Free His Poor Little Rich Girl by Melanie Milburne Page A

the thought of losing that final link with her mother.
    ‘Oh, dear God, where are you?’ she said out loud as she sat back on her heels and pushed the hair out of her face.
    Rachel had her back to the door and it took her a moment to shuffle around on her knees in order to identify the soundthat had whispered over the thick carpet like a fox on velvet paws.
    Her heart swung like a wildly flung anvil in her chest when she saw Alessandro sitting in a wheelchair, his blue-black eyes meeting hers. ‘Is this what you are looking for?’ he asked, her mother’s pendant dangling from his long tanned fingers.

CHAPTER FOUR
    R ACHEL gulped, her eyes going to the chair and then back to his unflinching gaze. ‘I … I …’
    He gave her a dispassionate look. ‘I am sorry I can’t rise in your presence but I am confident that within the next few days I will be able to do so.’
    Her face exploded with shame. She felt every single capillary fill with it. ‘I had no idea … I’m so sorry … I wish I had known. I would never have said the things …
Oh, God,
the awful things I said.’ She bit on her lip so hard she tasted blood. She mentally recalled every insult, every horrible insult she had flung at him for not standing. It had never occurred to her that he couldn’t. Oh, dear God, what must he think of her? Emotion clogged her throat, tightening it until she couldn’t speak. Every moment she had spent with him he had been sitting, apart from when he had been in the pool, but even there she could not recall him standing. He had leaned against the edge and later had pulled himself out of the water and sat with his legs in the water. Why hadn’t he said something? Why hadn’t Lucia warned her? What was going on?
    Alessandro used his hands to roll the wheelchair towards her. ‘You can stand up,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect you to kneel at my feet like a servant from the Dark Ages.’
    Rachel scrambled ungainly to her feet, momentarilyforgetting she was dressed in nothing but a slip of satin that was probably showing every contour of her body. It was only as she felt his dark blue gaze run over her that she wished she had asked Lucia for something a little less revealing to wear. ‘You found my pendant,’ she said unnecessarily.
    ‘Yes.’ He handed it to her. ‘It must have fallen from your neck when you dabbed at your spilt coffee on your top. It was on the floor. I found it as I was leaving to go upstairs.’
    Rachel tried to put the pendant back on but her fingers wouldn’t cooperate. She gave it another try but it slipped out of her hands and she had to kneel down again to retrieve it off the floor.
    ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Allow me.’
    She leaned towards him but it brought her so close to his face her breath stalled in her throat. They were eye to eye.
    His eyes were so very dark. His breath was minty and fresh as it caressed her face. She could see the pinpoints of stubble on his jaw, the fresh dark growth triggered by the rush of his potent male hormones. Her fingers ached to feel the rasp of his stubble under her fingertips, to trace the sensual contour of his mouth. Her lips tingled to feel the hard press of his on hers, her heart beat so hard and so fast in anticipation she was sure he could hear it. For that matter
she
could hear it. It was like the roar of the ocean in her ears: pounding, tumultuous, deafening.
    Alessandro took the pendant from her fingers and looped it around her neck, one of his hands lifting the curtain of her hair to free it from the snare of the chain. Rachel’s skin shivered in reaction, not just her neck but her entire body, inside and out. His touch was like fire. Her skin felt as if it weregoing to erupt into flames; every nerve ending was fizzing like a child’s bonfire-night sparkler.
    ‘There,’ he said, leaning back once the catch was secure. ‘You should probably get a jeweller to look at it to make sure it doesn’t come loose again.’
    Rachel fingered the pendant,