Gianni's Pride Read Free

dreaded knowing looks and sympathy. Even when, on the day before the wedding, her sister had confided that she was pregnant Miranda had somehow said the right thing, though she still had no idea what. She had actually begun to wonder if she had not gone into the wrong profession—sheshould have been an actor, not a teacher. But there were limits and Miranda knew she’d had to make a break—working in a school where Oliver, now her sister’s husband, was the headmaster was a non-starter.
    While she and Tam had never shared the sort of empathic link that Miranda had read some identical twins enjoyed, there was no way even her twin, who was never that interested in things that did not directly involve her, would not catch on soon.
    She directed her masochistically inclined thoughts from the imagined idyll Tam was enjoying on a Greek island with her bridegroom and concentrated on the man lying beside her. Now he was
definitely
raw—actually raw hardly covered the smouldering, in-your-face sexuality he exuded from every pore …
The man she was looking at?
    There’s a man in my bed!
    Her horrified gasp was drowned out by the alarm clock that began to shrill. It stopped when she lobbed it at the strange man’s head and in a seamless motion, her sleepy contentment a dim memory, produced a stumbling exit from the bed modestly wrapped, in the best tradition of old movies, in most of the bedding.
    Eyes like saucers, clutching the quilt to her heaving bosom, she stared at the man lying there, trying not to think about the draught that was cooling her exposed bottom. The adrenalin in her veins was telling her to run, but to get to the door she had to get past the bed. Thoughts racing, hyperventilating dramatically, she glanced longingly towards the open door that connected with the next room, but her feet remained nailed to the spot as she was submerged by a massive wave of visceral, paralysing fear.
    Attack, they always said, was the best form of defence … Act like a victim, she had read somewhere, and you became a victim.
    ‘Don’t move an inch!’
Or what, Miranda?
Her chin lifted, the defiance in her attitude an attempt to mask her fear as she played for time, waiting for her legs to move. ‘Or y-you’ll r-regret it!’
    He had to have heard the quiver of fear in her voice … but on the plus side he hadn’t made any attempt to move. If he had … Miranda’s glance slid down the long, lean length of the stranger. Even in his present recumbent position his physical superiority was pretty apparent. His lean body was heavily muscled, not an ounce of spare flesh masking the power and vitality of a man at the peak of physical fitness.
    He looked like the sort of fitness fanatic who could run marathons back to back without breaking sweat. He could swat her like a fly if he wanted to … Swatting was actually the least of her worries at that moment … Refusing to speculate on his intentions, she tried to breathe past the frantic pounding of her heart as, not taking her eyes off him, she surreptitiously reached out behind her for her phone. She could remember leaving it on the bureau the night before … Hadn’t she?

CHAPTER TWO
    O NE hand pressed to his eye where the alarm clock she had lobbed as she exited the bed—not before he had got a glimpse of a lovely pert little bottom—had landed a glancing blow, Gianni looked at her through his uncovered eye and held up his free hand in a gesture of surrender. It did not take a genius to figure out what she was thinking.
    ‘Relax. This is a simple misunderstanding … a mistake …’ he soothed, making eye contact and experiencing a flicker of shock as he registered the quite extraordinary colour of her wide long-lashed eyes.
    Extraordinary enough to make him briefly lose focus—an event in itself for the ultra-controlled Gianni—the deep, dark green made him think of cool, quiet forests, and the tiny flecks of amber recalled dappled sunlight shining through the foliage as