A chill ran down the length of his spine as he made his usual rounds through the mansion as he usually did when visiting.
He had no doubt about how much Gio would have talked about him over the last month. As his godson and his protégé, he was Giovanni’s pride and joy. Raphael had turned the small spare automobile parts company that Gio had handed him into Vito Automobiles, a leading manufacturing company.
Giovanni had been his lifeline when he’d been sinking as a seventeen-year-old. He’d been a light in a long, dark tunnel that Raphael’s weak father had plunged them all into.
Not that it stopped Giovanni from also being manipulative as hell. Throughout the evening, he had stood on the periphery of the crowd, watching, with a satisfied smile on his face. Like a puppeteer intensely delighted with the results of his string pulling.
Whatever the old man was up to, it would eventually fall to Raphael to clean it up. Just as he kept Giovanni’s hounding relatives at bay. Just as he ensured that the leftovers from Gio’s time on the board—men who would stab Raphael in the back before he could blink—didn’t leach away the gains he had made.
Just as he took care of the various and sundry branches of Mastrantino families without any expectations in return.
And yet, as he questioned one of the staff members about Pia, Raphael was suddenly aware that this was unlike any other responsibility he shouldered.
For no bickering ex-wife of Gio’s or grasping cousin of his mother had ever caused his blood to pound like this.
No woman had ever called to his baser instincts like this supposedly innocent granddaughter of his godfather.
CHAPTER TWO
COOL WATER SLUICED off her back and limbs as Pia swam lap after lap in the indoor pool on Gio’s estate as if the very devil were after her.
Raphael Mastrantino was very much the devil.
The man’s arrogance!
She worked off her fury in the water.
Of all the men to be attracted to.
She groaned and dunked her head in the water. He’d been so warm and solid around her. She could still feel the languorous weight of his hands on her waist. The length of his hard thigh rubbing against hers…
The only satisfaction left to her was that she’d surprised him even as he had mocked and taunted her.
She and Raphael Mastrantino lived in different orbits of life. He wouldn’t have even looked at her, much less danced with her, if she hadn’t been dressed up to the nines and if she wasn’t Gio’s granddaughter. What she didn’t understand though was why. Why had he pounced on her like that?
Her arms lagged on her strokes as her thoughts whirled. Just as she decided to get out of the pool, she saw Raphael standing at the edge.
The floodlights cast an outline along his broad frame.
His white shirt was unbuttoned to the middle of his chest giving a glimpse of ridges of tight muscle with sparse black hair. Her belly swooped. The raven’s wing of his hair had a distinctly rumpled look.
What would it take to shatter that arrogant cynicism, to bring a man like Raphael to his knees?
She shivered at the direction of her thoughts.
A bottle of Pinot Grigio and two wine flutes hung from his fingers. “I had to bribe one of the staff members for your location.”
“I don’t like you, Mr. Mastrantino.”
“I think you like me a little too much. Which is why you’re hiding.”
The gall of the man! Pia had never met a more annoying man in her life. “Just because my body thinks you’re a prime male specimen and is attracted to you—which, by the way, is based on millions of years of evolution and a chemical reaction that drives a woman to choose the strongest man as her mate—it doesn’t mean my mind agrees.”
His black eyes gleamed. The thin line of his lower lip curved with mocking amusement. “So you’ve dropped the act of trembling mouth and soft gasps then?”
He almost sounded disappointed. Pia sighed. “Distance helped me remember the hormones part of it. It’s when you’re close that I…” She shrugged, trying to go for casual, which her stutter totally ruined. “That I’m unable to handle my reaction.”
Just looking at the darkly sensual face stretched her skin tight over her body. And other parts. Parts that had never clenched and tightened with such wanton awareness.