Sicilian's Shock Proposal

  He took her virginity, she’ll take her revenge!

  Standing outside Luka Cavalieri’s gleaming office, Sophie Durante’s heart is pounding. Eight years ago, being caught in the Sicilian tycoon’s bed destroyed her pride and her reputation. He owes her, and now she’s come to collect. To placate her ailing father, Luka must become her fake fiancé!

  Intrigued, Luka agrees to Sophie’s outrageous proposal—one glimpse of the feisty spirit simmering behind her cool exterior and he believes this engagement charade could be pleasurable. But a wedding night is out of the question…until he can entice Sophie to admit just how much she wants one!

  “I need to think about what I’m prepared to agree to, but before we go any further there is something that you need to know.” They were face-to-face as Luka said it. “I will never marry you.”

  “You’ll do whatever it takes…” The spitfire he had known was returning, and Sophie jabbed a finger into his chest to make her point. “Whatever. It. Takes…”

  “No,” he calmly interrupted. Despite the cool facade she had attempted, he knew that she was as Sicilian as the volcanic soil there, and as he watched her struggle to hold in her temper, he didn’t suppress his slight triumphant smile. She was just as volatile and passionate as he remembered. Those traits in Sophie were everything he both loved and loathed.

  “After what you did, after what you said about me in court…”

  “Lose the drama, Sophie.” His voice was completely calm. “I accept that I have a moral debt to you, given all that happened, but, even with several years’ interest added, I do not owe you that much. I will agree to be your fake fiancé, but never your fake husband. Know that now, or get out.”

  He hoped for the latter. Get out of my life, my head, my heart.

  Just get out!

  Instead, Sophie must have accepted his terms, for she sat back down.

  It was time to talk business.

  Playboys of Sicily

  Taming Italy’s most notorious men!

  Tycoon Luka might agree to be ex-flame Sophie’s fake fiancé…but at what cost?

  Sicilian’s Shock Proposal

  Available July 2015

  Bella hasn’t seen millionaire Matteo since that night. He’s as irresistible as ever, but will he still want her after he discovers her secret?

  His Sicilian Cinderella

  Available August 2015

  You won’t want to miss this

  sizzlingly dramatic new duet from USA TODAY bestselling author Carol Marinelli—available only from Harlequin Presents®!

  CAROL MARINELLI

  Sicilian’s Shock Proposal

  Carol Marinelli is a Taurus, with Taurus rising, yet still thinks she is a secret Gemini. Originally from England, she now lives in Australia and is a single mother of three. Apart from her children, writing romance and the friendships forged along the way are her passion. She chooses to believe in a happy-ever-after for all and strives for that in her writing.

  Books by Carol Marinelli

  Harlequin Presents

  The Playboy of Puerto Banus

  Playing the Dutiful Wife

  Heart of the Desert

  Innocent Secretary…Accidentally Pregnant

  The Chatsfield

  Princess’s Secret Baby

  Alpha Heroes Meet Their Match

  The Only Woman to Defy Him

  More Precious than a Crown

  Protecting the Desert Princess

  Empire of the Sands

  Banished to the Harem

  Beholden to the Throne

  The Secrets of Xanos

  A Shameful Consequence

  An Indecent Proposition

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT FROM BOUND BY THE BILLIONAIRE'S BABY BY CATHY WILLIAMS

  PROLOGUE

  ‘A WOMAN WHO says she’s your fiancée is in Reception, asking to see you.’

  Luka Cavaliere looked up from his computer and saw the wry smile on his PA’s face.

  ‘I thought I’d heard it all until now,’ said Tara.

  Women would try anything to get an audience with Luka, but to have someone pretending to be his fiancée was a first. Tara knew from bitter experience that the woman in Reception was lying—the only thing that Luka ever fully committed to was work.

  She certainly wasn’t expecting his response.

  ‘Tell Reception that she can come up,’ he said in his rich Italian voice.

  ‘Sorry?’

  Luka didn’t respond to Tara’s question. Instead, he got back to the work he was doing on his computer. Certainly he did not need to repeat himself to his PA, nor explain things to her.

  ‘Luka?’ Still Tara hovered at the door, unable to believe that he knew who this woman was—he hadn’t even asked for her name.

  ‘Do you want a second warning?’ Luka checked. ‘I have already told you that I should not have to give out my instructions twice.’

  ‘No, you want to give me a second warning so that soon you can fire me.’ Tara’s voice was thick with tears. ‘You want me gone...?’

  Of course he did.

  ‘It’s because we made love, isn’t it?’ she simpered.

  He could correct her but he chose not to. Luka didn’t make love—he had sex.

  Often.

  His wealth attracted shallow women, but his dark good looks and skills in the bedroom did not lead to the fleeting encounters that he preferred. Always they wanted more than he was prepared to give. He knew that he should never have got involved with his latest PA, especially when he’d just trained her up to be useful.

