A Guilty Affair
FORBIDDEN! He belonged to another woman! Even as the champagne flowed at her engagement party, Bess realized that she was promising herself to the wrong man… Her fiance was kind, loving. Bess had even looked forward to becoming the perfect wife. Until Luke Vaccari walked into the party, mesmerizing her with his raw, shameless sex appeal.The intensity of her attraction was almost frightening … . It was also forbidden. Luke was about to marry her sister, and her feelings for Luke would have to remain a guilty secret. If only Luke hadn't confessed to mutual illicit desires!When passion knows no reason … FORBIDDEN!
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The temptation to wake him was enormousAbout the AuthorTitle PageCHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCopyright
The temptation to wake him was enormous
Bess resisted. He was so beautiful. But, more than that, Luke’s passion had been tempered with a gentle consideration and he had said thickly, making her feel special, “Luca. It is my birth name. To you I am Luca.”
And now she asked herself if he had also invited Helen to use that name. The question slammed into her, a physical blow. The awful, inescapable, uncontainable shock of guilt.
She had spent the night with her sister’s future husband. It was the ultimate betrayal, and she didn’t know how she was going to live with herself.
Unless he had fallen in love with her as catastrophically as she had with him....
DIANA HAMILTON is a true romantic at heart and fell in love with her husband at first sight. They still live in the fairy-tale Tudor house where they raised their three children. Now the idyll is shared with eight rescued cats and a puppy. But despite an often chaotic life-style, ever since she learned to read and write Diana has had her nose in a book—either reading or writing one—and plans to go on doing just that for a very long time to come.
CHAPTER ONE
THE way the dark stranger kept staring at her was completely and strangely disconcerting. There were times when Bess felt so uncomfortable that she didn’t know where to put herself.
That too constant tarnished-silver gaze, sometimes oddly speculative, sometimes quite embarrassingly assessing, was making her a mixed-up mess of edginess, arousing a weird kind of insecurity that made her feel dismayingly like a turtle who’d lost its shell.
A shell-less turtle with a tummy bug, she amended as her stomach churned sickeningly around.
And she shouldn’t be feeling like this—so hatefully and inescapably aware of a stranger—especially not at her own engagement party. She told herself that very firmly, adding that she wouldn’t allow him to have any effect on her at all, and she was working up a comfortable mood of defiant control as Tom whispered in her ear, ‘It’s time we circulated, pet. There are dozens of late arrivals we haven’t greeted yet.’
He was already releasing his hold on her and she went into a mild state of panic, clutching his shoulders, the ring he had put on her finger earlier glittering in the brilliantly lit, crowded room. ‘Must we?’
She knew she sounded childish and the censor in her brain told her that her deep reluctance to leave the dance-floor, to mingle and inevitably be formally introduced to the dark stranger who had appeared as her sister’s guest was totally irrational.
But knowing a fear was irrational didn’t make it go away.
‘Of course we must.’ Tom’s smile was wry as he undamped her hands from his shoulders. ‘We’re public property tonight. No need to be shy.’ But he didn’t sound impatient; he never did with her.
She had known him for most of her twenty-four years. and for all of that time he’d been protective of her, gently teasing her for what he liked to classify as shyness. So much so that she sometimes thought that even if she’d been the most extrovert soul on two legs he would have brainwashed her into believing she was the original shrinking violet!
But it wasn’t as simple as that, as uncomplicated as being shy and retiring by nature. She had learned, early in life, never to thrust herself forward or try to muscle in on the limelight that had shone down on her sister all of her life. It simply didn’t pay.
Two years older, the same age as Tom, Helen had always been the beautiful one, the witty one, the one who could charm and dazzle herself out of any scrape and into a position totally advantageous to herself, while Bess was the ordinary one, unnoticed when Helen was around, getting on with her life in her own quiet way, making no waves.
She exhaled on an unconscious sigh and Tom slid an arm around her tiny waist.
‘Did I tell you how pretty you look tonight?’
Bess smiled at that. He sounded more dutiful than genuinely impressed. But then she decided that she did deserve the compliment, after all, because she had carefully dressed to please him.
When she’d chosen the understated beige silk dress to wear for their engagement party she’d known it would be exactly to his taste. He liked to see her looking neat and tidy, her curling copper hair tastefully subdued in a head-hugging pleat, only a token amount of make-up and nothing startling in the way of jewellery—just the simple gold chain he had given her at Christmas around her fragile neck.
He hated and distrusted flamboyance in any form. Which was probably why he had never approved of Helen, or her lifestyle.
And that, in turn, was why Helen’s escort had been watching her almost from the moment she’d seen them arrive. He wouldn’t be able to believe she was in any way related to the dazzlingly glamorous blonde creature at his side, she decided sickly.
