Mistress To A Millionaire

HELEN BROOKS

When a sexy Italian tycoon offered Daisy Summers a job as live-in nanny, her first instinct was to refuse. How could she share a secluded villa with Slade Eastwood without becoming involved intimate with him?Only, Slade wouldn't take no for an answer. His power and wealth bought him most things except a mother for his young son. Slade wanted Daisy. Her sweetness would make her the perfect nanny for little Francesco; her sultry innocence would make her the perfect mistress for himself!

“I want you, Daisy,” Slade whispered against her lips.

“I want you in every way possible,” he continued, “and ‘being friends’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. And don’t say you don’t want me, because I know you do.”

Why had she ever let herself get into this? Slade was her boss—she was paid to look after his child!

Then, with absolute clarity, Daisy knew what was going to happen next, and she knew she wasn’t going to fight it.

Slade’s head dipped slowly toward hers….

HELEN BROOKS lives in Northamptonshire, England, and is married with three children. As she is a committed Christian, busy housewife and mother, her spare time is at a premium, but her hobbies include reading, swimming, gardening and walking her two energetic, inquisitive and very endearing young dogs. Her long-cherished aspiration to write became a reality when she put pen to paper on reaching the age of forty, and sent the result off to Harlequin.

Mistress to a Millionaire

Helen Brooks

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

DAISY breathed in and out very slowly to steady her quivering nerves and surreptitiously glanced at her reflection in the shop window. She looked good—she did—and she could do this. She had to do it. This was the start of the rest of her life, and she didn’t intend to begin it hiding in the shadows.

She took one more quick glance at the tall, slender image which—courtesy of a new hairstyle and new wardrobe—still didn’t look like her, and then dived out into the surging mass of humanity that populated the crowded London pavement.

Afterwards she told herself it was because she was concentrating so hard on appearing to be like everyone else—self-assured and poised and quite sure of where they were going—that she stepped straight off the pavement without looking, but that was much later.

For now there was a terrific squeal of brakes which made her lift up her head in horror just in time to see the car almost upon her. And there was nowhere to go. Nowhere. She just had to wait for it to hit her, her head up and her eyes wide with fear and shock. And then there was…nothing.

‘Daisy? Can you hear me, dear? Try and open your eyes, there’s a good girl.’

Daisy could hear the soothing, faintly motherly voice somewhere above her head, but it was remote, unreal, smothered by the enormous lead blanket that was weighing her down and making even opening her eyes impossible.

‘She is beginning to come round but it will be a slow process, you understand? And it’s quite likely she will have no recollection of the accident or even who she is at first. The mind tends to retreat in the aftermath of a nasty accident like this one.’

No recollection of the accident or who she was? Daisy wanted to tell them she remembered everything as a small surge of indignation made her fight against the heaviness in her body, but she was too tired. Much too tired.

‘Have you managed to trace her family yet? Or a friend, anyone? Someone must know her.’

This voice was male, deep and very masculine, with a slight twang of an accent that lifted it out of the norm. She knew she hadn’t heard it before; it was the sort of voice you remembered.

‘The police are working on it, Mr Eastwood, but her handbag contained very little in the way of identification, as you know. We aren’t even sure her name is Daisy; we only have the inscription on her bracelet to go by.’

‘I thought all women carried enough paraphernalia around