  ‘I’m not going to get into a discussion,’ Luka said. ‘Send her up.’

  ‘But you never said that you were engaged. You never even gave a hint that there was anyone else—’

  Bored now, Luka thought. ‘Take as long as you like for lunch,’ he interrupted. Yes, he wanted her gone. ‘Actually, you can take the rest of the day off.’

  Tara let out a hopeless sob and then turned and rather loudly left the office.

  The slam of the door made Luka’s eyes shut for a brief moment.

  It had nothing to do with his PA’s brief outburst, or the noise from the door—it was what would happen in the coming moments that he was bracing himself for.

  There had always been someone else.

  And now she was here.

  He stood up from his desk and moved to the window and looked down below to the London street. It was the middle of summer—not that he usually noticed. His life was spent in air-conditioned comfort and he dressed in the same dark suits whatever the month.

  It was ironic, Luka thought, that he and Sophie, after all these years, should meet in London—the place of their far younger dreams.
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  Until recently he had always assumed that if they did come face to face again it would be in Roma, perhaps on one of his regular visits there. Or even back in Bordo Del Cielo—the coastal town on Sicily’s west coast where they had grown up. He had only returned once, for his father’s funeral last year, but he had been wondering whether he might go back one final time if Sophie’s father decided he wanted to be buried there.

  Luka still hadn’t made up his mind if, when that day came, he would attend the funeral.

  He knew that that day was coming soon.

  And that, he also knew, was the reason that Sophie was here.

  His hand reached into his jacket and he took out not a photo, not a memory; instead, it was a brutal reminder as to why they could never be.

  He stared at the thin gold chain that wrapped around his long fingers and then he looked at the simple gold cross that lay in his palm. Yes, he would go to her father’s funeral, for this necklace belonged in that grave.

  It took only a few moments for Sophie to make her way from the foyer to his suite yet it felt like for ever as he awaited her arrival, but then came the knock at the door that he recognised from yesteryear.

  How much easier might his life have been had he not answered the door that long-ago day? Perhaps, Luka thought, he should not respond to it now.

  He pocketed the necklace and cleared his throat. ‘Come in.’ He managed a deep summons but, as the door opened, he did not turn around.

  ‘Your assistant asked me to pass on the message that she’s just resigned. Apparently I’m the final straw.’

  The sound of her voice, though a touch stilted and measured, still held, for Luka, the same caress.

  For a man who feared little, he was nervous to turn around.

  Luka rather hoped that the years that had passed since they’d last met had not treated her kindly—he fleetingly hoped that a nice little drug habit might have aged her terribly, or that she was pregnant with triplets perhaps...anything that might douse the eternal flame.

  He turned and found out that time had indeed been cruel, to him at least, for perfection greeted his navy eyes.

  Sophie Durante stood before him again.

  She was wearing a simple dress in the palest ivory that showed her curvaceous figure. Her glossy, long black hair was worn neatly up in a French roll when he remembered it spilling over naked shoulders.

  Her neutral-coloured high-heeled shoes enhanced her toned olive legs.

  He forced his gaze up but only made it as far as her mouth. Her full lips were pressed tightly together when he remembered them once laughing and smiling. Then he remembered them somewhere else, which was a rather inconvenient image to have sprung to mind, so he forced himself to meet those dark brown eyes again.

  She was just as beautiful as he remembered and, just as they had at their parting, her eyes showed she abhorred him.

  Luka stared back with mutual loathing.

  ‘Sophie.’ He gave her a curt nod.

  He did not know how he should greet her—shake her hand, or kiss both cheeks perhaps?

  Instead, he gestured for her to take a seat.

  She did so; placing her designer bag by the seat, she neatly crossed her legs at the ankles.

  ‘You look well,’ Luka said, and hoped she might miss that he then cleared his throat—for those first delicate traces of her scent had now reached him and his mind was firing taunting glimpses of memory.

  ‘I am well,’ she responded, and gave him a tight smile. ‘I am very busy, of course.’

  ‘Are you working?’ Luka asked. ‘Did you ever get to work on the ships?’

  ‘No.’ Sophie shook her head. ‘I am an events planner.’

  ‘Really?’ He didn’t even attempt to hide his surprise. ‘You were always running late for everything.’

  He glanced at the ring on her finger—a ruby stone set in Italian gold. It was very old-fashioned and far from what he would have chosen for her. ‘I have terrible taste in rings, it would seem,’ Luka said.

  ‘Don’t!’ she warned abruptly. ‘You will never insult me again.’

  He looked up and into the eyes of the only woman he had ever made love to as she asked him a question.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask why I am here?’

  ‘I presume you’re about to tell me.’ Luka shrugged. He knew damn well why she was here but he’d make her say it just for the pleasure of watching her squirm.

