have a couple of cigarettes on the balcony that came off the dining area, a hangover from her modelling days, when she’d used smoking to keep her weight down, one of her few revelations about her past.

  That night, she bolted her first cup of coffee down, Rico noticed. Didn’t touch any food then carried a second cup of coffee out onto the balcony. He would have followed her out there if Charles hadn’t kept blathering on about how he still couldn’t believe that hand and that bet.

  ‘Hell, Rico, you could have asked for anything. Anything at all. But all you wanted was a date. I didn’t realise you were such a romantic.’

  ‘All men are romantics,’ Ali said. ‘If they meet the right woman. Unfortunately, that’s where the problem often lies. Meeting the right woman.’ He placed his empty coffee-cup down, then waved the butler back when he stepped forward to refill. Ali could drink coffee with the same gusto Rico downed his Chianti. ‘No more tonight, James. I’ll be back shortly, my friends, then we can get back to the card table.’

  When Ali left the room and Charles pulled out his cellphone to ring Dominique, claiming he couldn’t wait to get home to tell her about Rico’s hand and his amazing wager, Rico used the opportunity to join Renée out onto the balcony.

  As he passed the outdoor table on which she’d put her bag and her coffee-cup, Rico noticed that the ashtray sitting in the middle was filled with recently burnt paper. The realisation that she’d hurried out here to physically destroy her own heart’s desire piqued Rico’s curiosity further, but he determined not to mention it. He also determined not to weaken and let her off the hook, no matter how much guilt was currently swirling in his stomach.

  The sight of her leaning against the railing in an attitude close to defeat sparked even more guilt within him. How can you possibly go through with this, Rico Mandretti? he asked himself.

  The answer was a very complex one. But, in a nutshell, he didn’t have a choice. Having her at least once was a compulsion, a necessity. Expecting her to accommodate him for a month, however, was definitely beyond the pale.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked as he leant against the railing next to her.

  She didn’t look his way, or answer him, just kept on dragging on her cigarette.

  ‘One night,’ he grated out at last, regretting the words even as he spoke them. ‘I’ll reduce the bet to one night.’

  Slowly she exhaled, then turned to face him, her expression haughty and scornful. ‘Pity, Rico? From you? I’m surprised. But sorry, darling, I must refuse your gallant gesture. A bet is a bet. You demanded I be your mistress for a month, so your mistress for a month I will be. Not a day less. Not a day more.’

  Her contrariness jolted him. Was this her pride still talking, or did she have some other secret agenda? Whatever the case, experience had taught Rico never to try to second-guess Renée, so he just shrugged.

  ‘Fine by me.’ Far be it from him to lessen her sentence. She’d made her bed now. Let her lie in it.

  ‘You might think that tonight,’ she replied. ‘You might think differently in a month’s time.’

  ‘Is that a threat, Renée? Or a challenge?’

  ‘It’s a promise. I don’t just dislike you now, Rico. I despise you.’

  ‘If you despise me so much, then why didn’t you tell Charles what I really asked of you? Why save me with a lie?’

  ‘Oh, good God!’ she exclaimed impatiently. ‘I didn’t lie for you. I just didn’t want Charles to find out what an out-and-out bastard his best friend is.’

  ‘Why would you bother?’

  ‘Because the foolish man likes you, that’s why. And I like him. Why should he be upset by any of this? You’ve caused him enough hurt this year, don’t you think? This battle is strictly between us, and that’s how it’s going to stay.’

  ‘Battle? That’s an odd word to use.’

  ‘I think it’s very appropriate. We are at war, you and I. We have been for a long time.’

  ‘Maybe it’s time we stopped, then. Maybe it’s time we made love, not war.’

  ‘Make love?’ she scoffed. ‘You must be insane. You don’t want to make love to me any more than I want to make love with you. You want revenge, that’s all, for what I said to you last Sunday.’

  Rico saw with a sudden and quite blinding insight that revenge wasn’t his first and deepest wish where she was concerned. He would have much preferred her to like him, and respect him, and, yes, desire him for the man he was.

  But he knew that wasn’t about to happen.

  So he wasn’t going to belittle himself further by putting his stupid heart on his sleeve.

  ‘Believe what you will, Renée. I will be booking us a room here in the hotel as soon as the evening’s poker is over. I will expect you to accompany me. And to stay the whole night. Given you don’t
want dear Charles to know what an out-and-out bastard I am, then I suggest you meet me in the lobby, after he’s left the hotel.’

  She didn’t even turn a hair. Not visibly, anyway. Rico began to wonder if she was a living, breathing woman, or some evil robot designed by the devil and sent to earth to torment and torture fools like him.

  ‘Fine by me,’ she said, echoing his dismissive words earlier. ‘Just one question before we go back inside. There are mistresses, and mistresses, Rico. What, exactly, will you be requiring? The I’ll-do-anything-you-want-when-you-want-it sex-kitten type of mistress, or the seriously kinky, black-leather-wearing, whip-wielding variety?’

  Rico was truly taken aback. Then slightly intrigued. ‘What if I chose the latter?’

  Her smile was pure ice. ‘I’d be most gratified. I’ve always thought a good beating or two was what you needed most in the world.’

  Rico couldn’t help it. He laughed. This was the Renée who aroused him most. The sarcastic spitting cat. ‘Then perhaps it’s just as well that that scenario doesn’t appeal to me,’ he replied, still smiling. ‘I would like to survive this month with my skin intact.’

  ‘Ah, yes, but what about your soul?’ she countered snakily. ‘Do you really believe you can go through with this and live with yourself afterwards?’

  For a moment, his conscience was pricked. Rico understood full well that what he was doing was wrong. But he was way beyond right and wrong where this woman was concerned.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ he said, feigning a contrite face and enjoying her momentary look of surprise. ‘I have no doubt I will feel very badly afterwards. But I can always run along to Confession if needs be. Come along, my dear Mrs Selinsky,’ he went on, abruptly whipping the cigarette out of her hand. ‘It’s time to return to the card table.’ He stalked over and stabbed the cigarette to death in the still smouldering ashtray before lifting glittering eyes to hers once more.