Sicilian Nights Omnibus Read Online Free Page A

the plane, pulling off her cap as she did so to let her hair cascade down her back.
    She saw him when she had reached the bottom of the gangway, though. Because he was standing there waiting for her, blocking her exit from it.
    For a moment they looked at one another in silence. She was tall, but even standing on the steps she was still not quite at eye level with him and had to tilt her head back slightly to look up at him properly.
    His question—‘What is the meaning of this? Where is the pilot?’—was so icily cold that for once Leonora struggled to manage her normal flip tone.
    ‘You’re looking at her,’ she told him.
    He knew who she was immediately. After all he had looked at her many job applications often enough, and the photographs accompanying them. She looked far more sensually attractive in the flesh, with her hair worn loose. To his own disbelief, given the situation and his own normally unbreakable control over every aspect of himself and most especially his sexuality, he could feel his body responding to her proximity and that sensuality. Had he somehow known that she would affect him like this? Was that why he was so resolutely opposed to employing her? Of course not. He did not employ female pilots on principle—equal opportunities rules or not. Besides, he was Sicilian—and generally speaking everyone knew that Sicilian men had their own code of contact.
    His eyes were so dark it was impossible to see their colour, and they were unreadable. But the slight flaring of his nostrils had already given away his rage. Leonora tried to clamp down on her sudden feeling that just maybe she had flown higher than she had planned. Her lungs certainly felt that the air was short of oxygen—or was that just her own apprehension?
    ‘If that’s true then you are in one hell of a lot of trouble—and so is Leo Thaxton.’
    Alessandro Leopardi’s harsh words confirmed that he wasn’t about to treat her behaviour lightly.
    ‘You can’t blame Leo.’ She immediately defended her brother. ‘I made him do it. I wanted to prove to you that I can fly just as well as any man, and that I deserve a job.’
    ‘What you and your brother both deserve is a prison sentence,’ he told her mercilessly. ‘And what you certainly will be doing is looking for a job together.’
    Leonora’s eyes rounded. This wasn’t going the way she had planned at all.
    ‘You can’t sack Leo. It wasn’t his fault.’
    ‘Then whose fault was it?’
    ‘Yours—for not giving me a chance to try out for a job,’ she told him promptly.
    Alessandro had never met anyone so infuriating or so reckless in ignoring the realities of the situation. By rights she ought to be treating him with kid gloves, not challenging him and arguing with him. He moved irritably from one foot to the other, reminded of the presence of the invitation in his pocket as its sharpness dug into his flesh.
    The invitation. He looked at Leonora, and a plan began to form inside his head. She was attractive, if you liked her type—which he didn’t. He liked groomed women, not girls with a mass of hair, too much attitude and too little sensuality.
    ‘I most certainly can sack him, and I fully intend to do so,’ he assured Leonora grimly.
    He meant it, Leonora recognised. She could see that, and for the first time she realised that this wasn’t a game she was playing. The consequences of what she had done were going to be very damaging—not just for her, but for Leo as well. Even worse was the mortifying recognition that, far from showing him that she could be the best, all she had done was prove that she was a failure.
    Humiliation burned bright flags of red into her high sculpted cheekbones, highlighting the purity of her bone structure. She couldn’t let him sack Leo. Apart from the fact that her brother loved his job, she could just imagine the comments that he and Piers—especially Piers—would make for the rest of her life, lording it over her as they so liked