  ‘My father may be released from prison this Friday on compassionate grounds.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I do occasionally glance at the news.’ Luka’s sarcasm didn’t garner a response, though his voice was kinder when he asked her a question. ‘How is he doing?’

  ‘Don’t pretend that you care.’

  ‘And don’t dare assume that I don’t!’ he snapped, and he watched her rapid blink as he continued speaking.

  Seeing her, he had been momentarily sideswiped but now he took back control and made a vow never to lose his control with her again.

  ‘But, then, that’s you all over, Sophie. Your mind was always made up even before the jury had been chosen. I’ll ask you again. How is your father?’

  ‘He is fading, he is a little confused at times.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Isn’t that what prison does to an innocent man?’

  Luka stared back and for now said nothing.

  Paulo was not as innocent as Sophie made out.

  ‘Not that a Cavaliere would know about prison,’ she added.

  ‘I spent six months in prison awaiting trial, two of them in solitary,’ Luka pointed out. ‘Or were you referring to my father being found not guilty?’

  ‘I have no wish to discuss that man.’ She couldn’t, Luka noted, even bring herself to say his father’s name. How much worse would this conversation be if she knew the truth? he wondered. He could almost feel the heat from the necklace in his pocket. He was actually tempted to toss it across the desk to her, to end them once and for all.

  ‘Just what are you doing here, Sophie? I thought we ended our engagement a long time ago.’

  ‘Firstly, I don’t want you to think, for even a moment, that I am here for any romantic reasons.’

  ‘Good, because it would be an extremely wasted journey if that were the case.’

  ‘However,’ she continued, ‘my father believes that you upheld your promise. He thinks we got engaged and that we now live together in Rome.’

  ‘Why would Paulo think that?’

  ‘It was kinder to lie and let him think that you upheld your commitment to me. I never thought he would be let out and now that he might be I need to keep up the pretence. I told him that the terrible things you said in court about me were in an attempt to protect him.’

  ‘They were,’ Luka responded. ‘I said what I did in the hope of protecting him, or rather protecting you. You simply refused to see it from my side.’ He looked at her for a very long moment and found he could not stand even having her in the same room so he shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t work.’

  ‘It has to work,’ Sophie said. ‘You owe me.’

  ‘I do.’ Luka did not concede with those words. He knew she spoke the truth. ‘But apart from the fact that neither of us can abide being in the same room together, I do have a life. I might be seeing someone...’

  ‘I don’t care if this upends your life for a while. This is going to happen, Luka. You might sit a rich man in your posh London office and live a jet-set lifestyle but you are from Bordo Del Cielo, you cannot escape from that. You might go through women like tissues but the fact remains we were promised to each other from childhood and where we come from that means something.’ Luka let out a tense breath as she asked again. �
��Will you help my father die in peace?’

  ‘You want me to move in with you and pretend that we live together?’

  ‘No, I read that you have an apartment in Rome...we will use that.’

  ‘Why not yours?’

  ‘I share with my friend Bella. You might remember her...’

  Luka bit back a sarcastic response. From what he had heard, a lot of men might remember Bella!

  ‘She runs a business from our home.’

  As she spoke, he noted that Sophie ignored his slight sardonic smile, even though she must know what it insinuated.

  ‘It would not be fair to disrupt Bella and it would look odd for us, as a couple, to be sharing a home with her.’

  ‘And would this loving couple be sharing a bed?’ He voiced the obvious question but she did not answer directly.

  ‘It would look strange for us to sleep apart.’

  ‘Would there be sex?’ he asked, wishing a blush would rise on her cheeks, for Sophie to give some indication that this hurt like hell for her also, but she stared back coolly as she delivered her response.

  ‘I would think not,’ she said. ‘Since that evening, given what happened, I have a phobia...’

  Luka’s eyes widened. Was Sophie saying that there had been no one since him? There was a small rush of giddy relief that he quickly doused but she hadn’t finished speaking. ‘But if that is what it will take for you to agree, then, yes, there can be sex.’

  ‘I thought Bella was the whore.’

  ‘We can all be whores,’ Sophie responded with spite, and Luka looked at the beautiful yet hostile stranger whose innocence he had taken, never to return. ‘So, yes, if sex is to be part of the deal—’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Luka interrupted. ‘I don’t need charity sex and, anyway, martyrs don’t turn me on—it’s extremely willing participants that do.’ He watched the slight swallow in her neck and he knew, he just knew she was remembering how good they had been so he cruelly walked her down memory lane and, as he did so, he reinforced a truth. ‘Surely you know how much I like a woman who instigates things.’

  He’d thought she’d blush as he pointed out how she had been the one who had practically begged him to make love to her yet, rather than blush, Sophie surprised him with a shrug and a smile.