Powerful Persuasion. Margaret Mayo

       CHAPTER ONE

      CELENA’S heart missed a beat as she walked into the room. Quite what she had expected Luciano Segurini to look like she was not sure: certainly not quite so tall, or so imposing, or so magnificently male!

      She had anticipated a powerful figure of a man, authority sitting easily on his shoulders, a man with massive self-confidence—he wouldn’t have got where he was today without it—but she had not envisaged someone whose very presence filled the room with raw sexuality; it was almost tangible.

      He had shiny, jet-black hair, side-parted and swept back, a square chin and hollow cheeks which made him look somewhat gaunt, a long, straight nose, slightly flared at the nostrils, and a full lower lip. He was not conventionally handsome and yet the combination of all these features made him lethally attractive.

      ‘Miss Coulsden.’ His dark, velvet-brown eyes looked unnervingly into hers and he took her hand in a grip that threatened to crush every bone. It lasted, Celena felt, for much longer than was necessary, and afterwards it was difficult to restrain herself from rubbing life back into her tingling fingers.

      ‘Please, sit down.’

      With a name like Segurini she had expected a foreign accent; instead he spoke perfect English, in a deep, gravelly voice that seduced her nerve-endings and sent dangerous waves of awareness through her body. She could not understand what was happening. She had come here for a job interview and instead was feeling disturbingly erotic sensations.

      After her engagement to Andrew Holmes had ended so disastrously she had been careful never to let any man close again. She instinctively distrusted the whole male sex and had built a defensive wall around herself, cutting out of her life anyone who came close to dislodging even one brick. People said she had changed after Andrew and maybe she had, but it was her way of dealing with it

      And when her parents had died in a skiing accident a couple of years later Celena had been glad she had not married him. Her younger sister, Davina, was at boarding-school and Celena determined to keep her there. Andrew would most definitely not have approved; he had had very firm views about paying for an education. He’d considered it a complete waste of money when there were perfectly adequate state schools. The fact that Celena herself had been to boarding-school had always been a bone of contention between them.

      It was because of Andrew that she could not understand her chemical reaction to this man now, this stimulus from him to her. It made a mockery of her every effort to school herself against reacting to any man and she felt quite sure that he too would be horrified if he knew what thoughts were surging through her mind.

      She sat thankfully. ‘Thank you.’

      He waited until she was comfortable before seating himself behind a huge curved desk that was home to a battery of technological equipment. Any lesser man would have been dwarfed by it, but not Luciano Segurini. And when he tapped on a keyboard she noticed that he had very long fingers, square at the ends with well-manicured nails. Strong hands, strong fingers—no wonder they had almost pulverised her!

      ‘Now, let me see.’ It was almost as though he was talking to himself. ‘Celena Coulsden—single, age twenty-eight, five A levels, a distinction in design and graphics at Brampton College, began work at—’

      ‘Just a minute.’ Celena stopped him with an agitated movement of her hand and a frown of incredulity. ‘How did you gain all this information?’ It was unbelievable. Why had he considered it necessary to check on her like this? What else did he know? Her dress-size? Her shoe-size? Her favourite perfume? She felt distinctly uneasy. There was definitely something going on here that she did not understand.

      First of all she’d been offered a job right out of the blue when she hadn’t even been looking for one, and now this amazing man was disclosing that he already had a very complete and very accurate file on her. Her heart raced again, through for a very different reason this time: she felt a deep sense of foreboding.

      He smiled, showing very even, very white, very large teeth. If it was meant to reassure her it didn’t. It was a wolfish smile; he was the predator and she was his prey!

      Go careful, Lena, she told herself. This man is highly dangerous.

      ‘There is nothing I cannot find out, Miss Coulsden—if I want to. There is nothing I cannot do.’

      It was his unutterable confidence