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The Virgin’s Sicilian Protector
by Chantelle Shaw
CHAPTER ONE
THE PICTURE SPLASHED across the front page of the newspaper was damning. Arianna focused her b
leary gaze on the photograph of herself, almost spilling out of a tiny bikini top and swigging champagne from a bottle, and shuddered.
Once she would not have given a damn that she’d made the headlines yet again. But that had been before she’d had an epiphany on her twenty-fourth birthday, just over a year ago, and realised that nothing she did would make her father take any notice of her. The only thing he was interested in, besides making money, was controlling her, as he had controlled her mother.
Arianna regularly spent the summer at the family villa in Positano and, although she’d never bothered to learn the language properly, she’d picked up enough Italian to be able to translate the paragraph beneath the newspaper picture.
The return of the Brat Pack!
Once again the offspring of many of Europe’s wealthiest families have flocked to the Amalfi coast to spend the summer partying.
Heiress Arianna Fitzgerald was clearly enjoying herself with close friend, reality television star Jonny Monaghan, aboard his luxury yacht.
Arianna is the daughter of billionaire fashion designer Randolph Fitzgerald and has been famously described in the British press as ‘the most privileged and pointless person on the planet’.
That particular comment had been reprinted so often that Arianna was bored of reading it. She dropped the newspaper down on the patio tiles, feeling too disorientated to wonder who had left it where she was bound to see it, and rolled over onto her back, trying to remember why she had spent the night on a sun lounger by the pool. Her head was thumping and her mouth was parched. She had no recollection of how she had come to be on Jonny’s boat, or how she had arrived at Villa Cadenza. Nor could she remember tying a sarong around her to cover up the miniscule gold bikini that had been a regrettable impulse buy when she had been in Australia.
God, she felt awful. But it couldn’t be a hangover because she’d barely drunk any alcohol. She wondered if someone could have spiked the bottle of champagne she’d taken a sip out of. Jonny and his crowd—who had once been her crowd—used cocaine and other so-called recreational substances to alleviate their terminal boredom. But, although Arianna had partied as hard and as frequently as her peers, she’d never taken drugs, because she had seen the devastating effects they’d had on some of her friends.
As she lay there trying to summon the energy to get up off the lounger and go into the house, she heard footsteps on the marble tiles, and the aroma of coffee assailed her senses. Good old Filippo. The butler had been kind to Arianna when she’d been a child—unlike most of the temporary nannies her father had employed to look after her during the school holidays. She had attended an exclusive English boarding school but her refusal to accept any kind of authority had led to her being expelled when she’d been fifteen.
Filippo was one of the few people who had not seemed to disapprove of her when she’d been a surly pre-teen and then a rebellious young adult. She could also testify that the butler’s secret recipe for a hangover cure worked. But what she craved right now was strong black coffee.
The footsteps halted and Arianna frowned. It was true she had never paid any attention to Filippo’s footwear before, but she was sure he did not usually wear heavy-duty black leather boots. Or faded denim jeans. She lifted her gaze and discovered that the waistband of the jeans sat low on a pair of lean hips, above which was a black T-shirt stretched tight over a flat stomach and a broad, impressively muscular chest.
The man, who was definitely too tall to be Filippo, was carrying a tray. Had her father employed a new butler? She craned her neck so that her gaze reached the man’s face and her heart crashed against her ribs.
‘Who are you? And where’s Filippo?’ Her voice sounded husky because her throat was dry, not because the stranger’s stunning good looks had taken her breath away, she assured herself.
‘My name is Santino Vasari. I’m your new bodyguard.’ The deep rumble of his voice, as sensuous as dark molasses, had a peculiar effect on Arianna’s insides. ‘Your father said he would let you know that he had hired me.’
‘Oh, yes.’ The fog around her brain was clearing and she remembered the text she’d received from her father yesterday when she had arrived in London on a long-haul flight from Sydney. Stupidly, her heart had leapt when she’d seen Randolph’s name flash up on her phone’s screen. She’d wondered if he’d missed her while she had been in Australia for six months. But the message had simply said that a bodyguard would meet her at Villa Cadenza, and that Santino Vasari was an ex-soldier who had turned to private protection work after he’d left the army.
His incredible physique certainly suggested that he had been in the armed forces. Arianna licked her dry lips with the tip of her tongue and flushed when his gaze focused on her mouth. She felt at a disadvantage sprawled on the sun bed while his eyes roamed over the silk sarong that had become bunched up around her thighs before he continued a leisurely inspection of her bare legs. She was used to attracting attention. Indeed, she had spent much of the past decade seeking notoriety and scandal. But something about Santino Vasari and her unexpected reaction to him made her sit up and swing her legs over the side of the lounger.
