Page 39 of In Bed with Her Billionaire Bodyguard

After seeing to himself, and before he could become even more of a neanderthal and take her again in the shower, he turned off the water, dried them off and wrapped her in a large fluffy white robe.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked as he led her out of the ground floor and towards the fourth.

It was a good question, and even though he replied, ‘Upstairs,’ his mind threw up many different answers to the same question. But what he wanted and what he could have were two different things. They always had been. Hope’s life—so prominently in the public eye—was impossible for him. Within an hour of being seen together there would be deep dives into his background, his family. There would be photos and research, and while Anna Bertoli on paper had no connection to Luca Calvino, he knew it wouldn’t take too much digging, too much work to uncover the truth. The only reason it hadn’t been done before now was because of his anonymity. So the only answer his mind offered to her question wasNowhere, even as everything in him roared in denial. This, whatever it was, had an expiration date. But until then he would satiate every single craving or desire Hope Harcourt could conceive of.

He went to a cupboard and produced a very nice bottle of red while Hope retrieved the glasses. Hitting the buttons on the solar-powered heaters, having stored their energy through the day, he flooded the balcony with gentle warmth and a subtle glow. He flicked a button on the hot tub and Hope started to laugh.

‘You’re trying to turn me into a prune, Calvino,’ she said, the lightness of her tone soothing his concern that he’d been too rough with her.

He turned, apparently, the question clear in his gaze.

She put down the glasses on the small table beside the bubbling tub. ‘That was incredible,’ she said, walking into his space, slipping her hands between the robe he wore and pressing herself against him like a cat. She reached up to cup his jaw. ‘You gave me what I wanted before I knew to ask for it,’ she said, easing any concern he’d had about what they had just shared. He kissed her, letting his relief, his thanks and his promises for more to come, bleed into the kiss.

‘A prune, Calvino,’ she teased, pulling back from the kiss, giving them both the chance to breathe.

She shrugged out of her robe, gloriously and utterly unselfconsciously naked as she stepped into the frothing bubbles of the hot tub. Lithe and graceful, and he’d have known that even if he hadn’t spent the entire day watching her traversing the slopes and runs as if she’d been born to them.

Shucking his own robe, he joined her in the bubbling heat, steam rising around them and disappearing into the night sky.

Although the kiss had rekindled the arousal between them, the burning desire that had driven him almost the entire day had been sated enough for him to simply enjoy the feel of her next to him, to luxuriate in the easy touches that passed between them as they settled into their wine, talking of particular slopes or moments of the day they’d enjoyed. And although the conversation was easy, he knew that the revelation about his mother had left an imprint. It made him think of the anniversary of her parents’ death. Of how she’d spent that night alone and he wished he’d had enough sense to fight her harder on that.

‘What were your parents like?’ he asked, wondering if she’d shut him down, hoping that she wouldn’t.

She looked out at the view of the mountains and was quiet for so long he thought she wouldn’t answer.

‘Busy,’ she said, surprising him with the choice of word. ‘Harcourts is from Dad’s side of the family, and he was groomed to take over from grandfather. Not something I think my uncle enjoyed very much. Perhaps that’s why Simon is so determined to become CEO.’ She smiled pensively. ‘But they were busy. Mum was an interior designer.’

‘Where you get your eye from?’ Luca enquired.

She smiled up at him, as if thrilled he’d noticed.

‘I’d like to think so. She filled the house with colour, prints and paintings, everything that was bright and cool. She would take kitsch and make it classy, and would get lost in a fabric shop the same way others might get lost in a museum,’ Hope said, smiling. ‘We actually did that once. Got lost in a fabric shop. I would swear, even now, it took us nearly the entire day to find our way out.’

She grinned up at Luca, the memory pulled to the surface by his question, of that special, magical moment in time when it had just been the two of them. ‘Nate was off with Dad, probably at Harcourts, but Mum and I spent the day pulling out reams of bright fabric and soft textures, sequins and silks.’

Her mother had promised to make her a dress for her twelfth birthday from the material they bought that day, but...then the accident had happened. Hope didn’t remember seeing the material again. After the funeral their grandfather had closed down the house, put most of their parents’ things in storage, sold the family townhouse in London and put the money into the trust fund that both Hope and Nate had access to when they turned twenty-one.

‘And your father?’

The question pulled Hope to another memory. ‘Tall,’ she said instantly, remembering clinging to his leg and looking up at him as he reached down to pick her up. ‘He had a bit of a temper, would shout, and of the two, we were definitely more scared of him than our mother. But she would soften him, soothe him. Coffee makes me think of him,’ she said softly. ‘And caramel makes me think of her.’

‘How did they meet?’ Luca asked, pulling her closer to him to rub soothing circles at her neck.

‘She had been working as an assistant to a window dresser, but he was temperamental and had an artistic disagreement with Grandfather, who promptly ordered Mum to ‘fix it’. That’s the story they always told, anyway.’

‘So Harcourts was the centre of everything?’

It was the heart.

‘Mum worked there before having us and then, after we were old enough, took on some private interior design clients. But Nate and I grew up in the halls of Harcourts. Playing hide and seek before it opened and after it closed, waiting for Mum and Dad to finish up work. All the staff knew us. It used to be a family joke that the store was the biggest nursery in the world.

‘Dad would sneak Nate into the board meetings sometimes,’ she remembered.

‘And you?’

‘I would be outside with the secretaries,’ Hope replied, losing a little of that smile. ‘They were lovely, but busy. I sometimes wondered if less work was done in the meetings than outside of it.’

Luca nodded. ‘Probably quite true.’

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