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“You are lost, signora?” he asked.

In Italian, his voice was just about the sexiest thing she’d ever heard, but his perfect, lusciously accented English sent a shiver rippling down her spine that had nothing to do with the snow dripping from her hair. That was trickling between her breasts and turning to steam.

“I know exactly where I am, signor,” she said, looking into those lusciously dark eyes. To emphasize the point, she eased off the fine leather glove and tapped the piazza on the map with the tip of a crimson nail.

“No,” he repeated, and this time it wasn’t a question as, never taking his eyes from hers, he wrapped long fingers around her hand and moved her finger two inches to the right. “You are here. ”

His hand was warm against her cold skin. On the surface everything was deceptively still, but inside, like a volcano on the point of blowing, she was liquid heat.

She fought the urge to swallow. “I am?”

Breathe, breathe…

Hoping she sounded a lot more in control than she was, she said, “One piazza looks very much like another on a map. Unfortunately, neither of them is where I was going. ”

“And yet here you are.

And yet here she was, falling into eyes as dark as the espresso in his cup.

Vettori’s Damsel

in Distress

Liz Fielding

LIZ FIELDING was born with itchy feet. She made it to Zambia before her twenty-first birthday and, gathering her own special hero and a couple of children on the way, lived in Botswana, Kenya and Bahrain—with pauses for sightseeing pretty much everywhere in between. She now lives in the west of England, close to the Regency grandeur of Bath and the ancient mystery of Stonehenge, and these days leaves her pen to do the traveling.

This book is dedicated to the authors I hang out with online. They are the best support group in the world—always up for a brainstorming session when the plot wobbles, ready to celebrate the good stuff and reach out through cyberspace with comfort when fate lobs lemons.

They know who they are.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘Life is like ice cream on a hot day. Enjoy it before it melts. ’

—from Rosie’s Little Book of Ice Cream

IT WAS LATE and throwing down a sleety rain when Geli emerged from the Metro at Porta Garibaldi into the Milan night. Her plan had been to take a taxi for the last short leg of her journey but it was par for the course, on a day when everything had conspired to keep her from her destination, that there wasn’t one in sight.