She winced as the movement exacerbated her pounding headache and the smirk on Santino’s lips sent a sizzle of temper through her.
‘I did not ask for a bodyguard. You have had a wasted journey here,’ she said abruptly. Her cut-glass English accent was as sharp as a razor. ‘I don’t want you, Mr Vasari.’
‘Is that a fact?’ There was disbelief in his lazy drawl. An arrogant, almost cocky confidence that every woman who laid eyes on him wanted him. His self-assurance was probably not misplaced, Arianna acknowledged. ‘Handsome’ did not come close to describing the ruggedly masculine beauty of his chiselled features: the slashing lines of his cheekbones that emphasised the harsh angles of his face and the square, worryingly determined jaw, covered with dark stubble the same colour as the almost black hair that curled rebelliously over his collar.
Santino Vasari did not appear to be fazed by her frosty attitude. He strolled towards her, moving with a loose-limbed grace that reminded Arianna of a prowling lion—silent, purposeful and decidedly dangerous. His manner was relaxed but his eyes—startlingly green eyes that gleamed as brightly as peridots—were watchful and unsettlingly perceptive.
Her heart gave another hard kick in her chest when he dropped his gaze to the swell of her breasts. Heat surged through her. She felt her nipples pucker but managed to resist the urge to glance down to see if they were visible through her bikini top. No other man had ever had such a potent effect on her. Not one. She’d come to the conclusion some time ago that she had a low sex drive—or maybe she was frigid, as an ex-boyfriend had told her when she had refused to have sex with him.
Arianna lifted her chin and forced herself to meet Santino’s mocking look with cool indifference. But when he placed the tray on a low table, before he pulled a chair up close to her sun bed and sat down, her heartbeat accelerated. Her senses seemed more acute and she breathed in the spicy sandalwood scent of his aftershave carried on the warm, early morning air.
‘You see, Arianna...’ he murmured, and she quickly tore her gaze from his mouth. ‘May I call you Arianna? “Miss Fitzgerald” is frankly a bit of a mouthful when we are going to be spending a lot of time together.’
‘The hell we are!’
He ignored her angry outburst. ‘Whether you like it or not your father has hired me to be your protection officer, which means that I will accompany you every time you leave the house.’
She drummed her long, perfectly manicured nails on the arm of the sun lounger. ‘Why has Randolph developed a sudden urge to protect me when he has never shown any concern for me before? And why does he think I need protecting while I’m here? Positano has a low crime rate, and I’m well known in the area. I’ve been coming here every summer since I was a child.’
‘You certainly announced
your arrival in Amalfi,’ Santino said in a dry tone. He picked up the newspaper. ‘You were still asleep when I brought you a copy of today’s paper. The picture of you fooling around with your sailor boyfriend made the front page of many of the English and European tabloids, as well as the local press here on the Amalfi Coast. Anyone who wants to find you won’t have to look very hard.’
Arianna shrugged to hide her discomfiture that she’d been unaware of his presence while she’d slept. It made her feel vulnerable, somehow, knowing that he was the only man who had ever seen her asleep. ‘I don’t suppose anyone will be looking for me. Most of my friends are aware that I spend the summer in Positano.’
She wondered why Santino had sounded terse, but as she stared at the newspaper she suddenly understood. ‘I’m not stupid, Mr Vasari. I am aware of the reason why my father hired you.’
She thought that he tensed, although she couldn’t be sure. His eyes narrowed on her face but his tone bordered on uninterested as he murmured, ‘And what reason is that?’
‘Randolph employed you to make sure that I keep out of trouble and out of the papers, didn’t he?’
‘You have a well-documented history of getting into trouble.’ Santino flicked his gaze back to the newspaper photo, and the look of contempt that crossed his hard features filled Arianna with an emotion that she was startled to realise was shame.
She had never cared what other people thought of her, or at least that was what she had tried to convince herself. The scathing words of the headmistress who had expelled her from her school—that she would amount to nothing in life unless she changed her attitude—still stung ten years later. But, Arianna assured herself, she absolutely did not care what a man who made a living from looking menacing, and who was probably all brawn and no brains, thought of her.
‘Drinking yourself to oblivion and flaunting your body like a hooker seems like pretty stupid behaviour in my opinion,’ Santino Vasari said, and something in his tone made her feel as small and insignificant as she’d felt all those years ago in the headmistress’s office.